Maurice Halbwachs’ The Collective Memory forms one of the central reference points for scholarship on memory. One of his key insights involves the observation that group identities emerge in and in relation to their spatial frameworks: “The group’s image of its external milieu and its stable relationships with this environment becomes paramount in the idea it forms of itself, permeating every element of its consciousness, moderating and governing its evolution” (Excerpt, p. 2). His starting example is the city, where the relatively durable arrangements of roads, buildings, monuments, parks, and more provide social groups with a means to make sense of who they are in relation to where they are. So far, so good.
But there’s a second part of his argument that I’ve been returning to these past few months as I’ve been reading the news about the plummeting exchange rate between the dollar and the Turkish lira.
How to begin describing this situation?
When I was living in Turkey between 2011 and 2013, the exchange rate was usually between 1.6-1.9 Turkish lira/dollar. It began to weaken further over the next several years, falling to ~3.6 TL/dollar in 2017 and ~7 TL/dollar in 2020 before dramatically plunging in the latter half of 2021 and into 2022.1 There are a variety of reasons for this, including the government’s refusal to raise interest rates in the face of high inflation and a general perception of cronyism and short-sighted political opportunism, but another major factor involves Turkey’s current accounts balance.
For most of the past two decades, private corporations financed their growth through foreign-denominated debt (e.g., holding companies taking out loans to finance real estate development and finding themselves unable to pay their creditors back). As long as Turkey was receiving inflows of foreign capital - both in the form of more debt and in the form of foreigners investing in real estate and acquiring various companies - the system existed in an uneasy equilibrium. That equilibrium - if it ever existed in the first place - seems to have vanished.
Over the course of his chapter on “Space and the Collective Memory,” Halbwachs turns to consider groups that are seemingly less ‘place-bound,’ what he calls “without an apparent spatial basis.” How do these groups depend on collective memory? He suggests three types (legal, religious, and economic) that, even though they seem to have less to do with the fixed frameworks of a city, in fact depend upon distinct geographies of memory. It’s his discussion of economic groups that I’ve been returning to in thinking about the ongoing crisis in Turkey. He writes,
A worker’s labor, a clerk’s skills, a doctor’s medical concerns, a lawyer’s legal aid, are objects which occupy a definite and stable spatial location. We never situate credits and debts, or the values of titles or copyrights, in a place. This is the world of money and financial transaction, where specific objects, bought and sold, are unimportant and what matters is the capacity to acquire or dispose of anything. Nevertheless, services are rendered and tasks are executed, and their value for the purchaser depends on their being performed in a specific office or factory. A union secretary or labor mediator passing by a factory or picturing its location has an image that is only a part of a more extensive spatial framework. (Excerpt, p. 6)
One economic relationship that helps us see the relationship between memory, economic relationships, and geography are the ongoing debates over potatoes and onions. Those two foods are staples of kitchens in Turkey, but both have become flash points for a wider argument about imports and exports.
Potatoes and onions are more than mere objects, bought and sold - they are absolutely central objects to domestic life. Their position as staple foods was also about a distinct relationship to the land (of Turkey). Their rising prices - as part of a series of macroeconomic shifts that are linked to Turkey’s depreciating currency - was thus also about a kind of memory.
Economic relationships are thus about more than simply buying and selling, more than current account balances and exchange rates. They are about the ways that people relate to each other and the world around them. And they also depend upon some kind of implicit relationship to the past: The price of this object (from this place) was x yesterday, and tomorrow it will also be x. That (assumed, fragile) stability seems to be key. What people in Turkey are going through right now (and have been going through for some time) seems to be a situation in which that stability has vanished. How has that impacted people’s consumption habits? Their experience of cities and the neighborhood pazar?
Thanks to all those who have subscribed! If you’d like to share this post with someone else, please click below. Next week I’ll be turning back to the United States of America, beginning with Sean Wilentz’s recent engagement with Woody Holton and Alan Taylor’s new books in The New York Review of Books.
Other things I’ve been reading: A lovely essay on Persian rugs and family histories by Anna West; Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment; and Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities.