Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space 9780812298123

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Reverberations

THE E THNOGR APHY OF PO LITI CAL VIO LENCE Series Editors: Daniel J. Hoffman, Tobias Kelly, Sharika Thiranagama A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Reverberations Violence Across Time and Space

Edited by Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ

U NI VE RS I T Y O F P E NNS YLVAN I A P R E S S P H I LADE LP H I A

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8122-5349-8

CONTENTS

Introduction. Reverberations of Violence Across Time and Space

1

Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ

PART I. SPACES OF DEATH

Chapter 1. Chronicling Deaths Foretold: The Testimony of the Corpse and the Problem of Political Violence in South Africa

33

Rosalind C. Morris

Chapter 2. Speculating on Death: Treasure Hunting in Present-Day Moush

63

Alice von Bieberstein

Chapter 3. Culture of Dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic: Land, Ethnoreligious Difference, and Violence

83

Seda Altuğ

PART II. VIOLENCE AND THE SUPER NATURAL

Chapter 4. Violence and Spirituality: Khidr Cosmography at the Turkish/Syrian Territorial Interface Yael Navaro

117

vi

Contents

Chapter 5. Icons of Uncaring: Borderland Cartographies of Icon Making

144

Connie Gagliardi and Valentina Napolitano

Chapter 6. Digging: The Spiritual-Material Imagination of (Dis)possession in Mardin, Southeast Turkey

158

Zerrin Özlem Biner

Chapter 7. Maskun: Two Landscapes of War

186

Munira Khayyat

PART III. VIOLENCE AGAINST NATURE AND INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Chapter 8. Infrastructural Violence in Jerusalem: Abjection, Incorporation, and Resistance in the “Cyborg City”

207

Hanna Baumann

Chapter 9. Tenses of Violence: Ruination and Accumulation Along the Çoruh Valley, Turkey

233

Erdem Evren

Chapter 10. The Wounded Landscape: Mass Trauma, Memory, and Human-Object Relations

255

Shannon Lee Dawdy

Chapter 11. Architectural Witnessing at the Former Madımak Hotel in Sivas, Turkey

277

Eray Çaylı

Afterword. Reverberations of Political Violence

295

Penelope Harvey

Contributors

311

Index

313

Acknowledgments

317

INTRODUC TION

Reverberations of Violence Across Time and Space Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ

The irreversible damage brought upon the earth by capitalist organization, human-motivated extraction, and allied systems of military destruction have recently come to the fore. New works on the “Anthropocene” have zeroed in on the destructive human agency involved in the irretrievable transformation of the earth as an ecological system. Works in this emergent “environmental turn” have begun to illustrate nature’s many responses, made in its own modes and by its own means, to violence born and imposed upon it via human-led modes of destruction (e.g., Gusterson 1996; Masco 2013; Kirksey 2015; Haraway et al. 2015; Lyons 2016). Underscoring the “anthropos” in the Anthropocene, scholars in this trajectory construe human beings as part and parcel of the ecosystems we inhabit, thereby shifting our attention to the relational responses of nonhuman environments to human-led worldly desecration of catastrophic proportions. It is in the wake of the incorporation of the “more-than-human” in recent examinations of planetary destruction at a cataclysmic scale (Stengers 2015; De La Cadena 2015; Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016) that this volume in the study of violence is situated. In light of such unprecedented transformations of the environment and the philosophical reorientations that accompany them, it is time, we propose, for our understandings of violence to be recast. We do this here through ethnographic and historical studies of violence that address violence’s more-than-human effects, manifestations, traces, and repercussions as distributed indefnitely through this-worldly time and space as much as through a supernatural “other world.”

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Introduction

Reverberations aims to generate new concepts and methodologies for the study of violence and its protracted aftermath. The innovative ethnographic studies presented here attend to the distribution, extension, and endurance of violence across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, politics, and imaginations. Our intention is to complement the focus, in the study of violence, on human agencies and experiences with an engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. We in turn interrogate and critique the displacement or debunking of the human in the posthumanist branch of inquiry known as the “new materialisms” by engaging them through and through with the study of violence. What, we ask, can be learned about violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? The turn to the nonhuman in the human sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of violence, its histories, and its traces. As the human being and the notion of the social was dislodged from the pedestal place it held in the humanist philosophies and sociologies to make way through the posthumanist turn for the study of things, so was the concept of agency recast and symmetrically distributed between human and nonhuman entities (Latour 2007). In works inspired by actor-network theory and social studies of science and technology (e.g., Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Candea 2010), the focus of analysis was so much tilted toward literally the object of analysis, that anything possibly referring to human responsibility, initiative, intention, decision, action, culpability, or complicity such as pertains in violence and its histories was cast away from the domain of research interest. As things took frontstage in posthumanist anthropology, human actions, politics, power relations, and conflict were pushed offstage. In the present work, we argue that in these attempts to expel the human from the center of anthropological analysis, the reifcation of things has worked to disembody, de-gender, and whitewash human beings, making it appear “as if” it were unproblematic to render humans voiceless, discourse-less, and lacking in imagination.1 This volume aims to redress this problem by methodologically, conceptually, and politically placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. How, we ask, are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings involved in histories of violence? And vice versa—how are human histories of violence implicated in things? If the new materialisms have glossed over and effaced violence (or rendered it nondescript), studies of violence to date have predominantly as-

Introduction

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sumed an anthropocentric framework inspired by humanist philosophies. In most of its conceptualizations, violence has been associated with the destructive acts of human beings and their sociopolitical extensions, most often adduced as states or other forms of institution or organization. The main question has been the relative agency of human beings in perpetrating violence, whether on an individual or massive scale. In turn, victims of violence have been studied as being located on the receiving end of a person-toperson manifestation unmediated by things. Humanist philosophies of violence also prevail in civil, criminal, and international legal systems. Focused as such on the question of human agency, the “act” of violence in its exposure of intentionality and “the event” of violence in its singularity has attracted attention, addressing culpability and responsibility, but therefore limiting the possibility of exploring the endurance of violence in its endless distribution through space and time or its transmogrifcation and reapparition in unexpected, nonhuman guises. Our conceptual frameworks and vocabularies must be up to the task of capturing the more-than-human/ other-than-human forms in which human-inflicted and -embodied violence coagulates, leaves its traces, only to reverberate and manifest again. Sites and locations where the perpetrators of violence continue to be supported by their states, where histories of genocide are denied, and where those who name atrocities and demand justice are criminalized require such a vision of us. In most historical studies, violence is sited but not specifcally conceptualized. This is particularly the case in Middle East studies. One of the many reasons for this neglect in conceptualizing violence is that the history of the Middle East has widely been written as equivalent to a history of violence assumed to be inherent to the society. Critical scholarly work strives to demystify such Orientalist depictions by highlighting nonviolent historical episodes and themes or by expounding on the modern character of violence (McDougall 2005; Makdisi and Silverstein 2006; Makdisi 2019). In turn, a burgeoning critical literature that “thinks about” violence (Khalili 2013), its underlying causes, manifestations, and mediators, has also developed in the post-1990s. Studies on colonial and postcolonial settings across disciplines such as law, sociology, history, and art have revealed the embeddedness of violence in the making of law and property (Bhandar 2018; Mitchell 2002), infrastructure and logistics (Chua et al. 2018), archives (Fahmy 2017), state, war, and governance (Ismail 2018; Neep 2012), urban space (Fuccaro 2016), and environment and famine (Davis 2001; Davis and Burke 2011).

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Introduction

Inspired by this vein of critical scholarly work, this volume attempts to conceptualize violence by amending the analytical framework through which we consider the relations between persons and things. Placing political violence at the center of our inquiry, we present ethnographic and historical studies that probe its manifestations and reverberations across human and nonhuman felds and planes. Foucault (2012) was arguably the frst posthumanist philosopher to analyze violence as it exists beyond the wounds inflicted through torture upon the human body, in spaces, time, institutions, and regulations. This edited volume aims to build on that trajectory by drafting into the study of violence more recent challenges from affect theory, vitalism, and the new materialisms (e.g., Thrift 2007; Anderson and Harrison 2010; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010). Our critical assessment of the humanist legacies within studies of violence that focus singularly on human agency and subjectivity is thus matched by our critique of posthumanist approaches which, in distributing subjectivity “outside” (Latour 2007), have failed to explore embodiment, racialization, and genderedness (Lossin 2020). Here, we propose to reembody analysis out of the shards left behind by the new materialist turn. We do this by keeping the insights of the new materialisms on board, while simultaneously carry ing them forward into the study of political violence and its embodied and materially embedded histories. Before moving on to attend to the question of materiality and particularly the notion of “remnant” as central to the context of this volume, the following section offers a more detailed engagement with and critical reading of posthumanist thought and its treatment of violence. We tease out concretely what we take on board for our project as well as where we critically depart from posthumanist scholarship.

Posthumanist Thought and the Absenting of Political Violence Posthumanism is broadly associated with a number of projects bound together by a break with what is commonly referred to as the linguistic turn within the social sciences and the humanities.2 The preferred sources of inspiration for this stream of scholarship are to be found in cybernetics and cognitive sciences, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, affect theory, Deleuzian assemblage theory, and animal and ecological studies. All of these share a commitment to de-privileging “the human” and to

Introduction

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moving beyond a theoretical framework of social constructivism that insists that the meaning, agency, and value of nature derives primarily from its cultural, social, and ideological inscriptions. In view of the disciplinary and thematic focus of this volume and its collection of contributions, we take a closer look at two branches of posthumanist theory in particular: the new materialisms, concerned specifcally with the nature and status of matter and materiality, and the ontological turn, the most prominent manifestation of posthumanism within anthropology. As elaborated in more detail below, while neither of these strands are born from engagements with political violence, they still present themselves as theoretical ways out of what is imagined as a modernist violence against nature and indigenous others. “Violence” is here seen to emanate primarily from a modernist nature/culture dualism. But we argue that the posthumanist project very problematically disembeds and absents histories of political violence from its analyses of human/non-human engagements. Both strands of posthumanism which we would like to critique share a desire to turn away from questions of epistemology, identifed with the linguistic turn, toward “reality itself” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011). Importantly, this “reality” is not imagined as one shaped by political violence. When violence comes into view in these works, it is mainly in the form of an apocalyptic specter, an indiscriminate violence riveting along networks and pushed by ecological, technological, economic, and political processes whose enmeshment is so complex as to render the work of localization practically impossible or futile. In an effort to rethink and challenge the powerful dualisms of nature and culture, mind and matter, the new materialisms have committed themselves philosophically to monism (univocity of being or single matter) and immanence (space and time as a common block) (Braidotti, in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). As a result, the new materialists speak not of inter-action between pre-existing entities, but of intra-action of the social, the biological, and the technological at the heart of becoming. Matter is not thought of in terms of recalcitrance or negativity, but in terms of a productive vitality. Materiality is “an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (Coole and Frost 2010, 9). It is characterized by “an active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness” (Bennett 2010, 3; cf. Braidotti 2013). Matter and materiality are not to be conceived of in terms of substances and stable states, but as forever in the process of becoming. Whether Jane Bennet’s “thing-power,” Rosi Braidotti’s

