2013 | Heritage Turkey | 39

Culture as heritage and the culture of revolutions

Özge Dilaver | British Institute at Ankara

Turkey experienced some extraordinary events in June 2013.An estimated 2.5 million people joined mass protests thatstarted as a reaction to a project that would demolish GeziPark in Istanbul. The park, now acknowledged as historicallyimportant by the Committee for the Protection of Culturaland Natural Heritage, is among the few green public spacesleft in the city centre after half a century of industrialisationand immigration from rural Anatolia. The proposed projectinvolved building a shopping centre that would resemblebarracks that once stood on the site of the park and whichhad been the scene of a rebellion against the restoration ofthe constitutional system during the Ottoman period.

Hence, even the way the protests emerged evokedcomplex symbolisms and clashing functionalities, and, injust a few days, they expanded into different spheres andlocations attracting crowds without a central organisation butwith the facilitation of ideologically heterogeneous socialmovements and political organisations. The resulting varietyof flags and slogans at parks and squares across Turkeyindicated the multiplicity of issues that the June eventsrepresented. It appeared as if the common denominators ofthe demands were personal freedoms and rights, a better-working and more participative democracy, and respect foridentities, historical values and the environment.

Taking these recent and extraordinary events as itsreference point, this short article explores the conceptualanatomies of culture and heritage. More specifically, thearticle refers to old confusions about intangible culturalheritage and raises new questions regarding the materialculture of large-scale protests. The term ‘revolution’ is usedhere not to imply that the June events have had immediateand significant effects within formal political institutions.Rather, it refers to sudden and significant transformations inthe habits of thought, day-to-day actions and interactions ofprotestors in their own political spheres and the societalchanges resulting from these transformations.

The concept of cultural heritage and the conviction thatthe cultural property of all peoples must be protected as partof a world culture emerged due to the very visible destructionof monuments during conflicts (Brown 2005; Vecco 2010).This conviction was followed by an increasing appreciation ofthe immaterial elements of cultural accumulation, such as richfolkloric traditions, performative arts, stories, rituals andknowledge sets such as folk medicine (Kurin 2004), as alsobeing a part of world cultural heritage (Brown 2005); therewas a recognition that the value of monuments could not befully understood independently of broader historic andcultural contexts and an understanding that the identificationof cultural heritage could not be done based on objectivecriteria, as our ability to recognise aesthetic, historic andsocial values is likely to be culturally specific (Vecco 2010).

For sociologists of culture, who have long studied defini-tions, contents, origins and manifestations of culture, thesemultifaceted extensions from a visible core to elusive andexpansive conceptualisations are nothing new. Although astream of studies approach culture as an environment trans-formed by communities with the aim of survival, mostscholars include institutions as shared habits of thought,language and other symbol systems and networks of bothrelationship and knowledge while theorising about culture.Already, distinctions between tangible and intangible culturewhich are relatively straightforward, like, for instance, kilim,oya or türkü, become subjective in performance arts like theKaragöz shadow theatre or rituals like the Mevlevi Semaceremony, where material elements play functional andsymbolic roles of varying weights. The complexity involvedin such distinctions increases further if the aim is also tocapture symbolisms associated with kilim designs, and, evenfurther, if it is also aimed to protect the habits of thoughtthat enable Anatolian people to turn their observations intonew symbols that will fit into the long-standing traditions ofkilim making. Regarding the latter, it is well known, butoften overlooked, that culture does not consist of repetitionsof fixed traditions in a vacuum, but of daily sense-making,discoveries and inventions of living actors trying to makesense of how their realities are and should be.

Although, from the way culture is theorised in the socialsciences, all social constructions that shape the physical andsocial environment an individual is born into can beconsidered ‘cultural’ and, albeit metaphorically, inheritedfrom previous generations, it is not the aim of culturalheritage conventions to protect, or fix in time, all spheres ofhuman life. The UNESCO conventions on intangible culturalheritage have been prepared with specific manifestations oftraditional culture with exceptional social meanings andvalue in mind (Kurin 2004; Vecca 2010). The rapid acceler-ation of information moving between cultures in the so-called network society (Castells 2000) has created anxietiesabout protecting traditional and authentic cultural elements(Brown 2005) before they become extinct.

Beyond this generally retrospective and tradition-oriented perspective, UNESCO also recognises contem-porary products of human creativity as part of world culturewith its charter on digital heritage. Hence, on the one hand,information and communication technologies may threatenworld cultural heritage and, on the other, help its production.Elsewhere, others have discussed whether the materialculture of other primates, which can provide insights aboutour own cultural evolution, the culture of robots, as productsof human creativity, and cultural elements with significantexpected future value, such as settlements in space, shouldalso be protected with cultural heritage management plans(Spennemann 2007). In all these cases, the products ofcreativity are approached as valuable resources, the impor-tance of which can be temporarily overlooked.

