Nostalgia and the social perception of the past: The ethnographic revisit of an industrial community (1980 and 2010)

In this article, I want to understand the processes of (trans-)formation of the schemes of temporal perception that are used by the inhabitants of a local community of the Ave’s Valley region (Portugal). Once a flourishing industrial center, Riba de Ave is today living a profound social “crisis”, which accompanied the macroeconomic instability of the region and the continuous loss of competitiveness of its main industry (textile and garment). Using a variety of research techniques (consultation of archives, questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews, ethnographic work), I tried to interpret the changes observed in the ways of interpreting the past (and future) that accompanied the objective transformations of the social structure that occurred in this industrial community over the past 30 years. The research, conducted in 2010, had the character of a sociological revisit (Burawoy, 2003) that recaptures a research topic originally from Alice Ingerson, an American anthropologist who visited, 30 years before, this Portuguese industrial region to complete her PhD thesis (Ingerson, 1984). Thanks to this methodological option, it was possible to observe empirically that the circumstances surrounding the time of remembrance bring consequences for the time remembered. Such horizon of expectations (and recollections), far from being inert, is constantly rebuilt along the singular and collective experiences of the inhabitants of the local community (Koselleck, 2004: 255–275).

Through the comparison of the observations made in 1980 and 2010, I notice a variation of tone in the retrospective reading of the historical period comprehended by the “Estado Novo” dictatorship, a regime characterized by the existence of a multiplicity of cultural, economic and political constraints, such as the prevalence of illiteracy and the ideological inculcation of official nationalism, the spread of low-wage between laborers and the containment of economic modernization, or the continued repression of political opposition expressions (Rosas, 2012). Taking into account their higher exposure to recent processes of social change, including an impressive sequence of factory’ closures, I will focus primarily on the social experiences of the industrial workers of Riba de Ave. In the 1960s of the last century, in the middle of “Estado Novo”, the consistency between the expectations and the opportunities that existed locally for the industrial workers, especially in terms of professional occupations, offered them the feeling of being in the right place (or having even won a coveted place). Such a consonance helps to make probable and plausible, if not necessary, the peaceful craft transmission through family lineages (Alves, 2002: 112–123). At that time, not only the economic and cultural constraints impending over the workers, but also the significant sedentarization of their life courses (although there were important waves of emigration that offered a way of social promotion) contributed to the appreciation of this epoch as obdurate and inflexible. However, in 1980, following the Revolution (25 April 1974), ¹ that brought an expansion of the universe of possibilities for the working families, the same period appeared then tinged with a negative tone. Alice Ingerson shows us that ongoing renewal of the schemes of temporal interpretation among industrial workers. It occurred especially in the passage of the 1970s to the 1980s, in the so-called “process of democratic normalization” (Schmitter, 1999: 293–371), when new and enhanced patterns of personal and household consumption, the effective access to housing property or the emergence of a greater education among their descendants became palpable (vd. Pinto, 2012).

The recent changes of the last 30 years in the economic environment of the region seemed to convert once again the sense of time among industrial workers. On the one hand, the predominant industrial sector (textile and garment) is nowadays characterized by the intensification of international competition and the persistence of structural weakness in the business sustainability. On the other hand, there occurred a gradual redirection of the workers’ projects that tends to point more to the school than to the factory. Alice Ingerson observes that the “before-and-after reasoning” was the principal pattern of temporal categorization used by local inhabitants to capture the changes in their community, a notorious sign, for the researcher, that the community was facing, in 1980, a historic rupture thanks to the rapid economic and social changes that followed the Revolution (1984: 254, 259). However, in 2010, the local inhabitants no longer balance, as they do when interviewed 30 years before, the vilification of the oppressive past with the prudent and reasonable belief in a better future. Today, there are signs that show a certain rehabilitation of the past encompassed by the Estado Novo, which seems to offer now a positive contrast to the contemporary landscape.

