ABSTRACT
In this article we employ the concepts of narrative identity and relational configuration in order to understand the different forms how States organize collective recognition and their institutional grammars. Using narrative as an analytical tool, we seek to show how collective identities are constructed historically, emphasizing simultaneously the intertwining of narratives of different institutional levels to legitimize the collective conceptions of frontiers of identities. Methodologically, the text is based on a historicizing approach that employs secondary sources and a research of a selected corpus of official documents collected in fieldwork in Portugal and Brazil. We suggest that the comparison between these contexts allows perceiving diverging movements in terms of the conception of collective adhesions and their meanings in the context of civic and ethnic-cultural pluralism in the contemporary nation-state.
collective identities; symbolical frontiers; lusotropicalismo; interculturality; multiculturalism