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| Eyüp and the Golden Horn (via SALT Galata Archives) |
Thanks to the
Culture, Power, Social Change group in UCLA's Department of Anthropology, I'll be speaking
this coming Thursday about my research. The abstract of my talk:
"A Present Past: Histories and Heritage in an Istanbul District"
Broadly, my dissertation analyzes three distinct processes as they
intersect in the Istanbul district of Eyüp: (1) the transformation of
the built environment; (2) the practice of Islam; and (3) the making
(and unmaking) of social worlds. It asks two fundamental questions: How
and under what conditions have these processes changed individually over
the course of the past century? And more importantly, how has their
interaction helped to make the district of Eyüp a place rich in
religious, cultural, and social value?
Eyüp's present-day status both as Istanbul's most well-known religious
destination and as one of the city's most well-preserved 'old'
neighborhoods cannot be understood in terms of an unchanging material
landscape, a transhistorical religious essence, or a static social
community. Instead, I argue that Eyüp's meaning has been generated by
the changing encounters of people, ideas, objects, and buildings,
encounters whose dimensions and contours have changed dramatically over
the course of the past 100 years. Drawing on archival and ethnographic
fieldwork, I follow these four strands as they are woven together into
one particularly dense urban fabric. This dissertation thus helps us to
understand how the material, religious, and social resonances of
specific presents come to be made and unmade by a complex assembly of
actors.
In this talk, I focus on one particularly central aspect of my
dissertation: that of restoration. Restoration presents a particularly
compelling case for two reasons: First, and in line with this
dissertation's broad argument, it draws together people, histories, and
buildings into variously fragile and durable configurations. Second, its
interventions paradoxically mark the past as distinct from the present
even as they mask the presence of those interventions. It thus provides
an ideal site from which to understand how and why particular material
sites come to be a present past and how those decisions remake and
reorder the world around them.
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