Aware of the impressions of simplicity and linearity that are associated with the “before-and-after reasoning” captured in the original work of Alice Ingerson, similar to the hegemonic temporality of intellectualized, western or capitalist conceptions that were sometimes used in the social sciences (Fabian, 1983: 21–25), I must state, therefore, that such temporal scheme is still today the principal frame of reference used to explain the historical change among our interviewees. Unlike other situations of epochal transition or rupture, where a coincidence or overlapping of various durations is noticed (Das, 2007: 97–98) or the pre-capitalist ethos opposes the imposition of the colonial or industrial time (Bourdieu, 1979: 30–49; Ingold, 2000), in Riba de Ave it is that sharp opposition between the “old times” and “today” that signals the perceived temporal sequence for the native inhabitants. Of course there are variations of tone in the ways of perceiving the past, since it is possible to notice the coexistence of mnemonic practices (Olick and Robbins, 1998) in the same society, which requires us to question any homogeneous or essentialist conception of collective memory. In sharp contrast to some cumulative and passive conceptions of remembrance, such practices are not only sensitive to territorial and historical variations, but they also expose the refractions introduced by the structure of power that locally prevails in the community as well as the inflections that major economic and social changes imprint over singular and collective trajectories (Shirani and Henwood, 2011). However, for the sake of exposition, I concentrate foremost in the principal interpretative scheme through which the local inhabitants contrast the past and the present in 1980 as well as in 2010. If we want to recur to the phenomenological vocabulary, this work tries, in comparison with works that concentrate upon the consequences of life events over the protention, or the temporal anticipation of the future (e.g. Bourdieu, 1979), to capture the retention, the changing patterns of remembrance of the past that were ingrained and used in a local Portuguese community (Husserl, 1991: 33–35).

An exercise of sociological revisit

Despite the significant contrasts that may exist in terms of program and research style, there is the opportunity to use the work of Alice Ingerson as a term of comparison. Thus, I tried to substantiate a research strategy that could theoretically reinterpret the observations made in 2010 using the historical information collected 30 years before in other case of study of the same industrial region. This methodological strategy has a name, linking up with the recommendations of Burawoy (2003: 671) about the “heuristic revisit”, a theoretical-methodological procedure that “appeals to another study - not always strictly ethnographic and not necessarily of the same site but of an analogous site - that frames the questions posed, provides the concepts to be adopted, or offers a parallel and comparative account”. Observing the techniques and results of the original research allows the researcher not only to evaluate, in comparative terms, the ways of eliciting and appreciating the historical changes prevalent among the inhabitants of a local community exposed to political or social turmoil, especially their retrospective interpretation of the past, as it helps to improve the theoretical principles that prevail in the sociological study of the mutual implications between temporality, locality and corporeality for the structuration of biographies.

The research work here presented began with the collection and reconstitution of official statistical series between 1950 and 2010 (in particular the General Population Censuses between these dates), which, together with the selection and analysis of a large set of documentary funds (museum collections, business archives, local newspapers), sustained the research, supplying it with a way to understand the peculiarities of the community’s historical processes and social structure when compared with the regional and national contexts. The research also comprised the realization of 30 in-depth interviews to representatives of local households (each with 1 to 2 hours length), which allowed to supplement the information collected by the socio-economic survey that was applied in the local community (904 individuals). At the same time, the research involved a work of ethnographic observation along the year 2010, which included the entrance into the everyday places of the workers existence (Pereira et al., 2012: 33–36). This large set of empirical data helped me to visualize the objective processes of transformation of the local social system occurring in 1980 and 2010, therefore serving to systematically sustain the research on the mutations in the ways of reading the past among industrial workers that those transformations accompanied. The work of Alice Ingerson is the single most important source of ethnographic material concerning the region under observation; scarce, other ethnographic studies, even if from the same conjuncture (for instance, Brettell (1991) which focus on Portuguese migration), were primarily connected with other sociological problems and were not, precisely for that reason, considered in my present research. My research work will, therefore, rely intensively on the topics Ingerson worked with, trying to comprehend, as intensively as possible, the fundaments and impacts of the mutations of the schemata of temporal perception and interpretation. Even if I backed my work in these statistical and conversational inquiries, some of evidence used in this article is nothing more than verbal particles collected from the local inhabitants throughout the fieldwork; expressions so repeated in the testimonies that they appear as constitutive of the local common sense. In spite of the fragmented nature of this vocabulary, it offers a way for the elicitation of the remembrance that is, sometimes, impossible to find in a verbally systematized manner.

