Festas e imaginários celtas numa aldeia global: o caso do Festival de Música Tradicional e Celta de Santulhão

The label of Celtic music has served in the last decade for the emergence of festivals in the north of Portugal, aimed at urban consumers consuming alternative cultural products. Festivals emerge at a time of “festive revitalization” (Boissevain 1992) and “invention of traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) as a strategy for local economic revitalization, identity affirmation and revival of traditional music. In the village of Santulhão (Trás-os-Montes) the Festival of Traditional and Celtic Music fulfills these requirements, being idealized and materialized by people who seek to resist the so-called global cultural homogenization (Tomlinson 1999) through the material and cultural resources that they have. In this paper I discuss the processes of collective memory construction to understand how “Celtic imagery” serves to engage a diverse range of material inventions and cultural representations in a global village.