Letters from Portugal X: Ego Sum Panis Vivus

To view the Portuguese Parliament, the Assembleia da República is a wondrous thing. This building emerges, like a huge ant-hill, from right within the middle of a regular residential neighborhood. There are no high walls, no barricades, battalions of guards restricting your experience of the exterior of the building. One minute you are ambling through the streets of the São Bento neighborhood, and the next minute you are smack in front of this national edifice. Indeed, one can walk right up to the main façade of the building and not be interfered with by the largely ceremonial guards standing at the entrance.

For a South Asian, this is a unique experience. For not only is the procedural seat of democracy, however flawed it may be, located right among the people it represents, but it is also unmediated by unnecessary security. Security in South Asia, is unfortunately a testament to the certain lack of trust in the citizenry by the government, a sign that something is not quite right. As a Goan, this arrangement is actually a reminder of happier days, when our Legislative Assembly was similarly located in Panjim, amongst the people it represented.

A Portuguese friend once grumbled that the location of the Parliament saying it allowed people no space to protest against the Government. The roads around the Parliament restricted the space and amount of protestors. While this may be true, a recent incident demonstrated how innovative protest can in fact make its point in such a situation.

Some months ago, faced with the looming financial crisis, the Portuguese government raised the VAT on a number of products, including bread – the most basic of all foods. Simultaneously however, it reduced the VAT on golfing drastically. While seemingly bizarre and insensitive this action was possessed of an internal logic. Golfing holidays brought in 500 million euros to the Portuguese economy in the year 2009, persuading the Government that reducing the VAT would encourage more golfers to holiday in Portugal.

This act however, drew the ire of a number; resulting in a rather innovative protest. Apparently designed so it could be recorded and transmitted to a larger audience, the protest is available online at http://vimeo.com/21415500. Choreographed to the music from the motet ‘Ego Sum Panis Vivus’ (I am the Bread of Life) by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the video shows a young man attired for golf, walk up the steps to the front of the Parliament, place a loaf of bread in front of it, and then swing his club, shooting the bread toward the Parliament. Having done so, he calmly collects his bag of golf clubs and leaves the scene of protest.

Returning to this focus on security, what is so interesting is that the guards at the entrance did not stop the man, calling their supervisors only after they saw this man shoot the bread toward the building. By the time the supervisors arrived it was too late, and the video shows them standing there, being briefed about the action. The video seems to mock the security apparatus around the Parliament. But perhaps these young Portuguese protestors seem to miss the point. The drama of their protest was enabled precisely by the relaxed security around the building. To mock this situation is to demand for the suffocating security that marks official buildings, and thus their democracies across much of the world. But then, we never know, until much later, what to be thankful for.

(A version of this post was first published in the Oheraldo 12 June 2011)

Letters from Portugal: The Natural Order of Things

On the fifth of June Portugal will go to the polls to elect a new national government. This election, precipitated by the economic crisis in the country, comes well before the term of the Parliament was to end. Indeed, I had just moved to Lisbon in September 2009 when José Socrates assumed office at the conclusion of the last election.

As an enthusiastic anthropologist I was looking forward to every possibility to experience facets of the Portuguese life. So when my landlady and her friend excitedly decided that they could not bear to watch the results being announced on TV, but would proceed to the ‘street’, I joined them.

I had no clue as yet though, that the street they had in mind was the street in front of the Hotel Altis, where the Socialist Party was camping while awaiting news of the results. Some time after we arrived at the hotel my landlady’s companion announced that she was going to go up to the thirteenth floor where the big shots were following the announcement of the results. And so, the three of us walked into the lobby of the hotel, to the elevator, and then up to the thirteenth floor. In a matter of minutes, I found myself introduced to the Mayor of Lisbon, the minister of this and the minister of that, and cocktailed my way to the announcements of the Socialist Party’s victory.

What was striking about this whole experience was how easy it had been for us to get up there. It occurred to me, that such a prospect would have been close to impossible in India. First, the hotel would have been bounded by a wall, with guards at the entrance to the compound. Subsequently there would have been security at the entrance to the lobby, then at the entrance to the lift, and finally on the thirteenth floor. There would have been no way in which a shabbily dressed non-entity would have made it all the way, quite literally, to the top.

This experience seems to allow a counter-intuitive reading of both Indian and Portuguese society. India may be a polity marked by a severely stratified society, but it is one in which those who are at the bottom of the pile are not willing to be remain there. They actively challenge the system, transgress boundaries and assert their right to enter spaces they are barred from. The guards are present not because India is marked by a naturally hierarchical society, but because it is not. The guards are there to violently assert the hierarchy of the political and social order.

By the same logic, it appears that the absence of guards at the Hotel Altis is evidence of a 'natural' order of things in Portuguese society. Armed with the knowledge that Portuguese society is in fact severely hierarchical, one could hazard a reading that for the most part, the hierarchies of the system are not challenged sufficiently. The people know their place in the social order and stick there, reducing the need for the excessive policing that one sees in the subcontinent. One also imagines that the economic well-being produced through joining the EU was incentive enough to not challenge social boundaries. What happens to this social compact however, now that the good times are over? Could poverty within a democratic framework in fact prove to be a blessing in disguise?

(A version of the post was first published in the Herald 29 May 2011)