The Portuguese Calçada in MacauPaving Residual Colonialism with a New Cultural History of Placeby Sheyla S. Zandonai and Vanessa AmaroDrawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the ways in which the calçada portuguesa (“Portuguesepavement”) that the late Portuguese administration developed in Macau (China) was converted into a “cultural item”of Macau’s visual and urban identity. It shows how a project loosely linked to the demise of the colonial, while re-claiming space through a contested operation of urban renewal, transformed the calçada into a seemingly desiredspatial and historical narrative, tied to the production of heritage and the emergence of a stronger “theming” strategy oftourism promotion for Macau. Primarily an urban project employed in the revitalization of the cityscape, the incipientcalçada encountered culturally inspired resistance and animosity from the Chinese population. At first embodying acontested image and legacy, the pavement has, nevertheless, undergone symbolic regeneration through discursive andmaterial readjustment following its localization into the cultural history of place. Throughout this process, past andpresent were conflated in a fabrication that eventually undermined the reminiscent equivocal nature of interethnicrelations that marked the transition from colonial to postcolonial Macau.In the early 1990s, important urban renewal projects accom-panied the countdown towardMacau’s handover to the People’sRepublic of China, scheduled to take place on December 20,1999. One of the places subject to intervention was the areafacing the building of former Leal Senado (i.e., Macau’s Mu-nicipal Council). Then the heart of the Portuguese adminis-trative apparatus, it was unexpectedly closed to vehicular trafficlate one night in July 1993. When Macau awoke the nextmorning, the street intersection, which converged on a smallroundabout surrounded by late-neoclassic buildings containingpublic services and shops, was blocked by large and heavy granitevases. Fearing their businesses would be in jeopardy once thearea was closed to the entry of private cars and public trans-portation carrying potential clients, the shop owners, mostlyof Chinese ethnic origin, angrily demanded explanations fromthe Portuguese authorities. Yet the administration’s plan wouldonly become publicly known a few weeks later, when 15 con-tainers of granite and basalt stones arrived from Portugal,11,000 km away, and were unloaded into that part of town. TheSenado area was to be paved with calçada portuguesa or calçadaà portuguesa (葡式碎石路),1 as a sort of replica of Rossio, asquare created in nineteenth-century Lisbon (Henriques, Moura,and Santos 2009:144–145). A typical Portuguese-style pave-ment, the calçada is composed by the manual assembly of smallblack and white cobblestones in decorative patterns, creating amosaic-like stone tapestry traditionally used for the finishing ofsquares and walkways. Following its implementation at SenadoSquare, the calçada was bound to become one of the majorurban features of Macau’s late Portuguese colonial geographyand early Chinese postcolonial imagery (fig. 1).The local press reported that Chinese shop owners weresuspicious of the restructuring plan, which they claimed was anattempt by the then-acting Portuguese administration to leave astronger colonial imprint inMacau before the handover. Severalvoices were raised against the project. Essentially, the eventexposed interethnic tensions—which had previously unfoldedduring an incident known in Macau as the “123,” triggered bythe Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when the Chinese stoodup against the colonial rulers (Fifoot 1994:28–29; Pina-Cabral2002:73–74; Wu 1999:323–324)—with the Portuguese admin-istration pushing the revitalization project somewhat against thewill of shop owners and residents of the area. Disagreement anddiscontent arose not only from the fact that small retailers feareda negative effect on their businesses but also because the projectwas being implemented only a few years before the handover.The decision to pave the square and surrounding promenadeareas with Portuguese cobblestones following a Portuguese-designed urban project triggered resentment and distrust amongthe Chinese toward the sitting administration. With the hand-over approaching, rumors spread among Macau residents thatSheyla S. Zandonai is a Research Associate at the Laboratoire Archi-tecture Anthropologie, L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture deParis La Villette (118-130, avenue Jean Jaurès, 75019 Paris, France[sheylazandonai@gmail.com]). Vanessa Amaro is Lecturer at the Schoolof Languages andTranslation of theMacao Polytechnic Institute (Rua deLuís Gonzaga Gomes, Macau). This paper was submitted 23 III 16, ac-cepted 3 IV 17, and electronically published 23 VII 18.1. We found several other names that are used to designate the calçadain Macau, e.g., 鵝卵石 (“goose egg” stone), 澳門路面 (Macau pavement),or 歐洲的地面 (European pavement).q 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2018/5904-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/698957378 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

some of the “last-minute” Portuguese national monuments andurban artifacts being hastily erected before the administrationlowered its flag (e.g., statues, commemorative structures, andthe calçada portuguesa) would be inevitably and progressivelyreplaced by Chinese versions. While existing monuments pro-jecting colonial imagery, such as the statue of former PortugueseGovernor Ferreira doAmaral (1846–1849), were being removed(Cheng 1999:27–28; Pina-Cabral 2002:51–53),2 the introductionand later development of the calçada proves that there was roomfor accommodation. Today, 19 years after the establishment ofthe Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR), the calçadahas not only been maintained and preserved but also laid inother parts of the city, including some considered more char-acteristically “Chinese”—that is, originally outside the walls ofthe former Christian citadel and thus, historically, parts of thecity with a concentration of Chinese people, institutions, andarchitectural typologies (see Amaro 1998:37; Zandonai 2009:28,2014:213–214).In this study, we analyze how the calçada portuguesa came toembody a continuum or an adjustment between the colonialand postcolonial periods inMacau owing to a program of urbanrenewal that harnessed features and narratives of city-makingand historical distinction. Why the Portuguese built the calçadain the first place and, perhaps more importantly, why the Chi-nese administration continued to build it, is a question we ad-dress and to which we hope to provide some answers. First, weaim to discuss the political stakes arising from the plans for thepavement construction at the decision-making and project-development level, as they were raised and pushed forward bythe departing Portuguese administration. Although the lattercould be seen as a “formality” at that point in time, given that theprocess of postcolonial transition had started before 1999—asearly as the Cultural Revolution (Fernandes 1997:51; Pina-Cabral 2002:5)—we claim the calçada has reanimated colo-nial agency and feelings, concealed under the process of tran-sition. Second, by describing the technical and discursive waysthrough which the Chinese administration has gradually em-braced the calçada, espousing strategies of theming bound to“market” the city under its rising economy of tourism, we invitefurther scrutiny of the political dynamics involved with theproduction of space, thereby tackling the questions of culturalFigure 1. The Leal Senado building, one of the most emblematic places of the Portuguese historical presence in Macau, facing thesquare adorned with Portuguese pavement in a typical wave pattern. Photograph by Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro.2. Ferreira do Amaral has been a contentious figure in Macau’s co-lonial history. The first Portuguese governor when Portugal compelledChina to recognize its rights of sovereignty over Macau, he ruled with astrong hand from 1846 to 1849. Imposing economic modernization andurban rationalization, eventually destroying Chinese sacred sites, he wasassassinated in 1849 by Chinese men near the Gates of Siege—the northborder separating Macau from mainland China. The monument erectedin his honour in 1940 was transferred to Lisbon in 1992.Zandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 379

transformation and place-making inscribed in processes ofheritage formation.Paving HeritageStemming from a Roman tradition, the calçada as we know ittoday was first used in Portugal and became a widespread urbanpractice and aesthetic motif from the nineteenth century, whenit started being implemented in Lisbon3 (Henriques,Moura, andSantos 2009:13–14, 144–145; Duarte 2010:20). Despite its longhistory and the existence of artistic inventories and historicaland technical manuals that portray the history and stylisticevolution of the calçada (see Cabrera and Nunes 1998; Hen-riques, Moura, and Santos 2009; Matos 1999, 2001, 2004; Tei-xeira 2010), its introduction and development outside Portugalhas never been the focus of any comprehensive social research.Our study aims to help fill this gap by shedding light on a long-standing tradition and ubiquitous urban surface in spaces his-torically connected with the Portuguese presence around theworld. First and foremost Portuguese in its genesis and its his-torical, material, and design ambitions, as a tangible mark of thePortuguese influence in Macau and elsewhere—from Brazil(Rio de Janeiro) to Africa (Mozambique) and East Timor—itmay be seen that the calçada has been adapted to other localitiesand cultural contexts, harnessing its aesthetics for touristic visi-bility. By focusing on the ways it has been produced and trans-formed during a moment of political transition in Macau, wehope to generate a better understanding of those adaptations asthey inform city-making processes, thereby problematizing thequestion of heritage as a “floating signifier,” with both long andshort links with the past and close and distant ties to culture andthe leisure industry (Harvey 2001).There are two reasons for putting the notion of heritage underscrutiny. First, several of our informants perceive the calçadaas a type of Portuguese “legacy.” Because it was “inherited” fromthe Portuguese and passed on to the Chinese—city planners,craftsmen, and so on—its development has an element of trans-mission, that is, the passing on and receiving of memories,practices, and knowledge, which is inherent to the definitionand actual experience of heritage (Smith 2006:3–4). Second,because it is a form of transmission and communication, heri-tage is a process of making meaning in and for the present.In fact, heritage does not have inherent cultural value: “It is itselfa constitutive cultural process that identifies those things andplaces that can be given meaning and value as ‘heritage’, re-flecting contemporary cultural and social values, debates andaspirations” (Smith 2006:3; cf. Brumann 2014:173–174; Harvey2001).Although we are focusing here on a material aspect of Ma-cau’s landscape, we engage with a notion of heritage that su-persedes the historical—as in chronological—relevance in-scribed in the built environment. In fact, as Laurajane Smith(2006) and Christoph Brumann (2014) argue, traditionalWestern accounts of heritage tend to rely on the physical ormaterial—often the criterion of monumentality and the aes-thetic of place—and historical (age) basis of edifices, sites, ob-jects, and so on, attributing inherent value to them. The calçadais neither old nor monumental. However, as we shall see, itsaesthetic appeal and potential for attracting tourism have pro-pelled its assessment as a product shaped by history. Helpedinitially by a strong political hand, its prospects for economicdevelopment and urban unity have been capitalized upon bydecision-makers in the cultural history of place and, later,“localness.”Therefore, our primary understanding of heritage is thatdescribed by David Lowenthal (1998) as an “act of fabricating”in which history is transformed—and even created—by addingand reshaping, leading to the invention of something altogetherdifferent. Accordingly, the making of heritage here is not onlyabout the ways in which history shapes space. It is also aboutthe ways that space is practiced and perceived and therebytransformed by experience (Bender 2002; Certeau 1980; Guptaand Ferguson 2002; Harvey 2001; Tilley 2006). Although thecalçada is a fairly new addition to Macau’s cityscape, it wascrafted to embody an “act of remembering” of a past and pres-ence, at the same time rooted and colonial—similar to cele-brations, monuments, and sites—which the Chinese adminis-tration of Macau has harnessed for the future. As an urbanartifact, the calçada became therefore a political artifice capableof conflating an imagined distant past and an urban project forthe reinvention of Macau under China’s sovereignty, high-lighting the component of intersubjective activity that trans-forms the message in the production of new situations and cul-tural forms (Bender 2002; Carrithers 1990, 2005; Smith 2006).By singling out the calçada to examine a specific historicalmoment in Macau, our aim is to show how this particularaspect can function as a measure of the ways place is producedand conferred with meaning: its study entails not only iden-tifying the forces that participate in its production but alsodescribing the ways in which they converge on the creation of aparticular urban design and ethos and how it is appropriated,contested, or embraced (Bender 2002: 104; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003; Rabinow 2003 [1983]:354; Yeoh 2001, 2006;Zhang 2006). Hence, our study analyzes how a project withresidual colonial strands, while reclaiming space through acontested operation of urban renewal, was transmuted into aseemingly desirable spatial narrative tied to the emergence ofa stronger political strategy of tourism promotion for Macauand an incipient heritage claim, in which history is removedand “filtered with reference to the present” (Harvey 2001:327;cf. Lowenthal 1998:8). The calçada, as we understand it, has3. According to Henriques, Moura, and Santos (2009:144–145), “Portu-guese Pavements with the appearance characteristics we know them now-adays had as great driver the Governor of the Castle of S. Jorge in Lisbonbetween 1840 and 1846, Lieutenant-General Eusébio Cândido FurtadoPinheiro Cordeiro (1777–1861), who transformed the fortress and its sur-roundings into walking places adorned with flowers, trees and mosaicpavement.”380 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

