De Volta à Terra: Notas de campo sobre incerteza e ritual

Based on my fieldwork research in the village of Monfortinho, Idanha-a-Nova, I will present a set of speeches, practices and representations about how one 'lives' and/or 'is' in this village. If those who ‘live’ in the village experience a sense a proximity to the end to a ‘rural’ mode of life, in particular due to the growing absence of neighbours and to the lack of youth; in practice we can observe a renewed social investment by those who ‘come-and-go’ in the revival of customary religious manifestations inscribed in the Lenten and Easter calendar. Homecomers find in these rituals a form 'to be' in the village, as a material and localized experience. The collective reciprocities and emotions that happen in the context of the 'ritual process' (Turner 1968), have activated forms of return mobilities to the 'home-land' (cf. Tuan 2008). 'Being' in the village thus tends to assume a broader ontological value (including 'living') in an experiential restoration of a 'rurality' as a tangible spaciotemporal reality. I propose here a reflection on the role of the (rural) labour on the local repertoire of rituals in the re-production of sensorial and affective forms of re-connection with and to the 'land'.