MEMÓRIA, EMIGRAÇÃO, FESTA E RETORNO A PARTIR DO INTERIOR NORDESTE PORTUGUÊS

Abstract

This work is a methodological and theoretical reflection on the study of migrations from the revisiting and snippet of the multilocalized ethnography (MARCUS, 1996) that I developed between 2011 and 2013.. The study focuses on a village in the northeastern Portugal that is intensely marked by emigration. The decennial censuses prove the progressive and regular emptying of the villages in general, and Vilas Boas specifically. However, the first question that moves the research is not the common "why do they leave?" (although it is also relevant), but above all "why do they keep coming back?". Mobility as the center of the problem points to the cyclical temporality of migration. I will try to highlight the emic meanings of the annual return in the festive periods, noting the ways in which life in the contexts of destiny is articulated to the temporality proper of the celebrations (which are for the villages highly desired events, at which culminates the whole social process here focused). Through return, city and village compose the same social system in which the experience of the emigrant is always crossed by its strategies of social ascension. In this way, I will try to analyze the ways in which migration and migrants continue to produce the village through a return economy.