Paper short abstract:

The ethnographic survey related to the transformation of the territory resulting from the building of a dam on the Vouga river forced the questioning of the expected ethnographic categories, confronted with a subjective construction of this relation by the inhabitants of the affected community.

Paper long abstract:

The building of a dam on the river Vouga (at center of Portugal) provided the approach of the relationship between a riverside community and their changing territory. The ethnographic survey of this relationship unexpectedly gave rise to the classic division of emic and etic categories, as the search for ways of heritagisation of the natural environment foreseen by the ethnographer was confronted with particular and subjective ways of assigning meaning to the relation with the river, by local inhabitants. This relation moves from the objective natural factors to the personal representation of the relation with this natural heritage.

Thus, the most awaited categories of the ethnographic survey are questioned by the indistiction of the public / private, ancient / modern, individual / community, shared / exclusive, everyday / exceptional fields, based above all on the construction of particular senses of the relationship with the river and with the territory it defines. This produce stories, memories, positions, value attributions, based on individual feelings and paths, which are materialized in spontaneous and fragmentary guarding of photographs, instruments of work, personal objects and others.

It then happens the making of a sort of a virtual museum, dispersed by homes, appropriated individually, evaluated subjectively, in a process constructed from within, which confronts the great socio-economic frameworks and the recognizable and expected social structures, and leads to questioning whether what prevails is the elements of nature or our particular relationship toward them.