Pedro Ramos Pinto

‘Mild Mannered’? Protest and Mobilisation in Portugal under Austerity, 2010–2013

Anti-austerity mobilisations in Southern Europe since 2010 have been widely debated in recent times. Commentators have emphasised the emergence of new political subjects such as the ‘precariat’ organised into loose, IT-connected movements. To what extent do these portrayals reflect the underlying dynamics of this protest cycle, and how do these movements interact with traditional political actors? Using Portugal as a case study, this article maps the cycle of anti-austerity contention between 2010 and 2013 to reveal a more complex picture, where traditional actors, including labour unions and left-wing political parties, emerge as key actors, facilitating and sustaining the discontinuous mobilisation of new forms of activism, while seeking to gain access to new constituencies through them.

Urban Social Movements and the Transition to Democracy in Portugal, 1974-1976

This article examines the impact of the urban social movement active in Lisbon on the Portuguese transition to democracy (1974–6). Academic and public discourse over the last three decades has tended to characterize the movement either as an embryonic form of a participatory society, or an illusion created by the manipulation of a minority of activists. Conversely, this article argues that the movement was largely autonomous and powerful enough to win valuable concessions for the urban poor, in the context of increasing competition between political elites, although more moderate than many have assumed. As the contending political forces fought for supremacy, the urban movement became a coveted ally and potential source of legitimacy. With the political arena becoming increasingly polarized during the course of 1975, movement supporters were faced with a stark alternative between revolution and moderation. It is suggested that their choices were instrumental in making the victory of the moderates possible, revealing the contradiction between the street and the ballot box as a false dichotomy.

The Revolution before the Revolution: late authoritarianism and student protest in Portugal

The chapters on the representation of hunting in visual culture and in literature, chapters six and seven respectively, strike me as less well handled. Reversing their order, so that literature came first, would have been useful chronologically, not merely in terms of the history of anthropomorphism – The Wind in the Willows (1908) is an obvious twentiethcentury starting point for that subject – but also because some of the visual treatments discussed were re-mediations of stories (Tarka the Otter and Ring of Bright Water) first told in print. Their subsequent transfers to film might themselves reveal changes in public perception, Tarka in particular as the book appeared in 1927, the film version in 1979. Retellings are never the same. And where anthropomorphism is concerned, greater attention to C.S. Lewis’s mid-twentieth-century talking animals in the Narnia books wouldn’t have gone amiss. Stag hunting is referenced in two of them. Attempting to address the respective influences of philosophy, feminism, and science in the following single chapter (eight) is also perhaps overambitious. These caveats notwithstanding, Tichelar has made an important contribution to the study of hunting in England in the twentieth century. And he has done so in a measured way. His reference to the ‘partisanship that seemed to motivate blood sport enthusiasts’ (ix) could be taken as indication of Tichelar’s own personal stance and his choice of terminology will flag alarm in certain quarters, as the very descriptors of what might neutrally be called ‘the hunting of warm-blooded mammals with dogs for the purpose of human recreation’ are emotionally loaded. Those who participate in the activity refer to ‘field sports’, stressing the countryside associations rather than the kill; opponents call them ‘blood sports’, a term popularized by the Humanitarian League founded in 1891. Tichelar chose ‘blood sports’ for the title of his study and this term appears more frequently in the text itself – but not exclusively, and the variation perhaps reflects a degree of ambivalence. Regardless of any personal views, in participating in a debate often characterized by vitriol Tichelar has produced neither a diatribe nor a polemic; this study instead offers academic probing of the reasons for a decline in public support for a once widely accepted pastime. It also acknowledges, if it cannot explain, the great contradiction of an activity which, despite a legal ban, and despite the new sympathy for the animal kingdom, continues to thrive and to attract support. At the time of writing of this review (May 2017), Prime Minister Theresa May had just announced that she would allow a free vote on repealing the 2004 legislation if re-elected.

History Manifested: A Commentary on continuity, disruption and the production of history

This comment began as a referee’s report on the essay – finding myself so engaged with its arguments, I went beyond my remit in ‘quality control’ and wrote a report of such extent that the editors (possibly dismayed by its length) asked me to convert it into a comment on the review. In this spirit of metacritique then, what follows is less of a detailed engagement with the way in which the author reads The History Manifesto and The Practical Past, and more of a comment on their view of how to face our present condition as historians. The essay, the books it critiques and the debates they have generated are evidence of a fertile moment in debating what History is, and what it should be. While the piece is in agreement with the works it reviews that history ‘ought to have an all-important public role in shaping our future’, the Author takes Guldi and Armitage and Hayden White to task for defending what could be termed a developmental, or genealogic view of history. To paraphrase, this would be the argument that ‘useful’ history is the history of ‘how we got here’. The fundamental criticism levied at the developmental view of history is that this view, forged in the kind of historical thinking developed in the nineteenth century to accompany the process of nation-building, is unable to address the present condition of ‘unprecedented change’: a change expressed in global effects such as the Anthropocene or the ‘technological singularity’. There are many elements of this argument I would agree with, but it is largely on the solutions presented by the Author that I would like to focus my comments. This solution is two-fold. Firstly, the author argues that we need to recast the subject of history. Secondly, that a more suitable history for our present time would have to focus on disruptions, rather than on continuities, which are the bedrock of the ‘developmentalist’ view of history. Recasting the historical subject would mean asking what is the human, and whether the human should be at the centre of the project of writing history, encompassing material and environmental agency and taking into account the interactions of these multiple foci of agency. However that does not alter the stakes in the discussion between a ‘developmental’ and a ‘disruptive’ view of history. Both could be, and probably should be, reflexive and expansive in their consideration of their subjects. But in the same measure, both views could cope with a fundamental redefinition of its subject and still retain the essence of their distinct take on the nature of human experience through time. The author’s second point is more central to the argument: that to address the challenge of unprecedented change we must refocus our historical sensibility from a learnedThis comment began as a referee’s report on the essay finding myself so engaged with its arguments that I went beyond my remit in ‘quality control’ and wrote a report of such extent that the editors (possibly dismayed by its length) asked me to convert into a comment on the review. In this spirit of meta critique then, what follows is less of a detailed engagement with the way in which the author reads The History Manifesto and The Practical Past, and more of a comment on their view of how to face our present condition as historians. The essay, the books it critiques, and the debates they have generated, are evidence of a fertile moment in debating what History is, and what it should be.