undergone a symbolic regeneration through discursive andmaterial readjustment. Eventually, it was converted into a“cultural item” of Macau’s visual and urban identity, as con-veyed today by the official dominant rhetoric of “East meetsWest in harmony.”Drawing on the classic approach of thin and thick de-scription (Geertz 1973)—the calçada is an “event” or a mea-sure shaped by processes larger than itself—we developed thisstudy bearing in mind a “family of methods” provided by eth-nography, including prolonged engagement with field obser-vations, in-depth interviews, and the analysis of various sources:newspaper articles, photography, statistical data, and maps(Agar 2008; Stewart 1998; Willis and Trondman 2000). We in-troduce testimonies and stories told by people who were or arecurrently involved with actions that have enabled the develop-ment of the calçada in Macau, such as architects, urban plan-ners, and civil servants, to complement and give insight to fieldobservations (Spradley 1979:19; Skinner 2012:29). Adopting thelatter as our ethnographic object, we follow both Igor Kopytoff ’s(1986) “biography of things” and Arjun Appadurai’s (1986)“social life of things” to track and dissect the ways in which theurban form, aesthetic value, and political role of the calçada àportuguesa in Macau have changed over time. By examining itsshifting character, we aim to analyze at length how the Chineseadministration has appropriated this material form and some-what contested aspect ofMacau’s recent past to produce anotheridea of the city.Senado Square Case: Hand-Made TroubleThe Senado Square arguably remains one of the most em-blematic sites of the Portuguese historical presence in Macau.The name of the square itself, “Senado” (議事亭前地), is areference to the former Portuguese Senate established in 1583,which governed the Portuguese population of Macau until theestablishment of a colonial administration in 1846 (Sena 1996:41; Wu 1999:71). It was only then, in the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, that the Portuguese arrogated formal control over theChinese population of the city. Erected in 1784, the building thattoday faces the square looks across the street at an ensemble ofbright-colored edifices that embody different historical sub-strates of Portuguese existence and rule in Macau as well asChinese power—one of them was the headquarters of theMacau Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, relocated tothe square in the early 1930s. Today, protected by local andinternational heritage regulations,4 this architectural ensembleenhances the symbolical capital of Portuguese legacy in the cityand remains one of its most visited sites.In the early 1990s, before what is today referred to as theSenado Square became a pedestrian zone, plans for blockingtraffic from the area had been on the table for nearly a de-cade. The idea was first advanced by Francisco Caldeira Ca-bral, a Portuguese architect who was then invited to elaborate anew master plan for Macau. The plan consisted of a concise listof short-term and long-term urban projects and actions theadministration was willing to implement to increase pedestrianmobility as well as relieve traffic congestion in the main arteriesof the city. When the plan was concluded, in 1986, the Por-tuguese administration embraced Caldeira Cabral’s sugges-tion of turning the area of historical edifices facing the Mu-nicipal Council into a pedestrian zone and repaving it with thecalçada portuguesa. Due to his familiarity with the urban-scapesof Portugal, where the calçada is widespread, he saw the creationof public spaces and car-free zones as being intimately con-nected to this type of Portuguese pavement. Caldeira Cabralexplained that this strategy also aimed to create a strongerPortuguese image and “legacy” when it came time for the Por-tuguese administration to officially depart from the city(cf. Tieben 2009:54). However, no immediate action was taken.According to him, the Portuguese authorities feared the ideawould be rather unwelcome.Closing the traffic was a sensitive issue, because the shop-owners thought that nobody would take a bus to get there.Besides this, even the Portuguese questioned the purpose ofsuch construction when we were about to hand Macau backto China, and nothing would be left after 1999. There wassome criticism from both sides. There was also debate aboutthe logistics of bringing the stones in, and finding skilledlaborers for the task.For those reasons, the proposal was left aside until 1992, whenthe architect eventually pushed the government to reach afavorable decision. Caldeira Cabral succeeded in persuadingthe administration after he decided to use the calçada in one ofthe projects that was commissioned to him at the time, as a wayto demonstrate that a large-scale venture would be possible.The Bela Vista Hotel, built in the late nineteenth century(1870) and classified by Macau’s administration as a buildingwith “artistic value” since 1990 (Macau Heritage Net), wasbought that same year by a joint venture between the Macaugovernment and private investors. It underwent a million-dollar renovation that transformed it in a luxury “boutique inn”while preserving features of a traditional Portuguese mansion inneoclassical style, with arcades, pillars, and balustrades formingspacious semiopen areas.5 Its terrace was the first one to bepaved with calçada. This was an experimental effort for whichthree calceteiros (i.e., Portuguese pavement masters) were hireddirectly from Portugal, and a few containers of stones werepurchased from there. “When the hotel hold its opening party,all the guests complimented the pretty work we did, and said itwould be great to see more of the calçada spread over Macau. It4. Macau’s Historic Center was inscribed as a UNESCO WorldHeritage site in 2005.5. No longer a hotel, the Bela Vista is currently the official residenceof the Portuguese Consul General in Macau.Zandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 381

was then my chance to push the authorities,” pointed out Cal-deira Cabral.As our informants have noted, while many Chinese res-idents and shop owners had perceived the intention by the Por-tuguese administration to pave the Senado Square as somewhatoutrageous, Portuguese residents were also reported to have re-ferred to the project as a waste of public funds, claiming such aPortuguese “legacy” would vanish when China took over thegovernment of Macau (see Macau Hoje 1992). There were dis-agreements even within different administrative departments, asAntónio Saraiva, an engineer then working at the MunicipalCouncil—today renamed the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bu-reau (IACM)—remembers: “The Public Works and TransportBureau was concerned with the negative reactions of blockingthe traffic; the Tourism Office thought it would be good to at-tract more visitors to the area; and the Municipal Council wasafraid of protests from the Chinese population. There was a lotof discussion over several months.”Following a 6-hour meeting about the project in July 1993, alldepartments eventually agreed to take immediate action. An-tónio Saraiva was in charge of “doing whatever was deemednecessary” to assure smooth operations: “It was about three orfour o’clock in the morning . . . there was nobody around whenwe drove a crane truck into the square and blocked all streetsentries with very heavy granite vases,” he explained. In truth,even though the Portuguese were officially administeringMacauat that time, the process of political transition to China, set inmotion in the late 1970s, was already a public matter (Fifoot1994). Their decision to act so late at night suggests they werealso concerned by the negative reaction that the idea of calçadahad triggered in the Chinese population. Saraiva explained thattheir primary approach was to wait for a low-traffic moment,consenting later that “this was also to prevent any kind of dis-turbance from those who didn’t agree.”The next day, when shopowners and residents of the area went to the Municipal Coun-cil headquarters seeking explanations, they were informed thatdrainage works were critical and urgent, thus preventing thecirculation of vehicles in the square (Macau Hoje 1992). At thesame time that this was taking place, a group of 12 calceteiros and15 containers with stones from Portugal were on their way toMacau. They were to be the backbone of the calçada project. Thewave-pattern pavement in the Senado, the same employed inseveral squares in Portugal and in the promenade of Copacabanabeach in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), was then officially opened in late1993, marking a new era for the development of business andtourism in Macau.Fernando Simões, who currently lives in Macau, was one of12 men invited to be part of the selected group of pavementmasters who would execute a series of calçada projects inMacau between 1993 and 1996. Speaking about his experi-ence, he commented, “[the] conditionswere fantastic. They paidfor our trips, accommodation, and offered a salary six timeshigher than the one we would get in Portugal.” As the worksincluded sites other than the Senado Square, the Portuguesemasters were divided into small groups and a number of Chi-nese helpers were assigned to assist with the basic steps ofconstruction. The works in the Senado lasted roughly 4months,and they became, according to him, attractions themselves.Dozens of Chinese residents would spend hours looking atus working. . . . During lunchtime we could see hundredsof people watching us, taking pictures, and asking to takelittle stones as souvenir. . . . They were above all surprisedat seeing Portuguese people [laughs] . . . involved in thisphysical labor. They were used to see Portuguese doutores6coming to Macau to work at the public administration . . .but this, craft, construction work, they had never seen.Simões’ testimony offers an interesting angle on how an inter-ethnic predicament stemming from a delicate political situationtakes a rather different, collaborative stance on the ground.Portuguese craftsmen and Chinese apprentices were workingtogether, and people, Macau residents, shared their curiosity,empathy, or bafflement toward a scene they may have en-countered on numerous occasions by the time the calçada wasfirst being settled in Macau. Michael Herzfeld (2005, 2009) ar-gued that the experiences of daily life that comprise the moreinformal dimension of sociality—such as language use and bodyexpressions, like gesticulation—often escape the domains ofsurveillance that characterize officialdom, party politics, andformal education systems. Which means they are freer to pro-liferate, often yielding expressions of “cultural intimacy” andsolidarity—in the sense described by Park (1915) and Wirth(1927)—reminiscent of community relations and cultural affil-iations that tend to dissipate in the urban environment. Beyondthe political rationalities that were informing the dynamics ofpower transition in Macau, we found that both peer solidarityand animosity toward remnant colonial agency have emerged ineveryday life, revealing how attention to the actual “territories”of culture and social life aids resituating colonial and postco-lonial tropes within more complex dynamics. Conversely, theequivocal nature of interethnic relations that surfaced beforeMacau’s handover—of which the calçada offers a glimpse—alsodeserves to be pointed out, as it sheds light on the ways colonialfeelings were still somewhat active, although gradually trans-formed and attenuated within the process of political transition.Highlighting these rapports and antagonisms in the recenthistory of Portuguese and Chinese relations is important to anunderstanding of how the emergence of the calçada as a dis-tinctive urban trait in Macau’s recent development marks adiscursive reorientation in the character of place.Drawing on the transformation of Stone Town, the oldersection of Zanzibar, into World Heritage in 2000, WilliamBissell (2005) discussed the turnaround of the abhorrencetoward foreign domination into narratives that idealize thecolonial past, suggesting this type of phenomenon is often aresponse to moments of deep economic uncertainty and re-6. In Portugal, the word doutor usually refers to a highly educated andqualified workforce and is commonly used to demarcate social hierar-chical positions.382 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

