Heritage, the illusion of inheritance and the volatility of memory: A reflection on the Procession of the Passion of Our Lord the Good Jesus, Macau

‘Heritage’, in our daily usage of the word, refers to those items that we inherit from our ancestors and that best represent our collective memory and cultural identity. While heritage and collective memory are allegedly entangled, such a correlation may not be so straightforward when we situate a modern-day ‘heritagised’ item in the longue durée of time to see how it becomes signified as such, and when we look closer at how collective memory can differ across time. In addition, how must one take into account the malleability of memory when relating it to the fixating notion of heritage? This article returns to the ideas of ‘collective memory’ and ‘inheritance’ behind heritage. Based on the archival studies of the Procession of the Passion of Our Lord the Good Jesus (Procissão de Nosso Senhor Bom Jesus dos Passos, 苦難善耶穌聖像出遊) in Macau, the author postulates that such an event, for its capacity to accommodate different significations, its distinct relationships with multiple people groups and its continued survival into the present, can shed new light on our understanding of heritage. This brief paper, in the end, proposes that any ‘heritagised’ item exists like a medium that can be related to, and imprinted with distinctive meanings by, diverse groups, which, in turn, renders the idea of ‘passing down’ possible.