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Introduction

posthumanist subject, or Donna Haraway’s (2008) species encounters, this becoming is emphatically relational, occurring through cohabitation, collaboration, incorporations, fusions, and splits in a feld that features different kinds of bodies, microorganisms, and technologies and is forcefully animated by affect and desire. The second branch of posthumanist thought we want to focus on is the ontological turn, broadly associated, within anthropology, with a larger set of projects, including indigenous cosmology studies (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Holbraad 2012), multispecies ethnographies (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010), experimental scientifc realism (Latour 2005), and phenomenologically inflected accounts of dwelling and material vitality (Ingold 2011). While the theoretical leanings and ethnographic interests of these works have brought into view themes and matters of pertinence that resonate with the contributions to this volume, including the supernatural and the more-than-human, their take on and treatment of violence is markedly different from ours. Importantly, the ontological turn has been marked by a suspension of statements of universal generalizability in favor of foregrounding concerns with methodology and a concomitant reconfguration of the relation between knowledge systems and ideas about the nature of reality and being. According to one of its foundational texts (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007), the point is to refrain from explaining, contextualizing, or interpreting ethnographic material. Ethnographic encounters with the unknown or the apparently senseless should not, they argue, lead to a domestication or incorporation of the ethnographic material within the limits of “our” conceptual world. Instead, the ontological turn argues for rethinking the relation between concepts and “things” such that it becomes the “things” themselves that generate new concepts. As has been noted by Michael Carrithers (in Carrithers et al. 2010) and David Graeber (2015), this move depends on treating language literally and not as something indeterminate. Concepts are taken as constitutive of reality and reality is hence knowable because concepts are reality. Whether through monism (univocity of being) or idealism (concepts as constitutive of reality), the new materialisms and the ontological turn seek to fnd a way out of those dualisms considered to be at the heart of the enduring logics of thinking and action aimed at control and mastery, both over nature and over colonial and indigenous others—mind/matter, reality/representation, nature/culture. Leaving behind these dualisms is thus also seen as a way of leaving behind the violence inherent in these regimes of power. The new materialists seek to do so by overcoming the inherent opposition and

Introduction

7

hierarchy within such dualisms through a new conceptualization of difference, one structured by affirmative relation. In their attachment to the possibility of radical alterity, the ontologists, however, leave a space for dualistic thinking as one among many cosmologies (Descola 2014). Central to challenging the premise of human exceptionalism has been the project of asking anew the question of agency. Within both strands of posthumanist thought examined here, agency extends beyond that of humans. This might proceed by foregrounding autopoiesis or self-styling observable in vital matter (Braidotti 2013), or by making efficacy and the capacity to make something new appear as the defning criterion for agency (Latour 2005; Bennett 2010). The effect of such a distribution of agency across “an ontologically heterogenous feld” (Bennett 2010, 23) is that politics and the political are likened to ecology, with consequences for analyses of accountability: “In a world of distributed agency, a hesitant attitude toward assigning individual blame becomes a presumptive virtue” (38). On the one hand, posthumanist thought is presented as an urgently required intellectual project that points the way out of the entrenched dynamics of mastery and exploitation so as to prevent the reoccurrence of violence. On the other hand, its methodological and analytical tools render violence imperceptible and non-localizable by dispersing it along extensive networks. Revealingly, an important part of the posthumanist critique of the linguistic turn relates to the latter’s alleged privileged concern with death and fnitude as part of its humanist legacy. Latour (2010), for instance, criticizes deconstruction as a practice of negativity that privileges distancing from and othering of its object, whereas what is needed in this moment of human self-destruction via climate change is a (more hopeful) practice of reassemblage or “compositionism.” For Bennett (2010), likewise, the linguistic turn’s focus on human suffering contributed to hardening the distinction between humans and things, while Braidotti (2013) wants to think of life beyond the horizon of death. A concern with fnitude (death) as constitutive of subjectivity fuels, according to her, a political ecology of loss, mourning, and melancholia, preventing us from engaging in an urgently needed affirmative relation to the present. Throughout posthumanist thought, death, suffering, and the past are devalued. As Ingold (2011) puts it, life conceived of as vitalist and non-teleological extends beyond death as a constant “movement of opening” (4). Both the new materialisms and the ontological turn are for this reason not in the business of writing histories of the present. In line with their commitment to the future and the emergent, they instead want to assemble

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Introduction

or spell out speculative or autopoietic alternatives, futures that are not tied to the logics, rationalities, or habits that govern the present (cf. Savransky, Wilkie, and Rosengarten 2017; Hage 2015). While this volume engages with a posthumanist sensitivity toward nonhuman things, with landscapes, infrastructures, the subsoil, matter, and more-than-human beings, we critically distance ourselves from how political violence has been absented particularly within the two strands of posthumanist thought, the new materialisms and the ontological turn, with which we engage. Posthumanist thought proposes to leave behind a concern with suffering and death identifed with the linguistic turn. Not to focus on death and suffering, but to lessen its import by dissolving it in a vitalist flow of becoming, is posited as a gesture of intellectual detachment politically and ethically necessary in order to move into a future of possibilities. As a consequence, violence, suffering, and death are rendered invisible; they disappear from the scene of conceptual and empirical engagement.

Living with Remnants of Violence When locating the imagination behind this volume, it is important to site Turkey and its protracted history of violence for the critical framework we propose in this introduction, which has an empirical and material counterpart in the feld.3 We introduce the notion of “remnants,” a concept that has emerged from our research in Turkey, as a comparative tool for the study of political violence. Remnants refers to the residuality of violence, its afterlife and spillover effects, its material and immaterial traces, and its ability to be inflicted in social and political relations. Our project has been to trace the remnants left behind by communities who were displaced, deported, exterminated, and/or ethnically cleansed by the Ottoman and Turkish states, specifcally by reference to the Armenian genocide.4 Our objective has been to ethnographically site practices of “living with remnants” in Turkey’s presentday politics. Such living takes the form of silencing of uncomfortable events such as abductions, looting, and forced conversions, and a resistance to reveal relationships of complicity in violence that deliberately targeted ethnically and/or religiously defned others. The synonyms for the notion of remnants, as we conceptualize it, are multiple: “ruin,” “remainder,” “trace,” “leftover,” and “residue” all capture aspects of the remnants we have sought to site and explore. We thus consider rem-

Introduction

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nants as multiplex phenomena that have enduring effects in the afterlife of the environments associated with the communities who were the targets of annihilitory practices. These are material remains in the form of houses, temples, and other forms of built structure once used and inhabited by communities who were forcefully displaced, ethnically cleansed, and/or exterminated. Entire villages or towns can be considered remnants, as can individual objects of everyday life, such as pieces of furniture or household items left behind after the violence. Immaterial affects associated with past atrocities that take the form of memory or the imagination among people who continue to live in these sites, such as accounts of haunting, may also be considered remnants. Remnants fgure likewise in subjective and embodied ways, where contemporary inhabitants of Turkey have begun to claim Armenian, Greek, or Kurdish ancestry, reaching back to grandparents who were forcefully adopted, converted, and assimilated. Remnants also constitute the context for ongoing inter-communitarian conflicts, which sometimes take legal and economic forms, between the stakeholders in Turkey and its diasporas.5 “Remnants” is not a neutral term. Persons who survived the Armenian genocide were often stigmatized as “remainders of the sword” (in Turkish, kılıç artığı) by people from the majority Muslim communities in Turkey. We expressly misappropriate this term, turning it into a theoretical concept from which we mobilize a critique of the originary violence upon which the Turkish Republic was manifested. “Remnants” in our rendition, then, takes the attributes of a framing analytical trope from which we propose to question the denial of atrocities and ongoing complicities. In their many varieties and forms, both tangible and intangible, remnants (in our conceptualization) are formative of new social practices and relations. We have ethnographically researched experiences of “living with remnants” in south and southeastern Turkey, regions that have witnessed massive demographic and social upheavals as a result of violence perpetrated and endorsed by the state. As material, immaterial, or embodied traces from a violent past, remnants can produce affects and imaginaries conducive to the emergence of new forms of politics and subjectivity. Highlighting this potential, we explore the dialectical relation between these remnants and the subjectivities of past and present inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey by studying the ways residual traces are either silenced and erased or surprisingly referenced in daily lives, making unlikely appearances in the present. What has happened to what was left behind? How are such remnants of violence reconfgured in new forms of politics and subjectivity? How might we

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Introduction

unearth the spatial, temporal, and material dimensions of violence, and its transmogrifcation and re-apparition in other guises?

Thinking Through Reverberations of Violence “Reverberations” in our title is a thoroughgoing concept we propose for organizing the study of the long-term persistence of violence. The concept allows us to trace violence’s remains and to pinpoint violence’s continuities and endurances. Rather than approaching violence as the expression or reflection of social and political formations, the concept of reverberations pushes us to conceive of violence as a sociopolitical form in itself, one that generates its own effects in continuum (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003, 5). More than studying violence as just a contingent “event” with a beginning and an end (that may or may not coincide with a military truce, a regime change, or the end of a court case), we study the long-term resonance and vibration of violence across spatial, temporal, and material felds, highlighting the entanglement of human-made violence in more-than-human, supra-human, or other-than-human entities. On the one hand, this implies being attentive to a “violence continuum” that includes “all expressions of  radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation and reifcation that normalize atrocious behav ior and violence toward others” (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003, 21). On the other hand, it implies being attuned to the lingering effects (and affects) of violence (see Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012; Stewart 2007), including its echo, cyclical recurrence, and sporadic reoccurrence in different guises, shapes, and dimensions. As Günther Anders (2008) has observed in his studies of Hiroshima and its aftermath, acts of atrocity do not terminate in the effects they inflict upon people, lives, bodies, psyches, land, nature, homes, felds, and other worlds. Just as Hiroshima never ended, so, too, do catastrophes like Chernobyl (Petryna 2003; Alexievich 2006), Katrina (Dawdy 2016; Adams 2013), and Fukushima (Weston 2012) endure. In addressing and emphasizing the endurance of violence, we follow the lead of scholars of the Armenian genocide and the Palestinian Nakba who have studied them as “ongoing” (Suciyan 2016; Ekmekçioğlu 2016; Salamanca et al. 2012). In this volume, we attend particularly to the aftermath of the Armenian genocide in Turkey as it materializes in state practices of denial and further atrocities committed so as to legitimize the denial (Nichanian 2009; Biner 2010; Erbal and Suciyan 2011; von Bieberstein 2017a).

