ABSTRACT
This chapter forms a discussion around reflection and affect to highlight the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding tourism and change. Using anecdotes of making pekmez – a sticky grape molasses – the discussion brings into view a generational perspective on the potential loss, and the potential revitalisation through tourism, of particular cultural practices. The urging of certain cultural practices to be revitalised and sustained, both for and through tourism, is juxtaposed against hopes of becoming something other; these hopes are highly gendered and vary between different generations. While the heritagised nostalgia within tourism – which acts to tie women’s daily lives, bodies, and activities to a logic of sameness – does not go without some level of resistance, it can render somewhat invisible particular moral imperatives which have long acted to shape women’s lives. In this chapter, discussion of these conundrums and ambivalences highlights how sticky memories, hopes, and dreams work constantly to undermine and destabilise each other. While the younger people of Göreme grasp onto tourism’s potential to improve livelihoods and enable their hopes of becoming something other, older generations tend towards nostalgia, so that even for those who have become very wealthy from tourism, the extreme change in Göreme manifests as a spectre of dreams come true.
