An ethnicist state sells its multicultural heritage: Marketization as a rupture in Turkish nationalism

This paper explores the relationship between nationalism and marketization by focusing on production of national pasts at cultural heritage sites. Scholars have already shown that production of national pasts is a negotiation process between different groups with different objectives. They have also pointed out that arenas of memory making are constantly in flux because paradigm shifts or other ruptures may create niches for new memories. Building on these literatures, I argue that the rupture created by neoliberal marketization generates a ground for agents of memory to re-engage in the making of national pasts. In other words, marketization opens up new possibilities for proponents of alternative constructions of past to use the validation of particularity, uniqueness, culture and aesthetic meaning in their political struggle for challenging institutionalized constructions. In the last decade increasing attention has been focused on national heritage sites by national governments and various other actors (i.e. local governments, firms, transnational groups, social movements, regional and global regulatory systems of trade) as cultural tourism was depicted as an important potential growth sector for many countries. Particularly in the developing world, with rising emphasis put on outward-oriented growth in the framework of development based on national comparative advantage, heritage tourism became a major source of revenue. In this framework, Turkey as a Muslim nation long ill at ease with its non-Turkish, non-Muslim history has now discovered Anatolia’s Christian heritage as a way of drawing visitors and of cultivating an image of the country as a cultural mosaic and arbiter of civilizations. In this regard, to illustrate my argument I analyze the marketization process of the Armenian Akhtamar Church in Turkey in the context of neo-liberal development strategies of cultural tourism.