Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic material collected in the Pergamon World Heritage Site, this paper conceptualizes the notion of world heritage as a practice of rooting into the earth that reflects both the extractivist ways to relate to the world as well as communities’ attempts to cultivate earthly belonging.

Paper long abstract:

This paper conceptualizes world heritage as a practice of rooting into earth that reflects both the multilayered violence that national and international heritage regimes impose, as well as communities attempts to undo given discursive frameworks. The notion of World Heritage promoted by UNESCO suggests a type of earthly belonging by turning selected locations into world property. This process includes multilayered processes of uprooting these locations from their existing local and national property regimes in order to manufacture a heritage site that supposedly belongs to everybody. In this sense, breaking the chain of inheritance the making of the world heritage embodies extractivist practices.

The heritage regimes that has shaped Pergamon has been formed at the intersection of German, Ottoman and Turkish cultural politics as well as the UNESCO conventions. Through archival and ethnographic material collected in Bergama (today’s Turkey) during 2023, the paper examines different local, national and international attempts of rooting into ancient history. Firstly, it examines how uprooting and rerooting of Pergamon has been discursively and materially constructed by multiple national and international heritage regimes. Secondly it analyzes how local, national and international communities’ attempt to claim Pergamon as a way to root into earth beyond the extractivist heritage regimes. It argues that the notion of world heritage reflects practices of rooting into the earth in extractivist terms while simultaneously generate communities seeking to cultivate earthly belonging by undoing the given frameworks of meaning and history making.