Abstract

This thesis explores the process of identification as a continuous articulation of culturally constructed choices, influenced by memory, the mass media, social relations and the imagination. Identification is shown to serve as a mechanism of social accommodation within transforming cultural environments. To shed light on how cultural identification functions as a process of social cohesion and separation, I conducted a self-involved multi-site and multidimensional research focused on several 'traditional' cultural practices among Ecuadorian migrants in several locations, including Queens, New Jersey, Montreal and Ecuador. Through its supporting observations, this thesis highlights: the engagement with tradition, as a continuous creative process; the choices that individuals and groups make in order to become culturally visible or invisible during the process of migration; the consumption of symbolic products associated with embodied memories; and the construction of modern houses in rural areas back home as representations of personal achievement and as part of a process of social transformation, among migrants who have become physically displaced from their original social milieu.