Suchergebnisse

"Aras has neatly shown how the anthropology of borders is alive, well, and still contributing to the global study of borders and frontiers… Aras's own experiences of the border, combined with long-term research there, have brought to life how the people who live, work and cross the border on a regular basis will always find ways to subvert or circumvent it. As Aras also demonstrates, the wall of the Turkish-Syrian border can never hope to contain or divide borderlands that are a thriving zone of cultural contest, negotiation and innovation." —Thomas M. Wilson, Professor of Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA "In today's world walls are coming down but also going up. One of the least known is the security wall which divides Kurdish community. In this book, Ramazan Aras uses political anthropology to show that the physical structures are not only a mindset, but also a tragedy. Crucial reading before the next construction project begins somewhere else in the world." —Erik Ringmar, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Lund University, Sweden Through an anthropological analysis, this book uncovers life stories and testimonies that relate the processes of separation as a result of the constructed political borders of nation states newly founded on the inherited territories of the Ottoman Empire. As it recounts ruptured social, cultural, political, religious, and economic structures and autochthonous bonds, this work not only critically analyzes the making of the Turkish-Syrian border through an exploration of statist discourse, state practices and the state's diverse apparatuses, but further analyzes the "unmaking" border practices of local subjects in the light of local Kurdish people's counter perceptions, discourses, family histories, narratives, and daily practices—each of which can be interpreted as a practice of local defiance, resilience, and adaptation in everyday life. .

The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey examines political violence, the politics of fear and the Kurdish experience of pain through an analysis of life stories, personal narratives and testimonies of Kurdish subjects in contemporary Turkey. It traces the physical and psychological impacts of the war between the state security forces and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) guerrillas in the last three decades, in Kurdish populated areas in the south-eastern part of Turkey. Focusing on the instrumentalization of violence, the ensuing and manufactured culture of fear, gendered experiences of state

Under the omnipresence of surveillance, control and fear of the state as ontological signifiers, not only agency but also subjective and collective memories of people become unspeakable, hidden and veiled. This paper aims to underline the difficulties of doing ethnographic research on the secular Turkish state formation and its diverse apparatuses with a particular focus on the single-party regime that started in 1923 and ended in 1950. This work claims that fear of the state, inaccessibility of the state archives, the inscription of protective laws such as lèse-majesté for founding figures of the state, and the senility of survivors result in muteness, the emergence of politics of forgetting and remembering that diminish the possibility of studying relations between the authoritarian secular state and its Muslim subjects. It is argued that the hegemony of emotions of fear of the state and insecurity have turned historical and ethnographic research on the subject matter into a difficult one. Based on a recently conducted large-scale oral history study in different parts of Turkey, this paper also analyzes the resistance, resilience, and silence of mass Muslim population towards diverse forms of state-sponsored authoritarian secular politics along with western and Turkish nationalist top-down regulations of the new regime. ; WOS:000494078300001 ; 2-s2.0-85074819438