Dispossession and the Economics of Belonging in Southeastern Turkey
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In the City, Out of Place: Dispossession and the Economics of Belonging in Southeastern Turkey The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Day, John William. 2013. In the City, Out of Place: Dispossession and the Economics of Belonging in Southeastern Turkey. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10973942 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA In the City, Out of Place: Dispossession and the Economics of Belonging in Southeastern Turkey A dissertation presented by John William Day to The Committee on Middle Eastern Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts January, 2013 © 2013 John William Day All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: John William Day Professor Steven C. Caton ABSTRACT In the City, Out of Place: Dispossession and the Economics of Belonging This dissertation analyzes everyday talk about livelihoods, or about the challenges of work and getting by, among displaced Kurds in the city of Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey. Over the past two decades, Diyarbakır has grown dramatically with the influx of tens of thousands of displaced and dispossessed rural Kurds uprooted by state policies of forced migration. These policies were designed with two strategic aims in mind: eliminating rural support networks for the Kurdish armed rebellion (the PKK), and concentrating populations in less dispersed and thus theoretically more easily policed spaces. However, it is argued here that while the former ambition has perhaps succeeded, the displacement and dispossession of rural Kurds throughout the 1990s, rather than suppressing dissent, has generated new fields and new forms of political struggle. Based on two years of fieldwork in Diyarbakır, this study explores the ways in which ordinary talk about livelihoods, about how to make a living and pay the bills, is, in this context, about more than ‘the economy’ alone. The interplay of people’s efforts to rebuild life and livelihood and the semiotic interpretation of these efforts is analyzed as a rich and under-appreciated site for the everyday practical generation of the political in Kurdish Turkey. This study contributes to the anthropology of Kurdish Turkey and of the Middle East, as well as to theories of displacement and dispossession, evaluative discourse, and the pragmatics of political stance. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements…………………..……………………………………………………v Introduction………………………………………………...……………………………...1 PART I Chapter One: Displacement as Dispossession…………………………………...………30 Chapter Two: Dispossession’s Ethnography..…….………………………..……….......58 Chapter Three: Tomatoes This Big: Rural Idyll After Dispossession.………...……...…90 PART II Chapter Four: Building a Future I: The Sons of Migration and Working Life After Dispossession………………………….………………..…………………………...….121 Chapter Five: Building a Future II: The Ambiguous Promise of Vocational Training and Fantasies of Escape………………………………………………………...………151 Conclusion……………………………………………..…………………………….…180 Bibliography…………………………………………………...…………………….…187 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Above all, I am indebted to the warmth and conviction of my interlocutors in Diyarbakır, who must remain anonymous. Arnold Toynbee once wrote that for a city to truly count as a city, it should possess the rudiments of a soul. In this respect, Diyarbakır is happily blessed. I could not have wished for a livelier, more intellectually and politically engaging, or more hospitable fieldwork setting. The city’s humor also deserves mention. Some of the material presented in this study might give the impression of a space suffused with despair; nothing could be further from the truth. The steeped, sophisticated wit engrained in Diyarbakır’s public life, its refined art of muhabbet, is rare and beautiful. Rüstem Taşdemir deserves special thanks. With his expansive intellect and insatiable appetite for ideas, his gift of gab, and his profound political passion cut by a wonderful irreverence and inspired sense of humor, Rüstem enriched my time in Diyarbakir inestimably. I’m humbled to call him a friend, and look forward to beating him in a game of yüzbir sometime soon. My committee members have contributed to this study in their own wonderful ways. Steve Caton has supported my work over the years, even when he probably wasn’t sure where my research was going. He is one of the closest and most incisive readers I have ever encountered. I also learned a great deal about teaching from his brilliant, often hilarious lectures and seminars. I met Ajantha Subramanian on my first visit to Harvard, and promptly put my foot in my mouth, asking her how far along she was in her graduate studies. Fortunately, she has a great sense of humor. Ajantha’s political imagination was a source of sustenance. The Political Ecology Working Group that she helped