Sites of Memory, Sites of Loss

The 2022 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Annual Conference

June 3–4, 2022 | Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Northwestern University

In June 2022, the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program convened its annual conference, “Sites of Memory, Sites of Loss: Politics of Archaeology and Heritage in Turkey and Post-Ottoman Lands.” Bringing together scholars from anthropology, history, archaeology, political science, and heritage studies, the conference examined how heritage is produced, contested, and governed across Turkey and its wider post-Ottoman geographies.

Rather than approaching heritage as a neutral object of preservation, participants framed it as a political and social process—one shaped by state power, disciplinary expertise, community claims, and material absence as much as material survival. Across panels, heritage emerged as a site of negotiation structured by loss, displacement, and uneven authority.

Heritage as Process and Governance

Drawing on a broad, UNESCO-inspired definition, the conference foregrounded heritage as encompassing tangible, intangible, and natural forms, while emphasizing its procedural nature. Speakers repeatedly stressed that heritage is not simply inherited but actively produced through legal regimes, expert practices, and selective narration.

Panels addressing heritage governance and state intervention highlighted how preservation frameworks often operate as technologies of rule. Discussions moved fluidly between archaeological practice, cultural policy, and memory politics, underscoring how heritage functions as a mode of governance through which particular pasts are rendered visible while others remain marginalized.

Archaeology, Museums, and the Authority of Expertise

Several panels examined the politics of archaeology and museum practice, focusing on the authority of scholarly expertise in shaping historical narratives. Presentations emphasized excavation, conservation, and exhibition as interpretive acts embedded within nationalist projects and institutional power.

Speakers interrogated the role of museums as sites where historical legitimacy is produced and stabilized, raising questions about who is authorized to speak for the past. These discussions foregrounded tensions between professional expertise and alternative memory claims, particularly those articulated by displaced or minoritized communities.

Landscapes of Others: Heritage, Destruction, and Rights

Our panel, “Landscapes of Others”, examined how heritage associated with marginalized communities becomes vulnerable to neglect, reinterpretation, or outright destruction. Chaired by Oya Topçuoğlu (Northwestern University), the panel brought together papers that addressed heritage as a terrain structured by exclusion, environmental pressure, and state violence.

Leigh Stuckey (University of Michigan) analyzed the cave churches of Göreme, showing how heritage interpretation and tourism contribute to the slow erosion—both material and epistemic—of sites linked to Christian pasts in central Anatolia. Ömür Harmanşah and Peri Johnson (University of Illinois at Chicago) discussed the destruction of local architectural heritage in Konya Province, framing these landscapes as “disposable” within the intersecting logics of development, environmental degradation, and the Anthropocene.

My own paper, “Heritage and Rights in Eastern Turkey: The Military Destruction of Diyarbakır’s District of Sur (2015–2016),” examined how large-scale urban destruction targeted historically significant Kurdish heritage while simultaneously suspending legal protections and residents’ rights, situating Sur within broader debates on securitization, heritage governance, and human rights.

I am especially grateful to Melissa Rosenzweig (Northwestern University), whose thoughtful and generous discussion not only connected the papers thematically but also sharpened the panel’s collective intervention by foregrounding how “othered” landscapes expose unequal regimes of care, recognition, and preservation. Her remarks underscored heritage as a site where political power decisively shapes which pasts are sustained—and which are rendered expendable.

Urban Transformation and Structural Loss

Urban heritage and redevelopment featured prominently across the programme. Panels on urban renewal and infrastructure examined how preservation discourse often accompanies projects that displace communities and erase layered histories.

Rather than treating destruction as unintended, presenters emphasized the structural relationship between heritage and loss. Heritage, they argued, frequently becomes legible only at moments of threat or disappearance. Loss, in this formulation, is not accidental but constitutive of contemporary heritage regimes.

Antiquities, Circulation, and Dispossession

Another major theme concerned the circulation of antiquities, including looting, smuggling, and museum acquisition. Papers situated Turkey and post-Ottoman lands within global systems of cultural extraction shaped by imperial legacies, conflict, and uneven legal frameworks.

Rather than framing displaced objects solely as legal problems, presenters emphasized their role as material witnesses to dispossession. The movement of artifacts was discussed as inseparable from histories of violence, forced migration, and economic asymmetry, complicating narratives of universal heritage and custodianship.

Keynote: Heritage and Human Rights

The conference concluded with a keynote by Heghnar Watenpaugh (University of California, Davis), who reframed heritage as a human rights issue. By situating heritage within a human rights framework, the keynote crystallized a central insight of the conference: heritage work is never merely technical or aesthetic, but fundamentally ethical and political.

Conclusion

At a moment when debates over restitution, decolonization, and memory politics are intensifying globally, the 2022 Keyman Annual Conference offered a rigorous, regionally grounded intervention. Centering Turkey and post-Ottoman geographies, it challenged universalizing heritage models and foregrounded contexts shaped by empire, nationalism, and ongoing political struggle.

Sites of Memory, Sites of Loss ultimately demonstrated that heritage is not about safeguarding a settled past, but about negotiating contested futures—where memory, materiality, and power remain deeply entangled.