Remembering through possessed treasures? Landscapes and memories of societal violence in contemporary Turkey

Abstract

May narratives of treasures be interrelated to remembrances of past societal violence? Attending to imaginations of and hunts for treasures across seemingly natural interfaces, this article explores these practices not simply as quests for material riches but as occasions through which past societal violence is recounted in the present across human and non-human assemblages. The article engages with two interrelated domains of scholarly debates. The first is the emergent field of scholarly discussions and presumptions about the ways in which past conviviality, displacement, and violence (both by civilian groups and state forces) are remembered by ordinary people who identify as part of the Turkish-Muslim majority in contemporary Turkey. The second, and much wider, scholarly debate the article aims to contribute to focuses on the way non-human entities exert a forceful (psychosocial and political) effect on social relations, which, in turn, invites us to rethink the interrelationship between humans and non-human entities.