Between Memory and Forgetting and Purity and Danger: The Case of the Ulucanlar Prison Museum

Abstract

Using insights from the field of memory studies and Mary Douglas’s concepts of purity and danger, this chapter analyses these dynamics through a reading of the Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Ankara. This chapter argues that the Ulucanlar Prison Museum can be read as an attempt by the AKP to purify the memory of political dissidents originally deemed “dirty” and “dangerous” by the secularist Kemalist state. The prison served as a space for actively forgetting what society deemed dirty or dangerous, the museum for actively remembering what is socially desirable. As a hybrid of these contrasting institutions, the Ulucanlar Prison Museum reveals how shifting conceptions of what the Turkish state considers dirty or dangerous are reflected in the curation of the prison space, as well as who is remembered and who is forgotten in the contemporary social and political imaginaries of the AKP.