The past debased: The anthropological work of Alice Ingerson in 1980

Fortunately, the knowledge of the former team-members of the US researcher puts me in the track of her doctoral thesis, Corporatism and Class Consciousness in Northwestern Portugal, which was originally presented to the Johns Hopkins University in 1984 (but is still to translate into Portuguese). Alice Ingerson was especially interested in the meaning that the historical change brought by the Revolution has for the industrial workers in the Ave’s Valley region. Serving herself from the virtualities offered by the “conversational history”, which was a highly original exercise at that time, Alice Ingerson tries to reconcile theoretical-methodological dimensions which, for several reasons, tend to be treated separately in studies about the experience of time. Namely, the inquiry on “the social contexts in which historical knowledge could be transmitted in conversation”, “the description of historical change, especially industrialization, in the interviews”, and the exposition of “the kinds of historical causality that people identify in an interview” (1984: 249). At this time, in 1980, all the surrounding region knew high rates of employment which contributed, together with a low incidence of unemployment, to make opaque the symptoms of “crisis” that were already latent in the industrial manufacturing sector (Silva, 2012: 117–118).

When Alice Ingerson conducted her field research in the Ave’s Valley, in the early 1980s, with objectives that initially consisted in using anthropological methods in the study of social classes and making criticism of the structuralist version of “class consciousness”, she was able to practice, beyond that, a sociological interpretation of the efforts then made by the workers that she interviewed to confer meaning to the personal and collective history. It was clear from these interviews that the workers “tended strongly to divide history into before and after, then and now, ‘in the old days’ and ‘nowadays’” in their own verbalizations (1984: 259–260). For Ingerson, the fact that the individual and social times seem to be broken in these two fundamental pieces is the expression of “an experience of rapid economic change and of industrialization as upward mobility” (idem. 259). It was that procedure of “conversational history” that allowed Alice Ingerson to find the points of “consensus” on the interpretation of history that prevail among workers from the Ave’s Valley region.

For Alice Ingerson, the first consensus consisted in the conviction that the present is better than the past. “People now lived an ‘easy life’, a more carefree or comfortable life – in the sense that life in the past had pinched like shoes that were too small, but had now become roomier. ‘Nowadays, no one lacks for anything, there is abundance of everything.’ The past, in contrast, was: a martyrdom, grinding poverty, bad or evil, or slavery” (ibid. 260). In the present time of 1980, not only the standard of living had risen considerably compared with the Estado Novo period, but also the class distinctions seem to have been meanwhile minored. “Life in the present was ‘incomparably better’ than life in the past. In the past, ‘everyone was poor,’ or ‘even rich people were poor.’ Many people expressed this contrast metaphorically. They likened the present to a nobleman, who was not only wealthy but flaunted his wealth, and the past to slavery” (ibid. 261). Hence, that sustained prudent postures. “Implicitly and often explicitly, people born before 1930 told people born after 1950 not to rock the boat, to remember that things could be and had once been much worse” (ibid. 260). The changes were visible from the outset in the banality of everyday existence of these workers. They were seen in the eating habits, since it begun to be consumed “white bread”, “coffee”, “fruit”. “Older people who had grown up eating half a sardine once a week now eat meat every day” (idem. 262). Succinctly, there exists “abundance”. It was also noticed the eradication of many of the diseases that were endemic among the proletariat, such as tuberculosis. Even the clothing used has changed, because no one walks “barefoot” or wears “wooden clogs” and now even factory workers “looked like they were going to a party”. Last but not the least, before, the work was usually “harder” in the sense it had been “more demanding physically” (idem: 264-270).

