3During my initial fieldwork in the mid-1980s, I had watched Hamburg’s various ranchos folclóricos, or folkdance troupes innumerable times in crowded rented halls, church courtyards, or parking lots outside the city’s various Portuguese associations. Some fifteen years later, a dramatically different venue for these performances had developed and I found myself watching the same ranchos in the Ethnographic Museum, an imposing and very German space, a place I had never entered during the course of my first years of fieldwork, and a place I doubt any of the Portuguese I knew had ever visited. Although folk culture still constituted the symbolic repertoire for national self-representation – couples dressed in “peasantish” outfits still whirled around to lively “traditional” Portuguese tunes – the specific content of the performances had shifted noticeably from those I had observed in the mid-eighties. Concerns with authenticity and historically accurate representations of regionally specific traditions had replaced the admittedly invented images of the generic Portuguese peasant.

4What, I ask in the following pages, is the significance of these changes? What did it matter that the Portuguese of Hamburg were now performing folkloric representations of self in museum foyers rather than parking lots and dance halls; that the composition of the audiences and their relationship to the performers and performance had shifted; that the ways of representing “Portugueseness” within this diasporic outpost had been recast? In puzzling over these changes, I examine the local, national, and transnational politics in which the representations at the Arraial were enmeshed and consider the ways in which the relationship between “those who see, and those who are seen” remains fraught with unacknowledged assumptions and consequences (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1991: 434).

5Multiple agendas and disputes are expressed in any exhibition or performance and different relations of power characterize the arenas around any particular cultural display. As will become clear in the following account, representations enacted within museums, especially in the prestigious institutions located at the centers of power, often reflect hegemonic conceptualizations of culture and hierarchies of difference. Although the Arraial was developed within articulated agendas of minority empowerment and heightened the visibility and public pride of the Portuguese migrant community, I argue that these representations of Portugueseness simultaneously covered up conflict, inequality, and contemporary agency.

A bit of background

7Despite their over three decades in Germany, an increasing comfort and engagement with German society and growing assumption on the part of many Germans that their erst-while guests had settled permanently in Germany, most Portuguese migrants were still firmly committed to eventually returning to Portugal. Almost everyone I knew, regardless of generation, length of stay in Germany, or class position maintained a commitment to returning “home” and refused to entertain the possibility of permanent settlement in Germany or the taking of German citizenship. Most expressed that commitment through investing in a future in Portugal, and especially the original first generation of migrants felt that moving up the social ladder and transforming financial gains into cultural capital were much more realistic possibilities in Portugal than in Germany. The second and emerging third generations were more culturally fluent in Germany than “at home” in Portugal, but by and large did not consider themselves as permanently settled in Germany; they tried to maneuver around the obstacles and take advantage of opportunities of both national spheres. By the time of the Arraial, the Portuguese in Germany had established actively transnational lives. Their individual trajectories, families, and communities had increasingly come to be organized across rather than within national spaces and the majority of Portuguese living in Hamburg fluidly connected German and Portuguese arenas (Klimt 2000a).

8The Portuguese in Hamburg are among the smallest group of foreign residents in the city, making up only about eight percent of the foreign population. They are not particularly conspicuous on the city scene, especially in comparison to the large Turkish and erst-while Yugoslav populations and the recent influx of more visibly different migrants from Africa and Asia. There are numerous popular Portuguese restaurants and cafes scattered across the city, but there is no concentrated or particularly visible area of Portuguese businesses or residence. In general, the Portuguese community is usually apparent only to insiders and the handful of Germans specifically interested in things Portuguese. It is in this context of relative city-wide invisibility that the very prominent displays of Portugueseness at the Museum took place.

The Arraial

10Since its inception in 1992, the Arraial has become a much anticipated event that has grown dramatically in scope. Originally a one-day event featuring a very generalized display of Portuguese culture, it has become a very elaborate three-day celebration which focuses on a particular theme or region, takes most of the year to organize, and requires the participation of numerous groups and committed individuals to be held. The Director, an anthropologist with expertise in Portuguese culture and language, had developed a friendship with two of the Portuguese community’s most respected and active intellectuals and it was largely through their initiative and collaboration that the Arraial developed into such a successful and popular event. The festivities draw German as well as very large Portuguese audiences and within Hamburg’s Portuguese community, the Arraial has become the most prominent event of the year.

