Nationalist imagination, historical memory and amnesia in rural area: An oral history from Datça Peninsula

Debates on how nation and nationalism should be defined primarily involve the question whether nations are the product of the modern era or nations are identities existing throughout the history. Approaches emphasising that nations emerged in the modern times point out the elements such as invention, artificiality and imagination in the construction process of national identity. Nationalism as means of giving the meaning to the past, the present and the future attributes a political meaning to the ethnic identity and history. Nationalism as cultural artefacts of a particular type can not be reduced into a political ideology or doctrine. This study problematises the relationship between national imagination and social history by trying to understand a local community in its historical conditions. Testimonies of 47 people gathered from the meetings held in the villages located mainly in the western part of the Datça Peninsula by oral history method in September 2016, September and October 2017. The present study reveals how peasants' mentality was strange to the national imagination and presents the changes in the sense of ethnic identity through oral tradition. Morever it points out historical-sociological conditions of peasantry of Turkey, which are widely neglected in academic field.