cultural examination of Portugal

Comparative cultures: Portugal
Section I: Concrete Experience
I have been attracted to Portugal for most of my life, because I have some Portuguese ancestry. I was curious, for example, about how much of the culture of family has been influenced by this background, and what elements. But as I got older I also started just to take an interest in the country in general. I would cheer for Portugal at the World Cup and things like that, for example, when I don’t know if I had any reason to. I started to become quite curious about this place that was on one hand a fairly normal Western country that seemed like it would be familiar in many respects to my own life, but on the other hand also seemed to be quite a bit different – slower pace of life, high family orientation, less work-obsessed than one might normally find in America. So I started to think a bit more about the differences between Portugal and America, and to that meant increasing my exposure to Portugal a bit more.
I know that some of the food my mother made growing up was Portuguese, or at least Portuguese adapted for the United States, so that was probably my first real exposure to the culture directly. But over time I started to research Portuguese music on the Internet and as I started to think about going there, I took it upon myself to track down some other media, and start learning the language. That part was actually a bit more challenging because a lot of times you end up learning Brazilian Portuguese, which is different from regular, but obviously is spoken by more people.
Of course, the final step for me was to do the immersion, with a trip there. The first thing for me was the trip planning, and that alone gave me the opportunity to accelerate my learning. Just starting with whatever information was online about the main sites, and trying to find things I would specifically find to be interesting, like heritage sites, religious sites, learning about the food, the beaches, the cities, and the history. All of those things came into my view in a much deeper way than I had learned before. I was still seeking out the things that I felt were going to interest me the most, but I had expanded my knowledge beyond the lowest-hanging fruit.
Then it was time to go to Portugal, and I had planned to spend three weeks there over the summer, seeing different parts of the country. For me that was a very visceral experience. When I first arrived I was swept away of course. The things I’d prepared and learned ahead of time were of course things that I recognized right away, but it’s one thing to read about some food and another to eat it. So experience just gave me a lot of richness, and added to the details that were already etched in my mind. I was excited and overwhelmed at the same time, but the first weeks I was in Lisboa and Oporto, and doing those cities made my experience easy. I was in hostels with other foreigners, so I was basically about to go to a place at the end of the day and process my experience a bit. I kept a journal in order to gather my thoughts on what I was experiencing. But interestingly, that first week, for all its euphoria, ended up being the least Portuguese of my experiences. What happened was that I was keeping one foot solidly in my roots. I was too intimidated to speak the language because I immediately recognized that I wasn’t very good. I hung out with other tourists, and did touristy things. It was an amazing time but after about a week I started to realize that my interactions were more superficial than I was expecting, and that was a problem.
So I sought out deeper experiences and the second week was easily the most difficult. I went into the mountains and then headed south, so I spent a lot of time in places with few tourists. I was forced to struggle with the language, rather than reverting to English. I was in places where I couldn’t just spend my evenings hanging out with other tourists. This was a much more immersive component of my trip and by the time I got to my third week I think I started to have my sea legs and really became much more directly engaged with Portuguese people and culture, not in the idealized sense I’d learned before the trip but in the real sense as those things are today.
Section II: Observations and Reflections
One of the first things that stands out about Portuguese culture is that it is this blend of old and new, but has a lot of the old. A city like Lisboa can seem modern in places but even that is less about the modern world than just about anything here in America. There is a deep, ingrained cultural memory. When I would see something like an old church or a Roman ruin, to me it was like a piece of history, an artifact, but to the Portuguese those things are living, because either they still serve a meaningful function or even the ruins are things around which they’ve built their lives. The other thing I noticed is how much pride that they have about their history. In America, we are a colonial country. We come from everywhere, but also most of us don’t have a background here. But in Portugal most people are Portuguese. In the cities you might see Africans from former colonies but mostly everybody there can see the history of their family there further back than anybody can remember. So they don’t opt into their culture in the same way that an American might, they live and breathe it.
Portugal has a very masculine culture, compared with America. We do, too, but it’s not the same; in Portugal the masculinity seems to have more concrete ways of expression that have been built into the culture over centuries, so there is little confusion about how people are supposed to behave, both in public and in private. I found that anytime I wanted to question something, like say, catcalling women, we would find offensive but few people there really questioned it because they felt there was an order to it – the norms of such behavior were understood by everybody in the culture.
I also noticed a strong sense of pride in their country and culture. It seems that they have to stand tall for themselves, because they live in the shadow of Spain or even Brazil, like when I would say something I learned in the language but it was a Brazilian term. This pride seemed to me different from the way that Americans interpret national pride – more a deep pride that you have to have in order to feel good about who you are, rather than trying to showcase something, or signal something to others. It’s a pride for themselves and themselves only, so they can actually seem humble when talking to someone from another culture, while still showcasing how proud they are. If pride in America manifests more as a boastfulness about how great we are, there it’s more just feeling good about having a unique culture that is recognized the world over, like they have a little bit less to prove.
