Next 15th April (Wednesday) a member of LXNIGHTS will offer a seminar at the University of Évora. The seminar entitled  “The place of ethnographic observation in qualitative research” will be presented by Daniel Malet Calvo to the sociology students of “Laboratory of Qualitative Analysis”, a subject taught by Rosalina Maria Pisco Costa. The presentation aims to contextualize the ethnographic inquiry as a methodological innovation belonging to anthropological tradition. In this sense the “participant observation” and other fieldwork innovations used for the first time by anthropologists in analyzing diverse social settings, are today broadly considered as the empirical foundations of qualitative research.

The seminar will provide a methodological starting point to the collective project “Through doors and side streets: Getting older in Évora’s Historical Center” in which the students will interview and observe the everyday life of old people in the public spaces of this medium size Portuguese city. After learning the theoretical and epistemological foundations of fieldwork, the students will get into Evora’s provincial urban environment to gather data in significant public places. The aim is to characterize old people’s socio-demographic profiles and describe their everyday lives in these urban spaces.

The object of this seminar, older people daily practices in a provincial city, seems to be far from Lisbon’s young-oriented nightlife leisure. However, in both urban environments the methods of ethnography are equally pervasive and relevant in understanding the social actors and their relation to the city. Social data is meaningful only when unveiled through ethnographic fieldwork.

One of the most important trends in Lisbon’s nightlife -following the international tendencies- is the aesthetic embracing of the “vintage” style in a growing number of nightspots and venues. Maybe the leading figure inspiring this nightscape transformation -and certainly the most well-known example of this trend- is the Pensão Amor, a former brothel turned into a crowded night bar on the way from the Bairro Alto to Cais do Sodré (the two most important nightlife areas in the city center).

However, the simulated bohemian and burlesque atmosphere, the prostitution-based iconography and the aseptic sexuality that emerge from the objects exposed in every corner of the place, obscure the role of “vintage” style in the gentrification of Lisbon’s nightscapes.

Jordi Nofre’s contribution in “Fennia. International Journal of Geography” shows how this new socially sanitized bohemian nightlife (mainly oriented towards the local new middle classes and their international peers such as tourists and Erasmus students) is actually displacing old forms of working-class leisure and decadent nightlife.

Here you can find Nofre’s article: “Vintage Nightlife”: Gentrifying Lisbon downtown“, an excellent case study providing relevant guidelines for our research in Lisbon.