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Of Conspiracies and Men: The Politics of Evil in Turkey A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Murat Altun IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Associate Professor Hoon Song, Adviser August 2016 © Murat Altun 2016 Acknowledgements This project was generously funded by the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Minnesota. Initial fieldwork was also funded by the University of Minnesota Graduate Research Partnership Program and the Anthropology department’s summer research grants. I am greatly indebted to everyone in the village of Livera (Yazlık), Maçka for facilitating my fieldwork and providing an inspirational environment during my time in Trabzon, Turkey. Without late İlyas Karagöz’s support and sharing of his personal library, the Maçka history part of my research would not be possible. I am especially thankful to the late Şakir Albayrak, Okan Mısır, and Hayrettin İshak Karagöz, without whom I would not have compiled the Kalandar folklore data. My dissertation committee has provided constant support and consistently encouraged me to think in new directions. Since my first year at University of Minnesota, Hoon Song has been an inspiring intellectual and has guided me to learn more, not only about anthropological theory, but also political philosophy. Stuart McLean has also been a source of constant inspiration and new perspectives, especially in regards to Balkan and Greek folklore. Jean Langford’s insights into cultural memory, mourning and ritual have greatly shaped the directions of this study. And Giancarlo Casale, the fellow subject of Ottoman realm, has always been the engaged reader of the drafts of this dissertation. In addition to my committee members, I would also like to thank David Lipset, whose research on masculinity in the South Pacific has inspired my own work, and William Beeman, who has helped me to stay on track with my learning in the field of i “Anthropology of the Middle East.” Outside of the University of Minnesota, I would also like to thank James Siegel for his feedback to focus on the continuity from the Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic in the context of Northeastern Turkey. Even though we have never met, as the expert of Northeast Turkey, Michael Meeker has inspired me with his work and directly contributed to this study by sharing with me his field notes from the mid-1960s. During my time in the field in Istanbul, I benefited from the guidance of Black Sea regional experts Özhan Öztürk and Ömer Asan, without whose encouragement and excitement for this study, I would not have dared to explore further in the history and folklore of Trabzon. Since arriving at the University of Minnesota in 2007, I have been blessed to collaborate with fellow graduate student from various departments. I am indebted not only to their contributions in this study, but also to their intellectual comradery. Without Amir Pouyan Shiva and Namrata Gaikwad’s writing partnership and Reed Coil and Katie Erdman’s heartily welcoming of me as roommate to their home, I would not have been able to finish this dissertation. “The Turkish Bunch” have always lent a hand during the hardships of the completion of this study. I am especially grateful to Sinan Erensü and Barış İne for our intellectual and therapeutic conversations and friendship. Before concluding I would like to thank to my (biological and adopted) families both in Turkey and the USA for their unfailing confidence in me. Members of the Altun, Özdemir, and Hacıosmanoğlu (particularly my mother and my grandmother) have made this study possible with their support. I also want to thank the Gavin, Silver and Kaiser ii families for making Minnesota a comfortable home for me. Finally, I would like to thank Jennifer Kaiser for too many things to list here. In addition to her careful proof reading of everything that I write, including the drafts of this dissertation, I am indebted to her unending support and encouragement, without which I would not have been able to complete this study. Indeed, with her presence in my life, “Minnesota will never be the same place again.” iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of İlyas Karagöz and Şakir Albayrak. iv Abstract This project is an ethnographic study of the belief in conspiracy theories in Turkey; a growing conviction that an insider evil agent is stirring the harmony and unity of society. Based on fieldwork in Northeastern Turkey, where belief in conspiracy theories are prevalent and a folk festival of evil power expulsion is celebrated, this project asks: what are the cultural and historical roots of believing in conspiracy theories? Once religiously dominated by Christian Orthodox, Northeastern Turkey, in particular the Trabzon province, became the hotbed of suspicion of Christian and non- Muslim “others” in the mid-1990s—a suspicion that continues today. Portrayed as the propagators of deeds disrupting the community, these agents of conspiracies are inquired as to where they could be hidden (inside or outside the society) and how their actions could simultaneously be visible and secretive—creating a parallelism vis-à-vis the legitimate authority. I view this conspiratorial perspective on par with Trabzon’s costumed celebration of the New Year, called Kalandar—a theatrical reenactment of the expulsion of a monstrous evil being. Kalandar’s ambiguous origin, Greek or Turkish, animates the tensions within Trabzon’s ethnic and religious identity and provides the folkloric ground for the appeal of conspiracy theories. The resulting ethnography sheds light on the increasing references to conspiratorial powers in Turkish politics by drawing attention to the conspiratorial thinking in Trabzon, one of the strong voter bases of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP). Kalandar, from its costumes and reenactments to its relation to historical religious conversions and state violence, provides a lens for its participants to v interpret the concept of a nation that they imagine to be in constant defense of “insider conspiratorial” threats. This project contributes to the field of political anthropology through an ethnographic analysis of the belief in conspiracy theories, tracing its roots to folkloric expressions of the memory of past violence. This project further contributes to a novel understanding of xenophobia, not as the fear of an outsider imagined as a threat to the “nation”, but rather as a suspicion about a community’s imagination of itself that is reflected on others as evil conspirators. vi Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE: Introduction ....................................................................................... 1 1) Contemplating the Communal Thing .......................................................................................... 3 Kalandar: The Coldest Night ...................................................................................................... 5 2) The Pontic Threat ...................................................................................................................... 13 Evil in Flesh and Blood ............................................................................................................. 15 3) Overview ................................................................................................................................... 21 CHAPTER TWO: A Celebration of the Evil ............................................................... 30 1) Messy (Karışık) Things ............................................................................................................. 33 Kalandar Night .......................................................................................................................... 33 Back to Livera ............................................................................................................................ 43 2) Play and Magic .......................................................................................................................... 49 The Eastern Deity ...................................................................................................................... 52 3) Eternal Time, Mimesis and the Wolfman .................................................................................. 59 Eternal Return ........................................................................................................................... 60 Miming and the Wolf ................................................................................................................. 64 4) Community ................................................................................................................................ 74 5) Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 78 CHAPTER THREE: The Conspiratorial Other .......................................................... 83 1) Beyond Folklore: Conspiracy Theoricism ................................................................................. 85 Dualities in Conspiracy Theories .............................................................................................. 90 2) A Folk Historiography ............................................................................................................. 103 Suspicion of the other, suspicion of the Self ............................................................................ 108 3) Conclusion