The quality of life was definitely something that I noticed as well. Portuguese people work to live, rather than living to work. I think in America we see work itself as a virtue, and celebrate that. In Portugal, work exists to give one the opportunity to take pleasure in life. There’s definitely the Catholic guilt thing that keeps them from indulging too much – and I notice that’s reflected in the Hofstede cultural dimension scores, too. So they like to eat well and drink their wine but those are indulgences made in the context of their culture. They still work hard and generally everybody keeps within the same bounds. They struggle with African immigrants who bring different cultural views. A lot of the people in the youth hostels talked about the open drug policies that Portugal has but it seemed to me that Portuguese culture would make it difficult for Portuguese people to actually have an indulgent culture around illegal drugs – they tend to behave in fairly predictable ways, albeit with some regional differences where smaller towns are more conservative. But that predictability is something that I’ve read is emblematic of Portuguese culture and reflected on that it makes a lot of sense – they did seem to have a certain risk aversion that governs them as a whole – the need to fit in with societal norms, so always going to Church, wanting to please family and that sort of thing.
Section III: Abstract Concepts & Generalizations
Portuguese culture is an interesting study. They are similar to America in terms of being able to live a high quality of life, but there are significant differences. Both cultures work hard, but in Portugal there is a clear reason – they want to live a good life, and do it within the bounds of what is acceptable to the families and communities. Family plays a much bigger role in the culture than it does in America, and the Church does, too, because there are many in America who are not religious. So one can see parallels between Portugal and the US along some dimensions, but the difference is that Portuguese quite clearly work to live, whereas Americans live to work, and that ends up being reflected in having different values in life.
Another key distinct aspect of Portuguese culture is that it has a historical depth to it. Most of the people in Portugal trace their ancestry back centuries – or at least they know that they could if they wanted. There are immigrants, but fewer than in America. Because the Portuguese are fairly traditional and conservative in nature, many aspects of their culture like their food and art date back centuries. They are far less enamored with shiny new things than Americans are, so they live a modern life but with much more historical resonance. They are incredibly proud of their culture, too, and there seems less conflict about it, unlike in America where we have these culture wars and rifts between different races, classes and genders. Most aspects of Portuguese culture are more settled, less in flux.
There is a much stronger emphasis on community and other units, like family, in Portugal, and this is one of the biggest differences between the country and America. Where America is very individualistic, family units are small and may not mean much, in Portugal family is very important, and plays a role in many aspects of people’s lives. A visitor who spends time with a Portuguese family may be unofficially a family member, which is a meaningful thing. But more than this, there is a collective sense of being, that a Portuguese person is not just some independent unit, but is also part of a greater whole. In America, the greater whole exists, but it is still characterized by individuals, and subservience to a greater cultural unit is not only avoided by many Americans, but frowned upon and suppressed. So the cultural values are quite different where individualism is concerned.
The lack of risk taking is another interesting aspect of Portuguese culture, especially when compared with America. Americans can be very risk-taking, and that manifests in things like business culture where risk is often rewarded loudly and publicly. Americans take risks for experiences, too. In Portugal there is more of a defined list of experiences one strives for, and so those make up the pleasure that people seek. Working to live doesn’t mean working to live freely, but rather live within the greater context of Portuguese society. For example, there is a lot of artistic expression – Portuguese are especially musical. But this expression is almost always done within the context of traditional, established forms. There is less innovation, and when it occurs does so at a much slower pace than what might be expected in America. This is why in Portugal people might all have smartphones, but they don’t have any high-flying technology companies and in many respects, especially in rural areas, life seems unchanged almost for centuries.
The sense of place in the world is something that differentiates Portugal from the US. Portgual is a former colonial power, and this gives them a sense of pride as to their contributions to the world. They understand that their culture and language extend far beyond their boundaries, yet they realize that they are no longer a world power, so this is quite different from the US. There are no expectations of greatness for the Portuguese people in that sense, they don’t want to be leaders of the world, and in fact they seem okay with their current position in the world, except of course when they are compared with Spain, in which case they might take a bit of offense.
Section IV: Application to New Situations
There’s two things I want to do with this body of knowledge. The first is to get to know the culture more. I think I have more language skills now, but I also have a much greater cultural fluency. This cultural fluency has actually grown since I’ve returned to America, because I’ve been able to reflect on my experiences and assimilate some of that knowledge. So for me, it is important to build on the work that I’ve done and really make my knowledge of Portugal and its culture a bigger part of my own world, not just some thing I did when I was younger. I want to really build a lifelong connection to this place and to this part of my background.
The other thing for me is that I’d like to take the ways that I learned about Portuguese culture and apply them to other cultures that I have an interest in. If I want to learn about French culture, or Argentinian or Japanese, or wherever, I feel that I have a pretty good sense now of how that learning journey will look. I know the starting points, and I know what to expect when I do get to the point where I can travel to get the immersive experience. I think that the immersive experience is essential to learning about a culture but I also know now how best I can get that experience. So I want to take the skills that I have acquired in learning about a new culture and use those to learn about other cultures around the world, especially some of the other ones in which I have an interest.
References
Hofstede Insights (2020) Country comparison: Portugal. Hofstede Insights. Retrieved May 24, 2020 from https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/portugal/
Mudge, E. (2019) Portuguese culture: food, fado and festivals. Portugal.com. Retrieved May 24, 2020 from https://portugal.com/portugal-blogs/portuguese-culture