Neo-Ottoman Legacies, Post-Ottoman Erasures

In this presentation, given as part of the Institute of Advanced Studies Materialities and Technologies research theme, Dr Jeremy F Walton will draw on Pierre Nora's concept of 'sites of memory' to explore the material textures and political effects of Ottoman legacies and Neo-Ottoman ideologies in three locations: Miniatürk, a theme park in Istanbul that features scale replicas of many prominent Ottoman structures; Thessaloniki's New Mosque, a former place of worship for the syncretic religious community of the dönme; and the Tomb of Gül Baba, a 16^th century Sufi dervish and saint, in Budapest.

His exposition moves in two directions. On the one hand, he emphasises how sites of memory frequently serve to bolster dominant, politicised discourses of Neo-Ottomanism. On the other hand, he traces how sites of renascent Ottoman memory - especially those outside Turkey - destabilise and contradict the premises of Neo-Ottomanism in unanticipated ways. Over the course of his presentation, he develops the concept of 'disciplined historicity' as a method for approaching sites of memory that integrates both historical knowledge and appreciation for the material and aesthetic qualities of the spaces in question.

Biography

Jeremy F Walton is the leader of the Max Planck Research Group, 'Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities', at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany, a position that he began in March 2016. Since graduating from the University of Chicago with PhD in Anthropology in 2009, Dr Walton has had the good fortune to pursue a variety of teaching and research positions. From 2009 to 2012, he was an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in New York University's Religious Studies Program; from 2012 to 2013, he was a Jamal Daniel Levant Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS); from 2013 to 2015, he was a member of the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen; and, from 2015 to 2016, he was a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of South Eastern Europe at the University of Rijeka. Dr Walton's first major research project was an ethnographic study of the relationship among Muslim civil society organisations, state institutions and secularism in contemporary Turkey. A monograph based on this research, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Dr Walton has published in a wide variety of forums, including journals such as American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam and The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. Additionally, Dr Walton was a co-editor of the volume Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (University of Chicago Press) and has book chapters in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?, The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies and Everywhere Taksim: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi. As the group leader for 'Empires of Memory', he guides an interdisciplinary team of researchers in a multi-sited project on post-imperial memory and forgetting in a variety of former Habsburg and Ottoman cities, including Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb and Skopje.

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