ANT4609 Contested Heritage: Power, Identity, and Memory in Modern Turkey
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits
What happens when a museum becomes a mosque? Or when ancient rituals turn into tourist shows? When does preservation become politics, and who decides how history is displayed? This course explores how cultural heritage becomes entangled with identity, memory, and power in contemporary Turkey. We will explore how historical sites and cultural practices become focal points for competing visions of the nation, religion, and modernity. From the Ottoman Empire to the secular republic and now to today’s political shifts, Turkey offers a unique lens through which one might understand how societies negotiate their relationship with the past. We consider heritage sites as stages on which national identity is performed and contested, where secularism and religion seek balance, and where local traditions are confronted with global tourism. The course pays special attention to the “politics of preservation”: who decides what is to be preserved, in what way it is to be presented, and for whom. Through ethnographic studies and theoretical texts, and the Nobel-laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence - which we will consider as literature, and through its physical museum in Istanbul - students will explore how heritage works not only in the sense of sites and traditions, but also how it actively shapes national identity, political legitimacy, and social memory.
Through guided fieldwork, students will also develop the key ethnographic research skills of participant observation, interviewing, and qualitative data analysis. These methods will allow students to conduct independent research that examines how heritage sites and practices are experienced, contested, and reimagined in contemporary Turkey.
Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 intermediate liberal arts courses (LTA, CSP, HSS)