Introduction

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To say that violence is ongoing is to highlight the way violence leaves wounds that are traceable even in sites where evidence has been quite effectively effaced. It is to argue that violence comes back, that it returns and resumes, or that it haunts politics, materialities, and subjectivities forever. To insist that violence is “ongoing” is to open the feld for the study of violence in the many guises and shapes it takes, both human and nonhuman, in the aftermath of atrocities. To suggest that violence is “ongoing” is to question the very rubric of “aftermath” itself. It is to ask whether there really is an after to violence. Inevitably, our volume works with and through a “methodological pessimism” (Navaro 2020), but one that we hope does not gloss over histories of struggle and resistance by those who have been the targets of political violence. Through the imaginary of reverberations, we argue that violence can be conceptualized as roaring, rumbling, grumbling, or murmuring, to use sonorous metaphors, or as having residues, remainders, excesses, surpluses, leftovers, or relics, to use spatial or material ones. In all cases we argue that violence has no closure or end, that it instead continues to generate new social forms and relations, and that it endures in other human and nonhuman entities and forms further afeld. The extent and expanse, metamorphosis and transmogrifcation of violence is what is central to our ethnographic and historical queries. Arguably the notion of “trauma” addresses the reverberation of violence in human bodies and subjectivities. Violence inflicted upon the human psyche on an individual or massive scale has formed the primary concern of scholarship on violence, especially in the period following the Holocaust, engendering conceptualizations drawing on theories of “subjectivity” (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Das et al. 2000; Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007). In works inspired by psychoanalysis, “trauma” became a key concept through which to understand the effects of violence on human beings (e.g., Caruth 1996; Leys 2000). If violence was conceived as embroiled in affects, the affects in these studies were primarily construed as emerging from and exerted upon human psychical interiorities or inner worlds. Concepts theorized in this vein, such as “depression,” “loss,” and “suffering,” have generated distinctive edited volumes in anthropology and allied disciplines, examining the relation between violence and subjectivity (Das et al. 2000; Eng and Kazanjian 2003). Some of these studies have built upon the notion of “structural violence” to develop the social suffering school (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997). Paul Farmer (2004) had insightfully defned structural violence as “violence exerted systematically—that is, indirectly—by everyone who belongs to a certain

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Introduction

social order” (307). Farmer studies the perpetual effects of slavery, colonial racism, and postcolonial indebtedness on the health, lives, and livelihood of contemporary Haitians. Proposing a materialistic approach for the study of the social (308), Farmer charts out a political economy of violence, studied as ingrained in social structures and institutions and therefore as recycled, regurgitated, and repeated in cycles of poverty, deprivation, and destitution. We are reminded here, as well, of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979) work on “symbolic violence.” Through this notion, Bourdieu attends to the ideological dimensions of domination based on social class differences, the ways in which materially differentiated access to capital and power is reflected in the cultural representations that organize a society. Centering class in his study of violence, Bourdieu’s work explores violence in the “habitus” of a society, in its forms of structured life and behav ior that reflect ingrained socioeconomic differences and therefore reproduce them.6 In turn, more recent studies on violence have begun to explore the effects and affects of violence on nonhuman spaces and materialities in tandem with those inflicted upon human bodies and subjectivities. Scholars in this vein have studied the reach, persistence, extent, and expanse of violence across time, space, and materialities as “ruination” (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012; Dawdy 2010, 2016; Stoler 2013; Gordillo 2014), as well as its mystical or supernatural re-apparition via “haunting” (Gordon 1997; Kwon 2008; Biner 2020). The relations between people and their personal objects in conditions of war and its aftermath has been studied as well, incorporating spatial and material geographies in the conceptualization of violence (Slyomovicz 1998; Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012; von Bieberstein 2017b; Biner 2020). Some scholars in critical international relations and architectural theory have explicitly attempted to create analytical concepts that move beyond the anthropocentrism of violence studies, researching the deliberate destruction of physical and built environments through notions such as “urbicide” and “spacio-cide” (Bevan 2006; Coward 2009; Hanaf 2009; Herscher 2010). Emerging from architecture and urban studies, other scholars have expanded the conceptual scope of this scholarship with a focus on the materiality of sovereignty or “the architecture of occupation” (Segal, Tartakover, and Weizman 2003). This has evolved especially from studies of Israel’s use of infrastructure, technology, and the built environment in its domination over the Palestinian people (Monk 2002; Yacobi 2004; Weizman 2007; Pullan and Baillie 2013). Unlike the new materialisms which depoliticize their object of analysis in order to render it as an “object” tout court, disembedded from

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human agency, responsibility, culpability, or embodiment, we follow the lead of scholars who have shown us that spaces and materialities are thoroughly embedded in embodied histories of violence such as those working on the Israeli apartheid and its longue durée, what Palestinian scholars designate as “ongoing Nakba” (Salamanca et al. 2012; Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007). The ethnographies in this volume account for violence as it seeps into the environment, the atmosphere, the air, nature, as it permeates people’s relations with supernatural beings, with their objects, houses, land, felds, and trees, their built environment, and infrastructures. Despite its diverse mediators, manifestations, and sites, the violence explored in this volume is human-produced violence. Importantly, it is political violence that crisscrosses relations between the human body, the environment, materialities, space, and time. Without locating violence as existing solely within the asymmetrical intersubjective relation between perpetrator and victim (e.g., Mamdani 2001), the ethnographies here trace political violence as it crosses substances, felds, and dimensions, analyzing how it is reconfgured, how it assumes other chemistries, or appears in new molds. In each instance, specifc rather than abstract conceptualizations of violence are developed and discussed, springing off from the reverberations metaphor here proposed as a concept for the comparative study of violence.

Parts of the Book This book is composed of three thematic parts that reflect the conceptual building blocks of our collective query. Each part of the book approaches one aspect in our theorization of violence. The three parts consecutively address spaces of death; violence and the supernatural; and violence against nature/ infrastructural violence. These three thematic frameworks push the study of violence further afeld, addressing the appearance of violence in the guise of non-human entities (such as spaces, supernatural beings, natural and built environments) and studying the deployment of violence through them.

Part I: Spaces of Death

Bringing death, the corpse, land, and the underground into a productive engagement with posthumanist literatures, this frst part of the book opens a

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conceptual space for exploring how posthumanist theory could potentially think violence in its historical and political dimensions. Within a particular strand of posthumanist thought, the underground is temporally reimagined in terms of the Anthropocene. Humans have violently affected the earth to the extent that we are now speaking of another geological age. The ground beneath is a fertile conceptual space for re-thinking the place of the human in relation to the nonhuman. But this ground is also a space of death, a site where death occurs (Morris, Chapter 1) and where violence’s ultimate fgure—the corpse—fnds its point of destination (von Bieberstein, Chapter 2). Some posthumanist philosophers (Braidotti 2013) have re-conceived of the dead body as a site where the human meets the nonhuman in a moment of indistinction. However, we argue that death also points to people’s enduring struggles and aspirations for recognition and political subjectivity. And just as these struggles have a history, so, too, is the underground historically constituted. In this part, we explore how land and topography are sites of violence through which various forms of dispossession have occurred and have been occurring. Land in particular is a material commodity, and land-related conflicts carry the burden of the past and are reminders of competing truth regimes that move through different temporalities. Unveiling the discourses and practices on which property regimes are based not only demystifes the state’s legality, but also singles out the role of violence in material processes of dis/possession. Chapter  1 by Rosalind Morris, entitled “Chronicling Deaths Foretold: The Testimony of the Corpse and the Problem of Political Violence in South Africa,” explores the contradictory status of political theory in South Africa today. It takes as its point of entry and departure the fgure of the corpse—and the corpse as fgure—in the representation of life on the de-industrializing periphery of the gold-mining sector. This theory emerges in a particularly complex social feld. On the one hand, it orients itself around the explanation of an economic logic that has been described as necropolitical, which is to say, beyond biopolitics, beyond the demand for the functionalization of the living human body. This theorization has exposed the degree to which people, especially poor migrants, are often made to inhabit a space of death. At the same time, however, it has also had to confront the assumption by capital, particularly mining and retail capital, of functions previously assumed by the state; namely, the provision of health care and particularly the distribution of AIDS and tuberculosis-related medications and diagnostics. In this chapter, Morris provides an alternative theorization of the postbiopolitical

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scene in South Africa. Importantly, her contribution grasps the parsing of life and death in a manner that recognizes the aspiration to recognition and political subjectivity that remains so central to the imagination of those who enter the representational scene primarily via the fgure of the corpse. In Chapter  2, entitled “Speculating on Death: Treasure Hunting in Present-Day Moush,” Alice von Bieberstein looks at the practice of hunting for what are mostly referred to as “Armenian” treasures in the area of Eastern Turkey/Northern Kurdistan/Western Armenia and asks how temporality articulates with death and the generation of value in this post-genocide locale, still riveted by violence and hardship in the ongoing war of the Turkish state against the Kurdish political movement. Von Bieberstein’s ethnography leads her to highlight and detail the essentially speculative nature of treasure hunting, involving investment in the here and now in equipment, the acquisition of knowledge, and social relations in the hope of striking it rich in an undetermined future. She traces affinities between this practice in its temporal specifcity with other contemporary economic practices, but also with particular strands of posthumanist thought, noting common attachments to a fantasy of immortality and to a future free of the burden and constraints of the present. Importantly, she shows how death becomes dedramatized in bodies of posthumanist thought, while, in the case of treasure hunting, it lurks in the ever-present threat of accidents, madness, loss, and impoverishment. But it is also constitutive of the very possibility of treasure hunting, as it cannot be thought independent of the history of genocide and mass dispossession that has formed the region. Following an excursion in how speculation, the future, and death is thought together in studies on contemporary forms of biopolitical governance, von Bieberstein fnally elaborates how treasure hunting can be conceived as a speculative investment in (historical) death. She argues that together with life insurances that had been held by Armenians in 1915 but were never cashed, treasure hunting marks the material-economic excess that could never be domesticated within a Turkish national economy founded on the mass transfer of non-Muslim wealth. Chapter 3, by Seda Altuğ, “Culture of Dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic: Land, Ethnoreligious Difference and Violence,” studies the multilayeredness of past violence by looking at the ways in which it permeates and saturates the land and topography in Beshiri, one of the districts of contemporary Batman, Turkey. A rural lowland and a medium-sized site in southeast Turkey, Beshiri and its surroundings have experienced some of the most violent faces of the late Ottoman Empire

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centralization and Turkey’s anti-Kurdish ethnic nation-making processes resulting in the Armenian genocide (1915) and a low-intensity warfare in the region (1925–) under the Turkish Republic. This chapter attempts to explore how violence and dispossession have been re-inscribed and engraved in land and topography and how knowledge of the natural and built environment forms the channel through which communal belonging and exclusion for the dispossessed selves are experienced and produced. In addition, based on Ottoman archives, Altuğ’s chapter presents the simultaneity in the transformation in the meanings attached to land and religion, a dynamic which underlies the interrelatedness between the land issue/agrarian problem and Armenian massacres in the last decade of the nineteenth century. By historically analyzing these stories, imaginaries, and subjectivities produced about the land and its topography, Altuğ explores the ways in which the ruined/ruining land, together with its material components, has turned into a fragmented trace of the past, as well as how it is being economically and symbolically deployed in the making of communal identities and sovereignties.

