Pleas click here to participate via the Zoom Webinar platform.
This talk examines everyday life, memory, and governance in Dersim (Tunceli, Turkey), a mountainous enclave located between the southern tip of the Armenian highlands and the upper Mesopotamian steppes. Shaped by layered histories of violence and political transformation, the region offers a critical site for understanding how the past continues to structure the present—not only through memory, but through everyday practices, spatial arrangements, and forms of attention.
Focusing on state institutions, tourism, and daily encounters, the talk traces how different identities are differentially rendered visible. While Alevi identity is selectively incorporated and reframed as cultural heritage, Armenian presence, despite its deep historical roots, often appears indirectly through silence, omission, and hesitation.
Bringing together sites of representation and everyday interaction, the talk shows that governance in Dersim operates not only through force, but through the organization of perception and expression. In doing so, it offers an approach to the afterlives of violence as embedded in the textures of everyday life.
Speaker:
Burcu Bugu is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Promise Armenian Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UCLA. Her research examines state power and everyday life in contemporary Turkey through ethnographic fieldwork, with particular attention to questions of memory, place, and political subjectivity. She is currently developing a book manuscript based on her doctoral research, alongside an ongoing project on Alevized Armenians.
Sponsor(s): The Promise Armenian Institute, Center for Near Eastern Studies