MESA Banner
The Matters of History: The Material Forms and Archives of Interfaith History in Southern Turkey
Abstract
The conditions of social cohabitation in the Middle East have been widely debated in recent years, especially in the context of popular uprisings for democracy, civil wars in Iraq and Syria, and the rise of state and communal violence against the region’s non-Muslim populations. In the context of twenty-first century Turkey, such debates concern both the rise of democratization efforts making formerly excluded minority citizens more visible in public life and an authoritarian nationalism that has bolstered the country’s longstanding racial, religious, and political divides. What role does historical legacy play in structuring the material sites and artefacts of social cohabitation that emerge for the minoritized from the interplay between these seemingly opposite political developments? How does it endure or adapt to the times of historical rupture and recursive temporality of the region’s never ending “crises”? My paper engages these questions by drawing on extended fieldwork from the early to late 2010s in Antakya (Antioch) near Turkey’s border with Syria where the country’s dual forces of democratization and polarization crystallize. I bring together historical narratives with ethnographic vignettes to trace the legacy of Antakya’s interfaith history in concrete material forms such as monumentalized religious symbols and architectures that collectively serve as mutating archives of social cohabitation even after being destroyed in the earthquake of early 2023. Often spatializing or objectifying religious differences, these material forms register the distinct historical experiences of minority subjection and the shared memories of connectivity under Ottoman, French, and Turkish regimes of governance, shaping the context in which minority citizens interact with one another and different state actors in public life. These citizens, my ethnography reveals, do not merely inhabit religious differences that governance regimes have historically produced in a uniform manner. Rather, they actively make and imagine social worlds with others by selectively remembering Antakya’s past and charting the times of various historical ruptures onto their fragmented material traces. In studying the unfolding of this process in public life as well as the silences and absences that it indexes, the paper rethinks minority lives beyond the dominant tropes of religious tolerance and political violence and as part of an extended temporality that binds centuries-long traditions within the everyday lives and collective memories of coexisting communities.
Discipline
Anthropology
History
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None