Part II: Violence and the Supernatural

The relationship between violence and the supernatural has long been studied in anthropological works (Taussig 1980; Ong 1988; Kwon 2008; Khan 2006; Morris 2008). In these works, narratives about supernatural beings such as the jinn, saints, spirits, angels, or demons have been studied as representations that give voice to experiences of violence and loss. In this strain of thought, anthropologists have considered “the supernatural” that lies beyond the worldly self, as an idiom for interpreting and structuring social reality (Crapanzano 1980, 1992; Mageo and Howard 1996), as a text formed through confrontations with various historical experiences (Lambek 1996), as a language of loss (Taneja 2013, 2017), or as the source for multiple histories that are made not only by human agents but also by invisible forces (Mittermaier 2012). Other social scientists and philosophers have moved these discussions around “demonology” (Crapanzano 1992) further and have ascribed a more revolutionary and transformative role to ghosts and their acts of haunting. Haunting keeps the event alive and present, engendering sites “where history and subjectivity make social life” (Gordon 1997, 8) and where insurgent politics and the establishment of responsibility between generations become possible (Derrida 1994). Despite their different takes on the role of the spiritual

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and the spectral, these explorations of the supernatural have mostly worked from within social constructionist conceptual apparatuses where the human imagination is considered the central agent in the making of reality. In this part of our volume, the contributors call for a new conceptualization of the relation between violence and the supernatural. Challenging the opposition between the anthropocentric notion of the human and the new materialist notion of distributed agency, we study the incorporation of supernatural beings in the realm of political, material, legal, and natural felds in chapters by Navaro, Biner, Khayyat, and Napolitano and Gagliardi. Here, we conceive of supernatural entities not merely as beings that mediate or represent human frailties and precarities, but as agents that act upon humans, moving between a range of spaces and temporalities. Our call to take the spiritual on board in posthumanist thinking also emerges as a further critique of the ahistorical character of the conceptualization of agency in the new materialist turn. In their appearances and renderings in these chapters, supernatural beings broaden our notions of memory and history, engendering dreams and visions and recasting ethical positions in the lives of our ethnographies’ subjects. In Chapter 4, “Violence and Spirituality: Khidr Cosmography at the Turkish/Syrian Territorial Interface,” Yael Navaro draws in the spiritual world as a fundamental nonhuman dimension that is engaged by people in their experiences of existential anxiety and uncertainty against the backdrop of violence. In an exploration of spirituality in an environment of violence in the towns of Antakya and Samandağ, bordering Syria, the mystical fgure of Khidr (Hızır) is invoked at times in human form and at others as miraculous occurrence or extraordinary manifestation. In the presence and under the weight of the effects of the Syrian war on this town and its inhabitants as well as Turkey’s uses of violence against its own citizens (in this instance, Arab Alawis) as a mode of governance, Navaro addresses spirituality as a world neither apart nor beyond, neither supplementary nor secondary, but as part and parcel of sociality, exploring its manifestation in this environment poised on the threshold of violence. Chapter 5, by Connie Gagliardi and Valentina Napolitano, “Icons of Uncaring: Borderland Cartographies of Icon Making,” builds on a parallel between the performativity surrounding two twenty-frst-century Christian icons. One is of Santo Toribio Romo, located in the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Mexico-town, downtown Detroit; the other, Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls, written on the Palestinian side of the Separation Wall

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in Bethlehem, West Bank. Santo Toribio Romo is an early twentieth-century Mexican saint associated with the history of a 1920s confrontation between the Catholic Church and the Mexican “secular” state. But he is also considered a patron saint of “illegal” border crossing. Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls is a Marian devotion, commissioned by a Greek Catholic monastery whose entrance stands ffteen feet from the Separation Wall and checkpoint that controls the movements of its Palestinian congregation. Her presence atop this “instrument of security” has become a place of public devotion but also a fxture of identifcation for the depleting Christian population in the Holy Land. By exploring the intersections between iconicity, borderlands, sainthood, political theologies, and theodicies, Napolitano and Gagliardi bring to light the nature of violence these icons condense in relation to a religious “minority” condition. They argue that this violence is best studied by focusing on the conjunction of the sociality and sinisterness of borderlands, the realities of histories of (un)caring, and the (dis)orientations that icons may engender as a response to a distribution of death. Chapter  6, by Zerrin Özlem Biner, “Digging: The Spiritual-Material Imagination of (Dis)possession in Mardin, Southeast Turkey,” draws on jinn narratives from the locals of a border city. The jinn narratives Biner conveys in her chapter are related to the digging up of stone houses considered the material and symbolic heritage of the city of Mardin. Biner discusses the limits of agency, responsibility, and justice in engagement with the anthropological literature on hauntings. She reveals the ways people search through and distribute the historical in between the material and spiritual, the human and nonhuman. In Biner’s ethnographic optic, the jinn that emerge at scenes of digging complicate the relations between the past, the present, and the future. Rather than creating causal relations between violence and its effects, jinn manifestations in the city of Mardin create a disruption in the interpretation of signifcant events, particularly that of the 1915 Armenian genocide and its aftermath. They, on the one hand, release tensions by turning the experience of haunting into an ordinary experience of living in a violent environment made of ruination. On the other hand, they recall multiple perceptions of justice over the right to property ownership, which combine the principles of Islamic theology and the official discourse of the Turkish state about the Armenian genocide. In Chapter 7, “Maskun: Two Landscapes of War,” Munira Khayyat studies the radically different worlds that open up fleetingly in spaces of destruction. The word maskun in Arabic simultaneously invokes habitation and

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silence, dwelling and abandonment, as well as haunting. In this chapter, Khayyat uses maskun to capture the link rather than the rift between destruction and creation, war and life, making conceptual and ethnographic use of the entwined meanings of the word and its ambiguous implications so as to illuminate the silent landscapes of the present. The place of which Khayyat writes is the borderland and meeting place of Lebanon and Israel, two states at war since 1948. A rural margin and site of repeated cycles of warfare, this borderland has remained suspended in a state of violence for the better part of a century. But life cannot be suspended; it goes on and thus this bucolic borderland can be thought of as cultivated through seasons of war. To cultivate is to enculture, nurture, and generate, and thus the cycles of violence that have been visited upon this place cannot be thought of as merely destructive. What emerges is often unintended, and in that sense creative of worlds.

Part III: Violence Against Nature and Infrastructural Violence

Nature and infrastructure are structural elements of and therefore instrumental to violence as an operation of power. Constituting a transparent and neutral grid, infrastructure is also central to sovereign claims and to the functioning of capitalism, generating and distributing vulnerability (Baumann and Evren in Chapters 8 and 9, respectively). Attention to infrastructure and concrete projects brings into relief the ambivalent temporality of violence, particularly through its enmeshment with capitalist processes of speculation, accumulation, dispossession, and ruination (Dawdy, Chapter 10). It makes possible a temporal reversal in our perspective on violence. Although its investments are calculated toward a future horizon of proft, risk, and security that brings violent effects on populations in their concrete present, any material structure implicated in violence raises the question of temporality also in relation to the past, particularly in terms of processes of commemoration and memorialization (Çaylı, Chapter 11). Chapter 8, by Hanna Baumann, “Infrastructural Violence in Jerusalem: Abjection, Incorporation, and Resistance in the ‘Cyborg City,’ ” examines the role of urban infrastructure networks in the ongoing conflict over Jerusalem, arguing that they participate in a structural form of violence both through exclusion and abjection of Palestinians as well as through expansion into and incorporation of contested territory. The notion of infrastructure as a

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link between humans and the built urban environment and a nexus between “organic” and “artifcial” matter is captured in Gandy’s (2005) conception of “cyborg cities.” Reading Jerusalem as a cyborg city highlights why infrastructures are such effective mediators of violence. They are inextricably linked on the one hand to bodies, making the humans whose lives they support vulnerable, and on the other to the nonhuman city, providing them with a longevity that makes their violence a structural, rather than a direct force. In addition to simply distributing power (both electrical and social) unequally, infrastructural networks can also become targets of violence. Because they are seen as more than benign means of urban ser vice provision, utilities and transport installations in Jerusalem have become key sites of contestation through appropriation, boycott, and disruption. Baumann reads these attacks on infrastructure by Palestinians and the resulting interruption of flows as signaling a refusal to be integrated into the system represented by the infrastructure, as a contestation of sovereignty over the territory in question, and as a manner of appropriating Israeli strategies of spatial control. In Chapter 9, “Tenses of Violence: Ruination and Accumulation Along the Çoruh Valley, Turkey,” Erdem Evren notes that since the beginning of the 2000s, the construction of a series of mega-dams has been severely devastating the environment. Planned as the highest hydropower project on the Çoruh River, the Yusufeli Dam will lead to the submergence of the entire town of Yusufeli and its nineteen villages, the resettlement of at least 20,000 people, and the destruction of nearly all agricultural land. Evren elaborates on the political and economic processes through which notions of belonging, valuation, and displacement relate to each other in contradictory ways to shape the predicament of waiting for what the villagers call “the coming annihilation.” Evren suggests that even though the material and subjective devastation caused by dam constructions is recognized and experienced by Yusufeli’s residents as some kind of injury and suffering, the slow and attritional character of this infrastructural violence sets the stage for residents’ engagement with different forms of “speculative accumulation” (Campbell 2014) in an effort to remain viable in the future. Yet, Evren also observes that imaginaries of speculation and calculation for the future are occasionally ruptured as some residents connect time frames by comparing their own coming dispossession with the plight of local Armenians who lost their lives and homes during the Armenian genocide of 1915. His detailed ethnography reveals that this enmeshment of infrastructural violence in contemporary

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Turkey with the originary violence of the nation-state summons a range of human and nonhuman entities to the valley to generate a range of unexpected perspectives on agency, responsibility, and suffering. In Chapter 10, “The Wounded Landscape: Mass Trauma, Memory, and Human- Object Relations,” Shannon Dawdy studies two New Orleans disasters—a catastrophic fre in 1788 that nearly wiped out the city and which left a signifcant archaeological imprint and Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. She argues that disaster victims often suppress or skirt around reminders of the event. Some sift slowly through the ruins as a way to come to terms with what has happened, and some rush to erase and rebuild. Others hold onto every remnant and curate the scars. While disasters often have the effect of temporarily uniting a community, the process of “recovery” just as often divides it. Dawdy explores the possible reasons for such contradiction and focuses on the relationship between trauma and materiality. In Chapter 11, “Architectural Witnessing at the Former Madımak Hotel in Sivas, Turkey,” Eray Çaylı explores how the legacy of Turkey’s violent past is negotiated through its sites of political violence. He focuses on the pioneering case of an arson attack that took place in 1993 in the east-central city of Sivas, through which violence’s on-site memorialization was taken up in Turkey as an architectural component of discourses of “facing and reckoning with the past.” The concept of witnessing has loomed large in this process due not only to the Turkish-language trope of referring to historic sites as “witnesses,” but also to grassroots demands that sites of political violence be “protected witnesses” in the form of memorial museums. In discussing architecture’s being mobilized as a witness to violence in this context, Çaylı revisits similar mobilizations that have recently appeared both in and outside academia. Whereas the focus of these mobilizations has tended to be on events in their singularity that are considered the stuff of the epistemic offering of witnesses (whether architectural or human ones), he encounters in Sivas the imperative to understand witnessing as an ethically charged practice through which the victims, survivors and their political heirs claim the agency to historicize and continually rehistoricize the event in relation to other events. Notes 1. Severin Fowles (2016) has argued persuasively that the moment the academic feld was challenged by non-white/non-Western scholars, the feld turned to the study of “the object.” After all, though an object may be said to have resonances and affects, it nonetheless cannot talk back or resist.

