Building a past: Cultural heritage, imagining, and marketing memory in Adana

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of historical Adana Tepebağ houses in the imagination of social memory and cultural heritage by exploring how the houses are marketed as both emotional instruments and economic investments. It analyzes the functions of places and materiality by treating Tepebağ houses as material traces of the past where different narratives unfold. My research is based on interviews I conducted with the residents of Tepebağ neighborhood and with state officials in charge of the Culture Street Project in 2017. I pay special attention to the dynamic interrelation between personal and local narratives, and imagination and materiality. My thesis will contribute to the scholarship on history and place memory by showing how place memory functions as a destabilizing or supplementary tool against circulated narratives in social memory and historical accounts.