Heritage Landscapes in the Margins of Europe: The Case of Köprülü Canyon National Park

Abstract

Heritage care has turned into a burden for modern polities as the consequence of a global conservation regime that is largely based on a Western ethos. As urging each and every nation-state to take responsibility for protecting the “world's cultural and natural heritage,” the international conventions often fail to address the idiosyncrasies of individual cases and disregard the needs of those whose lives are directly affected by decisions taken regarding this heritage. Once categorized as “belonging to humanity in its totality,” heritage becomes the purview of experts at the expense of local perspectives, who will, in turn, serve the national and international conservation institutions in “landscaping” heritage sites. A landscape conceptualized and arranged as “world heritage” reflects an outsider's view that obscures the social existence within that landscape. However, as Denis Cosgrove has argued, “landscape” is an ambiguous term in a quite insightful way. Largely informed by relevant debates in geography, archaeology, and heritage studies, this paper is engaged with the tension between the two implications of “landscape,” one as an ideological construct (e.g. sites listed as world heritage or as national heritage assets) and the other as an experiential domain fashioned by human and non-human agencies. In my presentation, I will focus on the Köprülü Canyon National Park in southwest Turkey to explore this tension and its manifestations in the context of heritage care and governance. In my larger project, I examine how a range of actors differentially engage in the ideological, material, and experiential production of the cultural and natural landscapes. Here I will primarily examine the state policies and practices aiming to establish land control in archaeological and natural heritage sites in Turkey, and analyze the resident communities’ responses to these interventions, their experiential relationships with their surroundings, and practical struggles around heritage conservation and management activities.