Exploring the representational Diaspora of the Places of the Southern Beyshehir Lake Basin

Place(s) of the Southern Beyshehir lake Basin

From my own experience and from the writings of others I have noted that the significance of places explodes with knowledge of the narratives, events and spatial definitions associated with, or definitive of a place. In preparation for the place-defined field work in the Southern Beyshehir Lake Basin Archaeological Research Project, I am conducting research into the diaspora of representations of and pertaining to the place(s) that are to be studied in the field. This is basically a preview and framing of place, an accumulation of associative knowledge to expand the study of places by reading geological, geographic, ecological and historical literatures, examining cartographies, visual and pictorial media, and any other representations that are available and legible to me.

I call it a diaspora of representations because of the remoteness with which I access the places that are depicted and discussed, and while engagement with this diaspora expands my conception of places it also opens and closes the possibilities of places by the definitions communicated to me, the distant interlocutor. The writings and pictures and maps struggle to define and hold places to incomplete and or idealized configurations that vie not only with each other, but with later iterations of ‘ground truth’ to be experienced when the places are visited. The representations are stuck at real or imagined moments in time, in the distant past, or at the time of publishing, but usually in a combination of the temporal frames of the subject of examination and that of the modes of the knowledge production particular to the representational time and place of the author.

It is my hope to get some sense of the dominant narrative threads that encompass representations of the places of the Southern Beyshehir Lake Basin, and the genealogies of knowledge transmission that promote them. Much of this will probably have to do with what communicates to my distance, over here in the USA, looking for books and papers and maps that I can get here in English language. These distances of geography and language will define the places that will have representations that reach me, and which representations will reach me. In the project of familiarizing myself with a regional place, and the places within it, my project is also to negotiate the synthesis and conflict of associative knowledge in the construction of place and it’s representational diaspora.

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