ATCK-HER · Cross-cultural heritage. Understanding cultural heritage in a globalized world

Cross-cultural heritage. Understanding cultural heritage in a globalized world

My research project explored how people with a cross-cultural childhood and a multicultural identity as adults (known as adult Third Culture Kids, or TCKs) develop a distinctive way of using traditional forms of cultural heritage. Adult Third Culture Kids are a particular type of migrant defined by high international mobility during childhood. As children they grow up experiencing multiple processes of social encounters, cultural integration or assimilation, and departure. As adults, they embody multicultural identity and lack a sense of belonging to any specific culture. Consequently they are not well described by traditional discourses of cultural heritage, particularly those that promote both notions of heritage as a form of common national inheritance, and values contoured by state borders. Instead, they understand common forms of national and local heritages as a source of embodied cultural capital, useful while crisscrossing countries. Researchers in social psychology have demonstrated that adult TCKs either have a multicultural identity or multiple cultural identities, and that in any of both cases there are no signs of a confused cultural identity. The question thus guiding my research is how these cultural identities are represented, or better say, feel represented, by current discourses and narratives of cultural heritage, or thereof/alternatively, how places and materialities are used by this particular heritage community on the move as collective memory landmark. For society this project has been important to show that contemporary models of migration are more diverse than the traditional pull-and-push factors. People not only move from other reasons than necessity, and move also to multiple destinations, and back and forward. This is creating a different citizen’s cultural profile, which goes beyond the traditional bi-cultural paradigm. This is specially evidence, for example, in Europe where workers move depending of quality and family interests, and for Erasmus students finally establishing themselves in third countries and creating mixed families. The overall objective have been those of understanding how this multiple migration is affecting our perceptions on the uses and meanings of cultural heritage beyond also the national-state narratives, and creating a embedded multicultural identities which increasing will characterize the citizen of the future.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз