Abstract

LOUCA, João Carlos. Memory of the Future or after the road curve, the Iberian anti- military movement between 1980 and 1999.Translated byElurre Iriarte. Andamios [online]. 2023, vol.20, n.51, pp.287-300.  Epub Sep 29, 2023. ISSN 2594-1917.  https://doi.org/10.29092/uacm.v20i51.977.

The fieldwork, set in the ethnographic present that invariably interrogates the past and its uses to envision the future, often provokes moments of astonishment. In the anthropology that looks at the time that is to come as a kaleidoscope of possibilities, these occasions suggest connections between intersecting worlds, which sometimes diverge and can meet again, always tracing unexpected paths for the projected investigation.

In communities that seek in the complexity of the present the simplicity of desired forms of life, which create utopias in the ways of producing, exchanging, educating or deciding among themselves, which transform precariousness into a continued possibility, some of these moments emerged with a bang. In the Pyrenees of the Upper Aragon there are people who live that since the 1970s, who have decisively influenced the anti-military movement in Portugal in the late 1980s. This movement contested compulsory military service, the belonging to NATO and the logic of the Cold War that spread missiles across Europe in a tug-of-war that no one could win, involved an urban generation that lived through the 1974 revolution in a time of normalization and the discourse that repudiated the “excesses of the revolution”. For the youth that orbited around the Portuguese antimilitary “Movimento Tropa Não”, the Spanish example of disobedience to military service, of the conscientious objection that made thousands of arrests in the neighbouring state, mobilizing wide sectors, was both inspiration and complicity, as well as the kick-starter and field of political consciousness. More than thirty years later, these meetings make the memories of those who investigate fundamental material to accompany what one seeks to understand throughout live or in that of social movements that gain other causes.

The melancholy that Enzo Traverso (2019) points out as a characteristic for the Left of the 21st century for not having new collective hopes on the horizon, may be being contradicted in the examples of struggles that are inscribed in the history of each specific territory. The historical time thought in the plural along the multiplicity of times that overlap in interactions, which constantly refer to its dimensions between past and future.

Keywords : Anti-militarism; left-wing; Portugal.