on the modern city and the habits that thrived in it. Physical education, a scientific and rational discipline, contributed to the return of “bodily naturalness” and regulated the individual’s adjustment to his new social milieu.125 This science measured and systematized movement on the basis of knowledge about mechanical and physiological principles. But as movements were triggered by emotions, physical exercises should be “executed in line with established norms and intentions . . . in harmony with other means of moral and intellectual education.”126 The emotions that trigger movement, according to Leal de Oliveira, should be the result of the “existence of morality, religion, education, and civilization.”127 This Portuguese model of physical exercise was sustained by moral principles that synthesized Christian thought, Latin historical heritage, and modern corporative ideas.128
The Portuguese researchers in physical education wanted to develop a strategy that could sustain the application of a state model.129 If in a premodern context this physical activity, although instinctive, was part of a natural order, in the artificial environment of an industrialized city, the socializing framework underpinning these impulses was artificial. Modern physical education needed to control such “inherited and involuntary motor techniques,” and “innate reflex movements.”130 For this rationalization process to be effective, body movements would have to be predetermined, in view of the “intellectual and perhaps moral meaning of a conscious goal.”131 For Leal de Oliveira, the concept of ideomotor stood for predetermined movements: “Movements springing directly from an idea are called ideomotor movements, an idea that is integrated within an instinctive tendency that, in turn, mobilizes and articulates reflex actions.”132 Every deliberate movement was ideomotor. Its execution was “conditioned by a power or personal will, which provides reflexive consciousness along with the faculty to execute the movement or not, and in a specific way.”133 Bodies whose movements did not correspond to a predetermined impulse were considered potentially harmful: “noneducated impulses,” responsible for heterodox and impure gestures, should be eliminated.134
The movements deemed adequate for preparing the bodies of the Portuguese were those of the Swedish gymnastics method.135 Segmented movements were fundamental (suspension, support, balancing, walking, running, rising, and transporting movements, as well as throwing and jumping). Cadenced movements, quite common in gymnastics, “facilitated collective work because rhythm represented an order, a natural discipline conducive to the harmony and concordance of partial efforts and to their union.”136 The idea of cadenced rhythm, of ordering, was common to numerous educational practices during the Estado Novo, namely those that involved the use of music.137 Natural exercises such as “walking, running, climbing, balancing, throwing, rising, carrying, swimming” were, by definition, useful and correct, “when executed in a manner that preceded any changes brought about by civilization.”138 Symmetry was the basic feature of the exercises prescribed by this gymnastics method. On the contrary, according to Leal de Oliveira, asymmetrical exercises could hardly become a habit because they “require the dissociation of symmetrical coordination fixed by habit. Human attention has to divide itself between the two homologous parts of the body, through which corresponding impulses and ideas immediately follow in the mind.”139 In his view, the dissociation of attention, the possibility of choice and the confusion between ideas were perverse qualities and led to an ill-defined body. Leal de Oliveira pointed out that a movement’s aesthetics rested on its usefulness, adding that “rectilinear movements,” typical of gymnastics, “express calm and determination,” whereas “curvilinear movements,” present, for instance, in sports such as football, reflected “indecisiveness.”140
The careful tailoring of each movement to the age and sex of the participant was one of the basic principles of the Ling method. The creation of the Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (Feminine Portuguese Youth), in 1937, institutionalized a sexual separation and distinction between the types of exercises appropriate for each sex.141 Thanks to the ability to categorize students according to a specific biotype, the kinds of movements more appropriate for each individual would be determined, thereby improving physical performances, correcting the bodies’ postures, preventing illnesses, and guiding youths in their professional life.142 A specific training space was necessary for the proper teaching of this orthodoxy of movement. The modern gymnasium, which since the late nineteenth century had gradually become more common in Europe, represented the space where the relationship between teacher and student could be regulated through a set of norms and hierarchies. It was a closed domain, measured and organized according to the intersection of straight lines. By taking individuals out of their social environment, this domain became a laboratory of bodies and ways of being and acting, argued Leal de Oliveira.143 The socializing function of this kind of total institution,144 inspired by the Greek gymnasium, had been adapted to modern times. According to the first commissioner of the Mocidade Portuguesa, Francisco Nobre Guedes, inspired by Pierre de Coubertin’s ideas, “You must protect the gymnasium from the twofold danger represented by the proximity of school and sports society. Both, were they to penetrate its walls, would lead it astray from its objective and neutralize its main action.”145 The chaotic city, where football thrived, was described in 1928 by António Faria de Vasconcelos, a psychologist and educator, in a text where the purifying benefits of the Ling method were praised: “We need only look at our own life, its zigzags and jerking curves, its haphazard rhythms, a fleeting flame of will and work, sometimes ablaze, sometimes slumberous, shifting from enthusiasm to despondency at a stroke, a life, in short, lacking spirit, balance, control, and discipline.”146
FIGURE 2.3. Sketch of a modern gymnasium. Author: Ana Estevens. Source: Adapted from Celestino Marques Pereira, A educação física na Suécia, 163.
MAP 2.3. Plan of the city of Lourenço Marques, 1929. There are obvious similarities between the structure of the modern gymnasium shown in Pereira’s 1939 original sketch and the principles behind the geometric layout of Lourenço Marques’s cement city. In a way, both these spaces were conceived as modern, confined, and organized spaces where life is produced. Caminhos de Ferro de Lourenço Marques. Source Wikimedia.
Movements molded by unregulated spatial contexts, such as sports associations, football grounds, and school playgrounds, had a negative impact on the teaching of symmetry.147 Schoolteachers were also to take part in this control of space by monitoring breaks between classes, on the playground, to “avoid excesses and deviations in children’s spontaneous activity,” especially in the course of “very dynamic games.”148 More dubious, from an educational point of view, were the movements executed in spaces such as football pitches, where players competed, in a more or less institutionalized way, before an audience. The football field had proven to be an unregulated space, not easily controlled by the state.149
The practical implementation of this model did not depend solely on the actions of state institutions vis-à-vis state-sponsored activities but also on their ability to regulate sports activities promoted by private associations, to change their principles, and to convert them into instruments of a “proper education.” The moral principles once prevalent in amateur sports matches had been corrupted by the growing popularity of those activities. For the Portuguese physical education theorists, body movements associated with popular games such as football reflected an urban space that was unhealthy, unpredictable, prone to conflict, hesitant, filled with disordered actions: daily movements executed by individuals who left the steady pace of country life for the uncertain rhythm of the city; individuals who lived in insalubrious houses and attended subversive associations and spaces where politics were discussed. The structural problem of sports games, according to Marques Pereira, rested in the acknowledgment that the movements they generate have a “utilitarian purpose,” an