Under the second consensus, Ingerson identified the assumption that some things were lost in the course of economic progress. In a sense, this extemporaneous romanticism countervailed the severe judgment on the past. Even if the present was so much easy and promisor than the past, it also implied the weakening and even the decline of “younger generations”. Among other signs, it was noticed the refusal to cultivate the land, and even to learn how to do it; the adoption of a competitive posture that led to the loss of the family and neighbourhood unity; or the rising primacy of material interests over family or friendship obligations. For Alice Ingerson, the third consensus was coupled with the widespread appeal of magical explanations for historical change at the personal and social level. Within the prevalent scheme of thought on historical causality earlier mentioned (“the before-and-after perspective”), it persisted the recourse to interpretations of mythical nature. “Changes in any individual’s life were often explained by vague forces such as ‘bad luck’, ‘good luck’ and that person’s ‘personality’ and ‘ambition’. People also referred to their own ‘possibilities’, the resources available to them as an accident of birth, determined by the social class of their parents or the economic era in which they grew up, as setting their lives’ patterns. Although ‘possibilities’ are clearly the result of class position, these interviews almost never mention the possibility of class action” (ibid. 275). ² It was, therefore, palpable the coupling between the fragility of material resources, the conviction about the exposition to invisible and incontrollable forces, and the adoption of a posture of fatalistic behavior towards the world.

Even in such circumstances of social heteronomy, the fourth consensus points to the existence of rules of success to be able to participate in a route of upward social mobility, which, however, were subjected to a period of reassessment in the present of 1980. The family and the patronage were, together with the enhancement of personal skills through “hard work”, the privileged means of production, concentration and transmission of material and symbolic valuables. For these industrial workers, the family support and protection, the networks of patronage or the bulimic work constitute the principal social circles that supported the individual and collective strategies of social promotion throughout the industrialization era. Beyond those alternatives, only the entry to the education and officiate in the Catholic Church or the option for emigration become substitute paths for a publicly rewarding and approved occupation (ibid. 279). Already then, according to volatile clues in the interviews, the school seemed to offer a possible way for upward social mobility to a narrow segment of the working class. “Yet, few people saw education as a guarantee for the future as clearly as they interpreted industrialization as a panacea for past poverty. People were acutely aware of a shortage of local jobs for more highly educated young people, and complained that the younger generation thought that manual labor was beneath its interest, although factories or farms had jobs available at the lowest levels. At the same time, they did not consider a job in a mill, at any level, a guarantee of economic security.” (ibid. 286). Finally, the fifth consensus sustains that the future was a time strongly governed by uncertainty. Never mind that there exists the certainty to have participated in “the progress”, translated in “comforts” and “privileges” that were unsuspected previously. For these workers, the future remained largely opaque. “The future improvements would be reached only ‘God willing.’” (ibid. 291). Even if it couldn’t dissuade the expansion of the aspirations, desires and hopes brought with “the progress”, such acquiescent and timid worldview elucidated the resilience in these worker’s postures and the unwillingness to approve proactive, least provocative, stances of behavior towards the future.

The past recovered: The effects of the crisis on the retrospective vision of workers in 2010

Even if the implementation of the survey on the “stereotypical perceptions of the past” were not completely fulfilled, in 1980, owing to the limitations of the team and funding (Ingerson, 1984: 391), it was possible to notice convergence nodes among Ave’s Valley industrial workers on their recollections of the past, especially the period concerning the “Estado Novo” regime. In 2010, practically 30 years later, the present research tries to concretise a sociological research on the impressions and representations of the past used by the industrial workers of the same region, inquiring a community that meanwhile was confronted with a profound deindustrialization process. Looking for the feelings and meanings associated with the remembrances in two moments in time (1980, 2010), it is possible, then, to interrogate the ways those situated processes of social transformation were apprehended and appreciated in the testimonies of these workers. Important not only because it gathered several hundreds of workers, but also because it was an emblematic figure of the regional industry (it was founded in 1896), the Sampaio Ferreira factory finally closed in 2005, after years of economic troubles and labour unrest. Other mills closed almost simultaneously in Riba de Ave. It causes the appearance in the community of a significant segment of population that is economically suspended, constituted by men and women who were compulsively and prematurely retired or sent to unemployment. According to the survey applied in 2010, 36.7% of the population was retired and 11% was unemployed (Silva, 2012: 130). Since the economic etiolation of the textile industry also brought the dismantling of social regulations and routines that guided the everyday life at local level, it helps to spread the helplessness among the workers, especially those separated from industrial employment. Under these social circumstances, significant changes, as sudden as pervasive, were introduced in the everyday patterns of the community life.