11The theme of the 1998 Arraial, the focus of the following account, was the regional culture of Minho, a northern province in Portugal whose colorful folk traditions have, for Portuguese as well as Germans, come to stand in as the quintessential essence of Portuguese national culture (Medeiros 1995). The beginning of the festivities was heralded by a procession of local and visiting Portuguese folklore groups through Hamburg’s fashionable downtown. They marched dressed in full regalia with Portuguese bagpipes, drum corps, and a troupe of big heads past rather startled throngs of Saturday shoppers. The point, according to the Museum Director, was to be as loud, and as visible, and as “Portuguese” as possible – although my conversations with people on the street yielded more puzzlement than recognition. Upon arriving at the Museum, which is located on one of Hamburg’s elegant wide boulevards, opening ceremonies were held in the transformed foyer – specially painted banners depicting traditional Portuguese-style tiles hung from the marble staircases; the otherwise very formal hall was lined with gaily decorated food booths selling Portuguese culinary specialties; and the usual museum hush was filled with boisterous chatter and the audible good humor of crowds of people. Welcoming remarks were given by a series of local notables including Hamburg’s senator for Social Affairs, the Museum Director, the Portuguese Consul, and Director of the Portuguese Catholic Mission. The German Senator noted appreciatively that this was one of the few invitations from minority groups that did not entail requests for funding and support. Speeches were followed by elaborately staged presentations of traditional regional costumes by the participating folkdance troupes.

13The regional culture of Minho was also displayed through the screening of documentary films and discussed in lectures by Portuguese ethnologists who were billed in the brochure as “experts in Portuguese popular culture.” Demonstrations of more generic traditional peasant crafts such as spinning and weaving, sausage-making, and bread baking in a replica of a wood-burning village oven were featured throughout the day. While the performances, lectures, and films took place in the Museum’s exhibit halls, much of the Arraial’s unrehearsed activity was in the Museum courtyard. There, numerous food stalls featured Portuguese specialties and the eating, drinking, and talking, the press of the crowd, the shouts to the vendors, and the smoke from the grills all evoked the feeling of a Portuguese village festival rather than an organized exhibition or display. It was there that everyone relaxed and socialized while the more scripted performances continued inside. The festival culminated in an evening dance, which featured a Portuguese band of local teenagers, the only “modern” music heard during the Arraial. The dance was much like dances at exclusively Portuguese celebrations – there was no designated distinction between performers and audience on the packed dance floor and only a very few non-Portuguese were still to be seen. The festivities ended at midnight with everyone milling out onto the Museum entrance stairs to watch the traditional Portuguese-style fireworks put on by technicians especially invited from Portugal for the event.

German spaces, German audiences

14Ethnographic museums are particularly intriguing places in which to explore the complex politics surrounding folk culture. Since their inception in the 19^th century, ethnographic or natural history museums, including the one in Ham-burg, have been in the business of bringing “exotic” cultures home for domestic consumption. As prominent and often state-supported institutions, they have played key roles in the processes of nation-making and of naturalizing dichotomies between self and other, national insiders and outsiders, civilized and uncivilized. Historically, the relationship between those in museums responsible for the collection and display of cultural difference and those whose difference was being represented to a select public was based on entrenched inequalities, often along lines of colonizer and colonized or hegemonic majority and dominated minority. Interactions were dramatically asymmetrical and certainly not aimed at resolving the vast divergence of interests between those who created and consumed the displays and those who were regularly featured in museum exhibits.

16As Clifford and others have noted, however, museums are still complex meeting grounds, “contact zones” in which groups of people engage each other in “a power-charged set of exchanges” (Clifford 1997: 192). Negotiations about who gets featured in museum displays, how they are represented to wider publics, and who gets to view whom continue to be politically loaded arguments that invoke historically particular “locations of power.” The conversations are never neutral and still involve significant differences in agendas, authority, and resources (Clifford 1997: 200). As ethnographic museums turn, at least in part, to agendas of minority empowerment, the challenge becomes how to resolve these continuing power differences. Given that the very existence of ethnographic museums depends on the language of cultural difference, the dilemma is how to create displays and facilitate interactions in ways that avoid essentializing cultural otherness and naturalizing established hierarchies of difference.