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2. While early references to it (Hayles 1999) openly acknowledged and built on the efforts by scholars in feminist and postcolonial studies to deconstruct a liberal humanist notion of the human, highly influential contemporary strands of posthumanist theory strive to overcome what they see as an enduring human exceptionalism inherent in these predecessors. It is impor tant to note that not everyone follows this radical gesture of distancing. Donna Haraway (2008), for instance, refuses the label of posthumanist for her own work, recalling that “urgent work still remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences” (17). 3. This book is one of several outcomes of a fve-year anthropological project funded by the European Research Council under the title “Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey” in which we, the coeditors of this volume, worked together. The conceptual framework at the heart of this volume emerged as a result of our feld and archival work in Turkey and project workshops between 2012 and 2016. We put this work in conversation with invited papers that were presented at a conference we orga nized in Istanbul in March 2015 under the title “Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space.” Our project and conference led to this volume’s composition. 4. While we consider “genocide” the correct legal and scientifc term to characterize the intentional mass murder and dispossession of the Armenian and other non-Muslim communities beginning in 1915, we prefer not to capitalize the word and thereby turn it into the proper name of the event. “Genocide,” by naming the intentional mass murder, captures the perspective of the perpetrators, unlike terms like Aghet (catastrophe), similar to Shoah or Holocaust. 5. The following are some works that have critically contributed to this feld of research: Akçam 2014; Akçam and Kurt 2015; Altınay 2006; Bilal and de la Bretèque 2013; Biner 2020; Brink-Danan 2012; Ekmekçioğlu 2016; Gözel 2016; Iğsız 2018; Kévorkian 2006; Maksudyan 2014; Mills 2010; Neyzi 2004; Onaran 2010; Özgül 2013, 2014; Parla and Özgül 2016; Ritter and Sivaslian 2013; Schäfers 2019; Şekeryan and Taşcı 2017; Suciyan 2016; Üngör and Polatel 2011; Watenpaugh 2017. 6. The “matter” in the materiality is not similarly conceived in historical materialisms (as in works on structural and symbolic violence) and in the new materialisms. We strive to contrast the materialism in studies of structural and symbolic violence with the power-blindness of the new materialisms.

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Khalili, Laleh. 2013. “Thinking About Violence.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (4): 791–94. Khan, Naveeda. 2006. “Of Children and Jinn: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship During Uncertain Times.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (2): 234–64. Kirksey, Eben. 2015. Emergent Ecologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kirksey, Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–76. Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2015. “Anthropology of Ontologies.” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 44 (1): 311–27. Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 1996. “Afterword: Spirits and Their Histories.” In Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind, edited by Jeannette Marie Mageo and Alan Howard, 237–49. London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 2005. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14–41. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2010. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto.’ ” New Literary History 41 (3): 471–90. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lossin, R. H. 2020. “Neoliberalism for Polite Company: Bruno Latour’s Pseudo-Materialist Coup.” Salvage 7 (June). https://salvage.zone/articles/neoliberalism-for-polite-company -bruno-latours-pseudo-materialist-coup/. Lyons, Kristina. 2016. “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers Under the Gun of the US-Colombian War on Drugs.” Cultural Anthropology 1:56–81. Mageo, Jeannette Marie, and Alan Howard, eds. 1996. Spirits in Culture, History and Mind. London: Routledge. Makdisi, Ussama. 2019. Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Oakland: University of California Press. Makdisi, Ussama, and Paul Silverstein, eds. 2006. Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Maksudyan, Nazan. 2014. Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Maksudyan, Nazan. 2019. Ottoman Children and Youth During World War I. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Masco, Joseph. 2013. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post– Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McDougall, James. 2005. “Savage Wars? Codes of Violence in Algeria, 1830s–1990s.” Third World Quarterly 26 (1): 117–31.

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Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Continuum. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mills, Amy. 2010. Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mittermaier, Amira. 2012. “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2): 247–65. Monk, Daniel Bertrand. 2002. An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morris, Rosalind C. 2008. “Giving Up Ghosts: Notes on Trauma and the Possibility of the Political from Southeast Asia.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1:229–58. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Navaro, Yael. 2020. “The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49:161–73. Neep, Daniel. 2012. Occupying Syria Under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space, and State Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neyzi, Leyla. 2004. “Exploring Memory Through Oral History in Turkey.” In Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, edited by Maria Todorova, 60–76. New York: New York University Press. Nichanian, Marc. 2009. The Historiographic Perversion. New York: Columbia University Press. Onaran, Nevzat. 2010. Emval-i Metruke Olayı: Osmanlı’da ve Cumhuriyette Ermeni ve Rum Mallarının Türkleştirilmesi. Istanbul: Belge Yayınları. Ong, Aihwa. 1988. “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia.” American Ethnologist 15 (1): 28–42. Özgül, Ceren. 2013. Genealogical, Religious, and Legal Conversions: Claiming Armenianness in Turkey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan International Institute. Özgül, Ceren. 2014. “Legally Armenian: Tolerance, Conversion, and Name Change in Turkish Courts.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (3): 622–49. Parla, Ayȿe, and Ceren Özgül. 2016. “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship in Turkey; or, The History of the Gezi Uprising Starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery.” Public Culture 28 (3): 617–53. Petryna, Adriana. 2003. Life Exposed: Biological Citizenship After Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pullan, Wendy, and Britt Baillie, eds. 2013. Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Everyday. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ritter, Lawrence, and Max Sivaslian. 2013. Kılıç Artıkları: Türkiye’nin Gizli ve Müslümanlaştırılmış Ermenileri. Istanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı Yayınları.

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Sa’di, Ahmad, and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. 2007. Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press. Salamanca, Omar Jabary, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour. 2012. “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (1): 1–8. Savransky, Martin, Alex Wilkie, and Marsha Rosengarten. 2017. “The Lure of Possible Futures: On Speculative Research.” In Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures, edited by Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky, and Marsha Rosengarten, 1–17. London: Routledge. Schäfers, Marlene. 2019. “Archived Voices, Acoustic Traces, and the Reverberations of Kurdish History in Modern Turkey.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61 (2): 447–73. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe Bourgois, eds. 2003. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Segal, Raf, David Tartakover, and Eyal Weizman, eds. 2003. A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. London: Verso. Şekeryan, Ararat, and Nvart Taşçı, Eds. 2017. Yok Edilen Medeniyet: Geç Osmanlı ve Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemlerinde Gayrimüslim Varlığı. Istanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı Yayınları. Slyomovicz, Susan. 1998. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Suciyan, Talin. 2016. The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post- Genocide Society, Politics and History. London: I. B. Tauris. Taneja, Anand Vivek. 2013. “Jinnealogy: Everyday Life and Islamic Theology in PostPartition Delhi.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 139–65. Taneja, Anand Vivek. 2017. Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and the Commodity Fetishism in South Amer ica. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thrift, Nigel, 2007. Non-representational Theory: Space / Politics / Affect. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Üngör, Uğur Ümit, and Mehmet Polatel. 2011. Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property. London: Continuum. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–88. von Bieberstein, Alice. 2017a. “Surviving Hrant Dink: Carnal Mourning Under the Specter of Senselessness.” Social Analysis 61 (1): 55–68. von Bieberstein, Alice. 2017b. “Treasure/Fetish/Gift: Hunting for ‘Armenian Gold’ in PostGenocide Turkish Kurdistan.” Subjectivity 10 (2): 170–89. Watenpaugh, Heghnar  Z. 2017. “Survivor Objects: Cultural Heritage In and Out of the Middle East.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49:752–56.

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Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Weston, Kath. 2012. “Political Ecologies of the Precarious.” Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2): 429–55. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yacobi, Haim, 2004. Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 1

Chronicling Deaths Foretold The Testimony of the Corpse and the Problem of Political Violence in South Africa Rosalind C. Morris

[If you’re] rich, then you can be a man among men. You’ve got a voice in the country, in the world, wherever. Even if you pass by where people stay, sit, and then they can point [at] you with a finger, “Yeah, you see that guy.” Because you’re well known. But if you’re just simple like me, ah . . . even if you greet some of the guys, they’ll say, “Ah, this guy. . . . What for? Why is he greeting us?” . . . You’re nothing. You don’t have something.

