Cultivating Temporal Subjectivities in Turkey
Panel 229, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 16 at 5:30 pm
Panel Description
"The 'present' is assumed to be a site that belongs only to a particular hegemonic class/group of individuals/cultures, whereas the marginalized cultures do aspire to belong to that present." So writes anthropologist Ratheesh Kumar, critiquing the many ways in which anthropologists have ethnographically crafted temporal subjectivities in the face of migration, displacement, extraction and labor. In line with this critique, in this panel, we complicate assumptions of paused, erased, and constructed subjectivities that freeze communities in particular moments in history, placing them eminently outside of a conjured present. Instead, we remain attuned to how communities juggle different temporalities arising from economic pressures, political and spatial violence, natural resource extraction, imposed movements, and grand development projects. Departing from Eurocentric approaches that attribute temporalities of the now outside of the realm of those deemed as the "marginalized," we emphasize how groups of people that do not enjoy affluence experience, negotiate, and work pasts, presents, and futures--each not necessarily understood as distinct entities.
We trace different modes in which temporal subjectivities are cultivated at manifold sites within Turkey, such as oil fields, metropolitan areas, and agricultural fields. We ask how Kurdish seasonal laborers, diverse members of transforming urban neighborhoods, Turkish lower-class pious youth, and Kurdish communities living in and around oil extraction zones in Turkey rearticulate, transform, and come to terms with the exclusions, pauses, and erasures anthropologists tend to assume. We illustrate the temporal subjectivities our interlocutors constantly shape, transform, and complicate in an effort to move beyond dualities of inclusion/exclusion, past/present, and hegemonic/marginalized. In doing so, we explore how communities creatively produce and navigate temporal subjectivities, rather than seeing communities as subject to static temporal belongings.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Farha Ghannam
-- Discussant
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Dr. Zeynep Oguz
-- Presenter
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Dr. Alize Arican
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Deniz Duruiz
-- Presenter
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Aydin Ozipek
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Aydin Ozipek
Based on two years of ethnographic engagement in a multi-sited research in Istanbul, this paper examines the Turkish government’s youth culturing program as a regime of temporal orientation. It explores how culture workers blended promises of upward class mobility and political certainty with notions of cultural authenticity and refinement in their attempts to appeal to lower-class young people in a time of political and economic upheaval. As a form of anticipatory politics that relies heavily on neo-Ottomanism, the government’s youth culturing program admonishes young people to see themselves as part of a collective, which is imagined to be a continuation of an idealized tradition. The appeal of this program comes from its promise of clarity and consistency in a world that is rapidly changing, and its governmental logic is to turn intense present uncertainty into a means of control. However, through a long-term ethnographic attention to intergenerational negotiations over personal and collective identity, authentic historical consciousness, traditional and youthful aesthetics, and political agency; this paper demonstrates that recruitment into such politics is a contingent and open-ended process, which often produces the conditions of its own transgression.
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Dr. Alize Arican
The last decade of city-making in Turkey has been marked by what is called urban transformation. Spearheaded by the incumbent Justice and Development Party, urban transformation became a term for state-led development projects that make room for luxury complexes for the affluent, oftentimes at the expense of minority groups. Tarlabasi urban transformation project, named Taksim 360, has been the first example of this in both Istanbul and Turkey. While it has been argued Taksim 360 is a local reflection of global trajectories of neoliberalization and displacement, remaining attentive to the unfolding of urban transformation reveals otherwise. I argue that delays mark the experience of urban transformation in Tarlabasi. Ongoing delays surrounding building projects in Tarlabasi create a temporal opening through which its remaining residents anticipate the future that awaits them. Led by these anticipations, I contend that Tarlabasi residents work delays: they produce networks of solidarity, develop quotidian forms of care, and share know-how to remain in the neighborhood in the future.
Building on 14 months of activist and ethnographic work with Tarlabasi residents, I demonstrate that delays produce the future as both a pragmatic and an ethical tool through which the implications of urban transformation can be recalibrated by communities. In that, I move away from teleological studies of urban transformation that study the future as an object regulated by urban policymakers and private companies.
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Deniz Duruiz
“Migrant seasonal agricultural work” is a form of labor that social scientists define categorically through two presumably conjunct temporalities, namely, the seasons of harvest and seasons of high demand for labor, and a spatial category of political economy, the so-called “regional inequalities”. However, this seemingly straightforward definition conceals much more complicated temporalities of the events of dispossession and violence in the past, collective efforts of subsistence in the present, and uncertain futures marked by precarious labor. In this paper, I will turn my attention to the cyclical migrant labor practice of over one million workers that move back and forth between their home towns in Northern Kurdistan and rural worksites in western Turkey in order to understand the erratic temporalities of movement and migration; the cyclicality of labor motivated more by the intertwined temporalities of the life events and life cycles of the members of the worker families motivating migrant labor rather than seasons of harvest; a past under constant traumatic erasure; displacement and (forced) migration as structurally recurring failures of subsistence (rather than displacement and resettlement as consecutive singular events that remained in the past); and a future constantly interrupted by death and hopes for a good life searched elsewhere. Exploring this labor practice through its multiple temporalities intertwined with dispossession, violence, life and death, I will ask: Could the embodied experience of work disclose the spatiotemporal dynamics of a labor practice otherwise reified and naturalized by the supply-demand logic of political economy?
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Dr. Zeynep Oguz
This paper examines how oil exploration and the prospect of future oil wealth have been operating in the colonial space of Turkey’s Kurdistan. By analyzing the uneven material and symbolic transformation of the region following the discovery of oil in 1946 in today’s Batman province along with contemporary contestations and stories around oil and oil futures in Batman, Siirt, and Diyarbakir’s oil geographies, I examine how different generations and actors in Kurdistan have appropriated or unsettled the modern, sovereign, prosperous, or developmental futures that oil exploration and extraction have generated in Turkey. While the Turkish state not only strengthened its claims of legitimacy and sovereignty in Kurdistan through the prospect of oil and geological surveys following World War II, oil also created material networks of connectivity and mediation that paradoxically fueled class-based-critiques of political economy and the idea of Kurdistan for a generation of Kurds. The infrastructures of oil that were originally intended for oil extraction worked to fuel a generation of politicized Kurds who actively challenged the Turkish state’s project of national sovereignty and colonialism. In the meantime, as I demonstrate, the extraction, transportation, and consumption of petroleum have continued to compose visible and invisible mechanisms of dispossession and violence in the region, often shadowed by the sovereign and prosperous futures that oil’s prospect generate. I conclude the paper by suggesting possible modes of action and imagination that challenge oil’s carbon-saturated futures.
