Transnational Technoscience and Political Power in Palestine, Turkey, and the Gulf
Panel VI-20, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Wednesday, October 7 at 01:30 pm
Panel Description
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has long argued that material and institutional technologies do not simply extend human societies' powers of control and production; they also shape the sociotechnical imaginations that mediate our relationship to our environment and facilitate the emergence of technopolitical formations to deal with specific issue areas. In recent years, climate change, wars, displacement, and the many existential threats such developments pose--from disease and resource depletion to violence--has prompted renewed interest among scholars of the Middle East in how human efforts at shaping and controlling the unpredictable through scientific and technological innovation have reconfigured their objects of concern, whether they be migrant population groups, natural resources and agriculture, bacteria, or large-scale geopolitical forces. The resulting scholarship has demonstrated surprising connections between the human and non-human, and has revealed technopolitical interdependencies that span the globe, linking Middle Eastern industries with Western political formations, and conversely, showing how political imaginaries have been shaped by their interaction with Middle East sites as "laboratories" of technoscientific development.
This panel brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on Palestine, the Gulf region, and Turkey, to investigate some of the technopolitical transformations that have shaped the present Middle East. Engaging economic, medical, anthropological, administrative and technological materials from the late-nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, it addresses questions such as: How has the hegemony of modern biomedicine reconfigured concepts of folk medicine in the Gulf? How did the introduction of modern techniques of national income accounting affect Jewish immigration quotas to mandate-era Palestine? How did the post-war dissemination of early computer science shape the Turkish state's response to the Cold War and the challenges it posed to the Kemalist paradigm of governance? How did the interaction of educational, agricultural and state actors--and their interaction spanning from California to Oman--enable state consolidation in the Gulf and Arizona? Taken together, these papers demonstrate that technologies are not simply tools with which humans intervene in their surroundings; they also shape how we conceptualize and interact with the world.
Turkey’s 1960 military coup d’état set in motion a wave of reform initiatives. Coming after a decade of rule by the populist Democrat Party, the coup was received by Kemalists in the army, courts, bureaucracy, and universities as an opportunity to reinvigorate Atatürk’s interwar ideal of a centralized and rationally organized state. But if Kemalism was to be reestablished on a more secure footing, its emphasis on national unity and corporatist solidarity had to be adapted to the new era of democracy and human rights and to an increasingly urbanized and complex society. When the army’s National Security Council established the State Planning Organization (DPT) and initiated the “Project for Researching the Organization of the Central Government” (MEHTAP) in September 1960, therefore, it prompted debates about how to reconcile technocratic control with democratic unpredictability, debates that were to continue well into the 1970s.
This paper investigates how a handful of particularly avant-garde thinkers sought to ride the post-1960 wave of reformism by promoting a techno-utopian solution to its dilemma of combining centralization with responsiveness to the demands of a rapidly changing society. Cybernetics, they argued, offered a paradigm of governance, adjudication, and administration unblemished by association with the ascendant ideologies of the Cold War, whether socialist or conservative, and constituted an approach to reform that was fully in keeping with Kemalist aspirations. Through an examination of the newspaper coverage, conference proceedings and other literature on cybernetic approaches to public administration, I show how they seized every opportunity to suggest that cybernetics combined dynamism with meta-stability, posthuman apoliticism with humanism, and deontology with sensitivity to the nuances of each particular case. Although it remained largely at the stage of fantasy, I argue, Turkish cybernetics became a Kemalism for the atomic age: a focal point around which state thinkers from several political camps found each other, facilitating the broader shift that occurred within the state during the 1970s away from the rights-based pluralism of the 1961 Constitution and towards an effort to depoliticize Turkish society.
Local texts on al-tibb al-shaabi, or folk medicine, craft an alternative narrative of the history of medicine in the Gulf under the development state. These texts address the period before the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century. In the Gulf region, shaabi has dramatically different cultural connotations than it does in other parts of the Arab world. Arabic-speaking nationals are in the minority and the working and lower classes are, in many cases, temporary and foreign. In this context, representations of al-tibb al-shaabi emerge out of ongoing politically and ideologically-charged efforts to rebrand local culture as national history.
The category of al-tibb al-shaabi as it is used to describe medical practices in this region generally includes cautery (al-kaiyy) and cupping (al-hijama; expanding blood vessels by using cups for suction on the skin), prescribing herbal medicines, setting broken bones, attending to women’s and children’s health and midwifery, and, finally, religious healing rituals. This presentation traces how such narratives frame certain health practices as indigenous to the region and the ethnically Arab population. In this conceptualization, al-tibb al-shaabi is an immutable cultural artifact as well as a foil to biomedicine as an alienating and overly institutionalized experience. As a form of medical nostalgia, al-tibb al-shaabi is in direct conversation with the medical infrastructure of the welfare state. At the same time, it offers an alternative science that relies primarily on Arab nativist, rather than biomedical, discourses.
“Palestine is a small country. Palestine is populated by Arabs.” With these two “stubborn facts,” the Austrian Zionist Nadja Stein opened her 1932 study on Zionism’s moral and material viability. To Stein, the issue came down to a single question. “Is there or is there not room in Palestine for Jewish settlement on an adequate scale if the native Arab population is not to be dispossessed of its land?” If there was not, Stein reasoned, the Zionists were “committing a wrong against others while appealing to the world to do justice to ourselves.” But by the same token, if there was enough room, then Zionism’s claim was unassailable.
This paper will explore a powerfully influential mode of political analysis in the interwar period that sublimated the question of Zionism’s virtue into a question of political economy, and the vehicle for that sublimation – the technopolitical object of “economic absorptive capacity.” It will historicize a debate that ran alongside the more well-known arguments for and against Zionism. It was a quieter but arguably more important debate over “data,” which, as Stein put it, “were necessarily complicated and technical.” Indeed, once the conversation had been moved onto this technical terrain, arguments for or against Zionism took the form of debates over the precise size of the territory, the proportion of cultivable acreage, the dynamic potential of technological change, and more. In other words, this paper will shine a light on an underappreciated yet critical front in the conflict between Arabs and Jews in interwar Palestine, one with contemporary resonances in Palestine/Israel and beyond.
