Inheritance without the Heritage: The Fig Trees and the Ecological Effects of Imaginative Attachments to Fetih (Conquest)

This talk is part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Speaker Series. This space encourages students and faculty to connect with recent cutting-edge research in the field of sociology and anthropology.

Abstract:

Turkey’s transformation from a multi-religious and multi-ethnic empire into a nation-state has caused the dismissal, transformation, replacement, denial, and destruction of several unrecognised material and immaterial heritage.

The livelihoods and diverse artisanship once ingrained into nature and its medians have been shattered after decades of war, generations killed in violence, and later with the neoliberal economy that values particular types of production over others.

Built on the understanding that heritage is beyond the cultural and the human, this paper connects a series of ethnographic data collected in a historically Jewish and Greek neighbourhood of Istanbul, Balat and Fener (B/F), to understand the interplay between the heritage as an imagined realm and the physical relationship to the inherited.

Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which the new inhabitants, especially those who have been living in the area for four to seven decades, have been developing rapport and making sense of this historic area and its native flora (ie. fig trees) through the notion of fetih (conquest).

The paper reads fetih as an imaginative heritage-making attempt and a reference point used in the processes of heritage removal and ecological destruction perpetrated by the area's older incomers. By doing so, it carries a trifold task. It questions the limits of the very idea of heritage as a social concept.

It reflects on the intelligibility of national heritage embedded in its ability to destroy other narratives that taint the neatness of a single dominant one. It then questions the notion of margin by suggesting that a narrative such as fetih created several groups of imagined winners and thick layers of multiple margins, simultaneously.

At the third layer, it questions the interplay between human and non-human heritage as co-created realms and thus then locates the non-human heritage in the middle of the heritage studies.

Keywords: Conquest, Istanbul, Neo-Ottomanism, Imaginaries, Ecology

Biography:

Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist and an associate professor at UCL’s Institute of Global Prosperity. Her work focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. She is the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2019), the author of “Working Our Desire: Women, Sport and Self-Making in Istanbul” (2021) and the co-editor of several journal issues including “The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender and Sexuality” (2020). She is also the editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies’ Reviews Section.