Hi Yannick. Could you start by telling us how it was that you first became interested in everyday life as a historical subject?
Hi Huw! That’s a tough question. In a way, my intellectual curiosity was always centered on human experience. It was a moment of great relief when I was introduced to historical anthropology during my undergrad. While I was in Leiden for my Master’s degree, specialising in late colonial Indonesia, it was my main ambition to write history ‘from the bottom up’, which can be a daunting project given the scarcity of source material that was not filtered, censored or produced by the colonial authorities. That’s when I got intrigued by the idea of looking at nationalism not only through the lens of intellectual history, but on the level of everyday life, grassroots activism and the experience of being a national citizen as opposed to a mere colonial subject. Oftentimes, being a nationalist was not so much about saying certain things or being a member of a certain party. It was rather a (predominantly urban) cultural movement, which included a unique slang, dress codes, nationalist ‘trademarks’ (such as smoking kretek, Indonesian clove cigarettes), and many other things. It was, in many respects, banal nationalism. But what I found most intriguing was not how it was imposed or instilled, but rather how it emerged as a form of sociability.
On top of that, I found myself gravitating more and more towards an approach that takes individuals as a theoretical starting point, and then expands towards the study of networks, groups, etc. The way I see it, a Foucauldian outlook based on discourse and regimes of knowledge often results in historical narratives where individual agency is not sufficiently acknowledged. In that sense, scholars like Michel de Certeau and James C. Scott, not to mention cultural historians like Carlo Ginzburg and historians of everyday life like Alf Lüdtke, resonated with me as their approaches address themes of individuality, belonging, compliance, resistance, disobedience. I was introduced to Alltagsgeschichte pretty early during my undergraduate studies back in Tübingen, Germany. But looking back, I never anticipated that, one day, I’d be working towards becoming a historian of everyday life myself. Life, as we all know, is full of surprises.
What inspired you to want to do research on Portuguese history?
As I already mentioned, I have a background in colonial and global history. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t expect that I’d be focusing on a European country again anytime soon. But when I found out about this project, I was immediately intrigued by its ambitious scope. I speak Italian, Spanish, and French, but until I started the project, Portugal was one place in Europe that I wasn’t too familiar with. So I guess that, in a way, I got interested in Portugal for reasons similar to the ones that inspired me to do extensive research on Indonesia, including learning the language and working in the National Archives in Jakarta. I always enjoyed the thrill of exploring something unfamiliar.
But there’s also another important reason why I decided to embark on this project: the Salazar dictatorship as a case-study. I’m particularly interested in the question of whether something like ‘apoliticism’ really exists, or whether it’s just something that features prominently in authoritarian regimes. Claims to ‘common sense’ can be strikingly effective for the purpose of demobilising the population. That way, politics became a matter of tradition and allegedly hands-on problem-solving.
Even nowadays, we will see politicians and parties deploying this strategy. One could almost describe it as a form of centrist populism. And this strategy is not only used by fringe figures, but by respected heads of state in well-to-do countries. All too frequently, political decision-making or the behaviour of citizens are not portrayed as parts of a process of negotiation or trial and error. Any political move is ultima ratio if we look at things that way. I find it disturbing to see these forms of Realpolitik make such a stealthy come-back, as this kind of rhetoric is anathema to democratic ideals.
Salazar and his Council of Ministers perfected this strategy like few other regimes in Europe. While the regime went through a period of flirting with fascist concepts and aesthetics and implementing some of them, these ‘politics of the spirit’ (coined by the regime’s chief propagandist António Ferro) were just a part of the regime’s toolkit. Various aspects of these mobilisation campaigns have been fruitfully explored in the scholarly literature. But what if, overall, fatalism and a sense of apathy, fostered by the lived experience of daily rhythms that offered little in terms of a long-term perspective, were the lifeblood of the regime? The Portuguese dictatorship is an excellent case to explore pervasive strategies of politics through the art of demobilisation. I’m convinced that it can further our understanding of authoritarian rule past and present.
What will be the primary focus of your own PhD research project?
I will take a particularly close look at the everyday lives of individuals on the margins of society: sex workers, homeless people, beggars, and delinquents. We tend to think of these ‘underworlds’ as separate spaces in society. From the perspective of an academic working at a privileged institution like the University of St Andrews, the daily realities experienced by people who live at the bottom of the social pyramid seem extraordinary. But obviously, looking at ‘ordinariness’ this way is quite normative. As a historian, I’d run the risk of reproducing markers of distinction that were officially encouraged, or possibly even invented, by the regimes under study. The phenomenon of sex work in Lisbon is a good case in point. As a cosmopolitan port city and an important centre of trade, commerce, and imperial connections, Lisbon, like other major port cities, had a thriving red light milieu. Under the dictatorship, very little changed. What did change, however, was the regime’s propaganda, and efforts were made to curb prostitution in the city. Life certainly didn’t get any easier for prostitutes and their clients, and eventually, laws were made to get the flesh trade under control in the early 1960s. But how much did the interventions of a staunchly conservative dictatorial regime really change affairs on the ground? Lisbon was still Lisbon. Porto was still Porto. And in the countryside, semi-feudal socioeconomic structures sometimes forced women into extramarital ‘arrangements’ with landowners and estate managers to obtain material benefits and protection for their families.
