Violence of the Map, Silence of the People: Thematic Maps, Ethnography and the Visual Representations of Ethnic Homogeneity Geography and statistics became two related disciples that were essential to “scientific governance” in early nineteenth century Europe. Supplementing maps with statistical tables became the norm, inspiring visual representation of statistical data in entirely novel forms. Familiar as they may seem to the modern eye, all forms of data graphics such as bar and pie charts, histograms and line graphs were introduced during the first half of the nineteenth century. These new visual techniques enabled the production of highly differentiated thematic maps, or maps that display the occurrence and spatial distribution of phenomena ranging from climate zones to population characteristics. “Choropleths” which were maps divided into self-contained compartments, each of which was tinted with a different hue turned out to be extremely suitable for spatial representation of data external to the map in a direct, visually uncomplicated manner. Combined with the heightened interest on ethnography as a “human science,” this technique gave us the “ethnographic maps” we are most familiar with today. Ethnographic maps are frequently used in popular media as well as scholarly publications to illustrate ethnic groups presumably in situ, and often, to illustrate alternative political boundaries that would follow the “ethnic boundaries” on the map. Innocuous as it may sound, this is a practice with a long and violent history behind it, a history that is inextricably linked to the rise of the nation state. Ethnographic maps of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century constitute a significant case study for understanding the role cartography played in projecting a nation’s territoriality, and the inevitable violence that followed that process. This paper will review several of such maps against the background of diplomatic crises and subsequently wars that determined the shape of nation states that arose in the former Ottoman realms, and demonstrate how the Ottoman elites, who, unlike their Balkan counterparts had largely remained indifferent to the practice of ethnographic map making, adopted its main principles as they transformed into Turkish nationalists intent on carving out and preserving a Turkish nation state in Asia Minor.

Recent research suggests we cannot understand how people make sense of state-led nationalism without considering how people interpret nationalist values through interactions in, and representations of, local environments. Indeed, Istanbul’s changing urban environment played a role in local interpretations and critiques of the state nationalist project in the Republican era. Satirical journals of the 1930s and 1940s printed humorous cartoons and essays about a diversity of topics, from Turkish foreign policy to Istanbul’s changing urban landscape. They occupied a critical stance with regard to state propaganda, in part because of Istanbul’s position of alterity with regard to Ankara, the location of state power. This paper examines texts and images from the journal Akbaba as representations that contributed to the production of a distinctly Istanbulite urbanism, a particular urbanism that developed within the larger nationalist context. Images of urbanism portrayed Istanbul as a distinct locality, with particular landscapes, such as streetscapes in the modern urban center of Taksim, or houses of non-Muslim minorities on the island of Büyükada. These images also communicated changing cultural notions of who belonged/did not belong in Istanbul’s places (with drawings of men in modern hats and overcoats in Taksim, wealthy non-Muslim minority women riding ferries to Büyükada, or a headscarved rural migrant woman looking incongruous on a modern boulevard because she is riding in an automobile). Images and texts about urban life created particular meanings of whose bodies, dress, and behaviors were modern and urban; as changing social norms found validation in an Istanbulite urban image, these ideas reverberated alongside the values of Turkish nationalism circulating at the time. The cartoons and essays, however, betrayed a deep skepticism regarding the Turkish nationalist project by lampooning state and municipal efforts to control the city’s social complexity. Cartoonists drew humorous images of wealthy, modern districts contrasting with ugly urban poverty; modern urban planning projects failing to transform Ottoman landscapes; and anti-Semitic cartoons next to funny essays about the new habits of modern life. Nationalist issues of ethnicity, modernity, and secularism collide, on the page, with the themes of class, urban development, and demographic change, just as diverse people interacted in urban places and inhabited Istanbul’s distinct landscapes. This paper argues for considering the impact of urban phenomena on emerging notions of Turkish cultural, national identity in the Republican era, and views images of the city, in turn, as dialectically produced within the nationalist context.

Nationalism is, paraphrasing Swyngedouw, a “decidedly geographical project”. Not only does it work in and through a number of geographical scales and their re-articulation, it can easily turn into a panoptical project of surveillance in the Foucauldian sense that operates on a spatial vision of homogeneity, exclusion and opression, and that employs a series of interrelated strategies and techniques to reify this vision. The ’facts on the ground’, ‘cleansed’ territories, homogenized topographies, renamed villages, national monuments, as much as exclusionary citizenship policies and approaches to minorities render hegemonic a certain spatial and temporal order of the nation. This geography of the nation, however, consists of multiple layers of every-day life, institutional arrangements and practices of memory and forgetting, which are inherently contradictory and contested. Rather than creating a unified space and time of the nation, different modes of memory and resistance politics of subverted ethnic groups re-shape the national space as a template of continuous tension, challenge and reprisal. This paper aims to ‘spatialize’ the analysis of nationalism by considering its dark, yet constituent side of exclusion, homogenization and human suffering. Its empirical analysis will focus on the city and province of Urfa, a peripheral border region close to Syria since the establishment of the Turkish nation state. It will look at toponymic strategies, deployed at the local level and directly from the Republican center, in order to transform the cultural geography of Turkey. It will argue that until the 1950s the toponymical transformation of the province of Urfa emerges as that of a gradual cartographic codification, with relatively few instances of renaming especially on the level of sub-district centers, and an orthographic standardization, paralleling the administrative systematization of the province, and that it was only in the late 1960s that a great rupture occurred, transforming the cartographic representation of the former Ottoman province into that of the unified temporal vision of the nation-state.

In the wake of the Tanzimat reforms during the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman bureaucrats began to deploy a variety of data collection and classification technologies to enhance their control over the empire’s variegated territory, assets, and people. Censuses (1831) and income registers (1840 and 1844) tracked population distribution and resources; a new Land Code (1858) streamlined landownership patterns; and a new Citizenship Law (1869) fixed the parameters according to which people were officially considered to be Ottoman citizens. While the overall scope and shortfalls of these efforts have garnered some scholarly attention, the actual ways in which they were implemented, understood, or resisted in specific localities remain largely unexamined. Using the mid-nineteenth-century seaport of Izmir/Smyrna, this paper explores how the reformist state employed modern forms of cadastral mapping and land registry to claim exclusive control over the city’s physical terrain and the people who lived and invested in it. In particular, I focus on how Izmir’s material assets and property regime became a battleground through which Ottoman bureaucrats, diplomatic missions, and local property owners staked their claims and articulated their priorities. As a cosmopolitan seaport, Izmir had long been home to foreign nationals and protégés whose extraterritorial privileges were becoming increasingly disruptive for the centralizing Ottoman state, while also undermining the Empire’s position within an emerging international state system. By indexing each property to a specific taxpayer and making ownership contingent on Ottoman nationality, modern cadastration offered a critical means for bringing under Ottoman jurisdiction individuals who had eluded its control and imposing stricter boundaries on what had previously been a porous territorial regime. The struggles over Izmir’s cadastration, which are at the core of this paper, elucidate the incipient shift from the inherently more porous imperial territoriality to the more self-contained modern state territoriality—a period of radical transformations in Ottoman history. Moreover, they reveal, on the one hand, an empire that was far more dynamic and flexible, striving to affirm its place in an increasingly state centered international order, and, on the other, numerous local groups and actors who actively participated in and engaged with the changes affecting their world.