Animate or Inanimate Memory

Since all migration involves memory and family breaks, this paper deals with the relationships between kinship and memory in the circular migrations between Africa and France. For the parents, and their children, discussing kinship means discussing migration, wherever they were born. Difference dwells with the time relationship of each generation. Parents’ memory is that of childhood, lineage, filiation : it is « dead », curdled. Children’s memory is « live », integrating both those present and those who are temporarily here. Without direct transmission migratory circulation helps build a memory on which continuity of filiation rests.