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Led by IAS Junior Research Fellow, Dr Laurent Dissard
The following events were organised by the research group:
The Materialities and Technologies research group explored key ideas around the theme of Materialities and Technologies. It drew different participants across departments at UCL and universities in London, and provided an intellectual environment where disciplinary and regional boundaries could be transcended. Key concepts related to Materialities and Technologies that were explored include, but are not limited to: Scale & Temporality, Embodiment & Corporeality, Information & Knowledge, Infrastructures & Urbanism and Poetics & Politics.
Neo-Ottoman Legacies, Post-Ottoman Erasures: Sites of memory in Istanbul, Thessaloniki and Budapest (8 September 2016)
In this presentation, Dr Jeremy F Walton (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany) was drawing 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 sixteenth century Sufi dervish and saint, in Budapest. His exposition moved in two directions. On the one hand, he emphasised how sites of memory frequently serve to bolster dominant, politicised discourses of Neo-Ottomanism. On the other hand, he traced 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 developed 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.
Archaeology as Salvage Operation in the Middle East: Ethics, Politics and Methods (10 December 2016)
Ever since its beginnings, archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East has often taken the form of a salvage operation in context of development projects and military conflicts that threaten cultural heritage. Construction of dam projects, rural infrastructure projects, political instability and looting operations open doors for archaeologists to work in precarious landscapes, working at a fast pace and with duly adjusted methodologies.
While the ticking clock dictates less than desirable methodologies for surveying and excavation, salvage operations lead to unusually intensive investigation of regions producing a wealth of data, channel unexpected funding into archaeology and heritage conservation, and allow easier acquisition of official permits. The increased scale of development in countries such as Turkey and Lebanon, and the threat of violence in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan has impacted the way in which archaeologists do fieldwork. They inevitably find themselves in politically-charged situations where multiple stakeholders challenge the relationship of the archaeologist to local governments, multi-national companies, local communities and activist groups.
This one-day workshop at the IAS invited scholars to consider the ethical, political and methodological issues in archaeological salvage operations. How has this rescue nature of archaeology impacted and shaped archaeological practice in the Middle East? Where does salvage operation locate archaeologists in the political ecologies of the field? The workshop opened a platform for real experiences of salvage archaeology on the ground, focusing on the ethics of archaeological salvage work in the context of development with the controversies of ecological impact and human rights violations, while salvage archaeology can be adopted as an allegorical concept for debate more broadly on the methodologies, politics and ethics of archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East. The workshop was co-organised by Laurent Dissard and Ömür Harmanşah, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
IAS Materialities and Technologies Seminar: The Interrogator and the Prisoner - The Violence of Evidence during the Korean War (29 June 2016)
If liberation from colonialism required an essential rupture with the historical past, what did that rupture look like on the level of personhood? What did a decolonised subject look like? And who had the authority to recognise it?
In this discussion, Monica Kim (Assistant Professor in US and World History at New York University) used the prism of military interrogations rooms during the Korean War to refract the competing claims of the United States, North Korea and India regarding their abilities to recognise the post-colonial subject. The ambitions of empire, revolution and non-alignment converged upon this intimate encounter of military warfare: the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner of war. Which state could supposedly reinvent the most intimate power relation between the coloniser and the colonised, to transform the relationship between the state and subject into one of liberation, democracy or freedom? Drawing upon the histories of Cold War psychiatry, Korean internationalist socialism and Japanese colonial police practices, Kim layed out a landscape of the intimate technologies of warfare that came to frame the notion of US-sanctioned 'humanitarian warfare'. Responding to Monica Kim's research and giving her insights on themes and issues raised during the talk was Laleh Khalili (Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS).
IAS Talking Points Seminar: Submerged Stories - Dams and Cultural Erasure in Eastern Turkey (7 March 2016)
In this talk, Laurent Dissard took dams as symbols of Turkey's 'modernisation' and their associated reservoirs, artificial lakes inundating the cultural heritage of river valleys, as metaphors for the country's 'submerged stories'. He explained how technological infrastructures, which delineate the possibilities and confines of Turkey's future, have also simultaneously helped to materialise the possibilities and confines of the nation's past. In the end, he explored the 'stories' of Turkey's 'others' (Kurds, Alevis, Armenians) left 'submerged' by the country's attempts to modernise. Respondents: Dr Katherine Ibbett (UCL SELCS) and Dr Ruth Mandel (UCL Anthropology).
Sunken Time: The Politics of Dams, Memories and Justice (23 February 2016)
In this talk, William Carruthers, Maria Iancu, and Caner Sayan discussed what infrastructural technologies, dams and other hydroelectric power plants built in Egypt, Romania and Turkey, can tell us about politics, science, memory, time, justice, and the environment. Carruthers (PhD, Cambridge and Gerda Henkel Research Fellow, German Historical Institute London) adopts a History of Science and Technology perspective to examine the interplay of archaeological practice, Egyptian politics, and infrastructural development in his analysis of the Aswan High Dam built on the Nile in the 1960s. Maria Iancu (PhD, UCL) interrogated categories like memory, loss and time in her discussion of the Ada Kaleh in Romania, an island on the Danube River submerged in 1970 after the construction of a dam. Caner Sayan (PhD, Dundee) explored such concepts as 'recognition' and 'environmental justice' through the case study of contested dams and controversial hydroelectric power plants being built today on the rivers of Southwestern Turkey.
IAS Materialities and Technologies Seminar (19 January 2016)
Andrew Barry (UCL, Geography) and Hannah Knox (UCL, Anthropology) presented their books: Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Cornell University Press, 2015). Through case studies of the interoceanic highway in Brazil and Peru (Knox) and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline (Barry), their discussion examined the importance of materials in political life and asked what large public infrastructural projects can tell us about contemporary state formation, social relations, and emerging political economies.
Material, Visual and Digital Culture Seminar (11 January 2016)
"We do not want guns... here": On the Materiality of Violence in Turkey's Kurdish City of Diyarbakır
In this talk, Laurent Dissard discussed the manner in which Diyarbakir's history of past and present violence has been commemorated or erased, i.e. how it materialises or disappears in the city's urban landscape. With this case study, he also hoped to reflect upon some of the stakes behind taking violence as an analytical concept in Anthropology.