The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized throug... more The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa—how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things?
espanolEste articulo aborda criticamente textos teoricos recientes sobre el afecto y la agencia n... more espanolEste articulo aborda criticamente textos teoricos recientes sobre el afecto y la agencia no-humana, a traves del estudio de las energias emotivas emanadas de propiedades y objetos apropiados a miembros de la comunidad "enemiga" durante la guerra. El material etnografico proviene de un trabajo de campo de largo aliento en Chipre del Norte, centrado en como se siente vivir con los objetos y entre las ruinas dejadas por la otra comunidad, hoy desplazada. Estudio las relaciones de los chipriotas turcos con las casas, tierra y objetos que se apropiaron de los chipriotas griegos durante la guerra de 1974 y la subsecuente particion de Chipre. Mi material etnografico me ha llevado a reflexionar criticamente sobre la filosofia centrada en el objeto de la teoria del actor-red, y sobre el giro afectivo en las ciencias humanas siguiendo el trabajo de Gilles Deleuze. Con la metafora de la "arruinacion", estudio lo que sale mal en las declaraciones academicas acerca de ...
Imagine a public square in the center of a metropolis crowded with hundreds of policemen, in iden... more Imagine a public square in the center of a metropolis crowded with hundreds of policemen, in identical uniforms, chanting slogans to demand more “rights” from “the state” to use their authority over “the people.” Imagine this taking place in Taksim Square, Istanbul, a site often selected for public demonstrations in critique of the state. Taksim Square— emblematic site in urban public consciousness for the enactment, production, and regeneration of the political—was built around the memorial monument for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular/modernist founder of modern Turkey. Imagine a group of mothers and a father throwing themselves in front of the rushing cars in Taksim Square traffic, or another group sitting on the main street and waving their banners at hurried drivers blowing their horns. Picture the banners reading “Our children are dying on hunger strikes in prison.” Envision, then, pedestrians passing by, cursing and spitting at the demonstrating parents. Imagine hundreds of...
10 The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities Yael Navaro-Yashin In the 1980s a... more 10 The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities Yael Navaro-Yashin In the 1980s and 1990s, every issue has been politicised in the medium of consumable style, regardless of its ideological orientation: from antiracism, antisexism, and antihomophobia, to ...
Recent anthropological works on the aftermath of mass violence can be studied as having generated... more Recent anthropological works on the aftermath of mass violence can be studied as having generated a negative methodology. New work has addressed the gaps, voids, and hollows of knowledge production in and about sites of mass atrocity and is developing novel research practices within these schisms. While considering the (im)possibility of research as the condition of possibility (as well as the question) for anthropological (and historical) work on the long durée of mass violence, this review highlights some adverse ethnographic methods that have emerged (and have been conceptualized) in the interstices. A critical positionality vis-à-vis anthropology's positive outlook for evidentiary presences in the field has moved scholars of mass atrocity and its aftermath toward methods that would tarry in and through the negative.
The categories of “state” and “civil society” have too often been used as oppositional terms in t... more The categories of “state” and “civil society” have too often been used as oppositional terms in the social sciences and in public discourse. This article aims to problematize the concepts of “state” and “civil society” when perceived as separate and distinct entities in the discourses of social scientists as well as of members of contemporary social movements in Turkey. Rather than readily using state and society as analytical categories referring to essential domains of sociality, the purpose is to transform these very categories into objects of ethnographic study. There has been a proliferation of discourse on “the state” and “the civil society” in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. This article emerges out of an observation of the peculiar coalescence of social scientific and public usages of these terms in this period. It aims to radically relativize and to historically contextualize these terms through a close ethnographic study of the various political domains in which they have b...
The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized throug... more The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa—how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things?
espanolEste articulo aborda criticamente textos teoricos recientes sobre el afecto y la agencia n... more espanolEste articulo aborda criticamente textos teoricos recientes sobre el afecto y la agencia no-humana, a traves del estudio de las energias emotivas emanadas de propiedades y objetos apropiados a miembros de la comunidad "enemiga" durante la guerra. El material etnografico proviene de un trabajo de campo de largo aliento en Chipre del Norte, centrado en como se siente vivir con los objetos y entre las ruinas dejadas por la otra comunidad, hoy desplazada. Estudio las relaciones de los chipriotas turcos con las casas, tierra y objetos que se apropiaron de los chipriotas griegos durante la guerra de 1974 y la subsecuente particion de Chipre. Mi material etnografico me ha llevado a reflexionar criticamente sobre la filosofia centrada en el objeto de la teoria del actor-red, y sobre el giro afectivo en las ciencias humanas siguiendo el trabajo de Gilles Deleuze. Con la metafora de la "arruinacion", estudio lo que sale mal en las declaraciones academicas acerca de ...
