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Claiming a Place Through Memories of Belonging: Politics of Recognition on the Island of Imbros1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Elif Babül
Elif Babül*
Affiliation:
Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University
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Extract

The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 marks the official construction of a new community and new forms of belonging that were expected to replace the communities and forms of belonging characteristic of the Ottoman Empire. The convention signed at the end of the First World War on January 30, 1923, concerning “the compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox Religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory” can be seen as the hallmark of this republican attempt to create a new homogenized republican community called the nation. Exchanging populations meant the mutual exclusion of the largest ethnic and religious minority groups from the post-World War I nationalized lands of Greece and Turkey.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 34: Special Issue on Social Memory , Spring 2006 , pp. 47 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2006

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Footnotes

1

This paper is a rethinking of my master's thesis in the light of the papers I delivered at two workshops, the workshop on “Politics of Remembering,” organized by Boğaziçi University's Sociology Department in April 2003, and the “Conference on Diaspora and Memory,” organized by the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis in March 2003. This paper is a revised version of an article to appear in a book compiled by ASCA from the presentations given at the “Conference on Diaspora and Memory.” The source material is mainly composed of the narratives of belonging of informants whom I interviewed in Imbros during my field research conducted in intervals between August 2001 and 2002. The research overall examines the regulation of the legitimate way of belonging to a place within national borders and addresses the larger issues of citizenship, governmentality, and sovereignty in republican Turkey. In this paper, however, I limit myself to one aspect of my general argument and look at the workings of Rum memories of belonging to Imbros and their diasporic articulations to make claims to, and be recognized on, the island. See A. Hoffmann, “Diasporic Articulations” (paper presented at the ASCA Conference on Diaspora and Memory, Amsterdam, March 26-28 2003). All the names of my informants cited in this paper are pseudonyms.

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