Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how members of Cape-Verdean tabancas and Bissau-Guinean manjuandadis mobilize, maintain and rework their bonds to places.

Paper long abstract:

Before anything else, places are names. They are names whose meanings do more than refer to points in physical space. As names, places are enduring signs, shaped by temporality, which evoke (by memory or imagination) past events and help people sketching possible futures As names, they are not something given; they are rather something which is made. And constructing places is tantamount to creating traditions, and a way of being in the world and relating to other people ¬- basic ingredients of personal and social identities. Places do not necessarily bear the concreteness that people usually assign to them. Thus we can dissociate them from the commonsensical idea of physical territory and reach a new understanding about them as imagined networks shaped by fields of communication the range of which is limited by the available communication technologies, cultural values and social structural constraints. This paper develops these ideas examining how members of Cape-Verdean tabancas and Bissau-Guinean manjuandadis mobilize, maintain and rework their bonds to places.