This article develops the concept of ethical geography through the case of Kürecik, a locality in the Akçadağ district of Malatya, Turkey. It distinguishes ethical geography from broader discussions of moral landscape, sacred landscape, spatial memory, and phenomenological geography by proposing the concept of geographically encoded moral memory. The article argues that collective memory, moral norms, and behavioral codes may be encoded into geographical forms such as stones, mountains, shrines, paths, graves, place-names, bird calls, and seasonal practices, and transmitted across generations through these forms. Through the examples of Ali Şükran, Çoban Dede, Cömert Kasap, and the Pepuk/Cuckoo Bird legend, Kürecik is interpreted as an ethical archive composed of spatially distributed moral memory nodes. By engaging with Keith Basso, Pierre Nora, Tim Ingold, Christopher Tilley, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, the article suggests that geography should not be understood merely as a passive surface onto which moral meanings are projected, but as a relational agent that stabilizes memory, provokes narration, and participates in the intergenerational transmission of ethical life.
Ali Arı (Fri,) studied this question.