Near the end of the 1970s, thanks to the improved economic situation (emerging in the testimonies as meaning “earn more” and having “plenty of jobs”) and the increasing guarantees that came to be provided by the system of social protection of the new democratic State (“pensions”), it was offered to the local proletariat the possibility to escape the labour discriminations and the economic compulsion they knew before. At the same time, it was assured a minimal access to the universe of consumption, especially to domestic and personal “facilities” that some time before were completely unimaginable by these workers. This trend was noticeable, for instance, in the volume and variety of supplies and foods available to workers, such as bananas and yoghurt, or in the conditions of habitability of their households, with the introduction of individual rooms, of piped and hot water, or of refrigerators and washing machines. The entry in the official markets of education and training also becomes more probable to the industrial workers, which opened or enlarged a promotion route once accessible only to the privileged classes. Moreover, it became progressively conceivable the access to the property by purchase of one’s own dwelling and of automobiles. “Today a person even can be considered rich!”, said to Alice Ingerson a female factory worker, when comparing the present of 1980 with the lifestyle available to her in the “Estado Novo” regime. On the backdrop of the compulsion of previous decades, be it imposed by the needs (“hunger”) or brought by local authorities (“oppression”), the social and political transformations in the country and in the community brought by the Revolution represented, for the local proletariat, the expansion of the universe of opportunities and the feeling of participating in a movement of social promotion.

Until the beginning of the 1980s, when started to appear the first signs of what become “the lasting crisis” of the textile industry, the past could be generally assessed as undeniably “worse” that the present. On the other side, the future was a powerful bearer of promises of social promotion and improvement, mainly through the new jobs being created in the more innovative enterprises (places like “technicians” and “engineers”), the opportunities to create a “business” sustained in the individual initiative (expressed as “staying on his own account” or to “open a company”), or the academic qualifications in teaching institutions (“to become engineer”, in the words of a male worker interviewed by Ingerson). After the Revolution in 1974, thanks to a family and community memory that still preserved the images of the uncertainties and worries experienced in the factories during the Estado Novo, in which factory work was exposed, following the workers’ testimonies that Ingerson collected in her fieldwork, to sudden and temporary interruptions caused by the fluctuations in the international markets (“worked only three days per week”, “called-in when needed”) and by the economic and political arbitrariness of local employers (“punishment”, “fines”, “to be in black list”), these workers see positively their biographic trajectory as a promotion. In fact, comparing their departure conditions with those they met in 1980, their trajectories seem to equal a social rise and to incite the planning and anticipation of the future.

The recent circumstances of the deindustrialization of Riba de Ave meant, therefore, an involution deeply resented. Especially in the case of unemployed or retired workers, the disappearance of the feeling of usefulness and proficiency conferred by salaried work, though it was previously rooted in a context of compulsion and scarcity, means that the deactivation from industrial work constitutes a professional damping experience (“discouraged”). The expressions employed by workers I have myself interviewed or met in the field point precisely to the coercive atmosphere surrounding their lived experience. The paucity of regular earnings, from work or from state transfers, is heightened whenever exist financial problems, as debts (“a bank loan to buy the house”, “have car payments”, “buy things for the house”, as “sofas” or “vacuum cleaners”). Such circumstances foster among workers’ families a sensation of “drifting” and create personally biting situations of embarrassment and shame (“I don’t want to be seen”, “when more I can hide better, I owe rents”, “I have to hide myself”). Even if fragmentary in character, these verbal expressions show the strong impetrations the contemporary situation have over the forms of perception of these workers. So, besides the more obvious suppression of economic income (“the wages at the end of the month”), the absence of work exposes these workers to a terrain of stigmatization, in where they appear as inept and unable to “earn for themselves” and “to be self-sufficient” as they were before.

