Leyla Neyzi: Memory Studies, History, and Anthropology: A Critical Interdisciplinary Approach
Today, the field of memory studies is asking new questions which challenge earlier assumptions. It is clear now that the well-meaning but romanticized goal of representing the powerless through memory work is at least as fraught with contradictions as attempts to write conventional history. The widely held opposition between history and memory studies is gradually leading to appeals for convergence. While the field of history needs to become more reflexive and critical, memory studies, history, and anthropology must combine forces in order to produce much-needed critical interdisciplinary work on the relation between the past and the present in the Middle East. In this presentation, I will use my research on Turkey as an example of such an interdisciplinary approach. I will use material from oral history narratives, historical and contemporary media and ethnographic research on minorities and on an elite neighborhood in the city of Istanbul to show how contemporary power and identity struggles are expressed through discourses of the past, which are variously (re)written by my interlocutors, the media, and academics, including myself-with reference to and mediated by other such accounts. Speaking of the past in Turkey is fraught with danger, raising questions of accountability both vis-a-vis informants and in terms of the positionality of the researcher. In fact, I would argue, pressure to take sides in increasingly polarized debates about the past can force not only informants but even the researcher into silence in the public sphere, given the difficulty of remaining in the gray zone of “academic” discourse.