Heritage Geopolitics: Hegemonic Meaning-Making, International Orders, and the Heritagisation of Traditional Archery in Turkey and Beyond

Abstract

This piece argues that to understand how cultural heritage functions as a form of power at the international level, it is essential to deconstruct the 'productive politics' that surround and shape the material and symbolic spatial formations of heritage and heritagisation. To this aim, by integrating critical accounts on heritage politics, geopolitics, and biopolitics, this piece deconstructs the dynamics of Turkey's heritagisation of traditional Turkish archery (TTA) in Turkey and beyond. We introduce heritage geopolitics as a novel analytical framework to unpack the role of these multiple intertwined scales of spaces in heritagisation and the 'productive politics' behind it. Heritage geopolitics, explained through the heritagisation of TTA, helps to illustrate how heritagisation becomes a multiscalar hegemonic process that shapes various features of the domestic and international orders, from the biopolitical to the geopolitical, attempting to challenge existing narratives of power and moral authority. We demonstrate that heritage geopolitics differs from other uses of heritage in world politics (such as cultural diplomacy, heritage diplomacy, or soft power) by foregrounding the domestic and embodied moral foundations of biopolitical and geopolitical imaginations embedded in the heritagisation processes.