Narrative Maps, Collective Memory,and Identities: Through an Ethnographic Example from the Southeast Aegean

This paper links two distinct representational practices, maps and narratives, with reference to long fieldwork in an Aegean insular community; it investigates how the experience of space permeates collectivity through narratives and how it ultimately, and largely, mediates the community’s values in terms of a system. Here, the concept of “narrative maps” acquires the meaning of collective representations and of a complex cognitive function for memorizing and mapping space through bodily transfers and collective memory. To what extent is a community able to preserve collective memory with its maps spontaneously, without imposing “realms of memory”?