Book, bread and monument. Continuity and change through ethnic memory and beyond

Abstract

The paper examines the meaning of ethnic memory as it finds expression in the life stories and identity formation of three young Swedish women of immigrant background. Their identity is formed within afield of tension between what is and what has been. Using the examples of diffèrent metaphors attached to the symbolic space of tradition, they seek to link time and space and thus fragments of migrants’ splintered life. In relating the past to the present and its antagonisms to those of the present, all three girls demonstrate an ability to re‐interpret and to translate tradition into present experience. This, the author maintains, can be understood as a creative capacity out of which a new kind qf self‐orientation is born, and a new sense of home and belonging, come into being. In this way ‘modern ethnic consciousness ‘ takes form as a reflexive linkages across space and time. A new order is created out of the disorder of dissolved continuity.