ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the panigiri, a festival performance expressing national and cultural identity among the Greek diasporic community in Brasilia, Brazil. Methodologically based on interviews with members of the community, the research first traces the history of staging the festival in Brasilia among first-generation immigrants in relation to their pre-migration memories of growing up in Greece. Drawing on Connerton’s (1989) conceptualization of social memory and the importance of commemoration and performance, the chapter illustrates how the panigiri became the community’s most important platform of cultural expression and negotiation of cultural identity (‘Greekness’), sharing memories and transferring cultural knowledge and belonging to the younger generation. The second part of the chapter focuses on how the younger generation, through personal experiences gained during travel to Greece, perceives and interprets the festival. Members of the descendant generation ultimately develop a re-invented form of the panigiri in Brasilia, which – among other things – removes the event’s traditional emphasis on religion and opens it up to participants from the Brazilian host-country context.
