Abstract

SILVANO, Filomena. Dressmakers, queens and their cloaks: deterritorialization, material culture and the construction of place. Finisterra [online]. 2015, n.100, pp.133-142. ISSN 0430-5027.  https://doi.org/10.18055/Finis7871.

In the late twentieth century, during the 1980s and 1990s, the anthropological notion of place was subject to critical revisions. The concepts and methodologies of its very foundations were questioned and new lines of work materialized, reaching far beyond the limits of those more classic concepts of place. These approaches revealed, however, that when we come across logics of deterritorialization, the notion of place may reappear - although changed, due to distinct social, cultural and economical environments. Grounded upon ethnographic fieldwork in the island of Pico (Azores), the text explores some of the innovations that were introduced in the Holy Ghost Festivals (Festas do Espírito Santo) - brought from the United states in the early twentieth century. Its main innovation had to do with the emergence of new characters, the “queens”, who were crowned during the ritual, followed by the dressmakers, essential to the making of their costumes and cloaks. Focused on the manufacture of these cloaks, the text aims to show the way in which local material culture is created and transformed within a continuous transcontinental movement of people, rituals, things and techniques. In a transnational framework, the mobility of people can thus become objectified in these locally crafted things, as such deterritorialization itself becomes a part of the making of place

Keywords : Place; transnationalism; material culture; Holy Ghost festivals; Island of Pico (Azores).

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