Edited Volumes by Laurent Dissard
Cahier d'Histoire immédiate, 2021
Faire quelque chose, marquer le coup, ne pas laisser la voix à des velléités réductrices et natio... more Faire quelque chose, marquer le coup, ne pas laisser la voix à des velléités réductrices et nationalistes, voilà ce qui nous a motivés à penser ce numéro, à l’occasion des 10 ans des révolutions que l’on a appelées « arabes » mais qui ont affecté le monde et ses sociétés. En tant que chercheur.e.s, beaucoup de supposés et de raccourcis nous ont dérangés dans le traitement de ces processus, on avait donc des choses à dire, il nous restait à choisir un angle d’approche. Solène Poyraz, politologue, travaillant sur les effets de la crise syrienne sur la Turquie, et Laurent Dissard, anthropologue de la Turquie et du Moyen-Orient, choisissent alors d’aborder une thématique cruciale qui semble avoir changé la donne dans la crise syrienne : les Kurdes. Une thématique omniprésente mais souvent traitée à travers un prisme ethnique et macro-politique, ne permettant pas de saisir les éléments du débat.
Études Arméniennes Contemporaines, 2021
Home and homeland are never the way we know them. They are highly evocative as concepts, yet diff... more Home and homeland are never the way we know them. They are highly evocative as concepts, yet difficult to define, and often used in an intertwined, even indistinct way. The Études Arméniennes Contemporaines volume "Home(land)s: Place, Loss and Return in Contemporary Turkey" examines the inherent tensions between the two terms that arise from the dual existence of a home (in exile) in a host society and a distant homeland (imaginary) that is permanently lost. The articles delve into the multiplicity of representations and meanings attached to home and homeland, and highlight the manner in which such places of identification, territories of attachment, and geographies of longing and belonging, are constructed and remembered, but also fantasized and romanticized, and ultimately imagined in past and present-day Turkey.
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Laurent Dissard
Revue des Sciences Sociales, 2021
In her 2004 book Anneannem, Fethiye Çetin, an Istanbul-based human-rights lawyer, reveals the sec... more In her 2004 book Anneannem, Fethiye Çetin, an Istanbul-based human-rights lawyer, reveals the secret of her grandmother, Heranuş/Seher, abducted from her Armenian family and adopted by a Turkish family in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide. Heranuş/Seher’s “matrix of silence” was not enough for her granddaughter to understand her grandmother’s secret before it was revealed to her in 1975. Fethiye Çetin then keeps her grandmother’s secret hushed as she also contends with Turkey’s post-genocidal habitus of denial like her grandmother did. The publication of Anneannem serves as an opportunity for Çetin to uncover more secrets and break more silences in her country, including in her grandmother’s birthplace, Habap/Ekinözü, through the architectural restoration of two fountains. The situation of hidden Armenians remains fragile in Turkey and their secrets can rapidly be silenced once again.
L’Espace Politique, 2020
The ground-breaking ceremony of Istanbul’s Third Bosphorus Bridge took place on 29th May 2013. Th... more The ground-breaking ceremony of Istanbul’s Third Bosphorus Bridge took place on 29th May 2013. The date chosen by the then Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to launch the construction of this urban mega-project transformed the inauguration into a commemoration of the 560th anniversary of the Ottoman Conquest of Istanbul by Fatih Sultan Mehmet. After explaining the significance of the 29th May 1453 commemorations in Turkey, in this article, we argue that the building of mega-infrastructures, such as the Third Bosphorus Bridge, has become the occasion for Erdoğan to (re)conquer the city of Istanbul, thus mirroring Fatih Sultan Mehmet more than five centuries ago. In the end, we argue that the “Conquest Festival” in Istanbul today is perhaps more than just a celebration of the 15th century Ottoman siege of the city, but instead a diverted way for the nation to commemorate - without necessarily ever acknowledging it openly - the ethnic and religious “purification” of Turkey during the 20th century.
Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 2019
The international and multidisciplinary Keban Dam Rescue Project, which took place between 1966 a... more The international and multidisciplinary Keban Dam Rescue Project, which took place between 1966 and 1975 in Eastern Turkey, brought scientists together to document and study the past of a landscape about to be submerged. The archaeological teams at Keban each constituted separate groups united around what they were to do in the field. This article examines the manner in which members of these archaeological ‘communities of practice’ learned how to undertake Turkey’s first salvage excavations. If such communities can form the basis for both archaeological knowledge and learning, they can also become the source of exclusionary practices, historical erasures and epistemic injustices.
Études Arméniennes Contemporaines, 2016
Arapgir’s municipality has recently embarked on an ambitious project to restore its architectural... more Arapgir’s municipality has recently embarked on an ambitious project to restore its architectural heritage in an effort to become a tourist destination. This article examines the manner in which cultural heritage is produced in Arapgir and explains the presence and absence of its Armenian past. I describe the town’s Armenian cemetery in order to discuss how the past of a contested “other” is included and excluded, remembered and forgotten, exposed and erased today in Turkey.
