Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folcloricos from Lisbon to Newark

Through the lens of expressive culture, Performing Folklore tracks Portugal's transition from fascism to democracy, and from imperial metropole to EEC member state. Kimberly DaCosta Holton examines the evolution and significance of ranchos folclóricos, groups of amateur musicians and dancers who perform turn-of-the-century popular tradition and have acted as cultural barometers of change throughout 20th-century Portugal. She investigates the role that these folklore groups played in the mid-twentieth-century dictatorship, how they fell out of official favor with the advent of democracy, and why they remain so popular in Portugal's post-authoritarian state, especially in emigrant and diasporic communities. Holton looks at music, dance, costume, repertoire, venue, and social interplay in both local and global contexts. She considers the importance of revivalist folklore in the construction and preservation of national identity in the face of globalization. This book embraces "invented tradition" as process rather than event, presenting an ethnography not only of folkloric revivalism but also of sweeping cultural transformation, promoted alternately by authoritarianism, democracy, emigration, and European unification.

Kimberly DaCosta Holton is Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Lusophone World Studies at Rutgers University, Newark.

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Choreographing the Spirit: Fascism, Folklorization, and Everyday Resistance

2. Battling the Bonitinho: Revolution, Reform, and Ethnographic Authenticity

3. From Intestines into Heart: The Performance of Cultural Kinship

4. Festival Hospitality: New Paradigms of Travel and Exchange

5. "We Will Not Be Jazzed Up!": Lisbon 94 and Ranchos' Festival Absence

6. Dancing along the In-between: Folklore Performance and Transmigration in Newark, New Jersey

Conclusion

Appendix: Musical Notation of Select Modas from the Repertoire of the Rancho Folclorico de Alenquer

Notes

Works Cited

Index