I could say similar things about other vulnerable groups in Portuguese society during the dictatorship. The bottom line is this: everyday life is not just the domain of those who work 9-5 jobs, build (intact) families and live on the same spot, in a house of their own. When we look at certain spaces, such as bars, music venues or, in more urban areas, nightclubs, we can observe how social groups overlap. Granted, distinctions were made, and social stratification undoubtedly did have tangible effects on peoples’ lives. At the same time, the regime – while it certainly did not condone illicit activities – had to find a modus vivendi and accept that interference with local communities was only desirable to a certain extent, which varied from case to case. My suspicion is that the regime exercised only very limited control over these fringe groups. It is my aim to explore how the quotidian rhythms of (criminal) underworlds clashed with a regime that claimed to represent Catholic morality and an apolitical, ‘common sense’ approach to politics, understood as technocratic problem-solving.
Before coming to St Andrews, you were doing research on decolonisation. Will this also feature in your research on the Portuguese dictatorship?
Indeed, I did research for my MA thesis on the impact of fascist role models on anticolonial nationalist parties in Indonesia. I showed that, on a grassroots level, Fascism and National Socialism were widely admired and emulated by members of Partai Indonesia Raya, Indonesia’s largest nationalist party throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.
It goes without saying that colonialism was a major factor in the political and social life of Portugal under Salazar. Salazar and his ministers were avowed supporters of Portuguese imperialism. Of course, the centrality of this imperial ideology for the Estado Novo as a whole can be debated: was it the lifeblood of the regime, or just one of many important factors? Obviously, it is much more complex than that, and we have to pay close attention to contexts and chronology.
I can’t say yet to what extent decolonisation will feature in my dissertation. What I can say, however, is that colonialism will frequently come up during the course of my argument. It is impossible to understand everyday life in port cities like Lisbon or Porto without considering the influx of people and goods from all over the globe.
Other than that, I plan on pursuing a smaller project on the side where I look at the experience of dictatorship in the remote colony of East Timor. Did changes in the metropole have any repercussions in the colony from an everyday life perspective? I find this question incredibly intriguing and would like to investigate it further.
The history of everyday life has been described as the assemblage of ‘collages of miniatures’. What’s your favourite ‘miniature’ that you’ve come across in the course of your research?
I’ve been struck by some anthropological studies about rural societies in Portugal during the 1960s. For me as a historian, these works are somewhere between primary and secondary sources, and that’s what makes them so eye-opening. Since they look at patterns of daily life and social stratification on communities that are not properly accessible through archival traces, they helped me to get a much better grasp on the complexity of rural life. There is this idea that Portuguese rural society was neatly stratified and, except for the large landowners, mostly apolitical, as sharecroppers and rural labourers tried to make ends meet under unfavourable circumstances. But while the social system in the Portuguese countryside was definitely more rigid than it was in urban environments, it was also harder for the state to control it. There is a strong ‘urban bias’ when it comes to Portugal’s political history.
The large historical port cities, particularly Porto and Lisbon, set the tone for the entire country. However, if we want to understand the exceptional longevity of Salazar’s regime, we need to get a better understanding of what was happening outside the metropolitan centres as well. And, surprisingly, the alleged ‘apoliticism’ of Portugal’s hinterlands did not only provide stability to the regime, but it seems like it also provided and opened up a variety of spaces that were beyond the state’s direct control. My favourite stories so far, as sad as they may be, are the stories of poor women, unemployed labourers, and beggars who were part of their respective communities. We shouldn’t romanticise the lives of those who had to beg for money, or for the daughters of low-income families who had to sell their bodies. While they were integrated into their communities, they were vulnerable and prone to disease and malnutrition. It seems as if the New State, however, changed very little about that. In fact, change was hard to achieve on a local level, at least if citizens expected the state to take care of things. The political structure of rural Portugal was effectively designed to minimise political participation. In the case of poor relief and the integration of vulnerable groups in society, villages often kept handling these issues on their own. In that sense, Salazar’s Estado Novo was a ‘new’ state with ‘old’ pariahs.