In such circumstances, the past becomes the target for feelings of nostalgia. The remembrance, without omitting anything from the previous material hardships endured in the everyday existence and without erasing completely the marks of hardness that wore the personal life, comes to select and accentuate the positive side of the past and to express repulsion towards the present situation. Sometimes, expressed in verbal and emotional terms, this estrangement engraves itself under the skin of workers as trauma, irritation or commotion. Exemplary are, in this sense, the words from an unemployed worker, born in 1958, when she shares her somatic experiences of “feel[ing] sad” or “without motivation” in contrast with a previous life of “joy” while at work. More often, as happens with melancholy (Fuchs, 2001: 121), the nostalgia appears to express a de-synchronization between social times, pointing to the mismatch and lack of coordination between memories and experiences, or pretensions and capacities. Nowadays, some workers seemed stuck in the continuous reminiscence of the past, captured amidst the impossible recreation of former times. Such comportments seek to celebrate or to attain in imagination the strength and fluidity of the past, which means, implicitly, the exorcism and the prosecution of the present. Since it intends to offer more than a compassionate or condescending picture of the past, for these workers the nostalgic remembrance functions as a discursive strategy through which they correct or restore the past. As Isabel, a retired textile worker (58 years old), told me: “We were punished, we were forced to clean the floor with water, sweeping. We were punished by talking with fines. But it was nothing like today, we weren’t send away. They were very good times. It was not like today. There was more respect in this regard. They [the bosses] did not put anyone on the street like today”.

The paradoxical celebration of the benignity of a past that contained innumerable moments of hardness, humiliations and aggressions is only comprehensible considering the social conditions where such retrospective view is taken. It is just under the circumstances of unemployment and coercive working conditions in the factories of today, with its mixture of casualness and intensification of work-rhythms, that the workplaces of “before” may appear as positive experiences, where “there was joy to work” and “everyone knew each other”, as Serafim, a former textile worker, 63 years old, tells me. They were places where not only the physical subsistence was guaranteed with a regular salary, but also where the colleagues and the boss gave us “value” personally. Although the life there was “a slavery”, or “a time when the great were great and small were small”, it acquires nowadays an emotional coloratura that equilibrates its negative side. It means that the trajectory of social and economic disqualification of these social workers favors the recreation of the past in fortunate terms Perceived from a situation of unemployment and precocious retirement the past is selectively perceived and positively promoted. The systematic contrast with an embarrassing present and with a future intuitively perceived as fragile strengths the idealization of the past. That is why, more than the mere evocation of the past, the nostalgia—saudade—assumes typical properties of the mythical thought, which, falling short of any cynical resolution constitutes an exercise to recover, although in and by the imagination, the past in its redemptive plenitude.

Since it is retro-envisaged from a situation of obsolescence or suspension of their social abilities, the passage from the past to the present begins to be seen by these workers as a decline, a setback or an annulation. Faced with the unavoidable recognition of loss and pain in their present situation, these workers engage in a positive reconstruction of their individual and collective past, which in turn reinforces the evidence of their current social impotence (“I think that is very bad and that has little solution”). The physical and social closure is mostly superimposed, but sometimes it is wilful if implemented as a symbolic and material tactic of preservation. Maria, a mill-worker, pensioner who is only 59 years old, formerly working in the mentioned Sampaio Ferreira factory, says that she and her husband, trying to manage their limited household income, cut ties with their former habits of encounter and choose to confine themselves to their house (“we don’t leave from here”). Feelings of suffocation, nervousness or fear, frequently prolix and penetrant, seems to impose on unemployed or retired workers, but also on those who are still employed in their jobs in the lasting, refurbished industrial factories, where the managerial pressures have increased. Such an atmosphere of dereliction equates the passage of time with a negative or reversed eschatology. Especially, the unemployment and retirement seem to imply the obsolescence of the previous biographical paths of these workers (“one thinks, for me there is nothing, it’s all over”). At other times, it is the silence of shame and fear that dominates. Because the passions and instincts that are incorporated have conative properties, they tend to predispose the usual attitudes, attitudes, and behaviors, even when the conditions where they were originally acquired, requested, or updated have long vanished. If this happens, the workers who are the personifications of these “outdated” ways of being, persevere, in an anachronistic fashion, in the realization of needs and desires that seem to be no longer relevant or even reasonable. Doing so, they increasingly expose themselves to situations of stupefaction (“someone understand this?”), alienation, or powerlessness.