structuring. In this process, the recasting of colonial tribula-tions into an idealized vision of the past—if not, as Bissell notes,because it is irreversible—reveals an act of “fabricating” that wehave likened to the notion of heritage formulated by Lowenthal(1998). The replacement of realities bymyths of origin, in whichmisreadings of history are essential to the production of col-lective understandings capable of creating spatial unity and asense of group cohesion, suggests that contested material lega-cies and troublesome histories are maintained because theycan be transformed (cf. Massey 1994:151; Yeoh 2001:461). ToLowenthal, this process is dialectically tied to history: it has todepart from its “facts” and traces to embrace tales and “belief.”In this sense, heritage is an artifice—as history itself can be—that harnesses an imaginary, not an actual, past.Cultural Transfers: From Calceteiroto Feng Shui MasterBefore the handover, the 12 Portuguese masters continuedtheir commission in other parts of the city, working day andnight to accomplish the goals set by the Portuguese adminis-tration. According to Fernando Simões, time was short, andthe surfaces to be covered with the Portuguese cobblestonepavement were wide, adding more pressure to their work. “Wewere only 12 masters, and we hadmore than 15 projects in ourhands. We had to teach the Chinese how to work this puzzle,”Simões commented. In 1997, at the construction site of thesquare in front of A-ma Temple (媽閣廟), in the Barra district,Fernando Simões and one of his colleagues had to complete thework in less than 4 months—under normal conditions, andcounting on two masters, it would take at least 6 months. Thesolution to meeting the deadlines was to teach the techniquesof calçada building to 20 Chinese helpers, thereby speeding upthe completion of several projects.There were 20 Chinese workers with us and a Macanesetranslator to facilitate the communication. When I saw allthose people, I asked the translator if they knew how tobuild the calçada. The translator said yes, but the truth wasthat the Chinese had never seen that kind of stone nor havethey ever worked with stones before. I panicked when Inoticed they knew nothing! How could I teach them an artthat takes years to learn so that we could accomplish a workin three months? . . . Later, they became almost experts onthis and we worked as a team in many other constructions.At the time Simões and other Portuguese masters startedtraining Chinese workers, in the late 1990s, it was still unclearif the learning of calçada construction techniques by the latterwould yield similar results or be applied to any other uses afterthe handover. As a matter of fact, in the first couple of yearsafter the establishment of the Macau SAR, the construction ofcalçadas slowed down. The talk in town was that they wouldactually disappear. To architect Francisco Caldeira Cabral,introduced earlier in this study, this was a constant “questionmark.” As Fernando Simões explained, “Right after the hand-over, they got rid of the calçada around Saint Anthony’s churchwith the excuse of building a fountain in the square. We allthought that the same would happen with other calçada pro-jects. But at the end, that was the only one removed.”Given the unease and social tension thatmarked the paving ofthe Senado Square and the fact that Macau was now underChinese administration, there was indeed a chance such projectseventually would be discontinued. Due to these circumstancesand the ensuing lack of work commissions, the masters had toreturn to Portugal. Yet in 2001, the calçada was once againbrought into the urbanscape. A renewed interest by the recentlyappointed Chinese administration fostered new projects, whichinitially continued to involve Portuguese experts and masters,including Fernando Simões himself. As the Chinese began,however, to gradually capitalize on the technique and attributeother spaces and imageries to the calçada, the pavement gaineddifferent shapes and contours, and it has continued to do sountil the present day. As Simões noted, when he referred to thebeginning of the enterprise in the 1990s, “at that time, nobodycould ever imagine that the calçadawould have the impact it hastoday” (fig. 2).Following the handover, Francisco Caldeira Cabral was in-vited in 2003 to be in charge of the revitalization project for thenew border gate facilities, in the northern part of the Macaupeninsula. One of the main requirements of the Macau gov-ernment in developing the project was that the calçada be in-cluded in the esplanade facing the border, known as Portas doCerco (關閘). The Portuguese architect received the challengewith surprise: “I really thought they would never consider theidea of extending the calçada under the Chinese administration.When they told me that I had to use the Portuguese stones, Icouldn’t believe it! . . . But it didn’t take me longer to under-stand the reasons behind their request.” As was made clear byhim and virtually all other informants who participated in thisstudy, the Macau SAR administration was seeking to highlightthe “unique” cultural identity of Macau, rather than turning thecity into just another typical place in China. But we shall returnto that later.The main evidence for such claim lies in the fact that, evenwith similar granite and basalt stones available at lower pricesin mainland China, both contractors and authorities have con-tinued to look for Portuguese suppliers as a way to keep theoriginality and “authenticity” of the pavements built in Macau.We first learned this from Caldeira Cabral. He had suggested,especially after the handover, that Chinese constructors searchfor similar stones in China. But they resisted, he explained:“They didn’t accept it at all. They insisted that the stone . . .ought to come from Portugal, otherwise it was no longer thecalçada portuguesa.” Later, we confirmed that informationwhenwemet KouWai, aMacau-born businessman, who saw inthis desire to keep “reinventing” tradition a window of oppor-tunity and profitability very early in the 1990s, when the calçadawas first appearing inMacau. He opened an import-export firmin partnership with a Portuguese resident ofMacau at that time,to bring in stones from Portugal, supplying not only the localZandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 383

government and constructors but also, more recently, Chinesefirms in regions neighboring the city as well as other countries inAsia, such as Singapore and Japan. Although he does not speakany Portuguese and has been to Portugal only a few times onbusiness trips to visit quarries, his company is the only one inMacau that continued to provide stones for different projectsover the years, especially after the handover, when other localcontractors were less keen to go to Portugal to buy the stones. Ashe pointed out: “Right after the handover, orders drasticallydecreased, but from 2001 onwards there was a lot of interest inthe pavement and my business went back on track. When thereis a new construction, everybody makes sure the stones reallycome from Portugal.”Though Portuguese stones were not used in all the urbanprojects that have been implemented since then, a total of52 public areas were repaved with the calçada portuguesabetween 2001 and 2013 according to data provided by EstefâniaInácio, an architect at IACM.7 Among the reasons for thesedevelopments, we found the creation of squares and spaces ofsociality, the revitalization of public spaces, the enhancement ofthe city’s aesthetic qualities, and tourism potential. FranciscoVizeu Pinheiro, another architect interviewed for this study,was in charge of some of these projects while he worked forIACM. He coordinated, for instance, the construction of thesidewalks of Almeida Ribeiro Avenue, adjacent to the SenadoSquare, in 2001, and the Sé Square in 2004. He is convincedthat the calçada plays a functional role in the lives of residentsand tourists, since it has “embellished,” “rehabilitated,” and“reinvented spaces” in the city. The greatest challenge he hasencountered while conducting these projects was to obtain abalance between the Portuguese craft tradition linked to thecalçada work and Chinese cultural values: “The intention wasalways to create pedestrian areas and more spaces of sociality,and although local residents understood this need, sometimesthey were not happy with the idea of such a Portuguese ar-tifact. I always had to consult the Chinese population to besure that my ideas wouldn’t interfere with their beliefs.”The Chinese “beliefs” regarding the calçada are primarily de-fined by the observation of principles of feng shui or fung seui, inCantonese romanization (風水). Feng shui is an ancient Taoistart dedicated to the harmonization of qi energy in a place tooptimize the well-being of those who occupy it, and it is thus apractice also used to define the sites and positions of tombs(Cheng 1999:26). Following the renewal project in the AlmeidaRibeiro Avenue, the sidewalks have been covered with variousmaritime patterns that are said to embody the historical and closerelationship that Macau’s Portuguese and Chinese populationshave entertained with the water. It is thus linked to the Chinesefishing tradition and the history of the arrival of the first Portu-guese in the sixteenth century by caravels, which are representedtherein. To compose this narrative, fishes, crabs, and stars, con-sidered to be auspicious elements in Chinese popular beliefs, wereincorporated into the calçada portuguesa. “Without this balance,it would be impossible to gain acceptance from the Chinesepopulation,” commented Francisco Vizeu Pinheiro (fig. 3).The Almeida Ribeiro Avenue (新馬路) is a peculiar artery inMacau’s urban fabric as well as one of the city’s most importantroads. Its linear design was cut across an existing matrix ofrather narrow and sinuous streets at the beginning of thetwentieth century. The ideals and ideas behind this plan were toconnect the former Chinese and Portuguese settlements, andMacau’s inner and outer harbors, making for a more dynamiccity center at a time when Macau’s population was rapidlygrowing (Cody 1999:3–4). The revitalization project at AlmeidaRibeiro was also designed with that in mind. It sought tocapture these “moments” in the history of Macau by high-lighting an urban unit connecting Senado Square to Nam VanLake (南灣湖) and Praia Grande Avenue (大灣大馬路). “Thisway, tourists would be able to get to know this historical areaFigure 2. Nowadays the construction of the calçada portuguesain Macau is in the hands of Chinese calceteiros only. Photographby Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro.7. Some examples include the Sai Van Square (2001), Praia GrandeAvenue (2002), Areia Preta Garden (2003), Largo do Cais in Coloane(2004), Carmo Garden in Taipa (2005), Ferreira do Amaral Square(2006), Pai Kok Street in Taipa (2007), São Francisco Garden (2008),Santo António Square (2009), Taipa Central Park (2012), and Travessados Anjos (2013).384 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