17One of the original missions of ethnographic museums and folklorists was to make visible a tangible essence that was persuasively and inherently German (Stoklund 1999). Turn-of-the-century peasant dress, rituals, dances and customs have, since the emergence of nationalist ideology in 19^th century Germany, constituted the symbolic repertoire that cements nation to culture and the peasant as nation writ large is a familiar theme in the birthplace of romantic nationalism. Along with collecting and displaying cultural artifacts of distant exotic cultures, German folklorists collected, documented, and preserved local rural traditions in Germany (Hobsbawm 1990) and worked to attach the notion of “German” culture to images of 19^th century peasants. This legacy is still evident in present-day museum exhibitions that tend to feature traditions and crafts from the past century. In fact, one of the exhibitions running concurrently with the Arraial in Hamburg’s Ethnographic Museum was a show on wood processing techniques of 19^th century rural Germany.

18The representation of Portuguese as picturesque and tradition-bound peasants from a distant temporal space that characterized the performances at the Arraial thus resonates with entrenched images of national culture in Germany. The Portuguese-as-Peasant made perfect sense in the German context, and except for the “easy-listening” Portuguese band that culminated the festivities, contemporary ways of life or “modern” versions of being “Portuguese” were explicitly absent from the performances and demonstrations. From the colorful peasant costumes, to the selection of folkloric music and dance forms, to the focus on the skills of bygone days, Portugueseness at the Arraial was depicted in terms of 19^th century rural culture.

19Despite the established symbolic connections between nation and peasant, this portrait of Portugueseness must be read against contemporary dialogues. That is, the matrix of meanings and implications surrounding the images presented at the Museum were specific to late 1990’s Germany and the question is what this version of Otherness meant on the present-day German scene. In contrast to exhibits that featured peoples from distant lands or bygone times, the Arraial depicted the culture of people who lived and worked in the same city as the consumers of those images. Unlike visits to the African mask gallery or tours through Indonesian domiciles, German spectators at the Arraial could potentially reconcile their understandings of what they saw on stage with the Portuguese migrants whom they often encountered – as co-workers, employees, neighbors, maids – in the course of their daily lives.

20Germans are deeply divided on who can rightfully “belong” to the polity and how to imagine the relationship between “German” and “non-German” residents of the nation. In the context of this debate, the Director and staff of the Ethnographic Museum certainly promoted agendas of “tolerance” and “integration.” Although the institution was closely connected to German centers of power, largely funded by the state, and run exclusively by Germans, those Germans who participated in the Arraial as organizers or visitors were already very sympathetic to ideologies of multiculturalism and the incorporation of “foreigners” into German society in ways that respected cultural difference. This encounter was thus clearly organized by Germans on the progressive end of the political spectrum and although aimed at engaging a wider public, it represents the perspectives and solutions of a very particular sector of German society.

21On the one hand, the Arraial made a public argument against established German hierarchies of difference and the frequently violent efforts to equate nation with cultural homogeneity. For the Portuguese to be proudly and visibly different, especially in such a prestigious German space, countered the entrenched expectations on the part of many Germans that foreigners should either completely assimilate or leave. Within the politics of local space, routing their procession through the up-scale sections of downtown Hamburg and performing in the high-status space of the Museum was to assert a kind of equality within German society. It laid claim to a place within Hamburg’s cultural landscape that was not marginal or inferior to that of Germans and legitimized that the Portuguese did indeed have a culture worth noting. The Portuguese I knew were extremely proud of the Arraial’s success and frequently noted its prominence on the German scene. Performing Portugueseness in the museum certainly had a different caché than performances at in-group social clubs located on Hamburg’s social and geographic periphery.

22The Arraial, according to the Museum Director, was also intended to facilitate an Annaeherrung, or “increased closeness” between Germans and their cultural Others and the Museum was selected as an ideal “encounter site.” Not only did the location bestow status on the Portuguese, it was a place where Germans would feel unthreatened and comfortable. The Museum was, after all, a place to which many Germans habitually came to encounter contained forms of cultural difference. The comfort of this cultural engagement for Germans was also due to the nature of the display. The Arraial was very innovative within the traditional parameters of museum display, but it was still a recognizably scripted event. The bilingual brochure “explained” the events to visitors and contained familiar elements such as scheduled performances, lectures, films, and demonstrations. Performers were readily identifiable through their colorful and relatively exotic dress and clearly distinct from spectators. And most events did not presume insider or prior knowledge and were accompanied by bilingual narrations. The performances themselves were also designed to be pleasant and entertaining and Portuguese culture was presented as different enough to be interesting and intriguingly exotic, but not so different as to be unpalatable or inaccessible.

