In this paper, I focus on “border” and take it as an agent to produce and reproduce “memory” on both citizenship and sovereignty. I do this by “conceptualizing history” as memory [1] on the one hand and “actualizing history” as past, on the other hand. Borders offer privileged sites for studying the intersection of a state and its subjects and citizens.
The research on borders offers various potential advantages for anthropological reasoning in general: first, this kind of a research involves a perspective across nation-states. Second, taking the border as a point of departure in the study of the state shifts the focus from centre to periphery, enabling new insights into how “border people” may actively influence national policies, identities and ideologies. Third, it offers us a view from below: of how ordinary people ascribe or deny relevance to cultural differences, how they actively enact and modify their notions of “nation”, “culture” and “identity”. And at last, the research on metaphors of border provides some insights about how people internalize history by constantly reelaborating, reinterpreting and hence recovering the past.
I will discuss these topics by examining two movies, which focus on border as a key abject. I will mainly look at how these movies reconstruct the ‘Kurdisness’ as memoirs [2] in Turkish Film Industry. The first one, titled Hudutlarin Kanunu (The Law of Borders)-a drama-, is directed by Omer Lutfu Akad and Yilmaz Guney as scenarist who is a hero for left wing people in Turkey, the Turkish (Kurdish) film director, scenarist and writer, in 1966 and the other one is titled as Propaganda (Propaganda) - a comedy, which is directed by Sinan Cetin who is known as “Fusion Film Maker”, in 1999. While O. Lutfu Akad’s film focuses on the “poverty-patriotism and the hard life of Kurdish people as border smugglers”; Sinan Cetin’s film is an abstractive reduction of the identity of Kurdisness to “people without motherland divided into two via national borders”. Both of these movies have carried similar roles in terms of reidentifying and caricaturizing Kurdishness of Turkey as either “obedience without solidarity” or “the obedience without reciprocity”.
[1] Giardiano, C., 2005. “The Past in the Present: Actualized History in the Social Construction of Reality”, in Critical Junctions, Don Kalb and Herman Talk (Eds.).Berghahn Books; Le Klein, K,. (2000), “On Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse”, Representations, no: 69, Special Issue: Grounds for Remembering, Winter 2000, pp 127-150; Bell, Duncan S., “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity”, British Journal of Sociology, Mar. 2003, Vol. 54, Issue 1.
[2] PAASI, A., (1999) “Boundaries as Social Practice and Discourse: Russian-Finnish Border”, Regional Studies, 33 (7) : 669-680.