Death is a transitional period that, beyond marking the end of life, involves traditional practices aimed at alleviating and sharing grief. One such practice, found across cultures in varying forms, is the tradition of mourning meals. This study examines the multidimensional social significance of social solidarity, gastronomic memory, and women’s labor within mourning meal practices in Turkey. Using a qualitative design, participants were selected through convenience sampling, and data were collected via semi-structured interviews with 21 women from Turkey’s seven geographic regions, then analyzed thematically. The findings show that mourning meals are organized around a division of labor grounded in social and female solidarity, that this knowledge is preserved through intergenerational transmission, and that it is closely intertwined with gender roles. Olfactory and gustatory memory emerged as powerful elements of gastronomic memory that give concrete form to the experience of mourning, although traditional practices have undergone significant transformation in recent years, driven partly by migration and urbanization. Beyond a mere nutritional practice, mourning meals in Turkey objectify shared memory across different faith communities, carrying both common ritual patterns and regional variations, with women’s labor remaining an invisible yet central element. The study conceptualizes mourning meals as a multilayered domain reproducing social bonds and cultural memory.
Amid urban renewal and heritage-making in the “Global East,” toponyms are not neutral markers but media through which state power rewrites spatial genealogies. This article examines how the construction of the Daming Palace National Heritage Park in Xi’an contested the spatial memory of “Daobei,” a railway-migrant enclave formed by Henan refugees after 1934, and how naming reorganized its historical layers. Combining critical toponymy with Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) theory, the study analyzes the Xincheng District Gazetteer, planning and fiscal documents, press reports and a published oral-history collection and compares the micro-toponyms recorded in 1993 with the post-2010 landscape. Three findings emerge. First, official discourse redefined Daobei as “urban negative assets” awaiting clearance. Second, “linguistic disinfection” operated through two mechanisms: the erasure of the vernacular micro-toponymic layer (villages, alleys and workers’ compounds) together with its referents, and the monumental re-signification of ruin-derived names such as Hanyuan, ordinary local names since the 1950s. Third, rehousing without symbolic recognition produced cultural displacement and a “toponymic aphasia” among returnees, mitigated only by informal memory tactics. The article concludes that heritage governance should institutionalize toponymic pluralism and proposes concrete measures for recognizing migrant and industrial histories in heritage landscapes.
This article aims to trace the genealogy of the sacred through four interconnected movements, asking: how does a protective structure of meaning invert into an instrument of structural power? It argues that the sacred originated as a psychological and social instrument of comfort against the terror of mystery, chaos and death. Drawing on Eliade, Otto and Malinowski, the article reconstructs the sacred as a protective structure of meaning. It then traces a decisive inversion: the instrument created to comfort vulnerable subjects was captured by institutional and political authorities, becoming a master rather than a servant. Using Feuerbach’s theory of projection and Fromm’s analysis of enslavement to one’s own creations, the article argues that the sacred exemplifies a dialectic in which the servant becomes the lord. The third movement examines the structural and psychological conditions of self-deception, drawing on Berger and Luckmann’s dialectic of externalisation, objectivation, and internalisation, Foucault’s analysis of power and truth, and Freud and Nietzsche’s accounts of illusion and forgotten metaphor. The fourth movement explores the plurality of the sacred, arguing through Girard that this plurality is not merely sociological but structurally violent, and examines how sovereign power captures and weaponises the sacred through Schmitt, Agamben and Althusser. Engaging with Charles Taylor’s challenge to the genealogical project, the article concludes that reclaiming human agency requires not destroying the sacred but recognising it as a human projection, transforming it from a master commanding sacrifice into a servant of meaning, ethics and solidarity.
This article examines how descendants of a deported community relate to a displacement they did not experience directly and how that inherited past acquires different meanings across settlement contexts. Focusing on Ahıska (Meskhetian) Turks in Türkiye and Kazakhstan, the study uses postmemory to examine intergenerational transmission and interpretation. The study draws on eleven semi-structured oral-history interviews conducted in Türkiye and Kazakhstan in 2024–2025, contextualized through published historical scholarship and documentary studies. The analysis considers narration, silence, selective uptake, material mediation, and commemorative performance as different forms through which descendants encounter the deportation past. Within this small comparative sample, accounts from Türkiye highlighted linguistic and cultural affinity and public commemoration, while accounts from Kazakhstan drew attention to local belonging, assistance received from Kazakh neighbors, and memories of historical injustice. Generational position influenced participants’ access to family memories, although direct conversations with older relatives, photographs, and commemorative events remained relevant across generations. The findings highlight how uneven family transmission, generational position, and individual circumstances shape descendants’ interpretations of the deportation past. They also show that attachment to Ahıska can coexist with a strong sense of belonging to the country of residence, without necessarily involving an intention to return to the ancestral homeland.
Personal naming traditions in Bekwarra communities of Cross River State serve as vital cultural repositories encoding memory, identity, and collective experience. While names have historically reflected lineage, spirituality, and communal values, contemporary socio-cultural shifts threaten the continuity of these meanings. This study examines how Bekwarra personal names function as carriers of ancestral history and how their significance is negotiated within modern contexts. It addresses the gradual loss of historical awareness among younger generations, who face pressures from Western naming practices, urban lifestyles, and weak intergenerational storytelling. The objectives of the study are to describe the forms and semantic categories of Bekwarra personal names (for example, those derived from lineage, events, occupation, objects, and animals); to analyse the sociolinguistic functions of personal names in Bekwarra communities (identity, kinship, history, and social norms); to document oral narratives (including Ogar Agba) that connect names to community memory and values; to examine processes of change affecting naming practices, including colonial legacies, religious conversion, urbanisation, and globalization; to assess community attitudes toward name retention, change, and revitalisation strategies; and to propose community centred recommendations (documentation methods, educational materials, and digital tools) for safeguarding Bekwarra naming heritage. The study adopts Cultural Memory Theory, a framework that explains onomastics by arguing that names are social symbols whose meaning is kept alive through collective interaction, not just etymology. It explains how names operate as mnemonic devices and sites where tradition and modernity intersect. Findings reveal that Bekwarra personal names function as living archives, encapsulating events, moral values, kinship ties, and ancestral encounters. The study also notes a widening generational gap between elders who retain deep name knowledge and many youths who recognize meanings only superficially. Despite this, there is emerging evidence of cultural revival, as younger individuals increasingly reclaim indigenous names as markers of heritage pride. The study recommends strengthening family-based storytelling, documenting naming histories through publications, and integrating indigenous onomastics into local school curricula to safeguard the cultural reservoir embedded in Bekwarra personal names and ensure continuity across generations.
