Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture

The Politics of the Past in Turkey

Gönül Bozoğlu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429638237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture examines the politics of emotion in history museums, combining approaches and concerns from museum, heritage and memory studies, anthropology and studies of emotion. Exploring the meanings and politics of memory contests in Turkey, a site for complex negotiations of identity, the book asks what it means for museums to charge the past with political agendas through spectacular, emotive representations.

Providing an in-depth examination of emotional practice in two Turkish museums that present contrasting representations of the national past, the book analyses relationships between memory, governmentality, identity, and emotion. The museums discussed celebrate Ottoman and Early Republican pasts, linking to geo- and party politics, people's senses of who they are, popular memory culture, and competing national stories and identities vis-à-vis Europe and the wider world. Both museums use dramatic, emotive panoramas as key displays and the research at the heart of this book explores this seemingly anachronistic choice, and how it links with memory cultures to prompt visitors to engage imaginatively, socially, politically and morally with a particular version of the past.

Although the book focuses on museums in Turkey, it uses this as a platform to address broader questions about memory culture, emotion, and identity. As such, Museums and Memory Culture should be of great interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, heritage, culture, history, politics, anthropology, sociology, and the psychology of emotion.

1Introduction

I am watching visitors in the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul, which tells the story of how the Ottomans conquered Byzantine Constantinople (Figure 1.1). The panorama itself shows this in dramatic and illusionistic fashion: in front of the painting are replica fifteenth-century cannons and other weapons strewn about, and in the painting the assault on the Land Walls is ongoing: Greek fire seems to rain down over the visitors’ heads; Sultan Mehmet II ‘the Conqueror’ can be seen on his white horse, arm raised to give an order. There is some spectacular fighting to be seen in the foreground, and the noise of Ottoman military music can be heard over the din of the crowd. The walls are being breached, and the battle is hard. Visitors exclaim loudly, pointing at areas of the painting and identifying the figures they see. They know the stories. Some people appear to react emotionally, crying and gesturing. Two middle-aged women are talking loudly to each other: one exclaims ‘This is our history!’ The other responds, ‘They took our ancestors away from us!’

Figure 1.1A group of visitors viewing the panoramic image of Greek fire flying towards the Ottoman soldiers, Panorama 1453 Museum, Istanbul

At the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara I observe an older woman, visiting on her own. She begins to weep quietly in front of a display case. This contains some clothes once worn by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic. It is one of many showcasing his everyday possessions, reverentially arranged and spotlit. Alongside these are photographs of him and a life-sized, highly realistic mannequin of him as he was in the 1930s, wearing white-tie eveningwear and looking presidential. I move onto the panorama rooms. One of these shows the fighting at Gallipoli in 1915, and in the centre of the painting – also life-size – we see a younger Atatürk, as a military commander, surveying the battle from a trench (Figure 1.2). Groups of visitors look on raptly. Some point and talk in hushed tones about the different scenes. People pay special attention to the figure of Atatürk. One smartly dressed, middle-aged man is quiet, but obviously moved. He puts his hand on his heart and stands in contemplation for some time, before collecting himself and moving on to the next scene.

Figure 1.2A detail from the Çanakkale (Gallipoli campaign) panorama, Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara: Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk) the military commander surveys the battle from a trench. In the front are 3D elements representing his belongings

Both of these passages from field notes are about visitors’ encounters with history in two state museums in Turkey: the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul (P1453) and the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara (AWIM).¹ In both excerpts, people respond with visible high emotion to the displays. They seem to take very personally the pasts that they encounter there. This book explores why this is so. It is about what kinds of museums these are, and what the emotional charge of the histories they present is. It is also about the visitors, and what place the museums have in their lives and experiences, at personal and social levels. These questions must then be related to wider matters of the political roles of historical memory cultures in Turkey. By this I mean the sometimes long-standing and layered practices whereby certain pasts – in this case the Ottoman Age and the exploits of Atatürk – are brought into the present and imbued with meanings and affects. These are capable of pervading people’s lifeworlds, public space, media representation, and discourse; they are part of, and configure, political and social tensions and identity contests; and they relate at the highest scale to geopolitical concerns about the positioning of Turkey in the world. What we see in the field notes above are complex, intertextual encounters between visitors and history in the museums, in which the politics of memory, emotion, and identity intersect.

