The Morality of Stone: Ethical Geography, Spatial Memory, and the Cultural Construction of Morality in the Case of Malatya–Akçadağ–Kürecik

This preprint introduces the concept of “ethical geography” through the case of Kürecik, a rural and mountainous cultural region in the Akçadağ district of Malatya, eastern Türkiye. Kürecik is examined as a cultural memory field shaped by Kurdish/Zaza-Alevi oral culture, sacred places, pastoral life, oath practices, lament traditions, traditional deq/tattoo motifs, Akçadağ carpets, lokma-sharing, and ritual objects.

In this study, ethical geography is defined as a cultural memory system through which a community records and transmits its moral values through place, body, object, sound, speech, and ritual. The article analyzes three place-based narratives—Ali Şükran Mountain, Cömert Kasap, and Çoban Dede—as a three-layered ethical model: vertical ethics, horizontal ethics, and internal ethics. It also examines the Pepuk/cuckoo bird narrative, oath culture, women’s lament practices, Akçadağ carpets, deq tattoos, and ritual objects such as çangal and çılkak.

The central argument is that morality in Kürecik is not only spoken or taught as an abstract rule; it is placed in mountains and stones, shared through ritual food, woven into carpets, marked on bodies, voiced in laments, bound by oaths, and heard in bird calls. The study proposes ethical geography as a conceptual framework for reading oral and material cultures as systems of moral memory.