Governance of or through culture?

Abstract

The notion of culture has loomed large in discourses and polemics regarding European integration and immigration in the European framework. While culture, as in fundamental cultural difference, is identified as the source of contemporary political quandaries, its incarnation as intercultural dialogue is conceived as their solution. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the arts settings of Berlin and Istanbul, this article elucidates how this type of "culture talk" intersects with recent cultural policy formations in the European Union and the national arenas of Germany and Turkey. Much of the political productivity of culture arises from a constant slippage between the different, often contradictory, meanings accorded to the culture-concept. This extension of the "rhetoric of culture" engenders a shift from a governance of culture to one through culture by relaying an array of pressing political concerns from the realm of social and economic policy to that of culture in the sense of artistic expression.

What Heritage Tells Us About the Turkish State and Turkish Society

“…Nation-building has been examined in the light of reinterpretations of the past and of local geography (Öktem 2003), of popular culture (Öztürkmen 1994, 1998, 2002), and more recently of phenomena being listed as intangible cultural heritage (Aykan, 2012a(Aykan, , 2012b(Aykan, , 2013. Other researchers have examined cultural policies (Karaca 2009), as well as "alternative" (Scalbert-Yücel 2009) and popular (Fliche 2007) heritage constructs and plural collective memories (Anastassiadou and Dumont 2003 inter alia). Finally, research has been carried out into the sudden increase in collective memory initiatives in Turkey (see for example Özyürek 2007 and the various publications by Leyla Neyzi).…”

Being sick of politics: The production of dengbêjî as Kurdish cultural heritage in contemporary Turkey

“…Such an understanding, in turn, allows for a continual slippage between cultural heritage understood as, on the one hand, marking the essence of the Kurdish nation and being therefore of an inherently political nature and, on the other hand, constituting a non-or prepolitical realm of folkloric engagement with ethnic traditions. Following Banu Karaca (2009), I suggest that it is precisely this slippage which lends the concept of cultural heritage its particular political productiveness and which may therefore account for the ways in which dengbêjî has become the central object of a number of heated debates and contestations. 3 By marshalling ethnographic material from my fieldwork with women dengbêjs in the region of Van who advocate dengbêjî as a form of cultural practice separate from politics, I do not mean to suggest that these women were in any way representative of all dengbêjs, of all Kurdish women in general or of all Kurdish cultural activists.…”

Ce que nous apprend le patrimoine de l’État et de la société turcs : vue d’ensemble sur ce numéro double

“…Des travaux portent sur la construction nationale à travers la réinterprétation du passé et de la géographie locale (Öktem 2003), de la culture populaire (Öztürkmen 1994, 1998, 2002) et, plus récemment, par le biais du classement sur la liste du patrimoine culturel immatériel (Aykan, 2012a(Aykan, , 2012b(Aykan, , 2013. D'autres s'intéressent aux politiques culturelles (Karaca 2009), aux constructions patrimoniales « alternatives » (Scalbert-Yücel 2009) et populaires (Fliche 2007) ainsi qu'aux mémoires plurielles (Anastassiadou et Dumont 2003 entre autres). Enfin, des recherches se centrent sur l'essor du travail de mémoire en Turquie (voir par exemple Özyürek 2007 et les différents travaux de Leyla Neyzi) 3 .…”