Remaking the past. Modes of (re)constituting “consensus” in the temporal perception

It is possible to compare the results of the research conducted in 2010, which inquired on the impact of the deindustrialization in Riba de Ave over the schemata of temporal perceptions and interpretations of the local workers, with the observations made by Alice Ingerson in 1980 on the modes of temporal interpretation that the Ave’s Valley labourers used to confer intelligibility to the process of industrialization. Even if the “before-and-after reasoning”, found in Ingerson’s original inquiry in the region, remains a major principle in the native explanation of historical change, it occurred a massive operation of reassessment of the value equilibrium between “before” and “after” among the workers of the Ave’s Valley. After 30 years, the shared and taken-for-granted conviction that the present is better than the past, which constituted the first consensus detected by Alice Ingerson, seems to have been relativized, or at least diluted. Today, in Riba de Ave, it seems that the present is permeated with embarrassment and sorrow (“debts”, “deprivation”, “the need”), which turns the comparison with previous periods of time potentially penalising. Quite on the contrary, according to what the workers said to Alice Ingerson, the present in 1980 was a time of “plenty”, “wealth”, “abundance”. Precisely the same constrains that were becoming partially and progressively minimized to the workers in the early 1980s, when their margins of manoeuvre were eased and enlarged when compared with those experienced during the Estado Novo regime, seem now to become compressed under the “crisis”, which multiplied the unemployment incidence and troubled the conversion to other jobs. This suggests that the economic and social improvements enjoyed in 1980 seem to have been relativized, if not suspended, for important sectors of the working classes.

The past, too, seems to obtain novel tonalities, hitherto invisible to the eyes of the workers interviewed by Alice Ingerson. It is true that the past still brings images of “martyrdom” or “slavery” to the fore, but now there is also a feeling of nostalgia for a past that, despite everything, ensured employment in the local industry, hence a source of regular and constant economic rewards and a warranty for feelings of personal value. The personal and collective relationship of condescension towards the past that was noticed by Alice Ingerson, expressed as moaning or consolation about the workplaces or the community in those times (“we were sufferers”, “in that time these were a little town”), seems to have been transformed meanwhile. Without having been suspended, the negative assessments of the past, that still reminds us of “misery” and “slavery”, are now counterbalanced, recurrently, with the reprobation of the experiences of negation faced in the present (“I have so much difficulties”) and with the tendency of partial rehabilitation of the past (“there was joy”, “then we have work”). So, the situation in 2010 compromises the principle enunciated in the first consensus noticed in 1980, that the present is better than the past. Quite on the contrary, the present now seems worse than the past, which even implies, sometimes, that the same period that was once vilified, the Estado Novo regime, seems nowadays to revive under emotional traits of nostalgia.

The second consensus that was signalized by Alice Ingerson held that certain things were lost in the course of economic progress, castigating the apparent escape from the traditional occupations (“laboring in the fields”) and the loss of ethics (“hard work”, “solidarity”) that was supposedly manifested by the youth of the community in 1980. Now, on the contrary, the possible evasion from industrial work of the “young men” is positively evaluated. If once it was morally censured the suspected estrangement of children in relation to the traditional (as well as, frequently, paternal) work practices, today not only this censure is weakened, as it is even noticeable among parents the existence of intentions of interrupting the transmission of their craft to their children. In the least, they vacillate in endorsing the jobs they occupy to their children, since they are increasingly apprehensive about its own value. However, it seems clear that the feelings of uncertainty and danger concerning the future persist, which means that the third consensus identified by Alice Ingerson still prevails. It expresses itself not only in the shared belief about the existence of hidden and blind forces (“gambling”, “luck”) controlling life, as is particularly accentuated in the form of constant impressions of imminent threats surrounding the possessions owned (“car”, “house”), that now seem to face a world extremely uncertain and hostile. As a symptom that the social situation of local workers remains fragile and unstable, the conviction that the individual and collective histories are ruled by principles beyond the reason and intelligence (the “luck”, or “the bad luck”, are still vectors that lead the fate of men) seems to have resisted the changes across time.

