Hi Josh. Can you tell us how you came to be interested in the history of everyday life?
Hi Huw. I chose to write my Master’s thesis on the Occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka) by Italian veterans in 1919, with the aim of uncovering a ‘snapshot’ of these men and their attitudes at the end of First World War, but, crucially, before the rise of Fascism. These men came from very diverse social backgrounds, but almost all the written sources we have were produced by a very small circle of writers and intellectuals. In order to get around this problem of unrepresentative sources (it is likely that a majority of the veterans were illiterate) I chose to look at how people acted in their daily lives. What emerged I think challenges a lot of the conventional narratives around Fiume, and made me really appreciate the potential uses of an everyday history approach.
You’ll be focusing on dictatorship in Spain for your part of the project. What got you interested in Spanish history?
My original interest in the project was sparked because of the methodology – it felt like a natural continuation of what I had been doing and the right fit for me. Right from the beginning I wanted to use a drugs-history approach, and although this is my first time working on Spanish history, I could see from the start that there was a lot of scope for working on this. Drugs seem to really capture the public imagination (sometimes literally), and therefore become strongly contested battlegrounds for symbolic meaning. In my previous work I have seen how social anxieties around race and gender were projected onto drugs in England and Italy, and already I can see a similar dynamic emerging around ideas of ‘good youths’ and ‘bad youths’ in Spain in the 1960s and 70s.
What, in particular, are you going to be looking at in your PhD research?
The project is still very much evolving, but right now marijuana seems to be a really promising way into examining wider social changes. In the 20th Century the drug was widely used by Spanish soldiers in Morocco, who then brought it back to the major cities of mainland Spain. It seems that for the most part people saw its use as a sign of working-class degeneracy, similar to excessive drinking. Around the middle of the 1960s middle-class youths began taking the drug. This sparked a radical re-evaluation of the drug in public discourse, and the emergence of a new narrative around youth, modernity, and morality. It also ties well into the themes of the dictatorship, due to its association at first with the army, as a way of temporarily withdrawing from the demands of the state, and then with the political opposition to the Franco regime. It is my hypothesis that alongside the change in public perceptions of marijuana, we will also see a change in its reported effects – from a drug associated with forgetting to a drug associated with widening one’s horizons. The way in which the cultural milieu informs an individual’s subjective experience of drugs is really interesting to me, and something that an everyday history approach lends itself to perfectly.
In our project meetings we’ve talked about Lucie Ryzova’s idea that unwanted junk can be seen as a kind of archive. I gather you’ve had some success following her advice in your previous research in Italy?
Early on in my work on Fiume I took a research trip to Rome. One of the more surprising moments was finding a stall in Piazza Borghese selling old, used postcards, including a sizeable amount from Fiume. Unfortunately they were from a few years after the occupation, but all bore the famous stamp with D’Annunzio’s face on them. They are definitely a contender for the ugliest stamps ever produced (D’Annunzio was the leader of the occupation, and regularly described as ‘grotesque’ by his contemporaries), but they attest to the significance of the occupation in Fiumian popular memory. I am hoping that in my work on Spain I can find similar ‘junk’, not deemed worthy of preserving in an archive. As Dr Ryzova pointed out, these kind of artefacts (postcards, family photo albums, autobiographies and memoirs of ‘unimportant’ people) are best read ‘en masse’ where you can start to see the same stories, tropes, and images repeated and ‘echoed’ and again – similar to Sheila Fitzpatrick’s idea of ‘common property stories’ which speak to the collective understanding of a particular time and place.
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 came across some wonderful miniatures when working on Fiume. The whole saga was filled with fantastic stories, but I think the Swiss-Italian aristocrat Guido Keller stood out particularly – he was easily recognised for his pet eagle, and was an early adopter of the ‘naturalist’ movement. Whilst flying near Fiume he suffered an engine failure and crash landed in a nearby monastery. After fixing his bi-plane he noticed a pig tied up outside the monastary kitchen, presumably the monk’s dinner for the evening. As a vegetarian he saw it as his duty to ‘liberate’ the animal and bring it back to the ‘free state of Fiume’. So, he tied it to the undercarriage of his aircraft, and took off. The animal became somewhat of a minor celebrity in Fiume (although some sources claim it was in fact a donkey) and I think that perfectly captures the bizarreness of Fiume, and the contradictions in Keller himself.