The practice of renaming places in Turkey: An anthropological perspective on spatio-temporal politics

Abstract

This thesis explores how the practice of renaming places in Turkey serves the discursive formation of the nation state and the national territorialization of space by creating the hegemonic spatio-temporal regime and by intervening into the collective memory. This is a brief attempt to rehistoricise the modernization experience in Turkey by reading through a particular governmentalization technique, i.e. the renaming of settlement and natural places. With the establishment of the Expert Commission on Name Changes under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior in 1957, the renaming practice was transformed into an entrenched bureaucratic project. This thesis explores the very formations, strategies, and performances of the Expert Commission. This study especially focuses on the renaming operations that were conducted by the Commission between 1957 and 1978. This thesis also inquires into the appropriation and contestation of the renaming policy “from below.” Based on a field work conducted in Diyarbakır and Batman, the study uncovers fragments of memory suppressed under the standardized-Turkified place names. By utilizing the tools of ethnography, the unwritten and negated histories of the replaced Kurdish and Armenian place names are explored.