ABSTRACT Memory, persistence, and cultural transmission are hot topics in anthropology today. Contributing to an increasing anthropological interest in youth agency, in this article I invite readers to look at youth as a crucial site for understanding issues of religious memory and cultural transmission. In the past five decades, Bulongic people (Guinea – Conakry) have undergone significant religious changes caused by the introduction of Islam, which has led to the official disappearance of pre-Islamic rituals. In this article, I explore how young Bulongic remember a pre-Islamic past that they have never experienced. I argue that, to understand how they assimilate and perpetuate this religious heritage, one must examine the subtle processes of intergenerational transmission through which their memories are dynamically shaped. [memory, crisis of transmission, youth, pre-Islamic religion, intergenerational relations, Guinea – Conakry] According to certain people, the youth have become, for the most part, amnesiac, nationless, and amoral. —Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Jocelyn Letourneau, 1998 D iscourses about the crisis in cultural memory and the transmis- sion of culture are pervasive in present-day Africa. Many African people claim that they are plagued by cultural amnesia, and they lament the loss of ‘‘genuine African culture.’’ In the Guinean Bulongic villages where I conducted fieldwork, the elders voice a common nostalgic discourse about the past, exclaiming that ‘‘everything has been lost from the past’’ and that ‘‘there is nothing left of the old times and customs.’’ Similarly, most young people there complain that they ‘‘do not know any more’’ and that they have ‘‘lost everything’’ from their ancestors’ past. Bulongic urban elites harbor Westernized notions of cultural ‘‘heritage’’ and ‘‘loss’’ influenced by the ideology of cultural preservation advocated by political leader Se ´kou Toure ´ until his death in 1984 and, more recently, by international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 1 Embracing the trope of the ‘‘vanishing culture,’’ these urban residents urge villagers to folklorize traditions to guarantee their preservation. 2 Such discourses in village and city alike convey a deep sense of loss and em- phasize the ‘‘crisis of transmission’’ that has seemingly impacted contem- porary Bulongic society. Just as attitudes toward the past and its transmission are prevalent topics in Africa today, ‘‘memory’’ and ‘‘cultural transmission’’ are key concepts for sociologists and anthropologists (Candau 1998; Climo and Cattell 2002; Connerton 1989; Olick and Robbins 1998). A growing number of studies have invited scholars to capture the way people perceive their own pasts and, furthermore, to document the existence of multiple and sometimes antagonistic perspectives on the past within the same society (Appadurai 1981; Cohn 1995; Herzfeld 1991; Jing 1996; Lapierre 2001; Price DAVID BERLINER Harvard University and Universite ´ Libre de Bruxelles An ‘‘impossible’’ transmission: Youth religious memories in Guinea–Conakry AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 576 – 592, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. A 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.