on foot,” Vizeu Pinheiro added. At the same time, as AntónioSaraiva suggested, it serves as a guide to visitors, functioning asa “compass” in Macau: “Whenever tourists ask me how to getto the Leal Senado, I tell them ‘follow the calçada!’ ”With thisemerged further economic benefits, as both the engineer andthe architect explained, because the calçada started attractingmore tourists to the area. Although assessing whether the in-corporation of Chinese elements acted as a turning point in theacceptance of the calçada by Chinese residents would requirefurther scrutiny, it is likely that economic prospectsmight havecontributed to softening the initial reluctance and disapprovaldisplayed toward these urban projects.As the number of areas paved with the calçada graduallyincreased, there was a tacit understanding that people living orworking in the targeted areas be consulted about the projects(e.g., with regard to patterns) before they could be approved anddeveloped by the administration. For the works at the Sé Square(大堂前地) in 2004, which Vizeu Pinheiro coordinated, theprocess entailed public consultations and negotiations withresidents and the gaai fong (街坊, General Union of the Neigh-borhood Associations), aimed at settling issues related to designand feng shui. António Saraiva confirmed these practices werealso adopted in the construction and revitalization of gardensbound to accommodate the calçada.We had a Chinese consultant, Mr. HoYengNing, who studiedin Japan and knew a lot about Chinese culture and feng shui.We would consult him whenever we wanted to develop a newproject, as it was the case with the Lou Lim Ieoc garden, a spacethat was rebuilt and preserved following closely the traditionsof the Chinese culture. We were very aware of these details.The practice continues to be observed today. Estefânia Ináciocomments that she takes note of feng shui criteria to develop herprojects for the calçada. One of her recent assignments, con-cluded in 2013, was aimed at revitalizing the Travessa dos Anjos(天使巷), a 500-meter alley in the central area of Macau. Herinitial idea included using the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, buther superiors did not approve. “They considered that havingpeople stepping over the signs was not auspicious. I thereforeopted for more neutral motifs, such as flowers and butterflies,”she explained. In fact, all architects and civil servants we haveencountered who have been involved with the construction ofthe calçada portuguesa inMacau since the handover agreed thatits continuity under the SAR administration depended largelyon the extent to which they embraced and respected Chinesecultural values. Accordingly, as Vizeu Pinheiro explained, inspite of the fact that the “inspiration” for the projects wasLisbon, they were aware that there were always certain elementsthat could not be used because they have a different meaning inChinese culture. For instance, while in Lisbon companies wouldhave their corporate symbols represented on the pavement, inMacau this could not be done. According to feng shui principles,it is not considered auspicious to step on a name or a logo, as wasthe case for the Chinese zodiac signs (fig. 4).In addition to the choice of patterns, which architects andurban planners thought should “speak” more to the Chineseculture, there were modifications, minor or major, in otheraspects of the calçada. First, there were the forms, which shouldnever have sharp points. In a few cases, Fernando Simões ex-plained, they had to alter parts of calçadas that were alreadycompleted because some of the patterns were “generating badfeng shui.” This happened, for instance, at the esplanade built infront of the statue of Kun Iam (觀音),8 situated on the water-front of NAPE (Novos Aterros do Porto Exterior,新口岸/皇朝),in the southeast part of the Macau peninsula. As Simões recalls,“We made a pointed fish that was ‘cutting’ the statue. The fengshuimasters came and said that suchfish . . . was weakening theenergy flows from the saint. . . . We had then to change it,placing a black bar around the fish, so it broke the sharp-edgepattern. [In Macau] everything has to be rounded.”Another adaptation was in the choice of colors, with the in-creasing incorporation of red, considered to be favorable inChinese custom. “The Chinese themselves asked us to includemore red stones and, for this reason, red started appearingmore often in Macau,” explained Simões. Indeed, over time,as Vizeu Pinheiro pointed out, “we notice there is more use ofgranite [red], rather than black. . . . This is already a moreconsequent adaptation to the local culture.” Finally, there were anumber of modifications with regard to the materials employedand the techniques and skills applied to the calçada. Importationfrom Portugal, which remains low, was superseded years ago bythe introduction of rocks from China. Moreover, unlikePortugal, where the calçada is laid over a “weak base of sand orFigure 3. Auspicious elements of feng shui, such as the crab, areplaced alongside maritime elements, such as boats and other seaanimals, on the sidewalks of Avenida Almeida Ribeiro. Photo-graph by Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro.8. Kun Iam is a bodhisattva known as the Goddess of Mercy.Zandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 385

broken rocks,” as António Saraiva explained, in Macau it is seton a base of cement so that the small cobbles are more firmlyfixed in place. According to the engineer, this explains why thetype of pavement built inMacau requires lessmaintenanceworkthan those constructed in Portugal.Regarding the requisite skills, the Chinese initially learned thecraft from Portuguese masters, as described above. However, asdemand for the calçada increased and its construction spreadover different parts of the city, including public squares, gardens,patios, sidewalks, and esplanades, Chinese constructors—whonow often propose these projects themselves, which are thenapproved or rejected by the government—started hiring Chi-nese manpower without being overly worried about technicalrigor. Vizeu Pinheiro confirmed that relatively qualified teamsare rather small, with only about 10 people today having beenactually trained in the traditional techniques to work on thistype of urban project in Macau. With regard to the Chineseworkers who have not been formally trained, they tend to learnby looking, emulating, or reproducing what they see. “Theylearned it by themselves, which is to say that they never ‘learned’it. Someone tells them what they are supposed to do, but theyhave not acquired the techniques. It is not exactly like theoriginal anymore,” Fernando Simões noted. In the cases wherethe workers hired are well prepared, there are, however, otherdifficulties that have an impact on the quality of the calçada.This is how Vizeu Pinheiro described them: “The problem inMacau is that everything is accomplished in a hurry, there isalways time pressure on the works. I notice that stones are notreally treated to finishing carried out with that affection andaccuracy. It is made in a way to get it done as soon as possible.”Given the consistent attention to feng shui, the employmentof new materials, and the transfer of techniques and skills fromPortuguese to Chinese workers, we argue that ensuing adapta-tion and transformation have given rise to a new type of calçada,characteristically more “Chinese.” This is demonstrated by newpatterns and newmethods of construction and the spread of thecalçada over different areas of Macau. It is also revealed in theemergence of a different, rather urgent development rationalitythat has compelled constructors to overlook the original tech-niques and, occasionally, lowered the quality of the work that isproduced. In this process of social reproduction, the role of thecalceteiro, the pavement master, intrinsic to the image, devel-opment, andmateriality of the calçada portuguesa, has been lostor undermined in Macau, where a “cultural” replacement has,nevertheless, been found in the feng shui master.Urban Renewal: Theming IdentityThe period of transition that marked the “official” passage fromcolonial to postcolonial Macau witnesses the emergence of thecalçada as a Portuguese cultural item and its later developmentand reinvention in Chinese urban practices and forms. Thecalçada is thus primarily an urban technique-turned-projectdeployed in the revitalization of the cityscape, mainly throughthe transformation of public spaces and the expansion of pe-destrian areas, in which public actors see a strategy to improvethe city’s image and aesthetic quality. Ultimately, it has beenemployed to enhance Macau’s tourism potential. On the otherhand, its existing or perceived Portuguese traits continue tohighlight the alien or “exotic” urban character that the calçadaconfers upon Macau, here with regard to China. At first em-bodying a contested image, the pavement was eventually con-verted into a distinctive “symbolic landscape” serving the differingpurposes of the Portuguese and the Chinese administrations.From the outset, the calçada was a strategy intended to in-scribe a sense of “Portuguese identity” into Macau’s urban fabric,signaling the late Portuguese administration’s urgent intent toleave a stronger “legacy” in the city before the handover tookplace. According toVizeu Pinheiro, this goal was championed atthe core of the pavement project in the 1990s. The calçada, heexplained, was conceived “in order to leave a stronger mark ofthe Portuguese attributes after the handover, and as a way tohighlight aspects of the Portuguese past, tradition, and culture inMacau. The squares in China, such as Tiananmen [in Beijing],don’t have the same function as the Mediterranean Portuguesesquare, which is a place for encounter and debate.” In keepingwith that, Caldeira Cabral suggests that, “no doubt, the calçadaFigure 4. At Travessa dos Anjos, more neutral patterns, such asbutterflies, were used in the calçada portuguesa. Photograph byGonçalo Lobo Pinheiro.386 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

