Paper short abstract:

In the context of Sephardic people in France, this paper will explore how musical heritage and performance function as a tool for individuals and groups to construct, transmit and represent their sense of belonging, within a community life and the nuclear family.

Paper long abstract:

During the 20th century in France, several religious and ethnic minorities abandoned their cultural practices to move toward a more secular-modern way of life. The Sephardic people from the Ottoman Empire did not escape this phenomenon when they arrived in France. However, with the revival of Sephardic identity, memories and experiences at the end of the 20th century, I discovered an entire community of people experiencing a process of identity quest: of update of Sephardic memory through kin relations in order to live in the present. Within this assimilation and rupture of the "traditional" system of clan organization, these individuals chose to consolidate their Sephardic-Jewish filiation by interrogating ancestors and their "origins". In this process, cultural heritage, especially the music that was performed using the lost language (Judeo-Spanish), occupied the centre of their collective activity.

This paper will explore how musical heritage and performance function as a tool for individuals and groups to construct, transmit and represent their sense of belonging, within a community life and the nuclear family. Following Sahlins (2011), musical practice and performance will be understood as an experience of "mutuality of being", that is, a relational network between people and groups of people that recognize themselves as united. More broadly, in this research I analyze the ways in which memory, heritage and nostalgia of worlds lost through the experience of migration, modernization and war are constructed both within ethnic and religious communities as well as within families, by means of musical practices staged by artists.