Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to show how the damanese living in the U.K. (re)create home through the maintenance of cultural practices brought from Daman and recontextualized abroad. It results from an ethnographic study of the musical reality in the damanese catholic community in Daman and the U.K. as part of an ethnomusicological research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper suggests a reflection about the way the damanense communities settled in Leicester and Peterborough (U.K.) recreate home abroad through the recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) of performative cultural practices as mandó - a local musical genre -, Portuguese music and dance as well as Bollywood music. This construction of the foster place shaped by Daman is set by two associations that act like a lieux de mémoire, as conceived by Pierre Nora (1989), due to its necessity of remembering, stop time and block the work of forgetting.

In the process of understanding how these communities negotiate the several issues resulting from the ambivalent and indeterminate condition they live in a diasporic context, concepts as "tradition" (Hall 2008), "cultural identity" (Chambers 1994; Hall 1990) and "memory" (Fortunati and Lamberti 2008) will be used here in a discursive and performative way instead of a monolithic, stable and homogeneous one.

Conceiving "diaspora" as a cultural dislocation more than a simple migration, which is the role played by the homeland traditions represented in the foster place? How are these performative practices recontextualized in the diaspora and what is the place of music in the process of negotiation, conciliation and construction of locality and as a territory of both identity and differentiation? How do these practices interact in a process that makes a "space" become a "place"?