Suchergebnisse

Personal States: Making Connections between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey Catherine Alexander (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

This article argues that the kinship relations of the national 'family' are not simply a direct appropriation of 'natural' kinship relations but involve a transformation of those relations that also takes into account some gendered image of the land as a member of that family. Using comparative research in the Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus, I propose that what is centrally important in images of national kinship is the common substance that land and people are imagined to share. Moreover, this common substance is regarded as so 'natural' that it constitutes an important axiom that is central to understanding the logic of nationalisms.

"Post-Ottoman Coexistence", interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched. ; Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ; "Post-Ottoman Coexistence", interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched. ; Mode of access: Internet.

What is de facto about the de facto state? In Sovereignty Suspended, this question guides Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay through a journey into de facto state-building, or the process of constructing an entity that looks like a state and acts like a state but that much of the world says does not or should not exist. In international law, the de facto state is one that exists in reality but remains unrecognized by other states. Nevertheless, such entities provide health care and social security, issue identity cards and passports, and interact with international aid donors. De facto states hold elections, conduct censuses, control borders, and enact fiscal policies. Indeed, most maintain representative offices in sovereign states and are able to unofficially communicate with officials. Bryant and Hatay develop the concept of the "aporetic state" to describe such entities, which project stateness and so seem real, even as nonrecognition renders them unrealizable. Sovereignty Suspended is based on more than two decades of ethnographic and archival research in one so-called aporetic state, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). It traces the process by which the island's "north" began to emerge as a tangible, separate, if unrecognized space following violent partition in 1974. Like other de facto states, the TRNC looks and acts like a state, appearing real to observers despite international condemnations, denials of its existence, and the belief of large numbers of its citizens that it will never be a "real" state. Bryant and Hatay excavate the contradictions and paradoxes of life in an aporetic state, arguing that it is only by rethinking the concept of the de facto state as a realm of practice that we will be able to understand the longevity of such states and what it means to live in them.

Abstract
The Cyprus conflict is usually described as one between a majority Greek Cypriot and minority Turkish Cypriot population, with their opposing visions of the island's future. In that conflict, more than 200,000 Cypriots from both these communities were displaced between 1958 and 1974. Lost in this standard narrative, however, are the conflict's other 'Others': the smaller Maronite, Armenian, Latin, and Roma populations, who also experienced displacement in the course of the conflict. This paper concerns the Maronite community's struggle to remain in or return to their historic lands in the island's northwest. We examine the acts of everyday diplomacy that, over the past decade, have resulted in a revival of the largest Maronite village, a removal of restrictions on their rights, and most recently the partial withdrawal of the Turkish military from another Maronite village so that it may be reopened to settlement. We use these as instances of what we term 'vernacular reconciliation', ways of rebuilding coexistence that suspend questions of sovereignty that remain at the heart of the Cyprus impasse. We argue that this pragmatic approach calls on cultural knowledge of past patterns of coexistence through performances that in turn produce deeply felt senses of responsibility and patterns of reciprocity. Such patterns of reciprocity, we show, are reappropriated in the context of ongoing conflict.

The Cyprus conflict is usually described as one between a majority Greek Cypriot and minority Turkish Cypriot population, with their opposing visions of the island's future. In that conflict, more than 200,000 Cypriots from both these communities were displaced between 1958 and 1974. Lost in this standard narrative, however, are the conflict's other 'Others': the smaller Maronite, Armenian, Latin, and Roma populations, who also experienced displacement in the course of the conflict. This paper concerns the Maronite community's struggle to remain in or return to their historic lands in the island's northwest. We examine the acts of everyday diplomacy that, over the past decade, have resulted in a revival of the largest Maronite village, a removal of restrictions on their rights, and most recently the partial withdrawal of the Turkish military from another Maronite village so that it may be reopened to settlement. We use these as instances of what we term 'vernacular reconciliation', ways of rebuilding coexistence that suspend questions of sovereignty that remain at the heart of the Cyprus impasse. We argue that this pragmatic approach calls on cultural knowledge of past patterns of coexistence through performances that in turn produce deeply felt senses of responsibility and patterns of reciprocity. Such patterns of reciprocity, we show, are reappropriated in the context of ongoing conflict.

Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.