Territorie and identity: analysis of social-spatial organization scales in a Lisbon's neighbourhood

• Autor(a) principal: Cordeiro, Graça Índio
• Data de Publicação: 2001
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/reh/article/view/2148
• topic: Antropologia

This article suggests a discussion about the building of territorial identities, actively produced through the exercising of festive and cyclical sociabilities, based on a ethnographic and historical research on a popular neighbourhood of Lisbon carried out in the beginning of the 90¿s. Considering the very notion of popular neighbourhood as a questionable and frequently reified unit of analysis, an micro-social level analysis based on first hand observations is proposed in order to identify some of the internal divisions of the neighbourhood studied. These divisions reveal the existence of strong, micro-territorialised local interaction ties whose ways of quotidian sociability contribute to the production of specific local interaction scenes in which certain supra-local institutions also participate. By comparing some present and past examples of the way residents appropriate themselves of certain streets and local associations while performing the festivity is possible to conclude that the neighbourhood should be understood not as a delimited territorial unity but as a close social territory, real and imagined, permeable and with ambiguous, plastic, contextual frontiers.