Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Politics of Memory in Anatolia

This dissertation explores the overlapping histories over the past century of state violence against both Armenian and Kurdish communities in the province of Van in southeastern Anatolia, with attention to the politics of memory as well as the material environment. It addresses the repeating cycles of violence against minority communities and the effects of these histories on the landscape through an ethnographic exploration of physical spaces of ruins. Through an attention to the persistent effects of violence on both local memory and the built environment, this dissertation complicates the categories of victim and perpetrator, and shows how Armenian and Kurdish histories, often understood disparately, are fundamentally intertwined. The ethnographic attention to shared spaces of material ruins in which overlapping histories of state violence are congealed serves to demonstrate how buildings and landscapes are not simply static reflections of a bygone time, but are dynamic spaces in which understandings of the past, politics in the present, and possible futures are negotiated, imagined and enacted.​ ​Chapter One introduces the region of Van and the main questions and research methods of the dissertation. Chapter Two addresses the afterlives of Armenian churches and monasteries in the Van region one hundred years after the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, with a focus on the alternating state policies of either destruction and erasure, or restoration and appropriation. Chapter Three discusses one particular ruined Armenian monastery which local Kurds visit as a pilgrimage site and outlines the way in which some Kurds narrate the Armenian past through a discourse of parallel victimhood. Chapter Four explores the widespread practice among local Kurds of digging for legendary buried Armenian gold and conceptualizes this treasure-hunting as at once a material interaction with a taboo past, an embodied practice through which the Armenian history of the area is animated in the present, and an enactment of a desired future. Chapter Five addresses how representatives of the central Turkish government and local municipal authorities aligned with the oppositional Kurdish movement compete over the representation, commemoration, or erasure of the local past through the building of monuments and the marking and naming of public space. Chapter Six outlines the repeating cycles of violence over the last century by focusing on the parallel histories of the destruction of the family home of an Armenian family in Van in 1915 and of a Kurdish family in Y�ksekova in 2016.​ ​Through an in-depth ethnographic exploration of local memories and narratives in relation to the afterlives of spaces of ruination, this dissertation demonstrates how catastrophic histories of violence and destruction are not only reflected and embodied in the material world, but how the landscape continues to shape the way that those histories are narrated and negotiated in the present. These sites of ruins are not only places where the past is remembered and contested, but also vibrant spaces in which lives are lived, new understandings of the past are activated, radical political possibilities are enacted, and alternative futures are imagined.​ ​ The research for this dissertation consisted of twenty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork (twenty months in Van, six months in Istanbul, and three weeks in Armenia), which included long-term participant observation; informal, semi-structured, life-history, and walking interviews; detailed fieldnotes; documentary photography; and visits to sites of historic and more recent ruins. This dissertation contributes to anthropological and historical scholarship on state violence against minority populations, memory studies, cultural heritage, and materiality studies, both in the context of the post-Ottoman territories, the Middle East, Europe, and beyond