ABSTRACT
The experiences of forced as well as voluntary migration in Europe tell us that the migrants’ search for social and cultural belonging in the receiving society is connected with biographical work performed in order to reconstruct a symbolic space of traditionality which creates the possibility of defining one’s own position in the new society. The ability of subjects to elaborate this type of biographical knowledge seems to be becoming more and more a basis of mutual recognition in European multicultural societies, with their paradoxical concepts of declared religious secularism and simultaneous state recognition of Christian privileges. In my paper I firstly want to briefly reconstruct some difficulties in the arguments put forward up to now on multiculturalism in European nation states. Secondly, I want to discuss the meaning of traditionality in the light of Antonio Gramsci’s arguments on folklore. Thirdly, I will discuss the meaning of religion in the European tradition of secularism and its consequences for multicultural Europe. In conclusion I want to present a new type of religious traditionality in migrant biographies in Europe, considered under the pressures of both integration and belonging. In each of these cases, ‘biographical work’ had to be activated by the subjects in order to overcome situations of crisis. In analysing this ‘biographical work’ one can identify types of traditionality representing both trajectory potentials and potential resources that can be used to control the dynamics of the crisis and to re-elaborate a biographical action scheme. It is my hypothesis that religious traditionality does not automatically lead to processes of ethnization but, on the contrary, potentially generates post national, post-ethnic biographical reflexivity. New forms of individual
autonomy can be reconstructed within processes of the biographical construction of self-esteem as elements of emerging new social practice.
