The role of narratives on the other in the construction of identity: A study of social memory in Alaköy village of Van

This thesis is aimed to examine the social function of oral culture and narrative. Narrative acts as a constituent element of the social self and also as a mechanism that maintains its continuity by changing itself in cultures where thinking and expression are based on verbal transmissions. According to this view, which is upheld in this thesis; narratives reproduce the identities of societies through the ideas and discourses they rely on. The answer of societies to the question "Who am I?" emerges from the narratives of the things that have been remembered from the past. The central problem of this thesis is what local people of Alaköy in the city of Van remember about the past of the village, what was transferred to them from previous generations and how they tell these. For this purpose, based on the ethnographic field research and oral history interviews, the narratives of people living in Alaköy and the discourses they used in their narratives were examined. Thus, in the case of Alaköy, the remembrance and forgetting practices of people with different identities who shared a common past and culture have changed in the axis of identity. Oral narratives of the village residents revealed that social memory, which has a deterministic role in the construction of identity, has been shaped through relationships developed by people of different identities. As a result, this is an indication that social memory is a dynamic just like society itself and a phenomenon that is constantly changing both situationally and temporally.