Maria Espírito Santo
- Integrated | PhD Student
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Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas | Universidade Nova de Lisboa
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Av. de Berna, n.º 26 C
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1069-061 Lisboa
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Portugal
- Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
- Tel: (+351) 21 790 83 00 (ext. 1583)
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Biography
Born and living in Lisbon, is Master in Ethnomusicology by the University of FCSH/NOVA (2016) with a dissertation devoted to the study of the relationship between music and identity, in a collective of bands that perform Balkan music in Lisbon. She is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology in the Department of Musical Sciences of the FCSH/NOVA with a research proposal dedicated to the study of fado and the political revolutions of the 20th century in Portugal, with a fellowship of the Doctoral Program “Music as Culture and Cognition”, supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. She plays saxofone and sings fado.
Doctoral ProjectTitleFado, Ada, Severa and the performance of nationalist identity in Portugal
Abstract
The word fado exists in the Portuguese language since many centuries ago to refer to fate. With its associated aura of mysticism, it became tied with the idea of songs in urban environments since the mid-19th century, nurturing romantic works and memories. From the earliest literary works dedicated to the history of fado, the debate about its status as a national symbol has been associated with imaginaries of a “national soul”. During the 20th century, the fado music category was used in several contexts by the dictatorial government as a symbolof Portugueseness. Recently inscribed in the UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2011), fado has reinforced its power as a symbol of the Portuguese nation. The legitimacy brought by the UNESCO brand, enhancing the image of national borders once again, was based on symbolic constructions and values that, built in the past, mark aesthetics and discourses of the present.The understanding ofnationalist expressions associated with fado lie, thus, in the questioning of symbolic constructions of the past and related re-creations of nationalist representations in the present. In my research the ethno-symbolic approach to the study of nationalismsprovides conceptual tools for an alternative tactic for the study of fado category as a symbol of the nation. The testimony and memories of Ada de Castro, the emeritus fado singer from Lisbon with whom I did much of my fieldwork, fit the ethno-symbolist analysis model that I used in my study. The analysis proposed departs frommethodologies of historical Ethnomusicology and collaborative ethnography within an ethno-symbolic approach, andconsiders reflexions on fado as a marker of the Portuguese image through time. Interpreting relationships between topics of music, memory and heritage I characterize slight changes of symbolism in the building process of nationalist purpose to illustrate recurrent powers of national representation in the fado practices in Lisbon today.Keywords: fado, nation, ethno-symbolism, Ada de Castro.Funding: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PD/BD/135573/2018)Research Group: Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies
