Politics and Anti-Politics of Care in Turkey
Panel III-02, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, October 6 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
How can scholars of the Middle East make sense of the intertwined relationship between intimacy and violence as manifested in different technologies of care, policing, surveillance, and communal politics? This panel explores emergent geographies of care in Turkey—a topic rarely explored in the international scholarship on care, and less so in the literature on the Middle East, which highlights charitable, benevolent, and/or religious aspects of care practices without much reference to broader political and economic dynamics in the region.
Like many countries of the Global South, over the past two decades, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, AKP) governments in Turkey have increased the share of spending on social services, expanded the coverage of existing ones, and introduced new social programs for especially the poor, women, elderly, and children. While this expansion has improved the living conditions of the most precarious segments of the population to an extent, it has, at the same time, rendered the domain of social care a battleground. Multiple actors, including state institutions and non-governmental organizations that operate in the field of care and pursue contesting political agendas, projects, and interests, have competed on moral, politico-economic, and legal-institutional grounds.
Addressing these contentious aspects of social care in Turkey, the panel brings together five works, each based on ethnographic research in a different setting ranging from public health clinics, police stations, and urban construction sites in Turkey’s metropolises to microcredit offices for coal-mining communities in peripheral towns to state-led family support centers and Kurdish movement’s women’s initiatives in country’s Kurdish southeast. Navigating these diverse settings and perspectives, the panel explores the entanglements of Turkey’s pressing political issues (from ethno-political conflict to contestations over gender norms to rising authoritarianism and securitization to neoliberal urban gentrification and credit schemes) with emergent care practices of governmental and non-governmental actors. Overall, the panel will discuss the potential of social care practices, both for anti-politics and depoliticization, for the benefit of the status quo and for emergent political practices and subjectivities of resistance in the Middle East.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Hayal Akarsu
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Dr. Hiba Bou Akar
-- Discussant
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Dr. Cagri Yoltar
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Seda Saluk
-- Presenter
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Dr. Alize Arican
-- Presenter
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Ms. Ferda Nur Demirci
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Hayal Akarsu
The Turkish National Police underwent intensive reforms during the 2000s, which generated a range of social projects implemented across different police units with the support of other governmental branches focusing on social policies, welfare and social security. These projects helped police experiment with new, mostly sensorial, policing methods in addition to teaching people how to see and feel like the police. People became subjects of proactive policing projects, and their homes became laboratories of emergent state care. Policing through social projects often felt like ‘suffocating care,’ especially for regular recipients of social assistance. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research between 2015-2017 in different social settings, from police stations to home visits, the talk analyzes the convergence of a service-oriented bureaucratic ethos with a populist appeal to serve ‘the people’. I take ‘suffocating care’ as an analytic to explore how populist authoritarianism makes inroad to everyday life.
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Dr. Seda Saluk
Public health clinics have long been important sites for data collection for the oversight of individuals and populations in Turkey. While the earlier periods relied on decentralized, paper-based mechanisms, the 2000s have witnessed a mushrooming of centralized, digital health technologies, mainly to track reproductive behaviors. Based on two years of ethnographic research in 2014-2017, this paper analyzes the changing regimes of care in state-run medical spaces with the introduction of new technologies. Taking its cue from analogies coming from nurse narratives, such as “acting like police detectives,” the paper argues that these regimes are always already entangled with both intimacy and violence, especially for marginalized communities.
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Dr. Alize Arican
In 2006, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party-led government designated Istanbul’s Tarlabasi neighborhood—popularly known and stigmatized as a hub of informality, illicit activity, immigrants, and minorities—as an urban transformation zone. Expropriations of property, evictions, demolitions, and the construction of Taksim 360, a luxury business and residential complex, followed soon after. Since then, Tarlabasi has been undergoing delayed and extended urban transformation. Scholars and activists have often interpreted the beginnings of Taksim 360 as marking the failure of urban resistance in Tarlabasi. But for many remaining Tarlabasi residents, the extended process is instead an opening to cultivate future-oriented politics through everyday practices of care—which I call “figuring it out.”
Accompanying my interlocutors to on streets, in living rooms, Ottoman archives, hospitals, and informal clinics, I show that residents temporalize care by “figuring it out.” Instead of caring to get by in the present, they orchestrate multiple temporalities of pasts and presents to work towards an urban future, shaping the outcomes of urban transformation. And approaching practices of care through a temporal lens, I contend, elucidates new understandings of care, somewhere between altruism and pragmatism, with the potential to reconfigure urban politics.
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Dr. Cagri Yoltar
In 2015 and 2016, the Turkish state organized a comprehensive military offensive against the strongholds of the Kurdish movement in Southeastern Turkey in a renewed attempt to establish its authority in the region. The military offensive was followed by an operation against Kurdish municipalities and a Turkish government-led social mobilization campaign to win the locals over. More specifically, Turkish authorities have expelled democratically elected Kurdish mayors and closed down flagship social and economic organizations affiliated with Kurdish municipalities (most notably women’s solidarity centers and welfare initiatives) and sought to replace them with central state-sponsored social care and socio-economic empowerment projects, such as Family Support Centers. This paper will focus on social care as a site of contestation between the Turkish state and Kurdish movement – a contestation that centers around the notion of family. I will discuss care practices of both the Turkish state’s Family Support Centers and Kurdish women’s initiatives which have flourished in the region over the past decade. The Turkish state’s Family Support Centers embrace a family-centered approach to women’s empowerment and seek to incorporate Kurdish women into a neoliberal economy and national citizenry as primary caregivers. Kurdish women’s solidarity initiatives, however, consider family as the primary site of the reproduction of patriarchal norms and Turkish state nationalism, and they prioritize care practices that promote women’s liberation and solidarity. Based on two years of ethnographic research in three Kurdish cities, I will provide a comparative analysis of discourses and practices of these rival care initiatives to demonstrate how the contention between the Turkish state and Kurdish movement over political and cultural rights, socio-economic justice, and liberation and autonomy manifest itself in this “contest of care.”
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Ms. Ferda Nur Demirci
Since the second half of the 2000s, the Turkish state has actively participated to a nation-scale policy of financial development and financial inclusion. The introduction of “credit for need” in 2006 was the most critical threshold; as a result of extremely low interest rates and the easy procedures, this local type of consumer credit has been the main tool for expanding financial inclusion policy to working class-masses in Turkey. Beyond its fiscal impacts in terms of the overgrowing household indebtedness, this new credit regime hinges on the dissemination of new regimes of solidarity and care through the provision of expanded access to the credit markets in the condition of being a regular wageworker. This financial inclusion process is also guided and morally supported by the Directorate of Religious Affairs in reference to Islamic concepts of “zaruret” (necessity) and “ihtiyac” (need). The moral re-elaboration of finance by DRA has mostly taken the shape of reinterpreting and undermining the Islamic ban on interest in exchange for a new conservative morality that hinges on the prosperity of nuclear families and the responsibility of male breadwinners to provide familial self-sustenance.
My presentation will trace the ramifications of this new moral-economic analytic among the coal-miner community in Soma, a former agricultural town in the West Aegean region of Turkey that turned to a miner town just in two decades and which has become one of the most successful regions in terms of ongoing financial inclusion policy. I will discuss how new popular masculinity norms, which are informed by the conservative reinterpretation of need in today’s Turkey, indispensably interlock shifting moral and economic concerns and aspirations of Soma’s miners, as well as providing an interface to discredit former informal debt relationships in the region. I will particularly focus on how access to “credit for need” suggests a new analytic of “proximity” to evaluate the limits of intimate family and whom to rely on, and to whom to show solidarity and care. In this sense, this paper discusses the shifts within “moral regimes of care” in Soma by focusing on how they are re-delineated at the intersection of the wage-labor regime, debt, masculinity and familial intimacy.
