Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Sustainable Futures for Rural Heritage: Opportunities and Threats in Türkiye and the Netherlands, Amsterdam, Hollanda, 17 Ekim - 17 Kasım 2025, ss.6-7, (Özet Bildiri)
Conservation in Türkiye maintains a top-down, pragmatic form, which is highly sensitive, if not subordinate, to domestic politics, the contingencies of heritage diplomacy, and above all, the demands of development capital. Against this backdrop, Büyüksaraç takes issue with the neoliberal development paradigm, examining its implications for rural communities’ relationships with heritage, based on her research in western Taurus landscapes, increasingly fractured by ecological crises and depopulation. She explores how heritage loss and the grief it begets are entwined with ecological fragility, a process that leads to small-scale initiatives aimed at engaging with and reclaiming local heritage. As much as they respond to environmental loss, highlighting the value of what remains, these are livelihood practices driven by the pursuit of economic gain. Engaging with heritage, thus, is a potential strategy for sustaining life amid rural decline across Anatolia, and particularly in the Taurus settlements.
The economic aspect of heritage practices foregrounds a key question of this presentation: How can we juxtapose local heritage engagements alongside developmentalist state and capitalist interests in heritage, to reveal their frictions? In addressing this question, Büyüksaraç turns to the complex relationship between heritage-based local livelihoods, on the one hand, and broader economic and power dynamics, on the other –a shift in her recent studies toward critically situating community-based heritage practices within not only capitalist logics but also broader structural inequalities. By avoiding romanticising initiatives that engage with heritage or their reduction to modes of commodification, this approach seeks to highlight the tensions, compromises, and creative adaptations that characterise heritage economies in rural contexts facing decline and dispossession.