is an element that belongs to Macau’s cultural identity, which,in this case, has everything to do with the Portuguese history inMacau.” He and António Saraiva assert that the calçada todayalso serves the purpose of showcasing Macau’s “difference”with regard to other places in China. According to CaldeiraCabral,I think that today it is part of the city’s identity. I’m sure thatmany people who come toMacau have never seen the calçadaanywhere before, and they enjoy it here. It’s also a feature ofthe Portuguese culture, since wherever the Portuguese went,they left the calçada. Being a Special Administrative Region ofChina in which Portuguese is an official language, I think thatthe calçada portuguesa blends well with Macau, although Ithink that it started being built too late.In embracing this trait of “Portugueseness” further on, theChinese administration sought to promote the calçada as a“unique” feature ofMacau’s urban identity. This is patent in theadvertising material freely distributed by the Macau Govern-ment Tourism Office (MGTO), which is produced in variouslanguages. Brief descriptions of the calçada are ubiquitous.However, the explicit mention of the word “Portuguese” isstrategically avoided in the leaflets, except in the one writtenin the Portuguese language. In the other languages we couldread and translate (French, Spanish, English, Chinese, Thai,and Japanese) in spite of the fact that there are always mentionsof the calçada, all point to its “Mediterranean” origin and in-fluence (南歐風情, literally “southern European landscape”),but never Portuguese or Iberian.9 Therefore, we argue, thecalçada’s popularity and expansion since 1999 stems, first, froma broad strategy of localization. Because the Chinese adminis-tration perceived it as an urban attribute that could be used todistinguish Macau from nearby Chinese cities, namely, Zhuhaiand Shenzhen in mainland China, but also Hong Kong, itsefforts were deployed in promoting not the calçada portuguesaitself but the calçada of Macau.Second, and here we return to our initial hypothesis, we arguethat the calçada has been incorporated into the ongoing dy-namics of place-making in postcolonial Macau, following neweconomic and political aims, through a strategy of image-building and theming. In this process, the colonial-inspiredfrictions that marked its beginnings as an urban project weregradually reshaped into different,more local forms and replacedby other, more conciliatory designs. As Saraiva explained, “interms of heritage and a city’s affirmation of identity, the vision iscompletely different. Nowadays, the calçada is a symbol ofMacau.” Harnessing narratives and, to that effect, policies ofurban distinction, this strategy has also yielded novel readingsof history, adapted, perhaps, to China’s national program forMacau as an international tourist destination.The idea of theming here is intimately connected to thedevelopment of sites for tourism in recent decades, in a processsymptomatic of new urban economies increasingly based onconsumption rather than production, and tied to the emer-gence of stronger market-oriented forces (Hannigan 1998:2;Paradis 2004:200, 202). According to Thomas Paradis (2004),theming consists of strategies launched by governments tomarket cities and sites in an attempt to foster economic devel-opment and increased profits. Although we argue the calçadahas been deployed as a “theme strategy” for tourism develop-ment and promotion, we wish to stress that we are not referringto the production of a “simulated environment” or a “city ofsimulations,” which would be closer to the idea of “fantasy city”proposed by John Hannigan (1998), in which the centralityof theming ultimately alienates residents from public spaces.While the calçada was progressively embraced as an artifact toserve touristic purposes—of which we will see other examplesshortly—it has also been part of Macau residents’ daily life andevolving urban character (see Tieben 2009:52–53).ConclusionExamples of clear connections between the themed aspect ofthe calçada and the promotion of tourism in and for Macaumay be seen in strategic locations. For people arriving at theOuter Harbor Ferry Terminal, on the east side of the peninsula,it appears right away. The information desk of the tourismoffice was renovated in 2013, reopening in January 2014 pavedwith calçada to welcome visitors to the city. As mentionedabove, this type of pavement was also chosen to cover the es-planade of the Portas do Cerco (關閘), Macau’s northernborder withmainlandChina. Another example is theMacau SARtourism representation office in Beijing, which is also decoratedwith the calçada portuguesa. More often than not, the image ofMacau promoted abroad is a collage of the calçada and his-torical buildings and monuments, in an attempt to recreate thecity’s “unique” environment, inviting visitors to “experienceMacau” (“Sentir Macau”), as conveyed in the slogan promotedby the MGTO. As a concluding remark, we introduce here partof an interview conducted in 2014 with the director of thatbureau, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, in which she ex-plains how the calçada paves the way to Macau’s touristic de-velopment and promotion.The calçada is one of Macau’s icons. It’s one of the centralelements of the city’s cultural, historical, and architecturalheritage, and one ofMacau’s major features as a meeting pointbetween the Chinese and the Portuguese cultures that turn thecity into a singular tourist destination. The Portuguese calçadais used as an element of embellishment and decoration, en-hancing the value of the Historic Center of Macau, part of theUNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cul-tural Organization] World Heritage list, alongside severalsquares and promenades of the city, inviting visitors to coverMacau step-by-step and to appreciate the beauty of the city.9. The terms in Thai and Japanese were examined and translated bytwo of our colleagues, Yoko Taguchi (Japan Society for the Promotion ofScience, Kyoto University) and Pijika Pumketkao (Institut Parisien deRecherche Architecture, Urbanistique et Société, University of Paris-Est,Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville).Zandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 387

Endorsing a narrative of cultural encounters and unmatchedarchitectural and historical value, the official portrait of Macauby the MGTO adopts the calçada as a central element in “con-necting” disparate historicalmoments andmaterial realities intoan urban unity. Acting both as an artifice and as an artifactcapable of conflating past and present in a rather recent urbanfabrication, the calçada is deployed to promote and advertise thecity while conveying processes of political compromise thatassess history by rewriting it with reference to the contempo-rary. Through discourses of tourism and heritage, the fraughtnature of interethnic relations that marked the transition from acolonial to a postcolonial era is softened, and different historicaland architectural categories are mingled with the aim of “em-bellishing” Macau’s identity. In this process, the calçada con-tributes to the production of a “place-myth” (Paradis 2004:204),intertwined with and further enhanced by Macau’s global out-reach to UNESCO, creating a stronger image, yet arguably apaler reality of place.AcknowledgmentsThe idea for this article was born at the very end of 2013, duringthe Macau Winter School, an initiative by the InternationalInstitute of Asia Studies (IIAS), supported by the University ofMacau (UM), in which we both have taken part. In addition toIIAS and UM, we thank IIAS Director Philippe Peycam andthe academic convenors of the event, Michael Herzfeld, AkhilGupta, andHo Enseng, for the opportunity.We own a particularacknowledgment to Tim Simpson (UM), for having procuredfinancial support to enable part of this research through a post-doctoral fellowship grant to Sheyla S. Zandonai. We are grate-ful to the several informants who offered their time and insightsfor this study as well as to Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro for the pho-tographs that accompany our text. Finally, we thank the peerreviewers for their committed reading of earlier versions of thismanuscript as well as the commentators for sharing theirthoughts with us.CommentsCecilia L. ChuDivision of Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Uni-versity of Hong Kong, 6F Knowles Building, Pokfulam, Hong Kong(clchu@hku.hk). 26 VIII 17The Propensity of Things: The Portuguese Calcadaand Its HistoricitySheyla Zandonai and Vanessa Amaro’s study of the transforma-tion of the calçada from a ubiquitous paving material originatingin Portugal to a “heritage asset” in postcolonial Macau provokesus to consider the forms and processes of heritage-making in anovel way. In contrast to existing heritage scholarship that tendsto focus ondistinctive buildings and landscapes located in specificsites, the authors direct our attention here to a mobile physicalsubstance that, despite being newly produced, retains a resilientassociation with its original context when applied to urbanfabrics in distant territories. The acknowledgement of this as-sociation by Macau’s local Chinese residents, who in time alsoinscribed new cultural meanings to the calçada on their ownterms, further highlights the important role played by materialartifacts in constructing new relations to place and history. AsZandonai and Amaro point out, the transplantation of thecalçada to Macau has helped to “reanimate colonial agency andfeelings” that were concealed behind political transition. Thestudy thus raises further questions concerning the nature andpropensities of heritage: How does the calçada function differ-ently from other heritage assets that are fixed in place? Whatmade it appealing to people with different experiences undercolonial rule and helped to create an affective sense of belongingin the present? How may the study of calçada and other ubiq-uitous and often-overlooked materials in the built environmentenrich our understanding of postcolonial urbanism and openupnew venues in the study of heritage and conservation practice?In my own research, I point out that the nomination ofMacau as a UNESCO World Heritage City after the transfer ofsovereignty has led to a surge of interest in heritage and fosterednew aspirations among Macau’s citizens (Chu 2015). But be-hind the collective enthusiasm in conserving the city’s historicalassets, people of different social backgrounds do not support thecause for the same reason.Macau’sWorldHeritageCity status issignificant in that it has provided a new platform for its differentconstituencies to reaffirm their identities and possessive rela-tionships to the city under the theme of “cultural exchange”(Chen 2001; Porter 2009). This can be seen, for example, in thenew recognition of the significance of “Chinese vernacularbuildings.” The move has been strongly supported by the Chi-nese, who feel that these structures that represent their traditionhad long been neglected by the colonial administration in thepast, as well as by the Portuguese, who see it as an affirmation ofPortugal’s historical role in making Macau a place where Chi-nese and European cultures harmoniously coexisted. It is im-portant to note here that, although the UNESCO dossier in-cludes a wide range of heritage assets, it is those that are notdirectly associated with any specific historical periods that be-came the most effective mediums for expressing the “East meetsWest” narrative. One can more easily relate, for example, aparticular Chinese vernacular building to other ones elsewhereand by extension to a larger “national culture” in general termsthan to other more prominent monuments and statues carryingspecific political messages. The same can also be said of thestreets and squares of Macau, whose distinctive forms andfeatures constitute a “landscape type” that is generally under-stood to be of Portuguese urban tradition. As the key materialsubstance that constitutes these landscapes, the calçada thusembodies a sense of historicity that is not determined by itsactual age or time of production. Like Chinese vernaculardwellings and other common cultural artifacts, its symbolicpower lies essentially in its generality as a type that serves as alasting reference to the geographical region from which itoriginated.388 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

