Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m8s7h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T15:40:59.972Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Remembering Conflicts in a Black Sea Town: A multi-sited Ethnography of Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Arzu Öztürkmen
Arzu Öztürkmen*
Affiliation:
Deparment of History, Boğaziçi University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

From a folkloristic point of view, memory is a repertoire, a potential knowledge that we store, only to perform when we choose. The selective process that defines what to tell is in folklore a function of the performance context. Why we choose to tell a particular story depends on who listens to it and how it is situated within the performative event. From an archeological-historical perspective, however, what we choose to preserve in our landscapes, archives and museums reflects choices made through historical-political processes. Within this framework, for an ethnographer in search of memory, there is an ongoing dialogue between narratives on what people remember and the material cultural context in which these narratives are produced. This essay is an attempt at writing an ethnography of memory in a small Black Sea town, Tirebolu/Tripoli, whose material culture and demographic structure radically changed since the 1900s through the effects of war, harsh climate, forces of modernization, and nationalism. To sum up very briefly, communities in Tirebolu—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—have been displaced at different times, temporarily or permanently since the First World War.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 34: Special Issue on Social Memory , Spring 2006 , pp. 93 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andreadis, Yorgo. Tamama Pontus'un Yitik Kızı. İstanbul: Belge Yayınlrı, 1993.Google Scholar
Ascherson, Neal. Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism. London: Vintage, 1996.Google Scholar
Bijiskyan, Minas. Karadeniz Kıyıları Tarih ve Coğrafyası, 1817-1819. Translated by Andreasyan, Hrand. İstanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1969.Google Scholar
Bryer, Anthony, and Winfield, David. The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1985.Google Scholar
Fischer, Michael M.J. “Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory.” In Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, edited by Clifford, James and Marcus, George, 194–233. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983.Google Scholar
Halo, Thea. Not Even My Name: A True Story. New York: Picador, 2001.Google Scholar
Kaeppler, Adrienne L. “The Structure of Tongan Dance.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1967.Google Scholar
Kardases, Vasilis. Diaspora Merchants in the Black Sea: The Greeks in Southern Russia, 1775–1861. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001.Google Scholar
Kasaba, Reşat, Keyder, Çağlar, and Tabak, Faruk. “Eastern Port Cities and Their Bourgeoisies: Merchants, Political Projects and Nation-States.” Review 10 no. 1 (Summer 1986): 121–35.Google Scholar
King, Peter. The Black Sea: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowenthal, David. Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Lowry, Heath. Trabzon Şehrinin İslâmlaşma ve Türkleşmesi, 1461–1583. İstanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Marcus, George. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 24 (1995): 95–117.Google Scholar
Meeker, Michael. “Meaning and Society in the near East: Examples from the Black Sea Turks and the Levantine Arabs.” International Journal of the Middle East Studies 7, no. 2 (1976): 243–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milliex, Tatiana. Mines Tripoleos. Athens, 1970.Google Scholar
öztürkmen, Arzu. “Local Responses to Regional Change: Memory of a Social and Economic Transformation in a Turkish Black Sea Town.” East European Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2005): 17–62.Google Scholar
öztürkmen, Arzu, “Remembering through the Material Culture: Local Knowledge of Past Communities in a Turkish Black Sea Town.” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 2 (2003): 179–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Özveren, Eyüp. “Turkey, the Middle East, and the Black Sea World: A Scenario within the Confidence Interval of Future Studies.” New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 15 (Fall 1996): 25–44.Google Scholar
Papailias, Penelope. Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.Google Scholar
Portelli, Alessandro. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, Dan. “Strife in Nazareth: The Meaning of Place and Space in Nazareth.” Ethnography 2, no. 1 (2001): 93–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sakkas, Georgius. I Istoria Tis Tripoleos Pontu. Athens, 1957.Google Scholar
Stathakou, Katilena. “The Compulsory Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey after 1923: The Case of Muslims of Crete.” In Crossroads of History: Experience, Memory, Orality, 1066–69. İstanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Sümer, Faruk. Tirebolu Tarihi, İstanbul: Türk Dünyasını Araştırma Vakfı, 1992.Google Scholar
Tabak, Faruk. “Economic and Ecological Change in the Eastern Mediterranean, Ca. 1550–1850.” Paper presented at the Mapping Out the Eastern Mediterranean, Orient Institute, Beirut, December 16-18 2004.Google Scholar
Turgay, Üner. “Trabzon.” Review 16, no. 4 (Fall 1993).Google Scholar
Vaux, Bert. “Hemshinli: The Forgotten Black Sea Armenians.” Journal of Armenian Studies 6, no. 2 (2001): 47–71.Google Scholar
Vilanova, Mercedes. Dördüncü Dünya: Baltimore Öyküleri, 1990 / the Fourth World: Baltimore Narratives, 1990. İstanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Yüksel, Ayhan. Giresun Tarihi Yazılan. İstanbul: Kitabevi Yayınları, 2002.Google Scholar
Yüksel, Ayhan, Tirebolu. İstanbul: Kitabevi Yayınları, 2003.Google Scholar