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Additional UNESCO criteria include that intangiblecultural heritage must be consistent with human rights,mutual respect between communities and sustainability(Kurin 2004). Even though these additional criteria may aimsolely to avoid potential clashes between different policytools, in effect they reflect the prioritisation of not harmingthe current human condition over protecting long-standingtraditions. This preference is not insignificant becausecultural heritage identified through various decisions onwhat deserves to be protected, and from what, and with allits implications for cultural identities, intellectual propertyrights and power struggles, is ‘transformed into a highlypoliticized commodity’ (Brown 2005: 43).

At this point, I would like to address another manifes-tation of politicised human creativity: the material cultureproduced as part of major protests and civil resistance eventssuch as the June events in Turkey. Culture has been thefocus of recent social movements studies, diverging fromearlier work that regarded social movements as instances ofa universal pattern that mechanistically follow predestinedstages. Recent studies identify the active, social, strategicand creative agencies of those participating in themovements as the point of focus, instead of universal lawshappening to them. In this regard, culture is thought to affectvarious aspects of social movements including the choice ofstrategies used during protests, the construction of collectiveidentities and oppositions, and the way reality in and aroundthe movement is framed and made sense of. Culture alsoprovides a toolkit for the material culture of the movement,which includes art forms, reference points, memories,symbols and skill sets (Klatch 1994; Polletta 1997).

Using humour at every possible outlet, the June events inTurkey quickly accumulated cultural outputs from new songsto new versions of well-known türküs and from momentarystreet installations to rainbow-coloured stairs. From the earlydays of the protests onwards, the parks that were at the centreof the events hosted open forums on various matters andpublic workshops on arts, and they facilitated the donationand distribution of food, books and other goods in thetemporary arrangement of public spaces into free ‘super-markets’ and ‘libraries’. While the cultural outputs exploredand communicated the subject matter of the protests anddocumented the emerging histories of the events themselves,the forums and activities experimented with alternative waysof organising or culturing the society’s life functions.

I will now conclude by integrating the two issues that Ihave elaborated on – cultural heritage and the culture ofrevolutions – in the form of a question. I have attempted toshow that the rationale behind protecting intangible culturalheritage is to save rare and authentic outputs and accumula-tions of human creativity that comply with contemporaryethical standards but remain vulnerable to the conditions ofour times. I will now argue that the material culture of revolu-tions such as the June events fulfil similar criteria. What

makes these objects rare and original is that they are productsof specific times that actively and, at times, courageouslyquestion previously established and empowered settings.Although we may find continuities before and after large-scale protests, the actual occurrence of the events, with themobilisation of time, effort, thought and creativity of largenumbers of people, corresponds to important turning points inthis long story. Thus, the cultural objects of such revolutionsare most of all authentic representations of the worldviews,realisations, insights, discoveries and inventions of those whoare standing up, or even jumping up, for human rights. Whilethey may offer rich sources for better-negotiated futures, beingclosely connected to dynamic presents and elusive futures,and challenging the power imposed by formal institutions,they remain extremely vulnerable to disappearance. Itherefore conclude by raising the question as to whether thematerial culture outputs of revolutions aiming to protecthuman rights have a special place in our heritage, not asexceptional works of art but for what they come to mean.

ReferencesBrown, M.F. 2005: ‘Heritage trouble: recent work on the

protection of intangible cultural property’ InternationalJournal of Cultural Property 12: 40–61

Castells, M. 2000: ‘Materials for an exploratory theory of thenetwork society’ British Journal of Sociology 51.1: 5–24

Klatch, R. 1994: ‘The counterculture, the New Left and theNew Right’ Qualitative Sociology 17.3: 199–214

Kurin, R. 2004: ‘Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage inthe 2003 UNESCO Convention: a critical appraisal’Museum International 56.1–2: 66–77

Polletta, F. 1997: ‘Culture and its discontents: recenttheorizing on the cultural dimensions of protest’ Socio-logical Inquiry 67.4: 431–50

Spennemann, D.H.R. 2007: ‘Of great apes and robots:considering the future(s) of cultural heritage’ Futures39: 861–77

Vecco, M. 2010: ‘A definition of cultural heritage: from thetangible to the intangible’ Journal of Cultural Heritage11: 321–24