Cultural Heritage, Identity and Cultural Mediation

The alert lifestyle and phenomena such as: technological globalization, increasing migration, demographic decline in some part of the globe, changes in population structure, multiculturalism tend to isolate us from our cultural heritage. In the same time, postmodern revolutions lead to a growing need of the individual to clarify his/her individual identity and find a model to rebuild his/her fragmented world. Cultural heritage as a cultural and social process, a discursive construction has a formative effect on our personal, social and cultural identity. Inside this discursive process, transmission of memory from the past in a reflexive manner gives space for new negotiations, mediations, interpretations. In the cultural field, there is a shift towards viewing the heritage audiences as active agents in the mediation of the meanings of heritage. In support of this position, we aim in the present paper to investigate the role of cultural mediation in shaping the personal, social and cultural identity of a social actor.