Landscapes of Heritage, Affect, and Loss

Climate change is a major destabilizing event of the Anthropocene but cannot be isolated as a stand-alone problem. The current ecological crises, the economic inequalities created by extractive capitalism, and climate change are deeply interrelated problems. In this chapter, we use the implications of an ethnographic study from central Türkiye in order to think about the entanglement of climate change, sustainability, economics, sense of place, affect, and heritage. This particular rural community has been experiencing economic migration, abandonment of traditional farming practices, and environmental change in the form of drought. The villagers were introduced to a sustainable development program, which was implemented to create an environment-friendly rural economy that would reverse economic migration. The program was not sustainable. This case study offers an object lesson about how sustainability and mitigation strategies should develop from a deeper understanding of local knowledge and dynamics. The long-time ethnographic case study also illustrates how the villagers deal with the changing conditions of their life worlds. The villagers engage in heritage-making as an affective response to change. Heritage-making becomes an active, responsive field in which conscious lived experiences, bodily affects, longings, conversations, and reflections emerge.