Paper short abstract:

Life stories allow one to understand how memories are built along a time line as well as daily life is lived. Cultural and social approaches are fundamental to understand this process and role a very important play in what identity processes construction is concerned.

Paper long abstract:

Portugal as a country and a concept of nation is today a place where identity is forged to many people caught in an ancient triangle: Goa/Mozambique/Portugal.

The cultural background builds the games and plays, bodies, tastes and food. These aspects of everyday life and its dimension as marks of identity process are not apprehended by the Portuguese/Mozambican/Goese people that consider themselves as Portuguese seeing themselves as people from a subculture as if they were from another part of Portugal.

The multi-belonging experiences emerge during the family ritual calendar of visiting parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles whose homes, inhabits and everyday practices confront these Portuguese with their own diaspora experience. At that moment they recall their lived memories crossed with their told memories becoming a group, more than an individual.

Shaping lives and social memories are a contribution to constructing real and imaginary ancestors, spaces, times, smells, tastes and symbols. When it happens it becomes natural and desirable.

With this paper it is our aim to show how this social memory is build during a long time line. In order to do this several life stories will be collected. The informers will be two generations of families who travelled from Goa to Mozambique and from there to Portugal.