These words, spoken by an informal miner in South Africa in August 2016, express the predicament of the undocumented migrants who inhabit the peripheries of South Africa’s contracting gold industry. Their fantasies of escape from invisibility and their desires for recognition emerge from a situation in which visibility is at once a lure and a hazard, accompanied by the contradictory demands of self-display and self-concealment. The speaker of these words bears an uncannily signifcant nickname, which translates roughly as “Look” or “Give Praise,” and I shall refer to him by a synonymous name, as Dumisani. Dumisani’s sense of being overlooked is shared by many young men, and is frst of all a function of poverty, but it

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has political consequences. In the citation above, being “nothing” describes a situation of lacking the material success that would elicit admiration and recognition from one’s peers, but it is also a lack of a voice, an incapacity to be heard in the country and the world, which is to say in the political domain. This is one of the reasons why it is associated with a desire for the state—despite the fact that the state is the source of possible exclusion and violent suppression. Such a desire for the state is at the heart of the story I wish to tell, and its ambiguous outcomes are the object of my efforts to understand. Some eighteen months after the conversation quoted above, after having been shot when chasing a group of armed thieves, as part of a vigilante group formed because the police had not responded to growing violent crime in the area, Dumisani attributed his nothingness to a lack of documents, including his lack of a passport and certifcates of education or vocational knowledge. “I don’t even have a CV to say this is who I am. Nothing,” he said mournfully. “Even if I had a CV with my name on it, when I’m looking for a job, and they asked me, ‘What job do you do?’ I would say . . . nothing. I don’t know anything.” Dumisani was a handsome thirty-two-year-old man with great intellectual acuity, a good knowledge of four languages, and considerable experience as an underground miner. He carried himself with a certain bravado and even pride, as his young comrades noted, but he was haunted by self-doubt. Without the credentials recognizing this status, he felt himself to be without substance, an invisible man. His common-law wife and the mother of his daughter, who worked as a cook and a domestic laborer before starting her own business as a seller of vegetables, and whose business acumen impressed all who knew her, echoed his sentiment: “Even if you go looking for domestic work, sometimes they ask you for ID or a passport. You don’t have a passport. You’re just a regular person. You came from the bush, you’re a nobody.” I could recount innumerable other examples of such felt invisibility in which a lack of state recognition and citizenship rights exiles people to poverty, which further deprives them of the means to garner the looks of appraisal that they desire from others. The psychic wounds that accompany this predicament are profound, but my concern in this essay lies elsewhere: with the forms and practices by which people solicit the state in an effort to obtain that recognition which they believe will grant them a means to escape such invisibility, to access political visibility. I do not make this claim in

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order to suggest that the state is the rightful bearer of this authority, but to understand the force of its promise—however violent, however broken—as it continues to reverberate in contemporary South Africa. To speak of political visibility is to identify a structure of recognition in which the one who gives him- or herself to be seen is assured of a response. It is to be distinguished from mere to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey 1975)—the condition that afflicts feminized or racially marked subjects who enter the political feld as merely visible objects, or fetishes, rather than those whose self-presentation forms the basis of their self-representation. The questions I wish to pursue in the following pages are as follows: What are the conditions of political visibility within which one can, as it were, be deemed to count without being reduced to the mere medium of demographic discourse or politics as vote counting? What happens when the effort, having been made, is nonetheless not recognized, or the claims that accompany it are refused? These are abstract questions, but I pose them with a specifc scene and set of referents in mind. Those whom I invoke with the concept of the invisible are the undocumented migrant miners and stone breakers who, lacking papers to legitimate their presence in South Africa, are ineligible for recognition by the state except insofar as they transgress its law. This position, which is a kind of invisibility, nonetheless demands self-concealment because such people often become visible for the state only to be refused, effaced, or negated via deportation. But these undocumented migrants, who long for recognition and an escape from the arduous labors of self-concealment and self-dissimulation, do not inhabit a world neatly divided between the visible and the invisible, among which solidarities would be inherited and alliances easily formed. Theirs is an internally heterogeneous world, riven by historically fabricated divisions. Indeed, it is this history of orga nized division that structures the way in which they negotiate the twin threats of both visibility and invisibility. In pursuit of an understanding of this predicament, I will trace a movement along an indirect and discontinuous path that has three points or moments that can be treated as exemplary. The frst entails the effort to solicit the state, and thus to assume a certain form of visibility, through the provision of images of crimes that can serve as evidence—if, that is, they are granted that status by police and allied juridical institutions. In this gesture, people give themselves to be seen as the bearers of facts and the locus of the state’s capacity to claim a knowledge function. They do so because they desire the state’s presence and believe that

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it will be accompanied by a transformation of their milieu from structural lawlessness and illegality to absolute lawfulness. In the case I describe, this effort fails. The second moment, related to the frst though not causally linked to it, emerges in the space of such failure. In this case, those who have not been recognized redouble their efforts in a cynical new mode and perform an image of themselves for the bearers of power (the state but also the mass-mediatized dominant public sphere) in the form of a stereotyped primitivity. They give themselves to be seen by exaggerating the forms of appearance expected of them. In doing so, however, they risk a merely negative recognition, and while this confers a certain aura of potency, it can lead to a more radical renunciation, which is the object of the activities in the third example I consider. In the latter, there emerges a mimetic theater of vengeance in which, having been refused recognition and access to the state, those who desire a certain rule of law enact what I consider to be a brutal simulation of statism, one that depends on ethnicized sacrifcial violence— in the interest of sustaining the possibility of political life in a space that is at once beyond and beneath, but mainly abandoned by, the formal structures of the nation-state. The state in question, post-apartheid South Africa, is both like and unlike other nation-states insofar as its history is one in which ethnicity has been cultivated to mediate the relations between society and the state, where capitalism has taken a highly racialized form. What one learns from those who inhabit its undocumented internal margins is that the so-called demise of the nation-state is also the scene of a persisting statism, that the echoes of apartheid reverberate across the desiccated landscape where it once ruled, and that the aspiration to visibility as recognition is among the most potent if ironic residues of this history: the last will and testament of liberation’s still unfulflled promises, and the form of its transmutation into the ghost of liberalism. Let me then turn to the exemplary scenes that I have alluded to thus far, in order to lay the groundwork for an analysis of this history of invisibility’s desires and of its tragic culmination in the theater of sacrifcial violence. I will begin not with the frst case, but with the second, in which the performance of a theatricalized savagery arises in the place where recognition is withheld but desired. This performance reaches backward to the moment of a frst effort to solicit recognition from the state, and forward to the last, where its failure to arrive leads to the exorbitant display of a violence both structured by ethnicity and exceeding it. Traversing all of these appari-

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tions is, I will argue, not a society posed against the state, but a longing for the political which emerges from society and which, against all odds, persists in its ruins.

The “Seen” of a Crime In September  2017, on the periphery of a now-closed gold mine in South Africa, the body of a man was found by the side of the road. The man had been the victim of an extra-judicial killing, meted out by community members in response to a transgression. According to witnesses, he had been a member of a gang and had attempted to rob informal miners, called “zama-zamas.” The alleged thief had been shot in the head. In addition, his eyes had been gouged out post mortem. The speculative explanation for this mutilation was that the man’s eyes had been removed to prevent police pathologists from obtaining an image of the killers from the retina of his corpse where, it was feared, it might have been stored in a kind of traumatic archive of the body. The fantasy that a corpse’s retina retains the image of a last vision is familiar to historians of photography and forensic science. It was a common belief in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, informing the experimental science of people like Franz Boll and Willy Kühne, as well as fction writers like Jules Verne and Villiers d’Isle Adam (Goulet 2005). It persisted in the common sense of many people throughout the twentieth century (Evans 1993). Nonetheless, such beliefs have acquired the aura of the archaic in most modern societies and I am not aware of their circulation in South Africa in recent history. One possible explanation for this strange optographical gesture (the post-mortem retinal image is called an optogram) is that it constitutes a vernacular appropriation of contemporary forensic epistemology. If this is the case, popular consciousness has taken over a photographic fetishism that is common in contexts where photography seems to offer a medium for radical objectivity, one that provides both an ideal and a fgure of modern justice. Another possible explanation is that the performance of belief in optography has become part of the theatrics of archaism that black subjects in South Africa have periodically been forced to enact in order to access powers that the state has historically denied them. Such a performance of a belief that has actually been relinquished (or never actually adopted) is addressed to those

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who expect such archaism: the heirs to South Africa’s racist primitivism. Indeed, such theatrical “primitivity” has been periodically mobilized in labor conflicts and other forms of insurrectionary protest, as was the case at Marikana in 2012. On that occasion, striking miners waved spears, assumed the attire of cinematically “tribal” warfare, and played up the threat of ferocious violence as the cameras rolled, flaunting the nightmarish images that their opponents had already conjured (Morris 2017). Essentially, they gave themselves to be seen in the imago projected by dominant white society. A long history demanded their performance of cultural alterity and had ensured that if they were to be granted recognition, it would not be because they are deemed the bearers of a right grounded in class interests or human species being, but because they were thought of as the locus of a primal violence immune to suasion through language and thus at the limit of the political. It is thus possible that the gouging out of the eyes was intended not merely as a preventive tactic but to announce and to threaten a capacity for violence in excess of any obviously utilitarian function. After all, the man was mutilated after death. So, the gesture—an acknowledgment of photography and an evasion of a specifc photographic act—can be read as the negative image of a foreclosure by and from within a racialized capitalist modernity. In other words, it is not a symptom of cultural difference or a trace of resurgent premodernity. Insofar as it imagines the body as itself an archive of evidentiary traces, the optographical fantasy may be read as an ironic and contradictory index of the dream of omniscience. It is the mark of a forensic modernity, not its obverse. It is not coincidental that the media-technological and bureaucratic logics of post-sovereign administrative states are interwoven in the ways that they are; both work to distribute and disperse the functions of knowing, which undergirds modern governmental power. A rich and varied literature on the history of formal gold mining in South Africa testifes to the complex forms of biopolitical governance fashioned in the aftermath of the AngloBoer War (1899–1902) and during the regimes of both segregation (approximately 1913–1948) and apartheid (1948–1994), under which the racialized and territorialized governance of populations was undertaken in the interests of mining capital by an administration distributed across state and corporate institutions.1 In recent years, the closure of some of the world’s deepest mines and the emergence of illegalized, informal mining in de-industrializing spaces has led to the emergence of improvisational forms of labor and life that defy any easy categorization in the terms familiar from either Marxian

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or Foucauldian analysis. Neither merely biopolitical nor fully necropolitical, these worlds are not administered in any sense proper to that term. And yet, if they are abandoned and neglected by most of the ideological and surveillance apparatuses of the South African state, these spaces are haunted by the histories in which such governance operated. Often, that receding horizon of governmentality returns in the dream image of lawfulness.2 But, as shall be discussed, this lawfulness is less the ideal of a world unmarred by crime than it is the scene of a hoped-for retribution, where violence would be the occasion for the state’s materialization as an authority that responds to individuals while foreclosing the specter of ethnocidal war, which is to say political violence within its bounds. Such violence threatens to erupt both above ground and underground. But whereas the dream image of a lawful society is sustained above ground by the promise of a retributive justice meted out by the state, underground, it is society itself, society beyond or below the state, that promises (without delivering and with varying degrees of coherence) its alternatives to and of violence. When the state fails to materialize in the scene where it is desired, I shall argue, the society forged underground is faced with two apparently contradictory options: politicized violence that takes the form of ethnocidal war; or sacrifcial violence, in which groups turn inward and affirm themselves in spectacles of sacrifcial self-purifcation. This sacrifcial violence both avows the social bonds that transcend empirical existence and attempts to contain conflict at a level below the state. In the representational domain, it is expressed in the simultaneous depiction of corpses as evidence and the use of those depictions to mark a distinction between the dead and death, the former being members of society, the latter being indices of its subordination to governmental logics and abstraction in general. In this awful space, the turn to sacrifce may constitute a specifc claim on the human in the face of a perceived dehumanization, particularly if sacralizability is one of the forms of being human. Not long before my conversation with Dumisani and his friends, in which he described his sense of being overlooked, I was shown a blurred image on the shattered screen of an old smartphone, where the glass had been transformed into a spider web of radiating shards. It depicted the body of a young black man, floating faceup in a dam. The body, it would later be revealed, was that of man stoned to death in a vengeance killing by competing zama-zamas. I was shown this image more than a day after the corpse had been found by Mozambican migrants who make their living recovering and reprocessing mine tailings near the water’s edge, or who “drill for water” with which they

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supply the sluicing tables of other miners who work deep underground. This digital photograph was taken by a neighbor of the deceased as a kind of proof. He wanted the local police to come and investigate the apparent crime, or at least to retrieve the corpse and enable its return to family members in the man’s home in Lesotho. Like other such documents, this digital photograph was impelled by a photo-graphological drive that retains a forensic ambition while nonetheless submitting itself to the necessity for a narrative supplement. That is to say, the picture in and of itself could not guarantee anything about the event, but it was used to make possible its recounting. I was shown it as the occasion to describe the inaction of the police, who had initially failed to respond to the image and the attendant requests for state assistance of these noncitizens. The testimonial function of the image had thus been split and doubled: initially a vehicle to solicit the state, it had become an icon of state indifference and a witness to abandonment.

