Fellow 2024-2025
Rabia Harmanşah is a cultural anthropologist specialising in political anthropology, ethno-religious conflict, memory and landscape studies and religion, particularly with regard to Southeastern Europe. Her research interests include ethnographic research on ethnoreligious groups in Turkey and Cyprus as well as NGO projects addressing the challenges of social conflict and cultural heritage.
Her project at LIAS sheds light on the increasing erosion of social plurality and shared memories in Turkey that have become inscribed in landscapes. At this intersection, she integrates insights from anthropology, history, geography, political science, memory, post-conflict, and landscape studies into a comprehensive study of landscape and memory, drawing on her analytical tool of “Memory Maps”.
Abstract
Mapping the ‘Lost’ Landscape: People, Power, and Belonging on the Island of Imbros in Turkey
This project studies those Orthodox Christians in Turkey who remained on the ‘wrong’ side of the shore after the ‘Treaty of Lausanne’ of 1923 population exchange, but who then faced discrimination, expulsion, being deprived of citizenship and properties, or forced emigration. Using a novel analytical tool, ‘Memory Maps’, the project prioritizes these marginalized experiences, claims their belonging to the land, and uncovers the layers of multiple loss from their landscape. It investigates the state’s efforts to deterritorialise memory and landscape to create a ‘national space’ while destabilising local communities’ strategies of resistance. Imbros Greeks of Turkey is an ideal case study to understand how the state dismantles indigenous practices of inhabiting landscape, and reconfigures it with administrative, military, and civic infrastructure.
Education
2014 PhD Cultural Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, USA
2010 Advanced East European Studies Certificate, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh
2006 MSc Middle East Studies, Institute of Social Sciences, METU Middle East Technical University, Çankaya/Ankara
2000 BSc Public Administration, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Hacettepe Universität, Ankara
Most Recent Academic Position
Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellow, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, Princeton
Most Recent Publications
“Conflict and the Museumification of Religious Sites: Mosque and Church in Divided Cyprus.” In Religion and Heritage: Scholarship and Practice in Contemporary Europe, edited by Todd H. Weir, Lieke Wijnia, Jacobine Gelderloos. London, Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2023.
“‘Fraternal’ Other: Negotiating Ethnic and Religious Identities at a Muslim Sacred Site in Northern Cyprus.” Nationalities Papers 50, no. 2 (2021): 334–52.
„Waiting within the Cyclicity of Time: On Bektashis and the Abolition of their Religious Orders“. In Waiting: On Temporality, Power, and Subjectivity, edited by Zerrin Özlem Biner and Özge Biner, 141–57. Istanbul: Iletişim Yayinlari, 2019.