.png)
Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities
Primary Theme: Environment and Environmental Inequality
Secondary Theme: Health
In the early 2000s, Turkey was considered a reliable NATO member, a budding market economy, a predominantly Muslim society with a functioning secular state, and a maturing liberal democracy with aspirations to become the next European Union (EU) member state. During this time, anthropological and ethnographic research on reconfigurations of polity, economy, society and culture in Turkey grew exponentially. Today, Turkey is in conflict with all of its neighbors and long-term partners in the West, whilst authoritarianism, neonationalism, and neoliberal destruction of economy, environment and cultural heritage are on the rise. This session is part of a double panel that aims at taking stock of latest ethnographic knowledge regarding Turkey. Soon after the opening of EU membership negotiations in 2005, Turkish President (then Prime Minister) Erdoğan began transitioning his country’s political infrastructures from a Western-style parliamentary democracy to presidential authoritarianism in the style of Putin’s Russia. Dubbed as the “New Turkey”, this process is marked by contradictory forces of wholesale privatization of state services and governmental functions, and recentralization of political power at the top, culminating in the disputed April 2017 referendum that granted President Erdoğan unprecedented presidential powers. Far from building respect for the rule of law, civil liberties, and minority rights–to which Turkey’s EU membership process served as both a catalyst and an anchor–successive Erdoğan governments, their elites and experts have been instrumental in materializing authoritarianism alla Turca, while dismantling the institutions of liberal democracy. Erdoğan-era policies triggered social unrest on a massive and even unprecedented scale. Collective expressions of popular dissent over the last decade culminated in numerous labor strikes, protests against anti-abortion measures, the Gezi revolts, the Academics For Peace petition contesting state violence in Kurdish regions of the country, and other small- or mid-size, local- or regional-level demonstrations with demands for environmental, economic and social justice. The state met this bottom-up resistance with violence, criminalization of dissent, and rising levels of incarceration by unconstitutional and/or extra-legal measures adopted against minorities and dissidents in the name of fighting “terror”. All of this escalated since the botched coup attempt of 15 July 2016 and the subsequent declaration of the state of emergency in the country. Today, Erdoğan’s “New Turkey” wages cross-border military interventions, promotes various forms of neo-conservatism and neonationalism, and manipulated land and resources with callous disregard of the people and their democratic needs. Papers in this session investigate the trickling down of policy changes in sectors such as healthcare and reproduction, environmental conservation, energy, and infrastructure development, while they interrogate the production of dissent and consent among activists, experts, bureaucrats and other members of the public. Collectively, they probe emergent forms of bureaucratic, biopolitical, ecological, energetic and infrastructural subjectivities in contemporary Turkey. Amidst Turkey’s present-day crises, this session is a timely intervention to take stock of cutting-edge ethnographic knowledge on the reconfigurations of culture, power, subjectivity, and social movements in that part of the world, with ramifications beyond.
Bilge Firat
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)
Hande Sarikuzu
Ph.D. candidate
Binghamton University
Christopher Dole
Professor of Anthropology
Amherst College
Hatice Erten
Ph.D. Candidate
Yale University
Seda Saluk
PhD Candidate
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Can Dalyan
Visiting Assistant Professor
Denison University
Caterina Scaramelli
Agrarian Studies Fellow
Yale University
Ekin Kurtic
Harvard University, Department of Anthropology
Zeynep Oguz
Doctoral Candidate
The Graduate Center CUNY