This is by no means to suggest that the calçada has not beenused for political purposes. As Zandonai and Amaro account,the decision to expand the paving of calçada around Macau inthe years building up to the handover was a deliberate attemptby the colonial administration to create “a stronger Portugueseimage and legacy.” The fact that these proposals triggeredinitial resistance from local Chinese shopkeepers indicates theexistence of a deeper animosity toward Portuguese colonial-ism. But as the authors point out, the eventual dissolution ofChinese antagonism and their identification of the calçada aspart of their heritage demands a more careful analysis of thecomplex dynamics that shaped colonial and postcolonialagency. Not least among these was how the widening use ofcalçada throughout Macau has helped to enhance the WorldHeritage City status that is a fierce source of pride to its citi-zens. It is also worth noting that the growing sense of own-ership of the calçada has much to do with the propensity of thematerial itself. Unlike other heritage assets, its ubiquity andmolecularity allow it to be easily adapted to any environmentwith new cultural references without losing its own historicityand intrinsic “Portugueseness.” This can be seen in the variouspaving projects where the calçada was utilized to create newpatterns that are characteristically more “Chinese.” Althoughthese projects were conceived as part of Macau’s tourism strat-egies, they have gradually given rise to a new “tradition” that isincreasingly identified by both Chinese and Portuguese citizens.By tracing the changing career of the calçada, Zandonaiand Amaro have introduced a new lens to study heritage thatbridges two types of existing scholarship, that of critical urbanscholars who theorize heritage as part and parcel of nation-building processes or capitalist globalization, and that of con-servationists who focus on deriving more practical strategies toprotect historical sites and improve the urban environment.The close examination of the ways in which the calçada wasused in Macau’s paving projects forces us to attend to both thepolitics of conservation and the multiple agents involved aswell as to the nature and propensity of the material substancethat constitute heritage places and maintain their historicity.Crucially, it shows that this historicity is not simply an effect ofage or particular conservation policies but also of communalunderstandings derived from people’s historical experiencesalong with a growing collective desire to protectMacau’s urbanidentity amid accelerating urban change. In this process, thecalçada’s versatility, generality, and historicity have becomekey to allow people to make claims to the city, whose streetsand squares remain the traces of their own histories.Allen ChunInstitute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan 11529(achun@gate.sinica.edu.tw). 22 VII 17This is a worthy paper that should invoke current interest inanthropology, most prominently in relation to cultural heri-tage. Its setting in Macau problematizes the legacy of Portu-guese colonialism, especially after its repatriation to China, butalso reveals the interplay between different actors in society.To say the least, the changing face of post-1999 Macau hasgiven newmeaning to what Christina Cheng (1999) once termed“a cultural Janus.” The cultural ambivalences that Cheng viewsas an abstraction of ideological conflicts rooted in coloniality,politics, religion, and literary imagination have always con-tributed to the unique character of Macau, regardless of ex-ternal influences. Instead of a simplistic clash of East andWest,one discovers a changing, nuanced interaction between variouscultural-qua-politicizing forces.The debate over cultural heritage, epitomized now byUNESCO’s recognition ofWorldHeritage Sites, hasmade it anobvious object of gazing for anthropological analyses of cul-tural objectification in theory and cultural industries in prac-tice, while carving out new terrains for tourist imaginaries andheightened commercialism. But the underlying politics of cul-ture still remains an underdeveloped field. The authors haveaddressed the relevant tensions that pitted the competing in-terests of historical memory, national reunification, and urbanrenewal. Contrary to expectation, the process of cultural ac-commodation has proven to be more hybrid and collusive thanone presumed by a clash of East versus West, tradition versusmodernity, and so on. If this was the main conclusion of thepaper, then it would be an important contribution to the liter-ature. In the process, their reliance on the behind-the-scenestestimony and opinions of Portuguesemasters involvedwith thecalçada project has gone beyond the usual analysis of the po-lemics of policy, thus providing an important source of dis-cursive material, even though one should hope for equal cov-erage of the Chinese side. In any case, the politics of culture inthe literal sense of governmental policy still represents, in thelonger view, part of a larger understanding of the complex cul-tural and political ground that ultimately defines the unique-ness of Macau.The authors reference, to a large degree, the Chinesenessand coloniality of Macau, but I would add that these are hardlythe pure pristine entities that we assume them to be. CathrynClayton’s Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question ofChineseness (2010) describes cultural ambiguity and margin-ality in Macau and their complicated meanings for a changingcommunity in ways prompted by a problematic notion ofidentity, defined paradigmatically by its modernity, assump-tions of inherent borders, and content, but muddled ultimatelyby the contradictions and overlaps created by negotiationsbetween its colonial and ethnic nature in the post-1999 era.Macau has always invited easy, misleading comparison withHong Kong, especially as a colony. Despite the long history ofMacau as a Portuguese trading port, the people have viewedthemselves and their culture largely as an extension ofGuangdong province in China and not as a separate entity. Thecomplex relationship between the Portuguese and locals in ev-eryday life is mostly a result of how Portugueseness has inserteditself into this normative Cantonese landscape rather than viceversa. Colonial Macau has, in fact, always been hybrid.In the historical long run, I think Macau was less a city thanan anachronistic ghost of a mercantile colonialism. Asia hasZandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 389

been littered with remnants of other Dutch and Spanish out-posts. Macau survived, reluctantly, after China initially declinedto take it back. What the Macanese call localized identity onlymakes sense vis-à-vis a distant empire. In fact, the most prob-lematic notion here is coloniality, which is treated too often as ageneric entity in themainstream literature. Macau’s colonialismperhaps resembles the Latin American experience more than itdoes high Victorian British colonialism, which has been sanc-tified as the basis of contemporary postcolonial theory. Despiteits zombie-like status, colonialism has mutated and persevered.One cannot contest the fact that the paving of the calçadawas adeliberate effort to memorialize Portugal’s colonial legacy, butthis was a token instantiation of the dead, closer toHobsbawm’s“invention of tradition” thanmaintenance of an ongoing way oflife. Like the emblemization of Scottish tartans, tradition refershere to superficial icons of culture, not Geertzian core symbols.As objects of status value, they are unavoidably politicized.On the other hand, I submit that the less well understoodaspect of the equation has to do with the China side of it. Mo-dernity, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of progress,”brought about widespread eradication of “irrational” tradition.Nationalist revolutions even routinely renamed the streets, in ad-dition to the above. Thus, in light of the repeatedly much hypedrepatriation of Macau and Hong Kong to the motherland, oneshould be surprised that, on the surface at least, one did notwitness the overt influence of sinicization in this process. I wouldargue that, beyond the rhetoric of “one country, two systems,”maintenance of local cultural identity, whatever it is, can beviewed as commensurable with the whole as long as it does notconflict with the politics of the center. How else can one rec-oncile the superficial contradictions between the emergence of“socialism with Chinese characteristics” (capitalism by anyother name) and the renaissance of cultural nationalism thathas, in large part, been supportive of it? If anything, the con-cessions made to Chinese aesthetic taste and feng shui in al-tering the calçada seem secondary in promoting this local vi-sion of Macau’s cultural future.Jonathan FriedmanDistinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, University ofCalifornia San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA ( jafriedman@ucsd.edu)and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 54 BoulevardRaspail, Paris 75006, France. 25 X 17This article provides an excellent example of what is called“theming” in advertising and not least in the tourism “in-dustry,” a phenomenon that can involve rather complex his-torical relations. These relations and their articulation addressthe issues of identity, colonial and postcolonial, as they relate tothe structuring of urban space.Macau’s reversion to Chinese ruleis the triggering event. It relates to legacy as well and, even moreso, to advertising. After all, Macau is not just a tourist resort. It isthe largest casino city in the world, having surpassed Las Vegasseveral years ago. The Chinese have adopted the calçada por-tuguesa to their own needs. Whether the Portuguese have lefttheir mark on Macau remains to be seen. The calçada wasadapted to Chinese needs with respect to symbols and evencolors. One day experts may reflect on the degree to which thecalçada really comes from Portugal or if there was a Chinesetradition aswell. History, after all, has been rewritten before, evenif, from today’s perspective, it does not appear likely. In any case,the article clearly documents the compromise between thePortuguese and the Chinese regarding the calçada and the dualfunction of this mixed product, a marker of Portuguese identityin China as well as having a specific trait linked to the casinotourism that it is meant to attract. The question that needs to beasked here is what the implications are of this material. Do de-clining empires aspire to leave a heritage behind themwhen theycontract to their former imperial centers? Is this whole story aquestion of advertisement and the tourist industry? It would beinteresting to know whether there were any consultancy firmsinvolved in the calçada portuguesa, either Portuguese or Chinese.The authors’ discussion of the reactions to the project of pro-ducing a Portuguese historical zone, free from traffic, that in-corporated the former Portuguese senate is clear and, of course,to be expected; the Chinese newspapers treating it as a scandal,and many Portuguese treating it as a waste of money. Here onemight have explored the specificity of the attitudes of Portuguesesettlers as opposed to that of the home country itself, because itis the former who seem to have a stake in the project. The furtherfact that the Chinese seem to have taken over the calçada alsoopens up numerous questions as to the meaning of this form forthe Chinese in Macau as well as those who visit. It is not clear tome to what extent this compromise product expresses fusion oran autonomous urban identity or, and this will be a question ofthe history of the future, whether the Portuguese has been as-similated to Chinese culture. Some contemporary anthropol-ogists would probably celebrate this as an example of hybridity,but it would be, as is usual, to overlook the real relations involvedas well the transformative aspect of Sinicization (if that termexists) that appears to have occurred. This article goes a signif-icant distance in exploring the details of the process that areimplied in the creation of a specifically Macau-based calçada. Ithas important implications for the study of the way colonial/postcolonial heritage is constructed.Michael HerzfeldDepartment of Anthropology, Harvard University, Tozzer Anthro-pology Building 311, 21 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts02138, USA (herzfeld@fas.harvard.edu). 26 VIII 17There is nothing particularly novel about the observation thatheritage and history are contested.Whatmakes this ethnographicexample interesting, however, is its demonstration of the role ofthe visual in modulating the passage from detested colonial relicto valued heritage. A recognizable product of a colonial era subtlychanges orientation, content, and color. Zandonai and Amaro390 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

have examined the localmeanings of these changes and show thatthe conventional features of the calçada changed as control of itscontent shifted from its use to mark a fading imperial presence,that of Portugal, to an instrument capable of registering localinhabitants’ cosmological and aesthetic concerns.The establishment of Macau and Hong Kong as SpecialAdministrative Zones was an exercise in intentional ambiguity.Places that China regarded as unequivocally belonging to themotherland were torn between patriotism and unease with the“return” to Chinese rule and the attendant fear of losing somecivilizational prestige. Like Cypriots who, with a measure ofembarrassment, nostalgically recall the good old days of Britishrule as they simultaneously decry the twinmicroimperialisms ofGreece and Turkey, the residents of the two SARs pay lip serviceto liberation but, in some contexts, regard themselves as cul-turally elevated by the colonial experience in relation to theproletarian self-image and authoritarian governance of the Peo-ple’s Republic of China. It is in a global hierarchy of value oflargely colonial origin that cultural self-abnegation gains trac-tion (Herzfeld 2016).In consequence, a culturally intimate view of Macau en-compasses local nostalgia for a colonial age alongside the morepredictable contempt for its remnants. Moreover, the Chinesemotherland is not immune to the allure of that same culturalhierarchy, as its pursuit of prestigious aspects of “Western”culture demonstrates. At the same time, China’s energetic re-habilitation of Confucius provides an encompassing appeal toharmony within a paternalistic idiom of governance. It is in thisbroader sense, I suggest, that the calçada speaks to the officialmantra that “East meets West in harmony,” invoked by theauthors. The larger geopolitical context helps to explain theofficial Chinese acceptance and expropriation of this colonialcultural trace: the conditions were right for such an act of aes-thetic absorption.The authors implicitly show how the performance of con-struction contributed to the change in the significance of thecalçada. They point out that local Chinese were impressed thatpeople they had always regarded as colonial masters and edu-cated people (doutores) would perform manual labor. Within afew years, there were virtually no Portuguese working on thesemosaic pavements. Whether intentionally or otherwise, thePortuguese specialists had “performed”—in the poetic sense ofacting on the world—a new role for the mosaic specialists, onethat quickly became accessible, with modifications of qualityand technique, to local workers. It would have been valuable tohave a more closely observed analysis of the learning process asPortuguese artisans taught Cantonese workers, most of whompresumably spoke neither Portuguese (despite the official statusof the language) nor Mandarin. It may be that the absence ofcommon linguistic ground, with its implications of cultural andpolitical hierarchy, favored the development of a more “dem-ocratic” mode of knowledge transmission. The authors tell usthat local Macanese workers largely learned to make calçadathrough imitation. Were the Portuguese reluctant teachers?Were the variations introduced by the Cantonese workers asource of friction or praise for originality? How did the Portu-guese master artisans react to the demands of feng shui andthe Chinese predilection for the color red? Did they understandthat these new elements would make the tradition culturallymore acceptable under Chinese rule? A significant dimension ofthe shift in attitudemust have occurredwithin the unusual formof apprenticeship thus generated. Knowing exactly how it oc-curred would shed considerable light on the role of ordinarypeople in effecting the political reevaluation of the calçada andwould have further enhanced the article’s contribution to ourunderstanding of the relationship between heritage politics andknowledge transmission.Macau’s eccentricity throws such processes into particularlysharp relief.We should not forget that the SAR is the site of “TheVenetian” hotel and casino—surely one of the most ambitiousreplications of another country’s architectural heritage everattempted, and a tourist attraction in its own right, at least inpart, precisely because it is not in Venice. Similarly, the calçadais not the calçada of Lisbon; indeed, the fact that it must belabeled portuguesa is the clearest indication that it is Macaneserather than literally Portuguese.This is a crucial distinction. The authors write rather blithelyof Portuguese and Chinese actors. Some of these actors, how-ever, still regard themselves as neither Portuguese nor Chineseand insist on being treated as “Macanese,” a label that is alsoapplied to their markedly hybrid cuisine. In short, they, too, hadundergone an identity transformation that presaged, and per-haps partially enabled, the identity now accorded to the calçada,thereby helping to guarantee its survival against what, at thetime, seemed hopeless odds. Indeed, the authors’ observationthat the word “Portuguese” is opportunely displaced by “Med-iterranean” or “southern European” demonstrates the enduringappeal of a global hierarchy of value cleansed of the poisonedmemory of colonialism as well, perhaps, as a sneaking ac-knowledgment that Portugal has latterly also been geopoliticallymarginal and might therefore now be viewed with greater ret-rospective sympathy than Britain or France. Local people whocalled themselves Macanese rather than Portuguese were majorplayers in the last prehandover administration. Did this cir-cumstance ease the transformation of the calçada—“neither oldnor monumental,” as the authors say, but nicely interdigitatedwith both antiquity and monumentality—into the “uniquely”Macanese heritage item that they show it to have become today?João de Pina-CabralSchool of Conservation and Anthropology, University of Kent,Marlowe Building, Canterbury CT2 7NR, United Kingdom(j.pina-cabral@kent.ac.uk). 5 VII 17Equivocal CompatibilitiesMacau and its history are, inmany respects, a salutary counter-example to the now standard approaches to colonialism/post-Zandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 391

