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Sociopolitical Seasons of Kurdish Rural Labor Migration in Turkey
Abstract
“Migrant seasonal agricultural work” is a form of labor that social scientists define categorically through two presumably conjunct temporalities, namely, the seasons of harvest and seasons of high demand for labor, and a spatial category of political economy, the so-called “regional inequalities”. However, this seemingly straightforward definition conceals much more complicated temporalities of the events of dispossession and violence in the past, collective efforts of subsistence in the present, and uncertain futures marked by precarious labor. In this paper, I will turn my attention to the cyclical migrant labor practice of over one million workers that move back and forth between their home towns in Northern Kurdistan and rural worksites in western Turkey in order to understand the erratic temporalities of movement and migration; the cyclicality of labor motivated more by the intertwined temporalities of the life events and life cycles of the members of the worker families motivating migrant labor rather than seasons of harvest; a past under constant traumatic erasure; displacement and (forced) migration as structurally recurring failures of subsistence (rather than displacement and resettlement as consecutive singular events that remained in the past); and a future constantly interrupted by death and hopes for a good life searched elsewhere. Exploring this labor practice through its multiple temporalities intertwined with dispossession, violence, life and death, I will ask: Could the embodied experience of work disclose the spatiotemporal dynamics of a labor practice otherwise reified and naturalized by the supply-demand logic of political economy?
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Kurdistan
Sub Area
Ethnography