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past, present, and future, Hartog's notion of “historicity regime,” relying essentially on the French example, can be contextually extended to other geographical areas. The notion of “historicity regime” can be an instrument to help us in thinking about our contemporary world. In this context, the “presentist” historicity regime is characterized by the immediate obsolescence of all events and by the omnipresence of the present. First, our contemporary world is marked by simultaneity, real-time media, numerical circulation, and torrents of memory. Second, it is marked by commemorative activities and identities. From this perspective, memory is no longer just the transmission of an account preserved by an individual or group; today memory is an instrument allowing individuals and groups into the present—a moment or place of rupture that produces a search for a denied, lost, or suppressed identity.25
Similar to memory and heritage, the memorialization phenomenon is an operation of updating the past that brings its physical or immaterial traces into the present, making them understandable.26 In recent years, the idea of heritage was extended to include natural, living, and immaterial heritages. The promotion of immaterial heritages, in some cases, seems to fill the gap left by the absence of material heritage. However, this absence is not natural. During the wars of conquest and the colonial enterprise, many societies in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa were deprived not only of their natural resources but also of their material and symbolic heritage, often displayed in European museums. Today these same societies lack sufficient resources to keep their museums alive and often must rely on international support to conserve and restore national material heritages.
In the Western tradition, monuments and commemorative activities aim at perpetuating the remembrance of someone or something. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the memorialization phenomenon, closely associated with the tourism industry, transcended European frontiers. It surpassed the gaze of the experts and emerged in diverse contexts in which the notions of heritage and authenticity are very different from those found in Western societies.27 In the case of Southern Benin, the memorialization movement encompasses a wide range of