ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will be examining the difficulties faced by those who experience some form of uprootedness from their social and historical linkages. I shall look at some of the mechanisms by which people cope after they have been summarily cut off from their cultural roots, forced to live away from what had been their ancestors’ home for generations. Such cases can, in my view, shed some light upon the way in which cultural dimensions contribute to the construction of individual and social identities. Culture refers here to the traditions and values, the social codes and norms, the official accounts of historical events shared by a given collectivity or society, and is therefore that society’s various social representations and idiosyncratic components which contribute to ‘regulate its collective life, set its specific goals and define its identity’ (Mauss, 1969:210-11). Culture also shapes the individual identity of each member of the society. This notion of culture resonates with the concept of the social imaginaries (imaginaires sociaux) introduced by the Polish political scientist Bronislaw Baczko to refer to the symbolic system through which a collectivity determines its identity and boundaries as well as the places, status and social identity of its members (1984: 32-3). The individual’s identity is closely determined by the framework of his/her multiple social encounters and experiences, as Maurice Halbwachs (1952) has shown in his 1925 groundbreaking exploration ‘The social framework for memory’. Halbwachs analyses extensively how individual experiences are constructed, stored in memory and recollected through social interchanges within various social institutions-first mainly within the realm of the family, then later in educational and religious contexts as well as in the various other institutional systems of any given state. He insists on the need for one’s personal experiences and private recollections to be couched in, or voiced within, a collective, public chronicle: the collectivity’s historical accounts provide the legitimising foundation for individuals to make sense of their personal experiences and therefore for constructing their identity.
