Abstract

Migration, as a cultural and historical phenomenon, has at its heart collective and individual encounters between new comers and local communities. These encounters translate into new stories, materialities and visual discourses. In the longer term, these elements all contribute to the formation of a new heritage (both tangible and intangible). However, amongst forced migrants (and more specifically refugees, the focus of this article) heritage needs to die, before being recreated, redefined and embedded into new shared cultural practices. Pivotal to this process is cultural memory, which, in the first instance, forced migrants are excluded from and then are required to assimilate. This determine a rupture with and loss, albeit temporal, of their own cultural memories and hence of their heritage. This paper explore the process of memory recollection which allows the recreation and the redefinition of heritage, once the healing process of resettling has started. I argue that cultural groups, including the ones of new comers, are able to redefine and reinvent their heritage (primarily intangible) only once different modes of remembering are initiated on the basis of individual memories.