Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper combines oral history and ethnography to examine how the Estado Novo is lived and remembered through everyday memories, silences, and family narratives, and how these micro-histories complicate Portugal’s public accounts of dictatorship and its afterlives.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on oral history interviews and ethnographic encounters with men and women who lived under the Portuguese dictatorship of the Estado Novo (1933–1974) to ask how authoritarian rule becomes “history in person”. Rather than approaching Salazarism only as an institutional past, I explore how it is carried through intimate registers: family stories, gendered expectations, silences around censorship and fear, and memories shaped by colonial imaginaries.

These accounts rarely follow the chronology of official history. Instead, they reveal how dictatorship is remembered through ordinary life, and how personal recollections complicate public narratives that frame the regime as either a closed chapter or a distant exception. Micro-histories of accommodation, resistance, or everyday constraint illuminate the affective labour involved in living with an authoritarian past.

Crucially, these memories do not remain confined to private worlds: they shape contemporary political emotions and inform present-day struggles over nationalism, democracy, and the resurgence of far-right imaginaries in Portugal.

Methodologically, the paper brings together oral history and ethnography as a shared space where subjectivity and archive intersect. Testimonies emerge not simply as sources about the past, but as situated practices of remembering in the present.

By foregrounding these lived memories of the Estado Novo, the contribution shows how everyday moral worlds remain deeply entangled with Portugal’s authoritarian and colonial past. The paper is part of the ERC project F-WORD, which investigates how fascist meanings endure and circulate through everyday life and memory across contemporary Europe.