To understand these encounters, this book involves a suitably relational study. Informed by interests and approaches from memory studies, uses of the past, anthropology, museum studies, and cultural studies of emotion, among others, it sets the development and displays of the museums, their appeal to audiences, and the behaviour of visitors into the wider context of historical memory culture and its social and political meanings. I also intend this book to have general use, beyond its Turkish setting, as an example of how it is possible to study the interrelations between museums, memory cultures, identities, audiences, emotionality, governmentality, and politics.

AWIM and P1453 opened eight years apart, the former in 2002 and the latter in 2009, both at critical junctures in Turkish history, involving the ascendancy of conservative Islamism that signalled profound changes to politics and society. Why these museums? The pasts represented in each have symbolic value for different groups. The Conquest of Constantinople has become a key symbol of Ottoman achievement for conservative Islamists represented by the ruling administration. By contrast, the victories and civil reforms of Atatürk are emblems of a secular, westernized (or at least apparently westernized) Turkish identity dear to his followers, and traditionally including the military. Indeed, official representations often pit the histories of the Ottomans and Atatürk’s early Republic against one another competitively (Navaro-Yashin 2013; Tharoor 2017). As later chapters will clarify, when the woman in P1453 exclaims ‘They took our ancestors away from us!’ she is referring generally to the Republican overthrow of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1923 and the subsequent dominance of a secular elite that many conservative Islamists still see as a threat to their way of life and values. She feels deprived by this group notwithstanding the Islamization of Turkey in recent decades (Kaya 2015) under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, henceforth AKP). Elsewhere, the sadness expressed by some of the visitors I talked to at AWIM was about the erosion of Atatürk’s civil and political legacy, the denial of freedoms, and the invasion of the state by religion. As this shows, what makes these two museums such compelling sites of study today is their critical position at the intersection of memory cultures and social divisions in Turkey, including within the state and the self. This takes place in a long moment of seemingly intractable contrasts between groups who identify strongly with different pasts. These pasts co-exist in tension in public memory culture, and although we will see some complexity, intertextuality, and give-and-take in their relationship, they are also foundational to political and civil visions that are generally antagonistic to one another.

This is more significant than just internal wrangling over what should be the national past and the national identity. The museums to be studied here also reveal different conceptions about the meaning of Turkey and Turkishness vis-à-vis the wider world. Turkey is – and some argue has long been – a site of complex negotiations of identity because of its location on the edges of Europe and Asia and its history of in-betweenness and oscillation between heritages and cultures (Fisher-Onar et al. 2018). This has informed rich literatures in history, political science and, indeed, fiction (such as the novels of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, among others), which explores the cultural interplay and tensions relating to Turkey’s situation in the world (see, for example, İnalcık 2006; Keyman 2006; Kirisci 2017). At best, these explorations transcend the commonplace notion of Turkey as a simple connector or ‘bridge’ between East and West – a figure easy to associate rhetorically with the bridges that link Asia and Europe in Istanbul – in favour of more relational, complex, and nuanced understandings of the reciprocities and relationalities through which geopolitical and geocultural realities come to be.

Of course, while most of Turkey is in Asia, a small area of Turkey is in Europe (remembering that these entities are more geopolitical than geological). But more than that, Turkey’s very position on the margins of the historical constructs of Europe and Asia makes it a site of contestation and transactions of identity in which European heritage and culture figure, either as an ‘other’ against which Turkey should define itself, or as a source of emulation (or, more often than not, a paradoxical mixture of both). Turkey is, at the time of writing (early 2019), both a European Union (EU) candidate country – albeit a remarkably longstanding, and possibly disenchanted one – and a Middle-Eastern power player. A secular, modernized state translated by Atatürk and later republican regimes from twentieth-century European modernity, Turkey is now in the grip of Islamic cultural norms and the desires of dominant conservative-Islamist politicians – most notably president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – to remake it in an image of the Ottoman Age that is sometimes used as a rallying point against Europe, against westernized identities in Turkey, and sometimes against the ‘West’ more generally. This does not go unnoticed. In April 2018 the French President, Emmanuel Macron, pointed out the Islamist bearing and ‘anti-European’ sentiment of the Turkish administration, seeming to lament that ‘Erdoğan’s Turkey is not that of President Kemal [Atatürk]’ (Yinanç 2018). The two history museums discussed here are contrasting representations of the national past and competing propositions for its future. They are two responses to perennial questions: what (and where) is Turkey? What is it to be Turkish? What is its foundational past, and hence its future? In case study chapters I work through these questions with consideration of geopolitical interrelationships and contrasts to be found in memory practices, opening up windows into European space in particular, where contrasting and comparable museum politics can be found.

