What's cross-cultural heritage?

Cross-cultural heritage is defined in my project as the heritage that is meaningful to people with cross-cultural life experiences, i.e. people who in their lives have been immersed in several cultural environments as a direct or indirect result of mobility, and consequently who amalgamate different cultural identities into something new. Traditionally, they represent expat groups (e.g. foreign service, diplomats, military ‘brats’, missionary people). Today, this group includes increasingly global nomads as a result of their career choice in an increasingly globalised labour market (e.g. researchers, academics, personnel of international corporations, migrant workers, etc.).

Cross-cultural people have certain difficulties to define themselves in terms of origin, cultural affiliation, homeland, and family passport(s). They are simultaneously belonging to “everywhere and nowhere”, which gives them a certain sense of lack of full cultural ownership, rootlessness and restlessness. They are living in and among different cultures. And consequently, their collective identity is often perceived as marginal and liminal, i.e. experienced as being in constant transition in relation to the dominant culture where they life in each moment.

Consequently cultural heritage identity of cross-cultural people is a restructured mix of everything that has relevance in creating a particular sense of belonging, without drawing on a single culture or place. Memories, images and performances from different cultures and landscapes compose a single but particular reminiscence that has little relations to the traditional concepts of defining heritage in terms of place and national ethos. Such cross-cultural identities challenge conventional definitions of cultural identity insofar as they can foster a sense of belonging that relates neither to any one culture nor to all cultures experienced (as most migrant or diaspora people experience).

Cross-cultural heritage thus derives from particular meanings given by people to their surroundings as they move between cultures. Some research exists on the psychological and educational effects and benefits of this cross-cultural reality, but notably absent is a consideration of collective identity and heritage.