45 CHAPTER 1 History, Memory and Emotion: The Long Term Significance of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations * Renée Hirschon Introduction This chapter attempts to show how history, memory and emotion interact in the relationship between Greeks and Turks, affecting and influencing relationships at the macro-political level, as well as at the interpersonal level. It aims to underline the importance of the personal, of the emotional, and the subjective in the formation of national images, elements which I consider to be critical, though not openly acknowledged in the sphere of diplomacy and of international relations. My presentation in this chapter is founded in an anthropological approach, which is essentially holistic. Unlike in other specialised social sciences such as economics and political science, anthropology’s functionalist heritage in the British tradition, though now seen as static and limited, nonetheless has its uses insofar as it conceptualises the interconnection of a range of different human activities. 20 It has a particularly valuable role to play as an interpretive approach and, therefore, in * I am most grateful to Vally Lytra for editorial guidance and suggestions, to the internal readers, as well as to Dimitris Kamouzis and to Dimitrios Gkintidis for constructive comments, all of which have improved this text, although I could not incorporate all of them. I am especially indebted to Emine Yeşim Bedlek for allowing me to use her draft translation from the Turkish of the Entrusted Trousseau by Kemal Yalçın, and to Natasha Lemos for additional help. 20 My approach is wider (developed at the University of Chicago where intellectual influences included those of Talcott Parsons, and systems theory) and also incorporates individual actors in a social, cultural and historical context, in a dynamic way. Resonances with Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ and phenomenological anthropology can be inferred.