24References to “race” and biological inferiority are certainly unacceptable in progressive German circles. Instead, “culture” has become the accepted way of talking about “kinds” of people (Stolcke 1995). In this model, culture is considered to be an immutable attribute that people carry from cradle to grave and cultural difference is seen as a permanent condition, one that is not subject to change or renegotiation. Cultural distinctions are valued – culture, after all, is a good thing – but they are also arranged along a generally unacknowledged and often only vaguely defined hierarchy that puts some cultures closer to pinnacles of human achievement than others. In these terms, Germans are secure in their modernity and proximity to sophisticated civilization and the Portuguese-as-peasants can never quite catch up. Even though the Arraial was part of the widening acceptance of and argument for a multicultural vision of Germany that gained momentum after the extensive anti-foreigner violence of the early 1990s, the displays of Portugueseness did not formulate difference in ways that seriously challenged the continued dominance of German culture. Within the accepted models of cultural difference, peasant folk could never really meet modern urbanity on a level playing field (Huyssen 1995). In contrast to cultural expressions popular in European urban centers among minority youth that stressed innovation and deliberately flouted convention, overtly invoked political statements on the plight of immigrant and minority populations, and played with fusion and stylistic syncretism of various cultural forms, the performances at the museum were safely contained within the parameters of “authentic tradition” and did not touch on any present-day concerns (Joan Gross, David McMurray and Ted Swedenburg 1996, Hammarlund 1994). I would argue that the form of “difference” featured in cultural displays and festivals such as the Arraial was, as Kirschenblatt-Gimblett has noticed for other contexts, “reduced to style and decoration, to spice of life” and did not rise to challenge the status quo (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1991: 421).

25When I asked a politically progressive German friend of mine who was very involved with the Portuguese community in Hamburg why folk culture and tradition were the sole forms of self-representation, her response was “but folklore is all they have.” A Portuguese observer echoed that view by pointing out that migrants, given that they had left their homeland decades ago, have ready access to the Portuguese past, but not to the rapidly changing culture of the Portuguese present. Traditional culture provided, in other words, a comfortable idiom, whereas modern versions of Portugueseness felt alien to most long-term migrants. New cultural forms that combined Portuguese and German forms or reflected the contemporary realities and difficulties of the migrant experience had not emerged within the wider Hamburg Portuguese community, nor would they have resonated with the Museum’s articulated mission of displaying “authentic” culture. Whatever complex combination of reasons led to the featuring of peasant images at the museum, the result was that Germans attending the Arraial could safely engage the foreigners in their city as a quaint, picturesque, and “enriching” presence, rather than as fellow residents with contemporary concerns. There was no hint that the people on stage might also be the neighbors next door. The performances at the Ethnographic Museum were aimed at promoting the acceptance of cultural difference and did facilitate a cultural encounter, but they simultaneously helped further establish a hierarchy through which to perceive those differences.

Arguments about authenticity

27It has only been in the last several years that any of Hamburg’s four folkdance troupes have been at all concerned with the historical authenticity of their costumes and repertoire. In the mid-1980s, when I first began my research, the ranchos dealt with the question of representing “Portugueseness” in very different ways. Two groups followed what had under Salazar been vigorously promoted as representing Portuguese national culture – that is, the generic regionally non-specific Portuguese peasant. The repertoire of both of these groups stemmed largely from Minho with a few other songs from other regions rather haphazardly mixed in. The costumes – flaring black skirt trimmed in the Portuguese red and green, lacy white blouse, colorful kerchief – were the same as the inventions that had been so common across Portugal during the fascist era (Holton 1999). There was no attention to historic period or regional specificity, and certainly no interest in questions about the authenticity of cultural traditions. Another rancho solved the question of how to look “Portuguese” rather differently and emphasized regional difference rather than homogeneous national culture. Each couple dressed in a different regionally specific costume and the ensemble’s repertoire included representative dances from each of Portugal’s regions. But even this solution was not particularly concerned with authenticity. The women tended to sew all the costumes and often made up their own rather fanciful versions of regional outfits.

