Composing Histories, Telling Stories: Two Approaches of History and Memory on the World Wide Web (original) (raw)

"The first hundred years (1918-2018) are difficult": a reflection of the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre's past and a projection in its future

Evangelos Karamanes (ed.), Du terrain à l’archive : les archives de folklore et d’ethnologie en tant que pôles de recherche, d’éducation et de culture. Centre de Recherches du Folklore Hellénique de l’Académie d’Athènes 34, Athènes 2019, pp. 83-105.

Anniversary celebrations, individual or collective (birthdays, weddings, national festivals, founding acts, major events, etc.) at regular intervals, adapted to the subject of celebration, are an opportunity for an account and reflection as well as for a setting of new objectives. For human beings, in particular, the Jubilee of 49 years (silver, gold, diamond, etc.) is sufficient time for forging ties. For formal institutions and national events, the centenary, a period of one century, is the minimum time for their consolidation and development. In this sense, the title of our announcement concerns the period of one hundred years following the foundation of the Folklore Archives, to this today. So despite the fact that in the living, especially the traditional, culture every generation is nostalgic for the previous ones, we will try, identifying the difficulties encountered in the development of the Folklore Archives, subsequently Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (HFRC).

Individuals and Institutions in the Early History of Turkish Folklore, 1840-1950

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The Transfer of Tradition into the Contemporary World: Turkish Folk Stories

2018

Folk tales composed of poetry and prose, have succeeded to come until today by various narrators. These stories which especially contain heroism and love stories carry the accumulation of the Turkish society such as belief, experience, art and law. Many societies, including European countries are concerned about the growth of generations that are disconnected to their own traditions and cultures. To ease of these worries and take measure to these matters some international and national organizations, especially UNESCO; researchers and academicians carry out scientific studies. In this study, evaluations and suggestions were made on how the folk tales, which are the most important cultural elements of Turkish society and part of oral literature, can be transferred to the contemporary world. It is a matter of debate that what arrangements can be made in the transmission of these texts to younger generations; as they appeared in the pre-modern period and these texts sometimes contradict to the values of the contemporary world. In this study, document scanning and document analysis methods from the methods of qualitative research were utilized. In this direction, the relevant literature information has been compiled and Ali Püsküllüoğlu's book which is called Turkish Folk Tales has been examined.

Traces of Earlier Cultures in Anatolia and their Perception in Modern Turkey

The following paper will try to take a small step beyond the borders of classical archaeology and try to examine the phenomenon of cultural continuity from the antiquity into the modern times and its perception by the local population of Anatolia today. At this point it needs to be pointed out that this is not a part of a bigger project but a first attempt in order to gain an idea about the dimensions of cultural continuity and cultural similarity in the region as well as the self-identification of modern Anatolian population and their relationship with the pre-Turkish cultures of their homelands. First a set of examples attesting the influence of pre-Turkish societies on the current Anatolian culture will be introduced secondly the results of short interviews carried out with the public in four ancient sites will be presented and finally the paper will be concluded with a discussion of the current situation as well as an humble suggestion in order to improve the cultural consciousness in Turkey.

Gimatzidis, S. 2018. “Claiming the Past, Conquering the Future: Archaeological Narratives in Northern Greece and the Central Balkans” in Archaeology across Frontiers and Borderlands, edited by S. Gimatzidis, M. Pieniazek, and S. Mangaloglu-Votruba, 27–54. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.

Archaeology enjoys an excellent reputation in the social and political lives of the Balkans and Anatolia, where it has been perceived as an efficient tool for the manipulation of public opinion. Cultural heritage is usually taken as hard evidence for the continuity of the nations' identities and as a commodity that can bring additional revenues. Archaeological narratives are being co-authored by state authorities and the public. Information is being issued by the state and edited further according to the nation's needs as well as public desires and requests. Nationalism has dramatically shaped methods and approaches and raised dividing walls among regional archaeologies in the Balkans. The main nationalist device in Balkan archaeology has been ethnogenesis, which is the search for formations, origins and continuities of ethnic identity. A locally coined public archaeology has achieved multivocality by means of constant interaction between the state and the public. Archaeological information is released after having been filtered by the state, which welcomes feedback in order to adapt and further process its narrations. However, these have already been pre-defined within national antagonisms and conflicts. A translocal approach is suggested as a means to overcome archaeological regionalism and biases originating in national conflicts.

Shifting Discourses of Heritage and Identity in Turkey: Anatolianist Ideologies and Beyond. (2017) in "In Search of Pre-Classical Antiquity: Rediscovering Ancient Peoples in Mediterranean Europe (19th and 20th c.), ed. Antonino De Francesco. Brill: 166-181.

an excerpt from page 180-181... Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, a number of Anatolianisms, both religious and secular, have emerged and informed the development of official discourses and practices of identity. By utilizing the universal language of heritage and history, these discourses have perpetuated strong sentiments of territory, conquest and superiority of "Anatolian" cultural achievement. At the same time, they perpetuated ethnic and religious divisions within the nation-state society. Essentially, the very structure of heritage language seems to have supported emergence of new sites of conflict rather than sites of peace at many scales. At the national scale, selected sites are ratified to the status of heritage, whereas other significant sites become a subject of routine destruction for political or economic agendas. At the international scale, the "world heritage" discourse continues to emphasise heritage as a collection of material things that should be protected for their attestation to ethnic pride, celebration of elite aesthetic values and contribution to tourist economy, while certain monuments become a subject of violent attacks exactly due to their association with these values, embedded in colonialist agendas. I believe that there is an urgent need to expose where the concepts of "civilization" and "heritage" stand in relation to the political economy of heritage in our society and the World today.