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Copyright by Hisyar Ozsoy 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Hisyar Ozsoy certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Between Gift and Taboo: Death and the Negotiation of National Identity and Sovereignty in the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey Committee: Kamran Asdar Ali, Supervisor Charles R. Hale, Co-Supervisor Kamala Visweswaran Pauline T. Strong Sharmila Rudrappa Between Gift and Taboo: Death and the Negotiation of National Identity and Sovereignty in the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey by Hisyar Ozsoy, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2010 Dedication To my brother Şirhat Acknowledgements I would like to first express my deepest gratitude to the people of Diyarbakır and Baĝlar who shared their stories, hopes and anxieties with me and made this dissertation possible. Their names have to remain anonymous, but it is to them this study owes the most. I want to extend my gratitude to my colleagues at Diyarbakir municipality. Particular thanks to Çaĝlayan Ayhan, Serdar Şengül and Cuma Çiçek. I thank Serdar also for the generous support he lent to my research in Diyarbakır with much critical insight and knowledge of the locality. I am grateful to my advisors Kamran Ali and Charles Hale for their invaluable personal and intellectual support, guidance, patience, encouragement and friendship throughout the course of my graduate studies in Austin. My special thanks to Kamala Visweswaran whose mentorship has always been inspiring, her criticisms stimulating and her friendship assuring amidst the blockages of graduate student life. I also thank Pauline Strong and Sharmila Rudrappa for their guidance and encouragement both as my teachers and committee members. My friends have invaluably contributed to my life and to the life of this work for the past eight years. Halide Velioğlu and Özlem Okur’s personally and emotionally generous presence made Austin a homely space from the beginning. While I am still v privileged to enjoy Halide’s presence in my life, Özlem’s untimely loss stays deep inside me. Salih Can Açıksöz and Zeynep Korkman, together with whom we survived both undergraduate and graduate life in Turkey and the US, have been time-honored friends and comrades. Ömer Özcan brought in a piece of home, soil and sense of youth to my last year in Austin. I thank all of them, and also to Azfar Moin, Mubasshir el-Rizvi, Raja Swamy, Mathangi Krishnamurthy and Ken Macleish for their enduring friendships and intellectual contributions to this study. Special thanks to Ali Fuat Şengül and Suzanne Schulz, my larger family in Austin, for their love, support and warm presence in my life. The writing-up of this dissertation survived the painful loss of my father Mehmet Mehdi Özsoy. I wish he could have seen my graduation. It also survived the painful and untimely losses of my friends Evrim, Cihan and Murat. I cannot stop thinking how much they have left unlived behind at such early ages, and how much they would have contributed to the lives of those whose stories have deeply shaped the concerns of this current work. Amidst all these, my nephew Lezgin was born, bringing a big hope and joy to our life. I thank my mother Sevda, my sister Newroz and my brother Felat for their sheer existence; and for their love, endurance and faith in me. The dissertation was supported by generous grants from several institutions. I thank The Wenner-Gren Foundation, who supported me with a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for a generous Dissertation Writing Fellowship. Finally, thanks to the University of Texas at Austin who supported my last year with a Mike-Hogg Endowed Fellowship. vi Ruken, Thank you for your love, patience and intellectual support over twelve years. Without you, this study would not have been. May, 2010 vii Between Gift and Taboo: Death and the Negotiation of National Identity and Sovereignty in the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey Publication No._____________ Hisyar Ozsoy, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisors: Kamran Asdar Ali and Charles R. Hale This dissertation explores politico-symbolic deployments of death in figurations of national identity and sovereignty in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Many Kurds have died in their successive rebellions over the last century. However biological death has not necessarily excluded them from Kurdish culture and politics. Rather, through a symbolic economy of “gift” the Kurds resurrect their dead as martyrs – affective forces that powerfully shape public, political and daily life and promote Kurdish national identity as a sacred communion of the dead and the living. For its own part, the Turkish state has been endeavoring to eradicate this persistent power of the Kurdish dead by obstructing their appropriation and assimilation into the regenerative realms of Kurdish national- symbolic. While these struggles are still in effect, with the shift in Kurdish politics away from the original goal of national independence in 1999, the Kurdish dead emerged as a site of contention also among the Kurds. At least until 2005 the place of the dead in Kurdish politics also shifted with a new politics of memory that the leadership of Kurdish movement initiated to buttress the “peace process”. Based on two-year fieldwork in viii Diyarbakır, the informal capital of Kurds in Turkey, this study explores the Kurdish political imaginaries and subjectivities that are generated in and through these multiple struggles and contentions over the Kurdish dead, situating death as a central symbolic and semantic field constitutive to national identity and sovereignty. This study contributes to the ethnography of the Kurds, Turkey and the Middle East as well as theories of death, the body, nationalism, sovereignty and political subjectivity. ix Table of Contents List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………xii Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………1 Why the Dead? ……………………………………………………………………..3 Theoretical Concerns ….…………………………………………………………..12 Research Sites ...........................................................................................................13 A Brief Political History of Diyarbakır ...........................................................13 Back and Forth between Baĝlar and the Municipality.....................................17 Positionality and Methodology .................................................................................20 Outline of the Chapters .............................................................................................22 Chapter One: Fighting over Corpses: Sovereignty in Contention between This World and the Hereafter .......................................................................................................26 The Power of the Dead ...………………………………………………………….28 Dirty War and Beyond ………………………………………………………….....33 Iqbal: The Making of A Martyr ................................................................................41 Serhildan: A Cultural Politics of Politicizing the Dead ............................................45 Wedding the Dead.....................................................................................................52 Conclusion ................................................................................................................57 Chapter Two: Symbolic Interruptions of the Real: Creating Life out of Death ................61 Nationalization of Death: The Quest for Immortality ...............................................62 Whistle in the Dark: Reanimating the Dead .............................................................68 The Symbolic Interruption of the Real .....................................................................79 The Mayor’s Ordeal with the Dead ..........................................................................81 Forget the Dead? ..............................................................................................82 Grieving for the “Terrorist” .............................................................................85 “Antigone’s Claim”: Death, Taboo and Political Subjectivity .................................91 Chapter Three: The Sacred Soil of Vatan: People without History, Death without Grave .........................................................................................................................98 From Exile to Death ................................................................................................102 x Loving Vatan ..........................................................................................................115 Mapping Vatan........................................................................................................120 Betraying Vatan ......................................................................................................124 Death without Grave ...............................................................................................127 Back to the Present..................................................................................................129 Chapter Four: Between Myth and History: Mnemonic Negotiations over Rebellion, Death and Sovereignty ............................................................................................133 The Sheikh and the Rebellion .................................................................................136