Heritage on the move. Cross-cultural heritage as a response to globalisation, mobilities and multiple migrations

Abstract

Globalisation is creating new perceptions of social and cultural spaces as well as complex and diverse pictures of migration flows. This leads to changes in expressions of culture, identity, and belonging and thus the role of heritage today. I argue that common or dominant notions of heritage cannot accommodate these new cultural identities-in-flux created by and acting in a transplanetary networked and culturally deterritorialized world. To support my arguments, I will introduce ‘Third Culture Kids’ or ‘global nomads’, defined as a particular type of migrant community whose cultural identities are characterised high patterns of global mobility during childhood. My research focus on the uses and meaning of cultural heritage among this onward migrant community, and it reveals that these global nomads both use common forms of heritage as a cultural capital to crisscross cultures, and designate places of mobility, like airports, to recall collective memories as people on the move. These results pose additional questions to the traditional use of heritage, and suggest others visions of heritage today, as people’s cultural identities turn to be now more characterised by mobility, cultural flux, and belonging to horizontal networks.

Keywords:

• Heritage communities
• Faro Convention
• deterritorialization
• Third Culture Kid
• global nomads

Acknowledgements

This paper largely benefited from the advice and critical comments of Anders Högberg and Ian Lilley, and from early talks on heritage and TCKs with Cornelius Holtorf . I acknowledge also Jaime Almansa Sánchez and Sharon Macdonald for their comments on the e-survey design. Thanks also to the anonymous referees for their comments that contributed greatly to improvements to this manuscript. Finally, I would like to specially thank all participants of the e-survey and those who kindly accepted to be interviewed.

Notes

1. Milena is participant number #071. Milena is a fictitious name.

2. Here, I use the notion of value as defined by English Heritage (2008), which lists four types of values relevant to conservation: evidential value, historical value, aesthetic value, and communal value. The last one is of special interest here, as its assessment resides in the opinions and feelings of members of the public: ‘Communal value derives from the meaning of a place for the people who relate to it, for whom it figures in their collective experience or memory’ (2008, 31, paragraph 54). Places and objects that embody these values might be of commemorative, symbolic, spiritual or social value and thus important aspects of collective identity because of the emotional links attached to them. The document therefore defines the notion of social value as

places that people perceive as a source of identity, distinctiveness, social interaction and coherence. Some may be comparatively modest, acquiring communal significance through the passage of time as a result of a collective memory of stories linked to them. They tend to gain value through the resonance of past events in the present, providing reference points for a community’s identity or sense of itself. They may have fulfilled a community function that has generated a deeper attachment, or shaped some aspect of community behavior or attitudes (…) They may relate to an activity that is associated with the place rather than with its physical fabric. The social value of a place may indeed have no direct relationship to any formal historical or aesthetic values that may have been ascribed to it. (English Heritage 2008, 32, paragraph 56 and 57)

3. The purpose of my research is not to undertake the task of defining TCK’s sociological profile. Neither I took for grant that they are a (sub)culture. In fact, my survey explored how adults with a childhood touched by global mobility relate to cultural heritage. Accordingly, I limit the subject population of my research to those who (regardless of their passport, the reason for their parents’ mobility or knowledge of what means TCK) lived in at least 2 countries beside the one on their passport country for a significant time (defined as 1 year). For practical reasons and with the aim avoiding new terms without clear sociological profiles, I will alternatively use the term ‘global nomads’ when referring to TCKs. Furthermore, I use the category of ‘culture’ as defined and used by my participants, without any aim to counter or support their notions, even if they are extensively using this category in a discrete and substantive mode, as in ‘culturespeak’ (Hannerz 1999; Wikan 1999; see also Grillo 2003 for discussion).

4. In the world of TCKs, ‘sacred objects’ are objects that children take with them (or parents encourage them to take) when they move to a new home. These objects help them to remember their past and feel at home in the new place (Pollock and Van Reken 2009).

5. This reduction of 13% was explored during the interviews. The question in the survey used the phrase ‘positive emotions’, and thus not all responders agreed with it despite their connections with airports. Participants developed strong emotions regarding airports, but those emotions were not necessarily positive. Because airports are the anteroom for uncertain new relocations, the doorway to loved friends and family, and the gateway to repeated farewells, global kids viewed them with contradictory emotions, ranging from sadness, fear, anger, joy, stress, surprise, happiness, caution, confusion, etc.

6. In the present study, the term ‘cross-cultural heritage’ denotes the heritage that traverses single cultures, is formed by life-experiences characterised by frequent moves and influenced by a variety of cultures. Although all manifestations of cross-cultural heritage vary and there is no single cross-cultural culture, there are some charactersistics that tend to distinguish cross-cultural heritage from other (single-)cultural heritage.