| Summary: | This article aims to explore the potential of objects and museums to generate alternative narratives by analyzing how people use objects to tell their own stories. Based on an ethnographic research, this text focuses on the reliquary of St. Francis Xavier of the Museu de São Roque, in Lisbon, to reflect on the identity processes of Goans in Portugal. Perceiving objects associated with the Portuguese colonial past in the light of postcolonialism also implies studying the characteristics of contemporary society, resulting from decolonization processes in order to reconcile this historical heritage with the demands of a contemporary multicultural and postcolonial society. The relevance of the relationship between people and things is exemplified by the symbolic weight of religious objects, as is the case of the reliquary chest of St. Francis Xavier. It is precisely to this complex identity that we intend to access, beyond the rhetoric of the museum, namely to particularities of Goan Catholicism, that reveal the maintenance of specific identity elements with origin in Goa and in the colonial encounter which, together with other practices, contribute to the reproduction of a specific cultural and religious identity. This empirical example intends to demonstrate how certain institutional narratives exclude the alternative stories emanating from objects, allowing migratory contexts the challenge of using objects and museums as vehicles to think not only of the past of migratory trajectories but to focus on the complex dynamics of contemporary societies, challenging the dominant narratives.
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