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The
Internationalization of Portuguese Historiography
António
Costa Pinto
Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa
acpinto@ics.ul.pt
I shall begin
with a true and curious story. In March 2003, I went to give a lecture
in an European university, as part of a seminar on the Far Right in the
20th century. In the room was a Portuguese student whom I barely knew
and who had landed in that University some months earlier. In the course
of the customary conversation after the seminar, she told me about her
great perplexity when she realised that many of the leading figures from
the Portuguese intellectual and historiographical world who had passed
through that University were unknown to their peers abroad. She was even
more surprised when she submitted their names to the "tyranny"
of the gigantic databases at the university library and discovered that
these names were not even mentioned in the summaries of the thousands
of articles and books published in English over the last 20 years.
This students discovery was the same I had made 15 years earlier,
when in the 1980s I had left Portugal to study for my doctorate at the
European University Institute. For several years, I tried to find explanations
for this phenomenon, which has definitively marked a generation of historians
and sociologists, who are now nearing the age of retirement. They had
been the first to go abroad to study either as political exiles
or as some of the rare beneficiaries of scholarships, shortly before the
fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. They wrote their theses in
English or French, but this proved to be of little benefit to them. In
a world of academic publishing that was demanding but generous and which
published dozens of works about the dictatorships of Paraguay, the Bulgarian
aristocracy, or the ethnic groups of Lower Guinea, I saw no Portuguese
name, and I couldnt even justify this fact by its being part and
parcel of the so-called "destiny of small countries". The reasons
for this phenomenon, about which I have been thinking over the last few
years, would fill a great number of pages and would be the subject of
an essay on the history of the mentalities of the Portuguese academic
community during the 1970s and 1980s, but there is no space for this in
my brief commentary.
Internationalisation first appeared on the agenda of Portuguese social
sciences a few years ago and has now reached History. The process has
been a complex one and has met with much resistance. Yet, thanks to some
outside encouragement, namely from the Foundation for Science and Technology
(or, in one particular area, from the Commission for the Discoveries),
the Portuguese universities have found themselves obliged to think about
this subject. In addition to a number of isolated initiatives, such an
obligation has arisen because the policy introduced for the funding of
research has begun to require greater contact with institutions and colleagues
from other countries, introducing non-nationals to the assessment committees
and gradually obliging journals and reviews to use a system of peer refereeing
etc. On the other hand, the number of students studying for masters
degrees and doctorates or enjoying brief stays at foreign universities
has increased significantly. These outside impetuses have altered the
research agenda in History, even though it is still too early to fully
review the situation.
As a specialist in contemporary political history, it is not easy for
me to undertake a global analysis, but I do believe that it is not difficult
to find some changes, most of which became particularly visible in the
1990s. The first is the rediscovery of Brazil. I have always
thought it strange that most historians from my generation, who studied
the Old Regime, did not know a single Brazilian historian. About Brazil
itself they had what can best be described as a vague idea.
The overall picture has changed quite dramatically over the last few years
and I believe that this is not only a circumstantial and short-term phenomenon.
Another change, and this one dates back even further, has to do with comparative
Iberian history. Contacts and research initiatives have multiplied over
the last 20 years or so. But it would be an illusion to think of internationalisation
in terms of geography. The fact is that the fundamental questions
direct our attention towards the inclusion of national areas of research
in the respective international historiographical communities, and here
the limitations are still quite significant. I limit myself to presenting
just some of them:
1. Portuguese historiography has enjoyed only very scanty exposure in
international journals and amongst international publishers. Here the
panorama varies from area to area. But the parochial resistance of many
established historians has been transmitted to their students. As a
small country with a small community of historians, where access to
the immediate audience was easier, many were content with the greater
facilities provided by the national market where, until quite recently,
special requirements such as assessment by ones peers or the scientific
editing of books were few and far between. Except for a few sporadic
individual cases, the impetus in this instance came from outside, or,
in other words, as I pointed out earlier, from the new funding and assessment
requirements introduced by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and
Technology, and these are finally beginning to bear fruit.
2. The historiographical community is still heavily dominated by what
is termed the "national fact", so that it does not generally
develop comparative projects. One can count on the fingers of one hand
those who study other national or cultural realities. Until quite recently,
the university teaching of history itself provided very little stimulation
in this area. The most important factors leading to internationalisation
have been the increase in the number of scholarships for doctorates
taken abroad and the funding requirements of projects.
3. With only a few exceptions, the community of Portuguese historians
has demonstrated a reduced level of international academic mobility.
The Chairs in History created by the Portuguese State and some Foundations
at a number of European and American universities, such as Brown University,
the European University Institute or Kings College, London, are important,
but there has been no Portuguese academic diaspora similar to the one
found in Greece, just to give an example of another southern European
country. At the same time, there are very few foreign historians teaching
in Portuguese universities, not only because the working conditions
are relatively unattractive, but also because of the fact that these
institutions have informally blocked applications by non-nationals.
Since even mobility amongst Portuguese university teachers has itself
proved to be complex, international mobility is understandably almost
non-existent.
4. It is obvious that underlying this problem is yet another problem
of a more theoretical and methodological nature and one that, at least
superficially, can be summarised as follows: the greater the tendency
towards writing narrative history, the more parochial it is; the closer
it is to the social sciences, the more likely it is to become part of
international historiographical debates.
Copyright
2004, ISSN 1645-6432
e-JPH, Vol.1, number 2, Winter 2003
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