Memory—Recollection—Culture—Identity—Space: Social Context, Identity Formation, and Self-construction of the Calé (Gitanos) in Spain

Abstract

Knowledge, recollection, and memory are the basics for the construction and characteristics of a cultural identity, which is built on a “me-” and a “we-identity” and which is fixed in the collective memory. According to J. Assmann, the collective memory is composed of the communicative and the cultural memory, the operational modes of which depend on the level of a society’s orality and literality. The Cale (Gitanos)–the Romani people in Spain, who are in transition between orality and literality–are chosen for an analysis of the importance that the different types of memory have for the formation and change of culture and cultural identity. Flamenco as an oral mode of expression and distinction is shown to be a fundamental link in the identity construction of the Gitanos.