Near Eastern Archaeology, 2013
Archaeologists often come across ancient human burials during excavations. Less often, however, d... more Archaeologists often come across ancient human burials during excavations. Less often, however, do human burials come across archaeological excavations. This happened though, at a site in southeastern Turkey a few years ago. When a funeral procession interrupted operations on the mound of Ziyaret Tepe, archaeologists confronted the dilemma of maintaining an excavation site as a scientific space in real-world contexts that are anything but sterile (void of contemporary meaning) or controlled (void of competing claims). The funeral event exposed the salience of the mound as both a sacred and scientific landmark, and brought to the fore numerous historical, political and cultural factors that rarely receive acknowledgement in the field or in publication. We outline these various influences on archaeological practice at Ziyaret Tepe, and use this unexpected funeral to advocate for a community archaeology that broadens the value of excavation by respecting a site’s valence as something other than a scientific space.
Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, 2012
Between 1968 and 1975, international and multidisciplinary rescue excavations were undertaken in ... more Between 1968 and 1975, international and multidisciplinary rescue excavations were undertaken in Eastern Turkey before the construction of the Keban Dam. This article focuses on three specific visual techniques (the artifact typology, the trench shot, and the gridded map) found in the site reports of this salvage project, in order to analyze the way Archaeology visually defines its object(s) of study. While scientific excavations make discoveries of the past visible, their representations in the discipline’s final publications simultaneously conceal the human agents responsible for them. In other words, as tools of visualization foreground archaeological knowledge, the conditions of its production are concurrently sidelined. By relegating the messy process of “digging” to the background, Archaeology’s techniques of visualization allow its practitioners to see the past, and all of its objects, from a distant present located “nowhere.”
Archaeological Review of Cambridge, 2011
It is important sometimes to break away from traditional methods of scientific and archaeological... more It is important sometimes to break away from traditional methods of scientific and archaeological writing to consider the broader social implications of our research activities. This paper is an attempt to do so by considering not the ancient subjects of our investigations, but rather the living participants of communities in which we labour. In so doing, many of the details of usual concern—site names, dates and periods, precise locations, artefacts, footnotes, and scholarly references—are not particularly important. Rather, what is of significance in considering the ethics (and beyond) of doing fieldwork are the relationships that we forge within the contexts of our scientific teams, local communities, and the broader public. This paper will focus on the second of these three contexts, namely the local community in which we work.
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Laurent Dissard
Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, 2021
The chapter begins with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inaugural speech at the Ilısu Da... more The chapter begins with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inaugural speech at the Ilısu Dam on May 19, 2020, during which he lists all of the supposed benefits of the controversial mega-infrastructure and proclaims that everything has been done to preserve the heritage site of Hasankeyf. It then relates some of the successes, but also the ultimate failure, of the anti-dam initiatives to protect Hasankeyf in order to explain its relationship to the broader Kurdish movement in Turkey. Finally, the chapter examines the perspective from the people in Hasankeyf themselves, many of whom perceived the construction of the Ilısu Dam, as well as the attempts to organize against it, both of which were intended to help them supposedly, as unwanted interventions into local affairs from the outside.
Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey: Environmental, Urban and Secular Politics, 2017
Dams were once the material manifestation of progress that best expressed the power of the nation... more Dams were once the material manifestation of progress that best expressed the power of the nation. Since 1923 Turkey has built more than 800 dams to regulate floods, provide water and produce electricity. These immobile and silent infrastructures have witnessed the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of the Turkish nation and the global skirmishes of the Cold War. In Eastern Turkey's Munzur Valley --a contested space populated by Dersim's Alevi Kurds-- dams have been challenged and sometimes successfully stopped. The "Campaign to Save Munzur," in the end, reveals a broader shift in Turkey from "Red" to "Green" political activism.
Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology: Political and Social Archaeology, 2012
Archaeology and the Politics of Vision in a Post-Modern Context, 2009
What do we mean by Archaeology and the Politics of Vision? The scientific discipline of archaeolo... more What do we mean by Archaeology and the Politics of Vision? The scientific discipline of archaeology gives us a way to understand and see the past in the present. It produces knowledge about ancient times and creates the material objects which stand for what we know about it. In this chapter, I will discuss two techniques (the site report and the museum) which facilitate the materialization of the past in order to reflect on the politics of archaeology in the context of a development and dam project in Southeastern Turkey. Museums and site reports, two specific practices which help us to visualize the past, both have effects on 1. Knowledge; they produce scientific facts about the past, and 2. Power; they “intervene” (Abu El-Haj 2001 following Hacking 1983) in the wider social and political realms. Focusing on both science and politics, the paper-at-hand will draw attention to the mechanisms behind the production of archaeology’s body of knowledge as well as the effects this body of knowledge and its material forms have in society (Abu El-Haj 2001: 13).
Book Reviews by Laurent Dissard
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2022
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Edited Volumes by Laurent Dissard
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Laurent Dissard
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Laurent Dissard
Book Reviews by Laurent Dissard