colonialism. I praise the subtle but complex way in which theauthors of this article picked on a somewhat minor aspect ofurban decoration and transformed it into a window to thehistorical relations that have marked the city. The handover ofpower from Portugal to China in 1999 was the final step in aprolonged and complex postcolonial transition that was on themove ever since the late 1960s. Furthermore, the city changedimmensely after 2002, with the impact of the new gamblingbusiness managed by American capital. Yet this very relianceon a new form of touristic consumerism opened the door toan increased consumption of history.The new hegemons (themselves not a uniform group), intheir efforts to show that they “represent” their locus of hege-mony, were led to pick on the dregs of past hegemony. The“land” (“territory” is the usual name used in Macau) is definedby its history, and those who want to show that they own it haveto grasp that history. Yet, in a postcolonial environment, this is asomewhat contradictorymove. Small things, like a certainmodeof paving public spaces with black andwhite stones, can come toconstitute forms of capturing power by wrapping up pasthegemonies within present hegemonies. In this way, things likecalçada acquire an inherently ambivalent quality. It is not somuch that they become polysemic but rather that they createcompatibility between different meanings that remain distinct.They thus become equivocal in the compatibilities that theyfacilitate (see Pina-Cabral 2002:105–126, 2010).Even as the city has changed immensely, it remains today, asit has been since the sixteenth century, a place where differentcultural traditions meet without fusing. But, for all that, it doesnot stop being one city. What this means is that the very con-tinuity of urban life depends on the existence of semantic shockabsorbers (so to speak) for the continuous play of ambivalentsignifiers. We could characterize such processes as heightenedinstances of indeterminacy, but they are more than that, sincethese encounters yield practical compatibilities of interests be-tween agents that do not simply fail to understand each other—they refuse to understand each other.Thus, things like the calçada, in that they facilitate a com-patibilization of equivocal understandings, are central to thecity’s life and, in particular, to the persons who find themselvesin the forefront of the encounter between these differenthegemonies (as represented in distinct meanings evoking dis-tinct cultural traditions—different definitions of space, differentlanguages, and different modes of expressing self).There is a point in which I do not fully follow the authors.Quoting David Lowenthall’s classic analysis of social time (seePina-Cabral 1987), they argue that “heritage is an artifice . . .that harnesses an imaginary, not an actual, past.” One canplainly see what they are aiming at in terms of their account ofthe postcolonial vagaries of Macau’s urban architecture. How-ever, they are perhaps overhasty in emphasizing the “con-structed” nature of heritage in the urban environment. They runthe danger of forgetting that, wherever persons are at stake,history (and life, in the broader meaning of the word) neverstops. The heritaged past becomes an actual past, but the silentaspects that this process of heritage-making depended on donot simply vanish into oblivion. They remain dormant as pos-sibilities of meaning, and they can emerge when least expected.An overemphasis on constructivism grants perhaps too muchpower to the present hegemony—in that sense, it is bound tobe a defeatist approach that one must not condone in ethicalterms. Hong Kong’s present political conundrum could be anexcellent example of what I mean.The very equivocation that permeates multiethnic (postcolo-nial or metropolitan) environments, where different culturaltraditions meet on a daily basis, highlights the fact that onecannot ever predict how history will turn out. For example, thePortuguese were never very successful at (or, truth to say, evendedicated to) imposing their language in Macau. Nevertheless,Chinese mainland interests in Africa and Latin America meanthat there are more people speaking and learning Portuguese inMacau today than during the four and a half centuries of Por-tuguese rule. As the result of this, possibilities arise for ecumenicencounters between people who transport certain linguistic ap-titudes and tastes even as they share no sociopolitical “identity”(see Pina-Cabral 2014). The sharing of an aesthetics of urbandesign, the sharing of a taste for calçada—much like the newlyfound appreciation of Portuguese food and table etiquette amongthe new Chinese ruling class of the city—come to operate asaffordances that favour or suppress interpersonal encounters. Astrictly constructivist approach is seldom sufficient to account forthe way life mixes and matches different aspects of the past andfor the way in which the constitution of hegemony so oftendepends on equivocation.Tim SimpsonDepartment of Communication, University of Macau, E21-4032,Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China (tsimpson@umac.mo). 18 VII 17Pavement PedagogyWhen I moved to Macau in 2001, I was immediately charmedby the city’s expressive stone tiles. Only later did I learn that thischarismatic pavement, which I presumed had persisted forseveral centuries, was a recently invented tradition and that theLargo de Senado, the city’s primordial central square, had beenpedestrianized only a decade before. I was therefore delighted toread this ethnographic account of Macau’s calçada and to un-derstand the administrative machinations and interculturalnegotiations necessary to create one of Macau’s most endearing(if not actually enduring) attractions.In this brief response, I would like to comment on the politicaleconomyof these particular stones. That is, I will focus not on thepostcolonial peculiarities of Macau’s calçada portuguesa butrather on the functional role played by Macau’s pedestrianizedpublic spaces and concomitant tourist peregrinations in China’spostsocialist economic reforms. This will (perhaps selfishly) im-392 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

bricate this project with my own interest in China’s use of nor-mative models to guide ethical behavior (Bakke 2000) and Ma-cau’s unlikely role as amodel city for Chinese tourists, exemplaryof a normativemode of “urbanism as a way of life” that is crucialto the country’s economic reforms (Simpson 2014).The authors correctly contend that, in postcolonial Macau,the calçada is marshaled in “new economic and political aims,through a strategy of image-building and theming.” But theirfocus on the representational aspects of the stonework and themanner in which it reinforces an imagistic or symbolic motifmay overlook the more practical use of the stones as a groundfor pedestrian movement and their function in normalizingspecific notions of appropriate tourist behavior.This relation between the image and function of the calçadais actually addressed by a tourism official who is quoted in thearticle. She suggests that, when “used as an element of embel-lishment and decoration,” the calçada is “inviting visitors tocover Macau step-by-step and to appreciate the beauty of thecity.”This comment explicitly articulates an understanding of tour-ism as, first and foremost, perambulation. The pedestrianizationof the Largo de Senado and the subsequent deployment ofcalçada in other areas of the city serves to mobilize the stones,and their hybrid Portuguese-Chinese aesthetic, to that end. Theheritage buildings on the Largo de Senado have been retrofittedas retail shops whose enormously expensive rents depend on themassive foot traffic driven by the 30 million tourists who visitMacau each year, two-thirds of whom come from themainland.The stones normalize certain ambulatory activities (e.g., win-dow shopping) with coterminous assumptions about appro-priate tourist behavior in public space (e.g., making photos andpurchasing cosmetics). It is worth noting here that the Chinesegovernment has recently promoted Macau’s urbanity as an af-firmative model for Hong Kong, whose own citizens havetemporarily pedestrianized public spaces for distinctly differentpurposes: to agitate for universal suffrage and sovereign au-tonomy (Bradshear 2017).That tourists walk around Macau may seem like an unre-markable truism, but such behaviors cannot be taken forgranted. As Orvar Lofgren (1999) argues in his social history ofthe European vacation, the leisure traveler has to self-consciouslylearn to be a tourist, and that means adopting appropriatebehaviors that are conducive to appreciating an assortment ofsites and experiences. “Vacationing has served as a laboratoryfor trying out new lifestyles or forms of consumption,” he says,and “the history of holiday-making includes a constant processof learning and relearning” (Lofren 1999:281). Macau’s calçadaand the pedestrian experience that they afford are a pedagogicalcomponent of China’s contemporary tourist conjuncture.Mainland tourists are not in Macau by happenstance. Theirtravel is largely facilitated by the Individual Visit Scheme,through which the People’s Republic of China extends specialexit visas to select citizens from relatively affluent cities andprovinces, allowing them to travel to the SARs of Macau andHong Kong. The central government promotes tourism as partof a pedagogical initiative designed to enhance cosmopolitanismand increase domestic consumption (Nyiri 2009). Therefore,Macau functions as both a laboratory of subjectivity and amodel of tourist practices for Chinese travelers.AlanA. Lew (2006) highlights the role of pedestrianized publicspaces in China’s market reforms. Today nearly every sizeableChinese city has a pedestrian shopping street. These environ-ments, Lew says, “are part of the transformation of many Chi-nese cities from socialist cities of production to cities of play andtertiary employment where tourism for both domestic and in-ternational markets is part of a new consumption-oriented econ-omy” (Lew 2006:151). Pedestrianizing social space ultimatelyinvites pedestrians, and this urban subject has been key to thepostsocialist transformation of China during the reform era, aspeople moved outside the self-contained danwei, or work units,to shop and socialize in commodified urban space.Interestingly, Lew notes that Macau’s Largo de Senado wasthe first such pedestrian project in China. Indeed, Chinese au-thorities tend to experiment with such innovative initiatives inperipheral locales, such as coastal cities, Special Economic Zones,or erstwhile colonial enclaves (Chuihua et al. 2002). From thisvantage point, wemay interpret the pedestrianization of Largo deSenado as not merely a decision by Macau’s outgoing colonialadministration to preserve the city’s Portuguese legacy, or anarena of postcolonial intercultural negotiation, but as an exper-iment in economic reforms. In saying this, I do not mean toreplace one explanation with another but merely to add an ad-ditional bit of antecedent nuance to this overdetermined ac-count.Finally, from the perspective of a materialist ontology, thecalçada stones themselves manifest an agency, or actant sta-tus, which is a crucial component of the inchoate Chinesepostsocialist tourist subject, who conflates the freedom of cross-border mobility with the freedom to consume. That subjectivitymay be mobilized when the tourist visits a pedestrianized shop-ping district in her own city, many of which also have heritagemotifs. In this way, Macau’s heritage, invented or otherwise,is mobilized in a didactic campaign of domestic tourist con-sumption with clear macroeconomic goals. Macau’s eminentwalkability therefore elucidates the postsocialist political econ-omy of the calçada.ReplyIf we could point out one strength that emerges from “ThePortuguese Calçada in Macau: Paving Residual Colonialismwith a New Cultural History of Place,” it is the diversity ofscholarly ethos and themes for further studies that it has evokedto our commentators. Our readers have found and proposeddifferent entry points and approaches, fromheritage politics andthe question of coloniality and cultural identity to the emergenceof new forms of consumption spaces enabled by tourism, to dis-Zandonai and Amaro The Portuguese Calçada in Macau 393

