Activism, Perception, Memory: 12 Eylül Museum of Shame

The source of much of the key material analyzed in this book lies in the poetic descriptions of Istanbul’s terrors and transformations communicated by ex-militants in extensive interviews. Given that 1970s activism and the coup occurred decades ago, I played particular attention in interviews to questions about activists’ presentday remembering. Although heavily reliant upon those accounts, in this chapter I move back and forth between more and less subjective analytic discussion, seeking to distil from the experiences of individual partisans key social practices germane to understanding the city in those years. The theoretical and methodological perspective known as phenomenology illuminates