Death Sans Papiers In a bureaucratized surveillance state, social abandonment is often marked and produced by the absence of documents. Documents, in the sense of identity papers, may submit an individual to the operations of abstraction, coding him or her in terms of ethnicity, place of origin, sexed identity, and so forth. But abstraction would also be the basis of recognition—as citizen— rather than its refusal. This is why being without papers can become the very scene of death. It is a form of privation. Those “without papers” are not only vulnerable to deportation or harassment by authorities, but they may also be subject to xenophobic violence. Occasionally, the mere absence of documentation leads to the presumption of foreignness in South Africa (Morris 2011). And, in an especially piquant irony, those who are both undocumented and economically destitute are often reduced to “writing papers on their bodies” (wearing placards), as they sometimes describe their self-marketing. Adorned with the signage of their own lack, they stand by the traffic lights, begging for employment. Dumisani once described to me how he had tried and failed to obtain a job, explaining the life of a zama-zama as the only alternative to such debasement: “Where am I going to work? Should I go back and write papers on top of my chest, saying I’m looking for a job. And stay for a week, two weeks, get one job for eighty rand?3 After two weeks, I need to pay rent. I need to do every thing as a human being, like everybody. . . . I do not like it

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but I’m going there because I do not have a choice.”4 If this description of writing need on one’s own body is partly a function of linguistic awkwardness on the part of a speaker for whom English is a third or fourth language, it is hard to imagine a more poignant expression of the condition of the undocumented migrant, the sans papiers—at once deprived of papers and exposed to the point of having to wear them.5 Anthroplogists often speak of the ways in which power is inscribed onto the bodies of subjects—whether in the forms of a violent and relatively immediate carving of the flesh, or in the more abstract codifcations that inform the logics of biopolitical governance. This vignette from the poverty-ravaged margins of South Africa’s mines reveals how the abstractions of the administrative state have assumed a new literality. At the limit of the state, they produce a humiliating kind of paper cut.6 Kafka understood that the person condemned by the juridical state deciphers the law or learns to read what is being inscribed in and on his body, with his wounds. Among other things, what the undocumented migrant feels and reads with his or her wounds is not merely the commandment (and with it the idea of the state as exclusive bearer of the law) but the fact of the state’s surrendering of its own functions to the market. It is partly the restitution of the state in its ideal form as the bearer of power, and especially that power that confers recognition, that is desired by many South Africans and non-citizens living in the country today. The new context demands and produces new fgures, and has been shaped by new forms of imaging, as well as new forms of aspiration to be seen. The floating corpse on the cell-phone screen may be grasped as an iconic instantiation of the post-apartheid state’s expulsion of undocumented migrants from the domain of national legibility, and thus of state responsibility. When people produce such images in the aftermath of a death and give them to be seen by authorities (from police officials to anthropologists), they selfconsciously draw upon the promise and the lure that knowledge can be the foundation of legal remedy. There is something almost magical or prayer-like in this belief that evidence will command a response. Such faith in the political efficacy of truth-telling is partly the legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), although it subtends a much wider set of commitments to the juridicalization of modern societies. In this case, however, it is not reconciliation that is desired but intervention and retributive justice. When the aspiration to transform event into evidence and evidence into the basis for state recognition fails, two possibilities seem to offer themselves in this

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context: one is inter-ethnic conflict, the other is sacrifcial violence. The latter, it turns out, is used to inhibit the eruption of the former, even when (especially when) the latter appears in the guise of the former. Under apartheid, ethnicization constituted the means for limiting the political lives of black South Africans (overlaying tribal affiliations with a new set of signifcations and intensities). In the aftermath of apartheid, the new state’s aspiration to escape the risk that ethnic communities would become fully politicized in an ethno-national form, and on that basis would claim sovereignty, was linked to processes of re-racialization on one hand, and the transformation of ethnicity into a mode of corporatization and self-commoditization on the other (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). But ethnicity is not merely a structure of governmentality, nor a form for accessing the market; it is also a structure within which subjectivity is acquired, an object of attachment and cathexis, a source of meaning and a point for orienting one’s relationship to others. It is thus not easily left behind. It also suffuses the consciousness (and unconsciousness) of those in areas—marginal, informal, and heterogeneous—where a corporatization of ethnicity is either inaccessible or meaningless. This is especially true in communities of informal mining, where the ethnically heterogeneous populations are comprised of undocumented migrants who nonetheless follow the routes established by the licit migrant economy during its heydays, migrants whose forebears also moved along those same routes under the aegis of the various labor-recruiting bodies who serviced mining capital with the blessing of the state (Legassick 1974; Wilson 1972; Wolpe 1972). It is from such spaces that sacrifcial violence returns as the broken instrument of a claim on both the state and the idea of a society.

The TRC: Theater of Political Violence To understand this scene in post-apartheid South Africa, some background is necessary. Over the last twenty-fve years, South Africa has seen a remarkable, if not always successful experiment in the reconstitution of the nationstate. This experiment has been carried out in a space stranded between the belated image of the party-state (which was its de facto form during the early days of the African National Congress/Tripartite Alliance’s rule) and the fantasy of a cosmopolitical formation of a regional sort. The Freedom Charter, signed at Kliptown in June 1955 and adopted by the ANC as its foundational document long before the writing of South Africa’s internationally praised

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constitution, opened with the remarkable assertion that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and . . . no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.” In other words, citizenship was not a criterion for belonging or recognition. Since the fall of apartheid in 1994, waves of xenophobic violence, directed mainly at undocumented migrant workers and residents of the wealthier informal settlements, have repeatedly displaced tens of thousands of those who have resided in South Africa, and who should have been recognized under the terms of the Kliptown declaration. At the same time, violence against women and sexual minorities has persisted, all in the shadow of that luminous theater of conciliatory experiment, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Meanwhile, labor strikes and popular protests have been accompanied by the proliferation of new, more militant unions and political parties. Structured by a discourse of class, strikes and protests have sublated within themselves what, in other times and places, might be called “civil war”—although W. E. B. Du Bois referred to the American Civil War in inverse terms, as a general strike on the part of black subjects. Both formulations beg the question of what constitutes warfare within a polity, as opposed to between sovereign polities. Civil war is not a Hobbesian state of “Warre” in which individuals retain the right to exercise private force (Sahlins 1972, 172–73). Civil war is organized; it is a question of groups and institutions that could conceivably accede to the status of sovereign polity and it entails complex fnancial practices in addition to military and strategic activities. Political violence, as the concept has been deployed in South Africa, refers to something beneath this level of organization. During the apartheid era, dominant discourse named such violence terrorism rather than civil war. Now, very few people in South Africa speak today of civil war, even when they invoke the specter of inter-racial war—whether as that which was surpassed by constitutional reform in the transition to democracy or as that which looms on the horizon as a recurring possibility (the latter often taking the form of analogy with Zimbabwe).7 Even prior to the collapse of apartheid, the nomination of both the conflict between white nationalist and black liberation forces and the conflicts between competing anti-apartheid entities, most notably the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party, was termed a civil war only at the risk of a certain scandal—at least outside of leftist circles.8 What was once racist demurring has become, in the post-apartheid era, transposed into a didactic fgure—a monstrous warning projected onto the future. Conversely, the category of political violence is now invoked to

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retrospectively name and sustain a condition that can perhaps best be understood as “not not war.” This category of political violence was always already haunted by the specter of criminality, however. At once a contaminant of the idea of the political and its dangerous supplementary foundation, the concept of political violence functions as the operator of a division between war and criminality, on one hand, and violence and civility, on the other. These nested and overlapping divisions are, I believe, the very means by which the political unit of the post-apartheid state achieved its tentative unity. Its vehicle has been a renewed concept of ethnicity. The historical circumstances in which political violence assumed its status are ones in which the idea of criminality failed to provide a stable ground on which the South African state could consolidate and legitimate a monopoly on violence, however. This was partly because it abandoned scheduled areas (reservations and homelands) to “illegalism,” or authorized and encouraged traditional authorities to operate vigilante forces. In the latter years of the apartheid era, the ruling regime was accused from without of crimes against humanity. And since then, the always-unstable claims of the state to a monopoly on violence have given way to the licensing and outsourcing of that function to private security corporations (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016, 24–25; Mbembe 2003). As is well known, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) worked on the basis of a differentiation between political and criminal violence. Only acts deemed to have been committed in the pursuit of political ends could be exempted from prosecution within the criminal order. As a body organized in the pursuit of restorative justice, divided between three mandates (human rights investigations, reparations, and amnesty), the TRC had no power to bring charges or to determine the culpability of individuals for criminal acts. It could only exempt some people from criminal prosecution, or indeed suspend the judgments already in effect by determining that the acts for which punishment was being or had been sought were committed for reasons other than personal interest and in the ser vice of a political function. The vast majority of cases brought before the amnesty commission failed. Only 849 of 7,112 petitions were granted.9 To this extent, the TRC buttressed or supplemented rather than opposed the juridical domain. Political violence was posed in the TRC as the other of economic crime, albeit only on the basis of excluding an analysis of the role of capital in the operations of apartheid. Thus, the condition of eligibility for amnesty was the full disclosure of all acts and activities carried out in the name of a political

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ambition. This demand for total confession generated two possible rationales for refusing amnesty. The frst was mendacity: the concealment or merely partial disclosure of violent acts. The second was the incapacity to demonstrate political motivation. What this meant was that, in the terms of the TRC, criminal violence was perpetrated by a self-interested subject who, acting on principles that would other wise be normative for a market society, had become excessive. The violent criminal, as opposed to the political insurrectionary, was the sign of a double failure: of both the political and the usurpation of the political by the economy. The violent criminal, as defned by the TRC, is always already the thief, but he abducts value outside of the market, and in ways that seem to defy economic rationalization. This is why so many South Africans of all political persuasions are perplexed when economic crime is accompanied by physical violence. If crime is reducible to economy, why must it be accompanied by assault and what often appears as cruel and gratuitous violence? This question, posed again and again, in cities and townships, in newspapers and idle chatter, is testimony to the hegemony of a kind of analysis that founders on that same threshold where war and political violence are arraigned in opposition to each other, and where the aspiration for economization makes of political violence the name of an excess which is neither war nor not-war. The passionate intensities, the rages, the desperate demands for reciprocity in the form of vengeance, the desires that have been rendered excessive for all who have been assigned to the category of need—all of these phenomena are at once contained in and disavowed in the twinned effort to conceive of political violence in opposition to both economically motivated criminal violence on one hand, and war on the other. The frst opposition rests on the distinction between violence that is said to be motivated either by self-interest (crime) or by social function (political violence); the second distinguishes between sociopolitical violence and warfare on the basis of their relative conformity to the interests of the state. It is therefore necessary to reconceive the question of political violence, and to do so with specifc reference to the case at hand.

