Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the notions of and the relationship between intangible cultural heritage and cultural identity in relation to displaced individuals and in the context of contemporary Europe. The starting point is that people’s movements have at their heart the encounter between newcomers and local communities. These encounters translate into situated stories and new cultural discourses about resilience, which, in the longer term, are likely to contribute to the formation of a shared European heritage.1 However, amongst newcomers, and especially those who like refugees experience displacement, the idea of heritage is particularly problematic. In order to be part, eventually, of a body of shared cultural practices, the heritage of displaced individuals needs first to ‘die’ so that it can be revalued and re-articulated through an osmotic and yet aspirational process, generated by its perceived absence. Therefore, this chapter aims to consider exactly this, by addressing the following questions: can we speak, at all, of an absence of heritage during displacement? If heritage does (not) die, how is it then revalued and redefined during displacement? And what are the cultural discourses developing around the idea of ‘heritage’ during forced migration?

In order to answer the above questions, the chapter has been organised into four sections. In the first section, I consider the notion of displacement, in relation to heritage as a non-fixed concept, subject to constant reinterpretations; in the second section, I explore the pairing “absence-presence” and I define it as a phased, emotional rupture with cultural traditions and heritage practices; the third section focuses on the “capacity to aspire”, as defined by Arjun Appadurai,2 and on the ways in which it triggers amongst displaced individuals, through a perceived absence of heritage, the aspiration to revaluate and re-articulate cultural traditions. In the final section, I present some critical reflections on ‘resilient heritage’, that is to say, those forms of intangible heritage that survive trauma, which is re-shaped through selective remembering3 and which foster a sense of cultural worth and belonging especially in the earlier stages of their resettlement