The Turkish cemeteries for the unknown are graveyards where the state buries the bodies of those people who remain unidentified or unclaimed over a certain period of time. In practice, it is a burial site for the deaths of marginal people, namely homeless people, victims of honor crimes, disowned members of blood families, and more recently, unaccompanied Syrian refugees. There is also a political dimension to these cemeteries for the unknown: these cemeteries are full of the bodies of political detainees who were disappeared under police interrogations and state violence. Historically, the state has deemed many radical leftists and Kurdish guerrillas unidentified, denied families and communities these bodies, and buried them as anonymous corpses. Bringing together the stories of those people who died in the social margins and/or whose death were rendered marginal in Turkey, this paper examines a mortal topography of social margins. These margins may be ethnic, religious, sectarian, and economic in addition to gendered or sexed. A close focus on these mortal margins will allow me to discuss shifting, contesting, shattering, or emerging intimate alliances between the state, the family, religion, ethnicity, sex and gender. More explicitly, I will discuss the contours and limits of different sovereign and intimate claims over the body through the registers of ethnicity, economy, religion, and sex/gender.

Members of early modern Ottoman society observed a variety of death and burial rites. Practices of preparing and burying the body of the deceased in individual graves according to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions were the most common and visible ones among such rites. Even though there were variations between different confessional communities of the empire, as well as between different regions, what informed those practices were established beliefs about the afterlife that emphasized the need to preserve the integrity of the body (i.e., keeping the body intact) and individualization of the eternal resting place (e.g., digging individual graves, personalized tombstones according to age, gender, and profession). Yet these practices could be transgressed in certain exceptional cases. Different rules governed the death and (non-)burial of individuals that were deemed dangerous and disloyal—politically, religiously, or otherwise. The unruly, the dissident, and the heretical could be punished in violent forms of death, such as by hanging, poisoning, drowning, impalement, or dismemberment. Moreover, those mutilated bodies were subjected to divergent practices of disposal, such as separating their bodies from other dead bodies or denying them a marked individual grave altogether. Violating the integrity of the body and denying a grave to the deceased were then the cruelest forms of punishment imaginable, meant not only to terminate life, but also to destroy the possibility of resurrection. In this presentation, I will discuss such divergent practices of death and burial in the early modern Ottoman context with a view toward questioning what crimes warranted these practices and how political and religious governance extended over the bodies (and souls) of individuals not only during their lifetime but also in the afterlife. My goal is hence to use these divergent practices as an especially revealing window onto the limits of governance in early modern Ottoman society.

This paper is on politics of record production concerning the dead in the Ottoman Empire. From the seventeenth century on, the Ottoman administration developed new mechanisms for inventorying estates (namely properties, debts and credit as well as bequests) of wealthy men and women, including - but not only - office and contract holders. These inventories were prepared by a group of scribes, trained and appointed by the fiscal administration. The main aim of the scribes was to collect the debt of the deceased to the state as a result of their contracts and offices. After the news of the death of a wealthy person reached to the capital, a scribe was sent to the locality where the person died. He met with the local authorities, sealed the estate; appraised the value of the movable and immovable properties; collected information from the locals about the usufruct rights, boundaries and values; figured out debt and credits of the deceased, including the debt to the state; and organized public auctions to liquidate the estate, if necessary. All these activities required different techniques of reckoning and value assessment strategies and as well as intense negotiations with the heirs of the deceased, debtors and creditors, and local communities. Debtors and creditors could number hundreds sometimes thousands, depending on the debt-credit relations of the deceased. Since many of the wealthy men and women were involved in tax-farming contracts in this period, rural and urban communities might be debtors to the deceased as collectivities. Often, the standard parameters of the law of inheritance was not adequate to settle the estate and there was a vast room for negotiations how to settle and apportion the estate, restructure the debts and credits. In these postmortem settlements, different parties (including the state) developed different strategies to maximize their receivable or minimize their debts. In these post-mortem disputes, the scribes prepared documents, which were also considered legal inheritance records, reflecting these disputes and strategies. Different parties intended to be involved in the document production process, tried to make claims with the documents in their hands, and incorporate their voices in the text of the final probate inventories. The probate inventories, therefore were not solely lists of properties and liabilities; they were textual grounds for post-mortem contestation.

In situations where migratory processes have introduced spatial discontinuities between the country of birth and death, the act of burial serves as a means to assert belonging, attachment, and perhaps even loyalty to a particular group, nation, or place. It confers a sense of fixity to identities that are more fluid and ambivalent in life. This paper examines what happens to migrant bodies after they die. It argues that the governance of the dead is intimately tied to the construction of the nation and the enactment of sovereign power. Through a comparative study of the mortuary practices of Muslim minorities in Europe, it highlights the ways that death structures political membership and identity. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin and Istanbul, it shows how the corpse functions as a political object by structuring claims about citizenship and collective identity. By tracing the actors, networks, and institutions that determine the movement of dead bodies within and across international borders, it analyzes how relations between authority, territory, and populations are managed at a transnational level. It demonstrates that in contexts where the boundaries of the nation and its membership are contested, burial decisions are political decisions. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with bereaved families, Muslim undertakers, government officials, religious leaders, and representatives of funeral aid societies, it shows how decisions about where and how to be buried are linked to larger political struggles over the meaning of home and homeland. While burial in Europe offers a symbolically powerful means for migrants and their children to assert political membership and foster a sense of belonging, the widespread practice of posthumous repatriation to countries of origin illustrates the continued importance of transnational ties and serves as an indictment of an exclusionary socio-political order.

How do the deceased live on in the throats, ears, voices, and hands of Muslim deathworkers—those who wash, recite to, and shroud the dead? How are the touch and sounds provided by deathworkers believed to provide deceased individuals with a beautiful death? This paper ruminates on questions of tactility, sound, sounding, aurality, and care labors for the literal posthuman in contemporary Turkish cities, coasts, and seas. As an ethnomusicologist and a sound studies scholar, I bring an ear attuned to critical listening at the threshold of lives and afterlives to this panel on the regenerative forces of death and dying in the Middle East. Based on over sixteen months of fieldwork in Istanbul and along Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, this paper interrogates pivotal intersections of vocal recitation, touch, several forms of water, heat, sweat, soil, and earth as they manifest in Muslim funerary rituals. The key component from which this paper’s claims are generated is the training and certification I received by the Turkish state in 2016 to work as a gassale—one who washes and shrouds the (female) dead. As a deathworker, I have cleansed, purified (via giving abdest or wudu), recited over, sung to, and shrouded dozens of deceased individuals. I have laid infants, girls, and women who passed from all forms of illness or accident to rest with my body, ears, and voice. My ethnography includes my work with Sunni and Shia rituals conducted under the umbrella of the Turkish state, as well as laboring in liminal coastal regions to bring refugee dead out of the seas to lay them to rest in Turkish cemeteries. Drawing on these experiences and my broader ethnographic project, this talk demonstrates the crucial need for new theoretical frameworks to understand the intersection of dying and what I call posthumous aurality—the knowledge that the dead can hear, feel touch, smell, and taste. Rethinking normative assumptions and approaches to death and funerary rituals, what is at stake in this paper is a new methodology for listening beyond the end of life, and a theorization of how the deceased live on in the sense experiences of deathworkers.