If once the fourth consensus of Alice Ingerson could be summarized as implying the existence of rules of success to be able to participate in a trail of upward social mobility, nowadays those rules seem to have been reformulated. The collective trajectory of downward mobility and harsh rupture of certain workers, occurring in a short period of time, was subsequently reworked as an inexorable journey headed to failure, negation, and impotence. In those cases, the feeling of obsolescence of the biographical pathway lead to the re-evaluation of the “rules of success” once known and applied, since now they seem incapable to avoid the frustrations of the “crisis” or even futile in view of the present needs. If the conviction about the existence of “rules of success” prevails, they acquired new forms: the last 30 years seem to have witnessed the consolidation and extension of schooling as the most important of the “rules of success”. Nowadays, schooling is absolutely necessary to be able to sustain expectations of upward social mobility. In the 1980s, schooling was far from being consensually viewed as a track of social mobility as robust as the path that passed by the universe of industrial work. On the other hand, the structural changes on the local economy seem to have compromised the effectiveness of the familiar and patronage connections as platforms and instruments to articulate strategies of social promotion, as they were in 1980. However, it is important to note that schooling, even if valuable as a “rule of success” today, is already being hampered by the inflation of the academic titles that touches the Portuguese youth, making the academic certificates progressively impotent to change by themselves the personal and professional careers. In accordance with the fifth consensus found by Alice Ingerson, the future was a time strongly governed by uncertainty. In 2010, the obliteration of the future persists, even if with a protracted solution for these workers’ heirs. Today, this uncertainty is felt mostly in relation to the personal future of workers, since, on the other side, it seems to have emerged an optimistic counterpart related to the future of their children. Notwithstanding the fact that the process of deindustrialization of Riba de Ave had aggravated the closure and obscuration of the personal future, there are clear signs of hope regarding the social promotion through the offspring. This partition of the future means, therefore, that although the future of these workers seems compressed and obscured, the future by delegation, the one that is anticipated and planned for their children, seems to contain a positive alternative.

As initially enunciated in this article, it was reapplying the rationale that conceived the projection of the future as structured through the present margins of freedom enjoyed (Bourdieu, 1979: 51), that it was possible to me to explore—in ethnographic terms—the mode of constituting the past under the impressions of the present moment (Husserl, 1990: 43). In such sense, I was concerned with the verbal and emotional actualizations of the remembrance, to which Edmund Husserl reserved the notion of “re-presentation” (idem. 339). My research on the schemata of interpretation and appreciation of the past that prevail in 2010 among the workers from a Portuguese industrialized community, was potentiated through the systematic comparison with another research conducted in the same region 30 years before. Looking to the work of Alice Ingerson from 1980, I tried to understand the implications that the social and historical changes have over the verbal and emotional restoring of the past. Through its very exercise, I hope to show that, methodologically, the option for a heuristic revisit secured the ethnographic contact with the palpable and concrete world of the present, while, at the same time, forcing the creative reinterpretation of the accumulated sociological knowledge on a given topic or theme. In more substantive terms, it was possible to show that the remembered past is ruled by the mediations introduced by the social place occupied in the present of remembrance as well as the positive or negative inclination of the biographical trajectory meanwhile outlined strongly weights on the perspective projected onto the past. However, these workers were not just passive containers of the social pressures. The mnemonic practices they use, not necessarily in a cynical way, to assimilate, circumvent or accommodate the historical changes, impose over the past meanings and impressions that, literally, reconstitute it from their personal point of view. Even if their view on the past is enunciated in a verbal style that is the also the incarnation of their very personal history.