Rabia Harmansah

Performing Social Forgetting in a Post-Conflict
Landscape: The Case of Cyprus

Working in both the Greek/Southern and the Turkish/Northern
parts of Cyprus, Rabia Hamansah conducted ethnographic research
on six Orthodox Christian and Muslim religious sites for two years,
in order to investigate how formerly shared religious landscape
contributed to the ways in which collective remembering and
forgetting is practiced by Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and how
religious and cultural heritage was destroyed, manipulated,
accommodated, and reimagined during periods of conflict. She
analyzes the “art of forgetting” as a central device to investigate the
selective construction of the past and collective memory, through
human interactions with the commemorative religious landscape.
Social forgetting is not only a negation, neglect, failure of
remembering, or unintended social amnesia; but is a positive process
through which a certain kind of knowledge of the past is produced
deliberately and actively.