Le fonds ethnographique des réfugiés grecs d’Anatolie : questions d’histoire et d’historiographie

Ateliers d'Anthropologie

关键词: Greece;    historiography;    ideology;    national historiography;    political history;    population exchange;   

DOI  :  10.4000/ateliers.1402

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The ethnographic collection of the Greek refugees from Anatolia: questions of history and historiography. In Greece, the word “refugee” (prosfyges in Greek) is always and exclusively understood to mean the 1,200,000 Greeks from Asia Minor and Thrace who came to the Greek territory in 1922 after the Greek army’s defeat in Asia Minor, and then from 1923 to 1925 as part of the Population Exchange. The text of the Treaty of Lausanne qualified these populations as “emigrants”. The term “refugee” is associated with the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Population Exchange, which definitively sounded the death knell for the irredentist and expansionist politics of the modern Greek state, which is also known as the ‘Great Idea’. From this point of view, the refugees symbolise martyrdom resulting from a national failure in the rhetoric which has developed in Greek historiography – they are the heroes and victims of the catastrophe and displacement. At the same time, they are the very symbol of the precursors who worked for the unification of modern Greece, for it is considered that their rehabilitation and reintegration contributed to it greatly. The ideologies and stereotypes which arose and were established in the body of historiography were originally the product of the burden which was and continues to be provoked by the tragic event itself – the defeat and the exodus which followed – and, later, were those of the difficult process of the progressive appeasement of the aftermath caused in Greek society by the integration of the refugees. Nonetheless, other factors also came into play. It cannot be emphasised strongly enough that the main characteristic of national historiography concerning the question of refugees lies in the absence of an examination of their past, and, in consequence, in the silence surrounding all the ethnic, social, cultural and linguistic particularities which were their own, or, to put it another way, in the silence about their very identity. National historiography aligned itself completely with the Greek State’s policy, which considered the refugee population as a uniform entity and which, as such, assimilated it with native populations (those born in national territory), choosing to ignore their social and cultural distinctiveness. It is no coincidence that a large majority of historians and politicians have always emphasised the successful homogenisation of Greece’s population as a counterbalance to the Catastrophe. Very recently, studies (especially in social anthropology, the science of cultural otherness) have shown the multiplicity of aspects of the refugee identity, and, with the help of examples, have retraced the role of Greek national ideology in the disappearance of the distinctive identity represented by the refugees in the landing which they were received. The lack of interest in the refugees’ past is counterbalanced by the innovative initiative by Melpo and Octave Merlier, founders of what was to become the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, who, immediately after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, concentrated on the systematic study of the refugees’ “popular” culture.

【 授权许可】

Unknown