A conference organized by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, İstanbul Technical University and the Department of Anthropology, Yeditepe University in İstanbul, Turkey on May 25-29, 2011:
We are organizing a conference on the interrelated themes of memory, materiality and cultural heritage that will appeal to scholars from the fields of archaeology, anthropology and history. We invite papers that particularly address the uses and management of ancient sites, monuments and objects at the local and global scales from different social spaces and sectors of societies such as houses, ritual-architectural spaces, netscape, museums, touristic scapes, media industry, ethnoscapes and nation-states. Many different processes play a role in the particular contemporary uses of ancient objects and monuments such as the making of public/official or alternative histories and education, nationalism, cultural preservation efforts, place-making, object and profit oriented capitalist material practices, violence, archaeological practices, and the politics of the production and/or erasure of memory about the past, present and future. Despite the efforts of countries to geographically and culturally ‘preserve’ ancient monuments and objects, there has been a process of deterritorialization in the sense that they constantly move across space and time in the form of actual reproduction in different socio-spatial contexts, web-based information and computer simulation. In these new contexts they are reappropriated and attributed new meanings and senses and/or intentions to evoke the ancient potent meanings, becoming objects of new materialities and also containers and/or producers of new immaterialities. They become part and parcel of new historicities.
In addition to particular case studies we are specifically interested in papers that address theoretical and methodological questions. How can we theorize about contemporary uses of ancient monuments and objects? What is the unit of analysis and how is it methodologically constructed? From an analytical perspective, how can we gauge the historical traffic of these objects across space? What are our analytical boundaries?
Website:
http://www.materialitymemoryculturalheritage.com/
Keynote Speakers:
Ian Hodder (Stanford University)
Richard Handler (University of Virginia)
Ayfer Bartu Candan (Boğaziçi University)
Charles Stewart (University College London)