Los herederos. Construcción y resignificaciones del imaginario de "gran familia"

This research focuses on how, in a context of crisis, the historical past of Pueblo Liebig was reinterpreted according to the idea of the 'extended family' and then updated according to the idea of the hips and practices  rooted in the present. In order to understand how this process of restoration works, this thesis explores the material and symbolic construction that produced the imagined fiction of the extended family, by analyzing how such representation operates in the discourses and practices of the Liebig´s Extract of Meat Co.Ltd. and how it shaped the memories of the many men and women that used to work there. It examines what type of spatial and temporal grammars helped create such memories, according to what rules and in what contexts different versions of the past were settled and what forces contributed to the rise of an hegemonic memory that determined the referential markers of identy for the formation of a distinct collective image of "us" and of the village as a whole. Finally, the thesis studies the role of familial metaphors in the disputes that the community experienced after the disappearance of jobs, and explains the processes of patrimonialization linked to the notion of "preservation" and "appreciation" of an alleged shared legacy.