Rita A Cachado

Este livro coloca em debate as formas como os antropólogos arquivam os dados recolhidos durante o trabalho de campo. Ao realizar etnografia, os antropólogos registam em diversos suportes o material empírico para as suas interpretações. Em Portugal, a discussão sobre a salvaguarda destes materiais passou recentemente pelo ciclo de debates "Fins de Tarde com a Antropologia. Conversas sobre Arquivos Etnográficos" coordenado por Sónia Vespeira de Almeida e Rita Ávila Cachado. Os resultados desta iniciativa vêem agora a sua publicação em livro, com 16 contributos que retratam múltiplas formas de olhar para estes arquivos, numa partilha singular no contexto português.

ABSTRACT
This dissertation is a study about a relocation process which took place at Quinta da Vitória (Portela, Municipality of Loures), focusing mainly in its Hindu dwellers. Ethnography shows how not only inhabitants of the slum neighborhood these are also city dwellers in the enlarged city. The study begins with a theoretical overview that will be at the background of all reading. Main approaches are driven from urban Anthropology, Post-colonial studies and urban Sociology. After presenting one of the slum neighbourhoods at Lisbon's outskirts, it explains how the Relocation Special Program (PER-Programa Especial de Realojamento) occurred in that urban space. The PER is firstly exposed as a social housing policy and how it was regarded by social workers and social scientists. then, the history of the neighborhood is presented in concordance with the PER history. The territory in which Quinta da Vitória grew shifted while the PER was being accomplished. The neighbourhood dwellers hesitate between upholding expectations about the relocation process and finding out housing alternatives themselves. Special attention will be given to the housing files in which each family is considered. These files are the key bureaucratic tool of the Program and they hold important information about the institutional encounter, or, in other words, about the relationship between social workers and Quinta da Vitória's Hindu inhabitants. The Hindu population adapts and resists to the never ending relocation process. Situational analysis will give a view from insight, in order to understand better all these dynamics.

Key-words: hindu-gujarati community, clustering, relocation, social housing, slums.

ABSTRACT Contemporary history of East Africa is linked with the history of West South Asia through trade and through social mobility, in a geographic, historical and cultural linkage.This paper follows a trend in transnational studies to incorporate life histories in order to thicken our knowledge. It recounts the story of a Hindu woman that migrated from India to Mozambique, from Mozambique to Portugal and from there to the United Kingdom. Twelve years after leaving Mozambique, M. went back to Maputo where she visited old friends and relatives. While M. was living in Portugal and in the UK, the African axis of the Portuguese Hindu-Gujarati diaspora seemed to have been forgotten; however, when she revisited places and social contexts where she had lived before, this axis was revived with old and new meanings.

This paper presents the case of Portuguese Hindu Gujarati families in Lisbon and in Leicester. It aims to corroborate the increasing importance of the urban referential in transnationality studies. Recent approaches in transntionality studies include the significance of cities for transmigrants under a variety of levels. One of them is social mobility. This paper focus specifically in motility, and it confirms, through ethnography, that beyond the classical national referential, the urban referential plays a central role for migration decisions. Cities confirm what transnationality scholars have been aware of: that migrants live and move between cities.

In Portugal, South Asians are a well-settled community in general, although some still live in deprived conditions. In the context of the Hindu families living in Portugal, a relatively large number of them live in a so-called shanty town on Lisbon’s outskirts which was until recently subject to a resettlement process. Though informal economy is not restricted to deprived housing dwellers, some families living in these conditions are seduced by the informal sector in an attempt to boost their incomes. Following recent ethnographic evidence, this paper explores specific types of informal income of Hindu Portuguese families, namely samosas and saris made at home for retail sale.
Outside the control of the formal system, the informal labour market is not clearly understood by the local authorities who managed the neighbourhood resettlement process. Issues concerning the Hindu community's informal economy at Quinta da Vitória are discussed in the paper in the light of Laguerre's (1994) conceptualization of the ‘informal city’, among other more recent approaches.