Entanglements: A New Materialist Approach to an Ethnographic Gallery in the Anatolian Village of Tahtakuşlar

Abstract

Tahtakuşlar is a village in South-Western Anatolia populated by a minority Alevi group called Tahtacı Turkmens. The Ethnographic Gallery there was founded by one of the residents to publicize and perpetuate the villagers’ socio-cultural heritage. The core collection of the gallery consists of typical ethnographic material which includes the founder’s family belongings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later additions, which are seemingly irrelevant to Tahtacı Turkmen identity, include disparate objects ranging from radios of the 1960s and 70s to stuffed animals, Shamanic objects from Native American tribes, and gifts from contemporary international visitors. We argue that a New Materialist engagement with this unusual collection reveals Tahtacı Turkmen identity as an ongoing production involving the entanglement of historical and contemporary discourses and the materiality of spaces and objects. We aim to show how both Tahtacı Turkmens and ethnographic collections are liberated from their dominant identifications and re-produced in unfamiliar ways in the Ethnographic Gallery.