ABSTRACT
“Entwined Narratives” introduces the reader to a novel approach in memory studies – multi-collective memory – arguing in favor of emancipating the notion of “collective memory” from being subjected to the “national collective”. In contrast to public memory propagated by the nation-state, individual accounts on the past are not primarily shaped by the experience of being “Armenian”, “Turkish” or “Kurdish” (national collective). Instead, they are informed by a mix of other non-national collective affiliations that form competing prisms through which individuals envisage the past: being local or newcomer (locality), old or young (temporality), descendants of land owners or field workers (genealogy and class), objectors or conformists (weltanschauung). Exploring the relationship between memory and genealogy, it first discusses the collective of the family/kin in order to reveal conflicting myths of the “old homeland” among the residing and the expelled. Moving on to the relationship between memory and locality, it shows how the collective of the fellow-dwellers produces sui generis narrative elements based on the divide between urban and rural (the residing) as well as settled and migrant populations (the expelled), respectively. With regard to the relationship between memory and temporality it discusses the collective of the generation and the evolution of memory along the temporal axis revealing changing collective perceptions of self and other. Finally, envisaging the complex relationship between memory and ideology the section concludes with the collective of the fellow-minded. It explores how starkly different weltschanschauungen (worldviews), ranging from Sufi humanism to Mesopotamian regionalism and Socialist internationalism, inform and alternate narrations on the past, linking the narrator to a multitude of collectives different from the nation-state. This chapter convincingly shows – drawing from an extensive set of empirical data – that accounts of the past produced in the multi-collective environment of personal networks stand in contrast to the canonizing form of the national myth which is characterized by rigid and constructed boundary lines of in-/out- group or friend/foe.
