Memories that Forget: The Conceptual Grammar of Forgetting the Armenian Genocide in Turkey and Its Implications for Social Relations

My project, Memories that Forget, focuses on the question of the effect of a public memory on the present. How does it shape social relations in society and effects politics? I am interested in the conceptual structure of the way in which people apprehend each other in the present. I look at the particular case of public memory through the lens of the following questions: What does the 1915 Armenian genocide mean for Turkish people today and what are the implications of that meaning for socio-political relations in Turkey? I consider the public memory as the main focus of my analysis as it is within the public process that a view on the past is generated, reproduced and used as a boundary condition to consider who belongs in the society and who does not. There are two entry points for this research: a) to understand what people in Turkish society today remember and think about the events of 1915 and b) to consider the sources of their understanding and the way they have developed their reactions to the discussions on the genocide. Here I argue that the mechanism of what is publically remembered and forgotten creates a cognitive censor for what can be discussed and used as the basis for constructing moral judgments.