Imagine a public square in the center of a metropolis crowded with hundreds of policemen, in iden... more Imagine a public square in the center of a metropolis crowded with hundreds of policemen, in identical uniforms, chanting slogans to demand more “rights” from “the state” to use their authority over “the people.” Imagine this taking place in Taksim Square, Istanbul, a site often selected for public demonstrations in critique of the state. Taksim Square— emblematic site in urban public consciousness for the enactment, production, and regeneration of the political—was built around the memorial monument for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular/modernist founder of modern Turkey. Imagine a group of mothers and a father throwing themselves in front of the rushing cars in Taksim Square traffic, or another group sitting on the main street and waving their banners at hurried drivers blowing their horns. Picture the banners reading “Our children are dying on hunger strikes in prison.” Envision, then, pedestrians passing by, cursing and spitting at the demonstrating parents. Imagine hundreds of...
10 The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities Yael Navaro-Yashin In the 1980s a... more 10 The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities Yael Navaro-Yashin In the 1980s and 1990s, every issue has been politicised in the medium of consumable style, regardless of its ideological orientation: from antiracism, antisexism, and antihomophobia, to ...
Recent anthropological works on the aftermath of mass violence can be studied as having generated... more Recent anthropological works on the aftermath of mass violence can be studied as having generated a negative methodology. New work has addressed the gaps, voids, and hollows of knowledge production in and about sites of mass atrocity and is developing novel research practices within these schisms. While considering the (im)possibility of research as the condition of possibility (as well as the question) for anthropological (and historical) work on the long durée of mass violence, this review highlights some adverse ethnographic methods that have emerged (and have been conceptualized) in the interstices. A critical positionality vis-à-vis anthropology's positive outlook for evidentiary presences in the field has moved scholars of mass atrocity and its aftermath toward methods that would tarry in and through the negative.
The categories of “state” and “civil society” have too often been used as oppositional terms in t... more The categories of “state” and “civil society” have too often been used as oppositional terms in the social sciences and in public discourse. This article aims to problematize the concepts of “state” and “civil society” when perceived as separate and distinct entities in the discourses of social scientists as well as of members of contemporary social movements in Turkey. Rather than readily using state and society as analytical categories referring to essential domains of sociality, the purpose is to transform these very categories into objects of ethnographic study. There has been a proliferation of discourse on “the state” and “the civil society” in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. This article emerges out of an observation of the peculiar coalescence of social scientific and public usages of these terms in this period. It aims to radically relativize and to historically contextualize these terms through a close ethnographic study of the various political domains in which they have b...
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space. Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durha... more Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space. Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. xix + 270 pp. Pb.: $24.95. ISBN: 978082235204.
Book Reviews Ⅲ 173 and self-su ciency in power, food, and other basic commodities. No organized n... more Book Reviews Ⅲ 173 and self-su ciency in power, food, and other basic commodities. No organized national force articulates Japan's emerging, alternative vision of organizing the political economy, on a collision course with current plans to extend globalization through free trade and deepen centralization through highly controversial constitutional reform. But concerning the political economy of sustainability in Japan and the rest of East Asia, we are hardly at the end of history.
A lthough affect has recently aroused anthropological interest, it still remains ethnographically... more A lthough affect has recently aroused anthropological interest, it still remains ethnographically underexplored. In The Make-Believe Space, Yael Navaro-Yashin addresses this gap, charting new theoretical ground in the discipline. She focuses on the legacy of the Cyprus conflict as written in the environment and psychic worlds of individuals living in northern Cyprus, which was established as a governmental entity separate from the Republic in the south (generally associated with Greek-Cypriots) after the war of 1974 yet internationally unrecognized. In so doing, she also steers clear of the ruses often associated with theoretical argumentation: attacking straw men, embracing the extreme of the argument, opting for a predictable middle, or leaving ethnography to trail behind the theory. Two relevant issues on which discussion seems to lapse into such argumentation spring to mind. One is the treatment of materiality in actornetwork theory, and the second is the condescension towards Foucault in post-Foucauldian treatments of subjectivity. Both of these questions, materiality and subjectivity, are discussed in depth throughout the book and presented in ways that open up rather than close down the space for analytical exploration. The concept of affect is brought to bear on these questions not as an answer that supersedes them, but as one that can explain those situations that ethnographic data throws open to complementary interpretation. A constant see-saw is the metaphor Navaro-Yashin uses to communicate the choices that theory proposes most of the time: this or that, or in this specific instance, interiority or exteriority in thinking about subjectivity. But rather than the well-known rejection of dualism and the "it's always more complicated" approach, she argues for a "both and," and shows how this is possible. The remarkable thing about this book is Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 3,
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