Social Memory of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange in Daily Life: A Case Study of a Tobacco-Producing Village in Turkey

Abstract

This article aims to understand how villagers whose ancestors had to migrate to Turkey from Greece in 1924 as a result of the Greek-Turkish population exchange remember their past. Within a theoretical framework built around the concept of habitus from Bourdieu’s oeuvre, social memory, and identity, I argue that social memory finds a practical place in the habitus of the villagers and promotes the villagers’ identity through practices. By emphasising the time dimension in the working of habitus, I also discuss how habitus attunes to changing conditions. Based on semi-ethnographic fieldwork, this article claims that the relationship among habitus, social memory, and identity was established within the framework of everyday lives that revolved around tobacco production and later changed with the transformation of the tobacco market in Turkey after the 1980s.