A second, connected, reason for studying these museums is because of their role as sites of powerful emotional encounters and behaviours. In each museum, certain kinds of emotional behaviour are prompted by well-established tropes, symbols, and stories that are hitched to contemporary social and party politics. As my field notes show, the spectacular museum displays are highly emotive, but they are not self-contained: many of the visitors know the stories and their protagonists; they respond to the iconography with practised familiarity and identifiable emotional routines. Each museum has its own kind of affective atmosphere – a term I adapt from one strand of the recent ‘turn to affect’, even though I will use it against its grain by mixing it with attention to affective practice (Wetherell 2012, Smith et al. 2018). Such atmospheres, I suggest, are made jointly by the emotive nature and prompts of the museums and their displays, and the ways in which encultured visitors use them to negotiate and articulate their positions, feelings, and enmities through reference to the past and to prevailing emotional regimes. That is not to say that the emotive provocations of the museums automatically compel all visitors to behave emotionally in a corresponding way. Notwithstanding the emotional behaviour they promote, through physical and intertextual means, the museums do not universally override all other responses, such as those that might be considered more ‘cognitive’ or ‘cerebral’ (if indeed any such distinction can be made – a question of long-standing and considerable debate in neuroscience (Pessoa 2009; Watson 2015, 283). As a case in point, part of my research involved visiting the museums with people who would never normally do so because of opposing political beliefs and historical attachments. Many of these people resisted both the pull of the affective atmosphere and the creep of ideology that they perceived within it. We will see that the encounters with the past that are staged in the museums are more complex, and that people’s inclinations, beliefs, and prior engagements with memory culture affect their emotional responses, and indeed their willingness and desire to engage emotionally at all.

This much might seem general, and hardly specific to Turkey. No doubt the phenomena addressed in this book may strike a chord with readers who are familiar with certain other museum, heritage, and memory cultures, particularly in countries with highly explicit political–ideological bearings in governmental uses of culture. This means that what follows should have value for scholarship more generally. However, there are also tighter, local histories and circumstances that inform the practice of museums and visitors that I explore. For example, I consider whether one of the reasons for the pitch and extent of emotional practice of historical memory – both by the museums and their visitors – is precisely because of the history of oscillation and tension between geocultural and geopolitical positions discussed above. What are the links between such positions and the intensity and charge of the emotional practice of the past in Turkey? In neither of the museums analysed is emotion ‘under the surface’, nor is it difficult to see in visitors’ behaviour; the emotional provocations are not subtly encoded or ‘banal’, to appropriate Michael Billig’s term for subtle, invisible, and everyday nationalist appeals (1995). The museums appear to be sites of and for emotion, unlike, for example, the art and archaeology museums that one can visit in Turkey. The latter are not to be understood as somehow emotionless, but what we see at P1453 and AWIM – both on the part of the museums and their visitors – are emotional displays of a different order.

P1453 and AWIM are the first examples of panoramic museums in Turkey. One of the key representational forms they deploy is large-scale panoramas. These are analogue and inspired by old-fashioned exhibitionary forms of illusionistic painting. In essence they are spectacular, immersive panoramic mural paintings and dioramas with dramatic audio tracks and some 3D elements, including replicas of objects, and, at AWIM, real ones too. They take visitors back – as it were – to particular moments in the past, especially to the heat of battle. The panoramas at P1453 and AWIM do not stage objects so much as scenarios. They offer a possibility for visitors to suspend disbelief in a curious way: to ‘look on’ the past but to be in it and inhabit it as well – or at least to feel almost as if one could. At the same time, the museums are social environments. Visitors interact, not just with the displays but with each other, and there is a sense of appropriate behaviour, even if each has its own repertoire: noisy and exclamatory in P1453, and mostly hushed and reverent at AWIM. In both museums emotion is very evident, not just in visitors’ displays of emotion but in the emotional provocations and references of the displays.