cuss the elements they deemed to be the most relevant or prob-lematic in the paper.When we began this project a few years ago, Macau wasreaching a culmination—and perhaps saturation point—of itstourism project. For a city of such small scale (nearly 650,000inhabitants spanning over 30.5 km2), and given the limitationsof its “Historic Center,” the number of visitors—at nearly twomillion per month—was overwhelming. It was inviting to lookat the politics of tourism at that point in time, when the majorcasinos ensuing from the gambling liberalization in 2002 hadopened their doors and the local government, backing China’sagenda, was actively promoting the city as a center of regionaltourism and leisure, as the official parlance goes.We decided, though, to look back to the recent past, whichhad witnessed the beginning and the transformation of thecalçada as we know it today. It was then a curious urban item,largely overseen by urban sociology or anthropology scholarsworking onMacau. This is, to our knowledge, the first work thatanalyzes its role in the city’s identity construction—and argu-ably the first study about the calçada—bringing on the analysisof political processes that have shaped it while informing dis-cursive changes that were larger than this urban artifact proper.In due course, we found out that, while informing changes in thesignificance and uses of the calçada, these processes were re-flecting the politics of the time. In other words, we resorted to anold but efficient anthropological approach, grappling with theconstruction of our object through a Geertzian perspective ofthin and thick description.Within the politics of tourism being shaped in Macau andthe “theming” policies connected to it, history and its dis-contents tend to fall into oblivion. Given the pace of econ-omic transformation and growth that have quickly taken overthe city since its handover to China in 1999, and especiallyafter the end of the gambling monopoly, changes to the urbanspace have not been negligible. More relevant here, they werenot random but responded to specific agendas.In keeping with that, we argued that, more often than not,the question of heritage—which we have linked here to his-tory—has been either confounded with or entrenched intourism economics and politics and that that which is labeledheritage is easily prone to commodification. While keepingsight of the role of tourism as a powerful catalyst for heritagematters, we deemed that there was value to first examiningthe processes that led to the assessment of the calçada as anintrinsically “Portuguese” heritage before it was understoodand appropriated otherwise—or “Sinicized”—because of itsfashionable and easily transposable nature, as Cecilia Chu hasshrewdly captured.Undoubtedly, because of the original Portuguese nature ofthe calçada—as understood by our respondents—and the pe-riod in which it started integrating the cityscape with more in-tensity—during the political transition—we could only sketchthe always-delicate question of colonialism in Macau. If Ma-cau was no longer a “colony” of Portugal but a “territory underPortuguese administration,” the harnessing of the calçada asan urban project revealed the existence of interethnic tensionsthat problematized the legacy of Portuguese colonialism bypitting “competing interests of historical memory, national re-unification, and urban renewal” against each other, as AllenChun remarked.Beyond the question of colonial animosity and the frictionsthat emerged within the political agency at the time, we concurwith Jonathan Friedman’s comment on the implications ofsuch material and its implementation in the city when hequestions whether “declining empires aspire to leave a heritagebehind them when they contract to their former imperialcenters.”We therefore found, in the calçada, an entry point, asomewhat “minor aspect of urban decoration,” as João de Pina-Cabral pointed out in his comments, which we have singled outas a “window to the historical relations” that were shaping thecity at that point in time. “These relations and their articulationsaddress the issues of identity, colonial and postcolonial, as theyrelate to the structuring of the urban space,” as Friedman wrote.Ultimately, we claim that the question of urban landscapetransformation highlighted by the development of the so-calledPortuguese pavement revealed overlapping and interconnectedprocesses that were ultimately a matter of identity constructionand affirmation.The matter of localization and identity formation as it relatesto place is the main underlying thread of our work, highlightedmore acutely in the comments by Michael Herzfeld. In ourwork, we sought to show how the production of the calçada,dualistic at first, resulted in something more complex and var-iegated than the sole inputs by both the Portuguese and theChinese administrations ofMacau in the short history periodwesingled out and described here, thus revealing claims to placeand spatial construction that cannot be taken at merely facevalue.We would hence refrain from embracing the notion of“hybridity,” which itself can only be taken at face value byactually describing a process of multicultural formation. Itdoes not, however, explain the social complexity of the agencyinvolved, which is what actually fosters the integration of suchearly “hybrid” forms into the culture of place as somethingelse, which we here called “local,” or which could be called“Macanese,” as suggested by Herzfeld (a point that we willreturn to below). What is the hybrid if not a locally born form?Particular choice of lexicon notwithstanding, there is an el-ement raised by some of our readers that deserves our attentionwith regard to further studies of the calçada, that is, the locali-zation or the identification with place that ensues from suchmulticultural and precolonial and postcolonial processes. Iden-tification is complex in Macau. Several groups of people claimrights to the city. The Macau Chinese, the Portuguese who havelong settled in Macau, and the Eurasians, to whom the termMacanese, stricto sensu, often refers.Perhaps this is where our analysis could have gone further.From our standpoint, a problematic aspect of this work is notthat it relies on a cultural division between what is Portugueseand what is Chinese but that it does not locate the complexity of394 Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 4, August 2018

what being a local Portuguese, or a Macanese, for that matter,comprises, as Herzfeld pointed out.He highlighted in his comments that some of the actors in-volved in the processes we described “insist on being treated asMacanese”—that is, as local residents of Macau—and do notnecessarily regard themselves as Portuguese or Chinese, havingalso undergone an “identity transformation that presaged, andperhaps partially enabled, the identity now accorded to thecalçada.” We concur that more scrutiny in that regard wouldhave added finer layers to the understanding of the process ofidentity formation, both in thematerial and in the cultural senseof the term, that the calçada has enabled as a local construct.The most novel approaches that underlie some of the di-rections this work could take, from our perspective, are theurban question and its relation to themateriality and experienceof place, raised by Cecilia Chu and Tim Simpson. The calçadaembodies a sense of historicity that is not determined by its ageof production, Chu highlighted in her comment. There is nodoubt that here lies one of the keys to the study of heritage asartifact or “fabrication,” in the sense described by David Lo-wenthal, with its close links to the tourism industry, as explainedin our work—an approach that Allen Chun has described in hisassessment of the calçada as an “invention of tradition” ratherthan a “ongoing way of life.” Accordingly, we emphasized thefact that the political constructs that have gradually transformedthe Portuguese pavement and the powers associated with it werea product of hegemonic changes in the recent history of Macau.Pina-Cabral warned us about the risks of a constructivistapproach, arguing that the “silent aspects” involved in pro-cesses of heritage-making “remain dormant as possibilities ofmeaning, and they can emerge when least expected.” We donot believe that an emphasis on the hegemony of the “pres-ent”—as we retold part of the history of the calçada—overrules different interpretations and understandings of thisurban item or any other (urban) matter. But we did focus ouranalysis on the processes of decision-making involved in itscreation as a “landscape type” feature of Macau’s urban andarchitectural spaces, as Chu suggested, privileging the studyof the top-down approach that has shaped such a feature as a“unique” Portuguese legacy turned into a syncretic or mul-ticultural (postcolonial) mark of the city.Hence, here is where we believe Tim Simpson’s commentson our work emerge as an interesting suggestion for futurestudies by highlighting the importance of the practical uses(versus representational aspects) of the calçada as “a groundfor pedestrian movement” as well as in the perception of Ma-cau as a “model city” for mainland Chinese visitors. By con-tributing to “normalizing specific notions of appropriate tour-ist behavior,” such as “ambulatory activities,” Simpson writes,the creation of public spaces by extending the calçada into thecityspace emerges as part of a new consumption-oriented econ-omy catering to tourists.This is a novel approach fromwhat we originally had inmindas an extension of this study, that is, the perception of touristsabout the “imagistic or symbolic” motifs cast in the pavement.As other commentators highlighted in their readings of ourpaper, we deem the latter also offers a research opportunity formore ground to be paved forward.—Sheyla S. Zandonai and Vanessa AmaroReferences CitedAgar, Michael H. 2008. The professional stranger: an informal introduction toethnography. San Diego, CA: Academic.Amaro, Ana Maria. 1998. Das Cabanas de Palha às Torres de Betão. AssimCresceu Macau. Lisbon: Livros do Oriente.Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The social life of things: commodities in culturalperspective. 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