Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging by Naomi Leite

Ethnography in psychological research.

“…Geography continues to have an impact on lifeworlds: Ecologies and their multispecies coexistences are shaped by contours of land and water; federal, state, national, and international policies constrain and facilitate opportunity; the way built structures are arranged shapes the way in which people engage with and within them (Adams, 2016;Fullilove, 1996;Simms, 2008;Snyder, 2020). But community can be constituted in many ways-through geography, perhaps, but also through affinity, as with furries, or with players drawn to a particular online game world (Gee, 2004), or through communities of practice characterized by "situated learning," such as the tailors and butchers described by Lave and Wenger (1991), or through "processes involving configurations of relations among different actors or institutions" involved in mutual dependence, struggle or conflict, as in the "relational ethnographies" proposed by Desmond (2014, p. 547), or through contested and even invisible claims to kinship, as Leite (2017) described in her study of Marrano ("hidden Jews") in Portugal. Meanwhile, individual participants are likely to occupy an intersectional array of identities, positions, and places, as (for example) Jenkins and Csordas (2020) observed in their study of the varied experiences of adolescents receiving psychiatric treatment in the American Southwest.…”

Jewish Presences in Portugal: Between History and Memory

“…Indeed, the Marrano lore of Belmonte's Jews is now considered a heritage that should be exhibited and shared with the public. Naomi Leite has identified another novel social phenomenon that she refers to as "urban Marranos": persons who claim different degrees of Marrano and/or Jewish memories, and whose variegated and hybrid identities propel them to be part of virtual communities via internet sites, rather than becoming members of real-life Jewish communities, which are less versatile and inclusive (Leite 2017). In some extreme cases, instead of merely observing this burgeoning process of Jewish and New Christian anamnesis (Mea 2020;Mucznik 2021), 13 along with a resurgence of the New Christian absent-presence memories (as shown by the 5000 Portuguese citizens who voluntarily affirmed themselves as Jewish in the 2001 population census and the estimated 8000 Jews in the 2008 mid-census, despite the fact that only a few hundred were then affiliated with official Jewish communities), we are also witnessing a "present-absence" phenomenon.…”