put together was a wonderful experience. A great teacher and a supporter of my work, even in its rawest stages, Ajantha deserves a thousand thanks. Kimberly Theidon came on board late, but offered invaluable insights and great critical commentary. She has left me with much to think about as I take this work forward. A number of institutions provided generous support for this research: the Wenner- Gren Foundation; Fulbright-Hays DDRA; FLAS; Fredrick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship (Harvard); the Graduate Student Council Merit Fellowship (Harvard); the Department of Anthropology (Harvard); the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Harvard). Writing was supported by a Cora du Bois fellowship, and by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. Friends in Cambridge helped make graduate school more fascinating and more fun. I thank Tal Arbel, Pete Benson, Omar Dewachi, Ujala Dhaka, Alireza Doostdar, Illiana Quimbaya, Darryl Li, Juno Parreñas, Anthony Shenoda, and Fumitaka Wakamatsu for their friendship and good conversation. v Hakan Karateke and Wheeler Thackston were excellent and patient language teachers. A historian, Hakan’s appreciation of Turkish as a living, changing language instilled in me early on a love of the language’s etymology. Wheeler’s unrivaled knowledge of languages and his hospitality will stay with me. So will his rhubarb stew. Beyond Cambridge, Evren Dinçer, balancing political commitment with a deep appreciation of the absurd, reminded me at important points in the writing process why ideas matter. Patrick Lyons, raconteur of the first order and closet literary savant, brought levity and admirable wit to the final months of writing. Henry Rutz sparked my interest in both anthropology and Turkey. My cheeks ached from laughter by the end of his visit to Diyarbakır. Thanks, Henry. Finally, to my family. First and foremost, to Çağlayan, who, across a long process of writing and rewriting (and re-rewriting), put up with far more than anyone should have to. The fact that she didn’t pack up and leave when I was at my most frazzled and unpleasant moments in writing is a miracle. I see it as a sign of her love. To Çağlayan, without whom not. My parents, Christine and John Day, have done much across the years to encourage my education, and not only in the classroom. A cancer nurse, my mother has spent her life caring for people at life’s boundaries; her understanding runs deep. If even a flake of her sensitivity and her way of approaching the world has rubbed off, then I count myself lucky. My father made sure I did ‘fieldwork’ when I was only in middle school: detasseling corn, bailing hay, picking melons. Every summer until my second year of university, I tended and harvested southwestern Indiana’s famous watermelons and tomatoes. My father also deserves thanks for the decades he spent as a social worker in the small city in which we lived, listening to people suffering the consequences of the restructuring of agriculture and the influx of drugs in the Midwest. He taught me a great deal about listening. Finally, to my son Sina, who came into the world in the final months of this project, and who provided the practical kick in the pants I needed to finally finish up. May you always be so extraordinarily curious about the world around you—and so delightfully silly! vi In loving memory of Bill and Marie Ringle vii INTRODUCTION In eight years, I visited nearly all of Anatolia, and of the cities I saw, Diyarbakır has no match. You look at the grandeur of the walls and the good manners of its people and you say, like Rome, like Istanbul, here is a city that has always been home to a genteel population. Then you see its new buildings, modern facilities…and its accommodation to change through an intertwining of scholarship, learning, arts, and culture, and you say, here is west...In terms of its liveliness and crowds, no city east of Gaziantep and Kayseri can measure up. Its wide roads, rich trading houses, vineyards and gardens, and active markets are growing day by day, flourishing day by day. —Journalist and author Cahit Beğenç, Diyarbakır ve Raman, 1949 Diyarbakır was, in its days of splendor, the shining star of the East, and, located at the crossroads of trade routes, was a center of history, culture, dialogue, business, and cuisine…[Today] it is a city where joblessness and the illegal tapping of electricity both push 70 percent. —MÜSİAD, Bölgesel-Sektörel Sorunlar ve Çözüm Önerileri, 2005 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Turkish state was engaged in armed struggle with Kurdish revolutionaries fighting for an independent state. Among the most significant legacies of this period is the mass displacement of rural Kurds. In the first half of the 1990s, some 3,000 villages and hamlets were forcibly evacuated, some by Kurdish guerrillas (Bruinessen 1999), and many more by the Turkish army (Jongerden 2001; Mater 1999; Bruinessen 1995; Olson 1989; Amnesty International 1996).