Plasticidade: Plasticity—A History of Plastics in Portugal ed. by Maria Elvira Callapez, Sara Marques da Cruz, and Vânia Carvalho (review)

Reviewed by: Plasticidade: Plasticity—A History of Plastics in Portugal ed. by Maria Elvira Callapez, Sara Marques da Cruz, and Vânia Carvalho Jeffrey L. Meikle (bio) Plasticidade: Plasticity—A History of Plastics in Portugal Edited by Maria Elvira Callapez, Sara Marques da Cruz, and Vânia Carvalho. Leiria: Município de Leiria/Museu de Leiria, 2022. Pp. 269. Recent decades have witnessed the appearance of collaborative government-funded projects in the humanities, especially in European nations—a model for scholarship that differs substantially from the traditional model of an individual researcher-writer. This new model has brought humanities projects and their funding more in line with those in the sciences. Plasticidade, a collection of about forty short articles comprising a history of plastics, both in general and in Portugal, is a fascinating hybrid work. In addition to narrating the announced history, the volume also serves as a catalog and permanent record of an exhibition of the same title at the Leiria Museum, a public institution operated by the city of Leiria, a center of plastics manufacturing. Some of the articles in Plasticidade, which was published after a plastics history congress in Lisbon in 2019 and after the Leiria exhibition closed in 2021, also self-consciously comment on various aspects of the process of putting together the exhibition. This outpouring of scholarship and public history, which brought the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits to the Leiria Museum in 2019, was made possible by funding from the Portuguese government's Foundation for Science and Technology. The historian and chemist Maria Elvira Callapez, who administered the grant as principal investigator, also organized the Lisbon congress, advised the Leiria Museum, and served as lead editor of this volume. Plasticidade provides not only a history of plastics in Portugal but also a partial record of the entire collaborative project. The book's first half is mostly narrative or interpretive. The editors impose order on quite varied essays (some scholarly, some promotional or celebratory, others popularizing) by grouping them in seven sections. In the first two sections, chemists define plastics by chemical composition and physical properties, while historians summarize the origin stories of natural plastics, celluloid, Bakelite, and petroleum-based plastics. Much of this material is already familiar to historians of technology, but it does make the book accessible to all audiences. There is some repetition, however, as multiple authors introduce their contributions by referring, for example, to the Greek word plastikos as the source of the word "plastic," or to the difference between thermosets and thermoplastics. Articles in the third and fourth sections are devoted respectively to the development of the plastics industry in Portugal and to the emergence of Leiria as a center of plastics injection molding after [End Page 1305] World War II. Most useful here are the articles by José Dias Coelho on the city's transformation from making glass to making plastics, a shift enabled by experienced mold makers, and by Paula Mota Santos on the gendered experiences of female and male plastics workers, as gleaned from oral histories conducted for the exhibition. The fifth section, devoted to "Objects," departs from historical chronology to offer several ways of interpreting plastic artifacts aesthetically and emotionally, along with two articles on museum conservation of plastics. Articles in the last two sections point to the future: one section in celebration, with discussions of digital manufacturing and bioplastics; the other in despair, with laments over plastics waste and oceanic microplastics. With definitional, historical, and even philosophical positions already covered from various perspectives, the second half of Plasticidade illustrates in color the installations and objects of the Leiria Museum exhibition. An opening section covers the award-winning installation itself, revealing a bright, imaginative, engaging one-way flow through early plastics history, manufacturing techniques, and a decade-by-decade review of Portuguesemade plastic artifacts. Of particular interest are several striking plastic simulations of intricate cut and molded glassware, a reminder of Leiria's industrial history. About eighty pages of individual artifact images, isolated against white backgrounds, portray commercial products as art objects in a stunning manner at odds with the historical contextualizing of the exhibition itself and the catalog articles. Especially effective in the...