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Gendered Fortunes: Coffee Divinations in Contemporary Turkey
Abstract by Ms. Zeynep Korkman On Session 165  (Gendered Vices and Devices)

On Saturday, October 12 at 11:00 am

2013 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Divination from coffee grounds has long been part of women’s culture in Turkey, where women socialize around coffee cups in which they seek their fortunes. Over the last decade, coffee divination has been transformed into a commodified service, providing women with an opportunity to craft a livelihood from reading cups amidst limited employment chances, traditional gender roles, and a legal ban on commercial divination. Drawing on an extensive fieldwork, I analyze the precarious gendered fortunes emerging out of coffee cups in contemporary Turkey. Fortune-tellers were criminalized in early 20th century Turkey as part of an ambitious secularization project that outlawed various religious and spiritual practitioners, including breath healers, amulet writers, and sheikhs and disciples of Sufi orders. Turkish secularism prohibited fortune-tellers because they were held to embody a superstitious, backward, and traditional religious mentality, which was perceived as the primary obstacle against nationalization and modernization of the country. Despite criminalization, women have been reading fortunes, particularly coffee cups, in the privacy of the domestic sphere, sometimes for an income and more often for leisurely socialization. Recently, coffee divinations were pushed out to the public sphere as they were commodified in cafés. Informed by a fieldwork with fortune-tellers and their clients, I explore how divination employees and customers seek their gendered fortunes in coffee cups. By gendered fortunes, I refer both to the fortunes revealed in cups and to the livelihoods earned from reading cups. While commercial coffee divinations are feminized, devalued, and even criminalized, the commodification of cup readings provides precious, if also precarious, employment opportunities for women who read fortunes. This commodification also generates inequalities among women, who now gather together around the coffee cup as workers and consumers. Most curiously, commodified cup readings foster a novel form of intimacy that is freed from familial and communal pressures and democratized to make room for the articulation of marginalized gendered and sexual lives of those whose fortunes are revealed in coffee cups.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies