Following a series of devastating earthquakes that struck western Turkey in 1999, psychologists and psychiatrists from across the country rallied to help survivors, as a vast network of international humanitarian mental health professionals descended on the region. Through this multifaceted response, psychiatry and psychiatric discourse entered into the everyday life of communities to an unprecedented extent—giving new meaning to individual suffering, taking part in familial networks of care, and emerging as a resource for both expressing distress and acquiring financial compensation. In this paper, I track the emergence of a series of specific psychiatric interventions as they were developed in and proliferated outward from the earthquakes’ devastation. In particular, this paper explores the divergent ways that these mental health professionals conceptualized sites of psychological damage, their struggle to formulate effective interventions capable of being administered across large populations, the forms of expertise they relied on to imagine the “social” as a site of intervention, and how each of these articulated within the massive international humanitarian psychiatric response that the earthquakes elicited. This analysis builds on recent scholarship in anthropology and science studies that explores the ways that large-scale disasters offer a unique window onto the political-scientific management of life and risk (Petryna 2002) and the ways that medical humanitarian responses to disasters serve to both globalize psychiatric categories of Western origin (Breslau 2000; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Watters 2010) and extend the legitimacy of new forms of globally organized power and transnational regimes of humanitarian governance (Pandolfi 2003; see also Feldman and Ticktin 2010; Barnett 2011; Bornstein and Redfield 2011).

Turkey’s application to enter the EU has required the country to learn new things about itself. It is required to learn them in specific frameworks, using specific concepts and methodologies, and these are subsumed in EU entry negotiations under the rubric of statistics. Having collected these statistics, it is required to share them with its population and the EU, at specific timed intervals. And—crucially—it continually reforms its institutions and practices in light of the new statistical knowledge. This paper argues that the relationship between statistics and social forms is not solely one of “description.” To the extent that statistics do not merely study or represent the objects they are purported to be about, but are intimately involved in intervening in/on those objects (e.g. social, economic, or ecological processes) and in fact in remaking them through ‘reform’ and/or ‘development,’ they have a performative nature. In this sense statistics are less a methodology and more a technology, a technology of governance. The paper draws on fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, technicians and agricultural experts working on the design and implementation of EU-inspired reforms to develop new apparatuses for the collection of data on agriculture in the country. What happens when a country changes the way it collects and uses statistics, as Turkey currently is? What objects are created through this statistical knowledge, how are they created, and to what purposes? How are such objects affected by the histories of the knowledges in relation to which they emerge? In other words, how ought we understand the ‘historicity’ of these objects, and how it relates to other contexts’ norms and histories. How do these changes in the area of statistics relate to issues of commensurability? This paper sets out from the proposition that through the study of changes in Turkey’s collection and use of agricultural statistics we are in a position to examine crucial processes through which different collectivities—with varied historical and political genealogies—are made commensurable.

This paper situates human rights training programs for state officials and government workers in Turkey within the larger framework of “good governance,” which underlies the public administration reforms undertaken for the country’s ongoing accession to the European Union (EU). A period of the reorganization of the governmental field through capacity-building and professionalization, this “harmonization process” is marked by a corpus of terms related to professionalism – such as expertise and rationalization – becoming increasingly relevant for public administration. Through socialization processes (such as human rights trainings) security forces, members of the judiciary, healthcare providers and other state officials learn to become experts by acquiring specific repertoires and occupational habits (Brenneis 1994, Carr 2010). The explicit purpose of these efforts is to transform public administration from a realm that produces hierarchy to a systematic apparatus that produces service, by installing a specific model through which the state officials should relate to citizens, to their profession, and to each other. This model requires that the state officials cooperate with each other towards producing service, and that they relate to citizens not as paternalistic supervisors of pastoral care, but as professional, "indifferent" service providers (Herzfeld 1992). Although this form of relationship is delineated as one that should be devoid of emotions and politics, human rights training programs end up promoting individual initiative, personal discretion, conscience and care in order to address the difficulties that are broached by the state functionaries, emanating from their everyday governmental practices.