Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MICoMe (Militant Imaginaries, Colonial Memories: The Visual and Material Traces of Revolution and Return in Contemporary Portugal)
Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2022-12-31
Theoretically and methodologically, MICoMe has approached these intersections by analyzing memory practices through which photographic, filmic, and other documentary traces are animated. By extension, it has examined how images and objects are central to the production, unsettling, and (re)structuring of contemporary memory narratives. While firmly rooted in ethnographic methods, the project has contributed to contemporary debates in historiography regarding how archives—both institutional and private, both official and unofficial—are sites where historical knowledge is actively produced and negotiated. It has also demonstrated how thinking with and through images—by reactivating images—can also be a powerful methodology for thinking across the temporalities of past, present, and future. In this sense, visual archives—but also the practices inherent to their existence and maintenance—are also potent ethnographic sites for understanding how the past informs the present and, in turn, how the past is animated to reimagine alternative political futures and forms of belonging. Similarly, by considering how memories of decolonization and political transition overlap in contemporary Portugal, MICoMe innovatively explored how processes of memory-making—both those linked to past events that are celebrated as well as those that are uncomfortable or “unsettling”—can be objects of study that make it possible to track how official narratives regarding the recent past and the Revolution’s legacy of democratization are challenged, complicated, and reinvented. Operationalizing Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory,” this project approached individual and collective memories of revolution and return not as competing narratives, but rather as a social arena in which forms of knowledge have been and can be co-constituted, thus illustrating the potential of interdisciplinary research that puts anthropological, historiographical, and visual theories and methods into contact.
MICoMe’s initial empirical contributions to the field of anthropology, history, and visual studies are evidenced several key outputs, described in more detail in Section 1.2. Specifically, these outputs include, but are not limited to:
• Completion of 1 peer-reviewed article (in press, Romanic Review, expected publication September 2023);
• Presentation of MICoMe research findings in 3 Portuguese conferences and/or academic workshops;
• Presentation of research findings in 4 international conferences;
• Presentation of research findings in 4 invited academic talks;
• Completion of 1 ethnographic audiovisual essay;
• Organization of and participation in 4 public symposia
Future empirical contributions, including an edited volume, a second audiovisual essay, another peer-reviewed article, and a digital memory platform are in development and are expected to be completed and made public by the end of 2023.