Presentations
28. 1. 2025

Seminar with Alice von Bieberstein: Sovereign accumulation and the recursiveness of dispossession in post-genocide Turkey

We are delighted to invite you to a Breakfast Seminar with Alice von Bieberstein on Tuesday, 4 February 2025.

The MEMPOP team and the Department of Mobility and Migration are pleased to host a breakfast seminar titled: ‘Sovereign accumulation and the recursiveness of dispossession in post-genocide Turkey’ by Alice von Bieberstein.

The presentation is based on Alice’s forthcoming book, Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey (University of Pennsylvania Press).


Details of the Event:

  • Date: 4 February 2025
  • Time: 9:00 – 10:30
  • Location: Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Praha 1 (5th floor) and on Teams (link HERE)

Abstract:

The Armenian genocide not only constituted a necropolitical project of deportation and mass murder, but it also served as a moment of primitive accumulation that laid the foundation for a post-imperial national economy and fundamentally altered class relations. This moment facilitated the elaboration of a racialized property regime built on the exclusion of non-Muslims.

Today, the reverberations of this property regime can be observed in the ways local actors, including municipalities, residents, treasure hunters, and descendants of survivors, engage with the land as a necro-geography filled with the ruinous remains of Armenian settlements. These dynamics are also evident in how individual objects and material assemblages become objects of desire for new projects of accumulation.

In her talk, Alice von Bieberstein will explore these scenes to illustrate the connections between genocidal violence, property, and accumulation.


About the Speaker:

Alice von Bieberstein is a Guest Professor at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie at Humboldt University Berlin. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Before joining Humboldt, she held positions at Cambridge, was an EURIAS Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. Her research focuses on the intersection of histories of political violence, biopolitics, and material culture, with particular attention to the legacies of the Armenian genocide.