Flying with Covid: The visual presence of the pandemic in airports

Since the beginning of 2020, with the eclosion of the Covid-19 pandemic, airports have been included among the main hotspots for the diffusion of the disease. Several limitations affected the possibility for people to travel, with diverse approaches between the countries, and with differences among who was authorized to travel and who was not. This caused a contraction on the number of passengers transiting in the airports in all the countries. However the commercial international aviation has never stopped, and despite the reduction of passengers the airports managed to implement health security protocols for the Covid-19 diffusion control. Before the pandemic, other challenges already affected airports’ security protocols, such as the “terrorist threat”, making of these places “nervous systems” (as defined by Maguire and Pétercsak). After one year and half from the beginning of the pandemic, with the vaccination campaigns accelerating in various countries (with the clear differences due to governments’ political choices and countries’ access to vaccines) the air travels have returned to a condition similar to previous one. An increasing number of planes flying and an increasing number of passengers can be registered everywhere. Meanwhile, the sanitary attention to the Covid-19 diffusion contention continues to be a concern in the space organization of airports.This ethnographic photoessay aims at describing the visual presence of the Covid in the airports. The work focuses on four airports in three countries the author passed through in June 2021. They are the airports of Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), Lisbon (Portugal), Rome and Venice (Italy). Despite the differences between the countries in the approached adopted to contain the diffusion of the pandemic, airports are subjected to standardized international protocols. These are intended to (re)produce similar safety measures in the diverse airports. Meanwhile, airports are designed not to be identitarian, historical and relational, but yes to be experienced as “non places” (as Augé defined these places). However, each airport introduces several dimensions of its specific location, of its specific local health politics, of its specific passengers’ flow, and so on, making of them a peculiar place to observe the space design for Covid diffusion control. Despite the definition of the Covid as an “invisible enemy”, used in general media in diverse countries, the thesis is that the presence of the virus is highly visible to everyone passing in some airport, independently from the specific country. Meanwhile, the diverse airports introduce their own local and specific visual modalities to achieve passengers. Pictures included in this ethnographic photoessay focus on some of these modalities, such as the hand gel dispensers, instructions and prohibitions for preventing Covid dissemination, among other. Covid’s aesthetics in airports highlights how the pandemic affected people visual and sensorial experiences of these places and of their designs.

Ecclesiastical normativity and particularism in the New World: the regulation of baptism in the Synod of Salvador da Bahia (1707) and its practice in the Freguesia of Fortaleza (18th century)

This paper aims to contribute with the study of ecclesiastical normativities in Portuguese America, mainly after the enactment of the First Constitutions of the Archbishopric of Bahia (1707). By analyzing baptism, which is regarded as the first Catholic sacrament, this text focuses on the creation of norms for particular spaces and how this process incorporates juridical and theological traditions. At the same time, the text confronts this analysis with the baptismal records of the freguesia of Fortaleza during the 18th century, in order to verify if this formal regulation actually was put into practice.

"Trabalho mais para que não se pervertam os brancos do que para a conversão dos negros": Pedro Fernandes, bispo de Salvador da Bahia (1551-1556), entre Paris, Lisboa, Goa, Cabo Verde e o Brasil

Resumo Durante a primeira metade do século XX, diversos autores interessaram-se pela figura do bispo que, em 1551, o rei de Portugal indicou para governar a diocese do Salvador da Bahia. Este estudo apresenta uma releitura e reinterpretação de documentação já conhecida que, agregada a um reduzido conjunto de novos dados factuais, permite reequacionar e esboçar o perfil do pensamento e atuação de D. Pedro Fernandes, o primeiro bispo da América Portuguesa. Suportado em análises vinculadas aos propósitos e métodos da história conectada e do global turn, aqui se argumenta que a sua passagem por Paris, Lisboa, Goa, Cabo Verde e Bahia, entre outros locais, lhe deram a conhecer o mundo sem alterar substancialmente as suas perspetivas e propósitos consoante os espaços por onde transitou. Tendo sido um agente da projeção do catolicismo na Ásia, África e América, articulando e estabelecendo conexões entre diversos lugares do planeta, focou-se mais nos portugueses do que nos indianos e ameríndios, contribuindo para construir, sobretudo no Brasil, uma igreja diocesana baseada na orgânica e dinâmicas das dioceses de Portugal.

Salvador da Bahia

The city of Salvador da Bahia was founded in 1549 under the name of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (Holy Savior of the Bay of All Saints). But it was known as the city of Bahia between the 16th and 19th centuries. This major Atlantic port city developed by exporting sugar and tobacco to Europe and beyond and importing slaves from Africa. It was also the capital of Portuguese America until 1763. We cannot really separate the history of the city and that of its hinterland, one of the most prosperous plantation economies in the Atlantic world. It was the plantations of the Recôncavo that made Bahia one of the major slaveholding regions in the Americas and the interaction between the city of Bahia and its hinterland was constant. Nonetheless, this article focuses on the urban setting. Salvador da Bahia was a Portuguese colonial city, built on land of the Tupinambá people, which brought together a multiethnic community made up of European, indigenous, and African populations. It was a cosmopolitan city despite itself, whose development was closely linked to slavery and slave trade. It was a place of mutual influence and deep reconfiguration, where mixing was both obvious and problematic. The society of Bahia was based on exclusion and negotiated forms of integration, influenced by the Portuguese imperial framework. It was a complex slave society, whose transformation between the 16th and the 19th centuries cannot be understood without taking into account the several Atlantic dynamics. Slavery reached its peak during the Brazilian imperial regime, being kept untouched after independence, and the dynamics of the city remained deeply tied to the slave trade, whether illegal or interprovincial. This persistence of slavery through the 19th century raises the question of the traditional chronology of the history of Brazil, whose colonial period would end with independence. This article encompasses both colonial and imperial periods and offers a wide historiographical overview on Salvador da Bahia. The historiography of Bahia has been extensively devoted to slavery history and slave populations. Historians have long been interested in black urban slavery and its specificities, highlighting the complexity of the society of Salvador da Bahia and the strength of the interactions that took place there. In recent years, scholars have explored new perspectives, by taking the path of micro history and collective biographies. They have examined in depth the multiple connections between Bahia and different African regions, which involved different agents and social groups. By focusing on the South Atlantic, they have experimented with approaches beyond the imperial framework and have made a major contribution to Atlantic studies. The political perspectives were also renewed, emphasizing the strength of local powers and the interactions between local and imperial strategies. The indigenous history of the region of Bahia is also experiencing a significant revival. We thus intend to emphasize recent works and ongoing research on Salvador da Bahia.