Emotion in the museums

I did not particularly set out to write about emotion in museums: in some ways it took me by surprise. I began this as a study of the politics of history in Turkey: the ways in which the past is bent to contemporary political purposes, and the selections and exclusions this involved. I was interested in how government administration politicians with conservative and Islamist tendencies used Ottoman history to support their own political and economic agendas; or how the figure of Atatürk, who died in 1938, continued to feature so heavily in public space. I wanted to see these phenomena relationally with museum representations, and to study the interplays between cultural, memory and party politics, so I identified museums strongly associated with each of these histories and with explicit, publicized links to party-political positions and actors. But upon visiting the museums, and seeing their displays and visitors, affect and emotion emerged as key forces, and not something that could be ignored.

After this, my sense of surprise diminished, and I began to become sensitized to the deeper-seated cultural and emotional practices to which the museums and many of their visitors relate. For example, I thought of my own childhood and schooling in Turkey, when I was encouraged to display emotion over the memory of Atatürk. I looked anew, and critically, at things that were ‘internalized as second nature’ (Bourdieu 1990, 56) – an exercise that has become de rigueur in ethnographies of the familiar, where researchers’ come to realize how their own lifeworlds are tied to the ‘objects’ of study. Alongside this, I became attentive to the emotional ‘set-up’ of public memory culture, even in its everyday, naturalized and unquestioned forms. This led me to a different kind investigation, which is into the relationships between memory practices inside and outside of the museum; how the museum might derive emotional power from long-standing social practices, value-laden symbols and people’s learned responses to particular pasts. This is not just some kind of Pavlovian response (as perhaps, to a degree, mine was as a child, because my ‘good’ behaviour was rewarded) but about how institutions and people might use and adapt established, recurring emotional practices to make new meanings and renegotiate identities and social positions. In my research, emotive uses of historical memory by the museums were tied to governmental projects. Meanwhile, the museums’ visitors often behaved in ways that seemed premeditated and important for their sense of themselves, and the act of situating themselves in relation to a symbolic past was a key part of this that could best be achieved in the museum, because of the authority and historical accuracy that they believed the museum had.

Divya Tolia-Kelly et al. talk of the ‘groundswell of research that attends to the value, power and politics of affect and emotion, and shapes heritage landscapes as experienced, as curated, as foundational to our relationship with the past’ (Tolia-Kelly et al. 2017, 1), and this book can be seen as part of that groundswell. Indeed, it was researched and written during a time of intense interest in the importance of affect and emotion in heritage studies. Smith et al. (2018) draw out a narrative here, in which heritage scholars after the millennium began to move beyond David Lowenthal’s view – in his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country – of heritage itself ‘as a particular form of engagement with the past, that was nostalgic, sentimental and nationalistic, which was antithetical to the more measured, systematic and evidential approach of history’ and therefore had dangerous political liabilities (Smith et al. 2018, 7). (Next to this we might consider also the influence of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition of 1983 in cautioning against sham histories loaded with people’s desires to remake the past.) Smith et al. (2018, 8) argue that such suspicion of emotional engagements with the past informed attempts by professionals to ‘neutralize’ political uses of heritage through a ‘flat affect of expert interpretation’ that obscured the affective qualities of heritage. Rather, the current waves of research into heritage and emotion take emotion seriously, not as an undesirable element, whether in the production or experience of heritage, but as an inevitable and foundational one. I share this approach and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The museums and their histories: The politics of Ottoman and republican pasts
• 3 Memory, emotion, politics: Understanding visitor encounters with history in the museums
• 4 Politics of display at the Panorama 1453 Museum
• 5 Visitor experience at the Panorama 1453 Museum
• 6 Politics of display at the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum
• 7 Visitor experience at the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum
• 8 Time machines and the politics of affective practice
• Appendix: Visitors surveyed at the Panorama 1453 Museum using a questionnaire
• References
• Index