Spaces of Dis/Harmony in Colonial Goa. Lefebvre’s Spatial Dynamics and the Convent of Santa Mónica, 1606-1740

Abstract

This paper explores the interplay of Henri Lefebvre’s conceived, perceived, and lived spaces in the Real Convento de Santa Mónica, a nunnery located at the heart of the Portuguese Asian empire, in Goa, India. The sense of harmony produced by the conceived and perceived spaces, frameworks that produced a particular habitus among the nuns, which in turn facilitated congenial lived spaces that aligned with the nuns’ aspirations, was significantly disrupted by an external authority, the Archbishop of Goa Ignácio de Santa Teresa, in the early eighteenth century. The archbishop’s desire to curb the power of the Orders and elevate the local Goan ecclesiastical institutions had an unintended effect: it introduced a state of disharmony into the lived space of the nuns, and thus the dialectic between habitus and space led many nuns to experience the convent not as a place of calm and refuge, but rather as a prison. This article is part of the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries, guest-edited by Rozely Vigas and Rômulo Ehalt.

Keywords

• Goa
• architecture
• convents
• space
• nuns
• Henri Lefebvre