28By the early 1990s, however, an exacting attention had developed to “doing it right” and correct reproduction of cultural traditions had become the shared goal and criteria for excellence. By the time of the 1998 Arraial, enactments of Portugueseness all emphasized the faithful replication of 19^th century peasant culture and authenticity had become the accepted grid on which to evaluate Portuguese cultural performances. The group, for example, widely considered “the best” at the Arraial was also the strictest in their adherence to “tradition.” Shiny and elaborately embroidered costumes had been traded in for the decidedly modest and homespun look of working peasants. No longer fashioned at home, the outfits were ordered, at considerable expense, through catalogues from Portugal that guaranteed the “accuracy” of these recreations of late 19^th century peasant dress. Along with the certified authenticity of the outfits, the leader of the “best” rancho insisted that all evidence of contemporary culture be removed. All the girls, for example, had to remove their make-up, earrings, and fingernail polish before every performance since, as the rancho leader emphasized, “turn-of-the-century peasant women didn’t use such things;” and the men had to be certain to remove their wristwatches – precautions that nobody would have even imaged a decade earlier. The rancho’s dances were carefully rehearsed upon the advice of folklore experts from Portugal who sent them videos of “authentic” performances by contemporary folkloric troupes and several of the lead performers had traveled to Portugal to learn more about regional traditions and work with folkdance troupes committed to documenting and accurately replicating 19^th century peasant culture.

31Interestingly enough, all four ranchos participated in the Arraial and ended up collaborating on this very public display of unity. The neutrality of the Museum space, the brokering role of the Museum Director, and the way the event was organized made it possible to keep arguments down to a manageable level. Most performances at the Arraial could be constituted as parallel performances that did not require agreement on what constituted “correct” versions of Portuguese culture and there were no organized competitions or prizes. All the folkdance troupes, for example, could perform their own versions of Portugueseness separately, one after the other and members of the audience could easily circulate to see the performances of their choice and choose to either vigorously applaud or politely and quietly watch. The disagreements over historical accuracy extended into other aspects of the Arraial. Several of the Portuguese women’s groups, for example, each of which were associated with one or the other of the ranchos, could not agree on the “real” recipe for caldo verde, a traditional Portuguese soup. Did it, or did it not have chouriço; did it have more or less potatoes; how thinly was the kale supposed to be sliced, etc. etc. Happily enough, a consensus was not required as each women’s group was able to separately sell their distinct versions and members of different factions generally patronized the concession stands of “their” group. Critiques, arguments, and complaints were kept soto voce, even though they often exploded into vigorous arguments during the planning meetings and the Museum Director had his hands full in guiding everyone towards mutually palatable decisions. The uninitiated spectators, on the other hand, had no idea of any of the underlying tensions and were presented with a harmonious vision of Portuguese culture. Although that unity did not last much beyond the Arraial itself, the very factionalized community did in fact manage to come together year after year and successfully create a major public event.

34The validation of authenticity as the central criteria of “Portugueseness” and the emphasis on accurate replication of cultural forms also played into power relations between Germans and Portuguese. Ironically enough, the Arraial successfully established a German as the local authority on what Portuguese culture was supposed to look like. The location of this event in the Ethnographic Museum meant that the Museum Director had quite a bit of influence on choices of what constituted Portuguese culture and how it would be represented in this event. He by no means was the only, or even the most influential person involved in these choices and, as explained above, certainly did not invent the turn-of-the-century peasant incarnation of Portugueseness. But siting the festival at the museum gave the Director the authority to sanction and promote this “authentic” form of Portugueseness and help establish the notion that “culture” meant tradition untainted by change and contemporary influences. His role in shaping representations of “Portugueseness” has also come to extend beyond the Museum. When, for example, shortly after the Arraial, a local German hotel wanted a “real” Portuguese troupe to perform at a multicultural festival, they called the Museum Director for his advice on which was the “best” and “most authentic” group. Curatorial standards of excellence defined within German ethnographic museums thus entered into the local relations of power that defined some forms as more and others as less representative of “real” Portugueseness.