Kurdish Studies May 2021 Volume: 9, No: 1, Pp
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Kurdish Studies May 2021 Volume: 9, No: 1, pp. 129 – 152 ISSN: 2051-4883 (Print) | ISSN 2051-4891 (Online) www.KurdishStudies.net DOI: https://doi.org/10.33182/ks.v9i1.636 BOOK REVIEWS Political violence and the Kurdish conflict: A review Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 264 pp., (ISBN 9780812251753). Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, Oakland: University of California Press, 2020, 272 pp., (ISBN: 9780520305304). Reviewed by Marlene Schäfers, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Political violence, war and dispossession are realities that have resoundingly shaped Kurdish life worlds, identity, and self-understanding throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Being denied a place within the order of sovereign nation-states that arose from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire has had tremendous consequences for Kurdish populations in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, the four main countries occupying different parts of the Kurdish heartlands. Without a recognized political status, Kurdish communities have been subjected to projects of annihilation, integration and assimilation by the states ruling over them. These projects have often employed different forms of violence in order to facilitate the establishment of national sovereignty, ranging from the physical and embodied to the epistemic and symbolic. They have relied on violence to simultaneously exclude Kurdish subjects from and assimilate them into the fabric of the nation-state. How such violence has shaped the life worlds and subjectivities, discourses and practices, aspirations and imaginations of Kurds and other “minorities” is a question that a growing body of anthropologically inspired scholarship has begun to explore over recent years. Much of that scholarship has focused on the Turkish context, and the present two volumes to be reviewed here are no exception. Nonetheless, they provide precious new insights into the complicated effects of sovereign violence. Importantly, they approach the so-called “Kurdish question” not as a self-contained instance of ethnic conflict but as embedded in broader histories and logics of political violence in Turkey. The Kurdish conflict in this way becomes a vantage point from where to explore the complex relations between different “minority communities” situated at the margins of the nation-state (Biner) and the militarization of public life in Turkey and the kinds of masculine subjectivities it produces (Açıksöz). Zerrin Özlem Biner’s ethnography States of Dispossession masterfully shows how Kurdish life realities in contemporary Turkey are intricately intertwined with broader histories of dispossession, including those of the 1915 Armenian genocide and the violence perpetrated against other Christian communities throughout the twentieth century. The book focuses on what Biner calls the period of “violent peace” between the lifting of the state of emergency Kurdish Studies All rights reserved @ 2021 Transnational Press London 130 Kurdish Studies (OHAL) in the Kurdish regions in 2001 and the return to full-blown violent conflict in 2015. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Mardin during that period, Biner is interested in how life is remade in the aftermath of war and violent loss at the “margins” (understood both geographically and metaphorically) of the Turkish state. Biner uses Turkey’s bid to register Mardin as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as an entry point to investigate how the city’s Kurdish, Arab and Syriac inhabitants have carved out new life trajectories during a fragile peace period that witnessed the rise of commercialized multiculturalism and the aggressive implementation of neoliberal urban policies. She traces how Mardinites engage with the new forms of value created by these developments and how they often end up entrapped in relationships of debt and obligation. Mardin emerges from her account as a centre of fantasies of progress, development, and enrichment, while continuously being haunted by the violence, losses and absences of the past. Biner draws on a well-known corpus in anthropological and political theory to conceptualize the ambiguity, suspicion, and mistrust that protracted conflict has inserted into the everyday lives of her interlocutors. Key interlocutors are Veena Das, Michael Taussig, and Michael Lambek, as well as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler. Crucially, for Biner ordinary life is not simply a space of hope, recuperation or healing after decades of violent conflict, but rather a space of complicity and enduring ruination. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, Biner holds that the Mardinites she interacts with are “cruelly attached” to the very forces that cause their injury and dispossession, making them complicit in the ongoing ruination of the built environment – mainly through digging for treasures – in the hope of social and political mobility, which mostly fails to materialize. Six ethnographic chapters demonstrate how such cruel attachments are (re)produced across a range of sites including Mardin’s stone houses, the law and the land. Following the introduction, which sets out the theoretical concerns and analytical framework of the book, chapter 1 introduces the reader to the city of Mardin. It provides a history of the region’s different religious and ethnic communities, highlighting the violence and dispossession that Armenian, Syriac and Kurdish communities have been exposed to over the course of the twentieth century. The chapter further zooms in on the various heritage-making projects that ensued in the early 2000s, including most prominently the UNESCO World Heritage bid. Biner shows how these projects’ promotion of an apolitical notion of multicultural harmony have imbued the stone houses of Mardin’s old city with novel forms of value tied primarily to heritage tourism and fostered the rise of new elites (mainly ethnic Arabs and Kurds). Chapters 2 and 3 then present ethnographic accounts of how this new value is articulated through fantasies of treasures that many Mardinites believe are embedded beneath the stone walls and grounds of their houses. In chapter 2, we get to know Veysi Bey, a local expert digger for treasures who is convinced of the presence of underground riches while remaining permanently indebted. Together with Veysi Bey, Biner explores the Old City where digging has become an obsession for many, even if one that is shot through with anxiety. Houses have their own agency here: they reject paint, shake when violated and cause premonitory dreams. Access to their value passes through their ruination via digging; a bind that ties hope to anxiety, wealth to dispossession. Chapter 3 moves on to explore in more detail the jinns (cin) that guard the treasures of Mardin’s stone houses and routinely prevent their appropriation. The chapter gives fascinating Kurdish Studies Book Reviews 131 ethnographic insight into how jinns manifest as snakes or scorpions, how they appear in dreams and can be tamed in rituals of hypnotization. Treasures and the jinns that protect them are in Mardin never directly attributed to the Armenian genocide or to the displacement of Christian populations. Stories about them are seldom critical of official historiography, nor do they upend ethno-religious hierarchies. By foregrounding these ethnographic facts, Biner circumvents a perhaps all too easy interpretation that would read jinns as instances of subaltern consciousness or counterhegemonic discourse. Nevertheless, her ethnography suggests that histories of violent dispossession constitute a moral subtext to stories about treasures and the jinns that guard them. Stories about jinns, Biner maintains, may not critique or even recognize genocidal pasts but they open up a space of encounter between past owners of imagined treasures and those seeking to appropriate their riches. Chapters 4 and 5 then take us beyond the realm of the Old City into the surrounding countryside to bring into view the complicated relationships of Mardin’s Syriac communities with their Kurdish neighbours and the Turkish state. Chapter 4 introduces us to İsa Bey, a Syriac from Mardin who has spent much of his life outside Turkey. He is one of many Syriacs in the diaspora who invested their hopes in a return to their villages, spurred by the end of violent conflict and government promises made in the early 2000s. Biner follows İsa Bey in his attempts to reclaim Syriac land and property around the nearby town of Midyat. Rejecting traditional patronage relations with Kurdish tribal leaders and villagers, İsa Bey works instead through a legal framework of rights and duties in order to counter the ongoing dispossession of his community. Throughout endless bureaucratic and court battles, İsa Bey insists on relating to the state as a rights and property-bearing citizen. Chapter 5 focuses on the struggle by the Syriac Mor Gabriel Monastery against encroachment on its land by both local Kurdish tribes and the state. A close reading of the history of this struggle illustrates the Syriac community’s precarious position that leaves them at the mercy of interventions by both local and state actors, highlighting the fragility of the law as a purveyor of rights. Against this backdrop, İsa Bey’s insistence on the framework of the law appears as a “cruel attachment” that relies on an optimistic mobilization of hope in the face of its continuous