Intimate and yet Alienated

Résumé En Fr

Drawing on ethnographic data from northeast Turkey, this article departs from the discreet preservation of Greek among Turkish-nationalist communities and explores the changing meanings of home and homeland in relation to this discreet cultural heritage. The discussion interrogates the changing dynamics, modalities, and configurations of home/land in contemporary Turkey and provides us with insights into how landscapes are implicated in the way communities make sense of the past and fashion their identities in the present. The findings demonstrate how homeland as a category is incessantly stretched and transfigured in relation to the diverse modalities of imagining, relating, sensing, remembering, and inhabiting places. Attending to these social reverberations of localized senses of places – however elusive and spectral they may be – would help us further the discussions around the social production of landscapes as well as their effects on subjectivities and collective memory.

Fondé sur un travail de terrain ethnographique dans le nord-est de la Turquie, cet article interroge le discret maintien de la langue grecque au sein de communautés turques locales marquées par le nationalisme. Il analyse l’évolution des significations attachées aux notions de home et de homeland en relation avec cet héritage culturel spécifique. En particulier, il s’intéresse à la production sociale des paysages et à ses effets sur les subjectivités, les identités en relation au passé, et la mémoire collective des lieux.