Can a cultural re-reading of the past and its mediations in the present elucidate how historical knowledge is produced in current contexts of political change? The EU-funded MICoMe project answered these questions by designing an innovative interdisciplinary approach capable of tracking how knowledge about the past is produced in contemporary Portugal. Specifically, it tracked, analyzed, and unpacked individual and collective engagements with material and visual traces left by entangled historical events: the 1974 Carnation Revolution, the Liberation Movements that occurred in former Portuguese colonies, and the return of colonial settlers to the "metropole." Both revolution and return were outcomes of the Portuguese Colonial War, known in the former colonies as the “Liberation Wars,” which resulted in the constitution of new African nations. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation, life history and oral history methods, and photo/object-elicitation strategies, this project has collected empirical data regarding how film, photography, and documents from institutional and family archives are animated in order to produce new narratives about the recent past. In this sense it has conceptualized how knowledge about Portugal’s transition to democracy and, by extension, its relationship to the (de)colonial project is produced and mediated. In doing so, MICoMe has put forth novel theories regarding history and memory not as separate entities, but rather as co-constituting spheres of knowledge production and meaning making. In doing so, it has also developed innovative methodological approaches to understanding how contradictory and, at times, oppositional memories regarding the recent past have and are negotiated through public and private engagements with visual and material traces left by experiences with revolution and return. By juxtaposing colonial memories and militant imaginaries, this project concluded that a cultural re-reading of the past and its mediations in the present can elucidate how historical knowledge is produced in current contexts of political change while simultaneously unsettling closed narratives regarding empire, decolonization, and political transition.
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.