Enduring Foreignness

Undocumented zama-zama miners can be found in many of the deindustrializing spaces of the South African gold industry. In these areas, where large-scale industrial operations once enabled gold extraction from

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depths of two to four kilometers beneath the surface of the earth, illegalized, itinerant miners, mainly from Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Malawi, now descend with virtually no technological support. They use hammers and chisels, and small amounts of dynamite purchased on the black market, to break up the rock, carry ing the sorted ore on their backs to the surface, where women or, less frequently, boys and young men, grind it by hand into extremely fne sand. Afterward, the men process this powder on improvised sluicing tables, before amalgamating it with small amounts of mercury, also illegally bought on the black market. Smelting is undertaken with handheld blowtorches or wood-burning fres, after which small nuggets of gold are passed along illicit chains of buying and selling until they either enter the markets in South Africa or travel out of the country. Depending on the area, this activity is conducted on smaller or larger scales, with miners descending in groups that range in size from three to ffty men. They stay underground for periods that range from three or four days to several weeks or even months at a time. Those who crush rock above ground, and who work under the authority of the men who go underground, are also organized in teams. So, too, are the providers of water to the sluicing tables. Local gangs and international cartels play their part in this economy, particularly at the interface between the market and the miners, but most of the local activity is undertaken independently, in groups that are structured by natal language, place of origin, and kinship ties. These are the principles of sociality that offer themselves as alternatives to both ethnicity and the state, but that are relentlessly recoded as ethnicity by the South African state—and many of its citizens and analysts. The word “zama” means “to try” in many of the Bantu languages spoken in the polyglot spaces of informal secondary extraction. It also translates as “to gamble.” The money that can be earned or won from struggle in this extremely dangerous and legally prohibited activity of informal secondary extraction is not merely sought by those who mine. It is the object of theft, and such theft is a recurrent fact of life here. Often, the thieves are members of the police force. It is to stave off such threat, and to respond to it, that zamazamas form groups underground. Nor are money and commodities the only things stolen. Labor itself may be seized in cases where miners are captured underground and made to work for others at gunpoint. “You need a strong group,” zama-zama men say, to avoid being press-ganged in this manner as well as to protect the rocks that have already been identifed as gold-bearing. For this reason, the zama-zamas in this area have also submitted themselves

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to an ethnicized regime of security on the surface, according to which guards (who typically belong to one or another ethnolinguistic group) watch over the entrances to the shafts, taking payments of thirty or forty rand (between two and three dollars at the time of research) when the men enter as well as when they leave, in exchange for some confdence that no one will be permitted to enter with arms. Everyone who pays agrees to be searched before descending. In the event that the zama-zamas do not have cash, they pay in rock or leave a cell phone as surety. In the area where I conduct research, the decision to establish security of this sort was taken by non–South African, mainly Zimbabwean zama-zamas, and it relied on local stereotypes of Sotho speakers from Lesotho as especially ferce but also especially knowledgeable of the scene, this latter presumption based on their long-standing involvement in both formal and informal mining in South Africa. When speaking of crime or violence, people in this area generally refer to alleged perpetrators according to their ethno-national identity in a relative way, and according to nested categories of more or less local belonging. South Africans speak of Zimbabweans, Zimbabweans of South Africans; Mozambicans or people from Lesotho refer to people as Zimbabweans or Malawians and so forth. But such categories are left behind when people speak to each other. At that point, Zimbabweans are Shona, Tonga, or Ndebele; some Malawians are Tonga, others Ngoni or Chewa; Mozambicans become Shangaan, and so forth. Underground, spoken discourse both marks speakers in these categorical terms and opens itself to a ludic heterogenization, as mutually unknown people address each other with terms of respect in the addressee’s presumptive language, before speaking in sentences cobbled together out of phrases and verbs drawn from two or three different languages. Thus, Sesotho gives way to Chitonga, and veers off into isiNdebele or isiZulu, is sprinkled with English, and returns to Sesotho or Chitonga. Sometimes the near-rhymes and homonyms between languages cause misunderstanding, but sometimes they permit jokes. And misunderstandings are themselves the objects of humor. The pleasure in verbal combat across languages, and the delight taken when someone is caught out merely imitating a language he does not know, is palpable underground. The highest expression of this is the proverbial claim that someone can defeat another in a battle of words without the vanquished even knowing it. Sometimes status pronouns are confused with ethnonyms, as when Sesotho speakers use the term ndende, meaning “ father” or “sir,” to identify all Tonga men, again eliciting laughter when they use it for youths who ought not receive such respect. The wrong

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word in this sense becomes the mark of social failure. Unlike the formal mining industry in South Africa, where the invented creole of Fanakalo constituted something of a truncated lingua franca, the discourse of the zamazamas does not cohere into a single tongue. Rather, it is relentlessly changing according to the situation, and depending on who is speaking as well as the presumptions they have about whom they are addressing.10 Although the apartheid state attempted to territorialize ethnicity, not only through the creation of scheduled areas but also in the organization of residential spaces in townships following the demise of the so-called homelands, ethnicity has been a principle of vacillating but persisting intensity and efficacy in the lives of individuals. Most of the people in the mining communities whom I have interviewed while conducting feldwork over the past twenty years cannot trace their genealogies beyond two generations without identifying at least one person in the family who speaks a native language other than their own, or who comes from a group with which they themselves do not or no longer identify. Marriage and other intimacies were far more creatively transgressive of apartheid regulations than its ideals of purity could ever accommodate. Thus, if neighborhoods in some townships are still referred to as “Xhosa” or “Zulu,” and if their residents generally identify with the groups whence their fathers came, actual social life has generated “identities” that are at once more tractable and more mixed. Nonetheless, against a backdrop of plurality, of constant movement and mixture, violence provokes recourse to the language of ethnicity—both as explanation and as motive for the formation of defensive groups conceived in terms of ethnic affiliation. When, for example, the cell-phone image of the corpse was shown to me, it was introduced as the opening of two distinct but intertwined narratives. The frst was about the failure of the police and emergency ser vices to respond to the request for assistance when the body was discovered at daybreak. A classic case of subaltern speech (in Gayatri Spivak’s terms) failing to make itself heard by the state, the element foregrounded in this story was nonetheless that of deferral: of the hours spent waiting, counted and endured by this dead man’s comrades because of officialdom’s indifference. A simultaneous narrative focused on the man’s identity and on his accidental victimhood. He had been mistaken as a member of a Sotho household that had other wise been implicated in an armed robbery. He was in fact new to the neighborhood and had been the misidentifed object of a retaliation. Unlike the migrants from neighboring countries, many local residents born and educated in South Africa are quick to blame violence on Zimba-

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bweans. Thus, one of the local community leaders explained to me that the crime and violence for which this place is renowned in the national press was exacerbated when Eskom, the nation’s largest energy provider, terminated electrical ser vices to the area. According to this narrative, the area had previously been dominated by Zimbabwean zama-zamas, and conflict with Basotho miners is a relatively recent phenomenon. Here is his narrative: “There were only Zimbabweans, mostly here who were doing the illegal mining. But the Zimbabweans, they started to terrorize the community, you see. So, it happens, while they were down there, underground, they clashed with the Basothos and the Basothos were a minority by then, you see. And then, those Basothos called up friends, the reinforcements, you see. They come here, they fought with the Zimbabweans for the mining, for this gold, you see.” Following the arrival of those “reinforcements,” the Zimbabweans are said to have fled, and the Basothos to have flled in the gap left behind. “They come in numbers, come in numbers,” my interlocutor said. And then he added, by way of explanation, “Why are we preferring the Basothos? The Basothos, even when they fght, they fght among themselves. They don’t involve the community, you see.” He continued as follows: “The Zimbabweans. When they rob you, they kill you. They go inside your house, they kill you. They take your stuff. But the Basothos, they didn’t do that. They are here to mine gold only and only gold. They take their gold, they sell it, they send money home, you see. Every week. That’s their process.” When I mentioned that some Zimbabweans and other South Africans cleave to an inverse narrative and that they sometimes speak of Basothos as the instigators of conflict and the perpetrators of gratuitous violence, a momentary and thoughtful silence opened in our conversation. In the place of a lumpen category of ethno-national criminality bearing the name of Zimbabwe, there emerged the split fgure of “two Basothos,” including those who were long-term residents and those who are newly arrived. But even this division failed, and the increasing competition over ever-limited gold offered itself as explanation: “It is now recently, recent weeks that they start doing these things. Because, the Basothos, for them to start to do this crime that they’re doing. . . .” He trailed off while contemplating the transformation of the socio-political landscape and began anew: “The mine, it doesn’t have enough gold any more, you see. So now, they resort to crime now: to rob people and every thing, you see. Those who are robbing people, shooting people, killing people, they are not long-time . . . just now, they come now. . . . It is not the people that we lived with before. These are the new faces that do

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this.” Beyond the social force of mutual knowledge and entanglement, the force of law failed. Our conversation turned to the three assaults—all stabbings—committed in the previous two weeks, in this community of a few hundred souls. One of the victims was Ndebele from Zimbabwe, one was a Sesotho speaker from Lesotho, the other a Sesotho speaker from South Africa. Following this spate of attacks, the local residents gathered to discuss how they might respond. They believed they knew who the perpetrators were, and they believed that those men were armed. However, the community members lacked guns, and so “They told themselves . . . we’ll fght them [the alleged perpetrators] with stones, we’re going to challenge them with stones.” The man whose body had surfaced frst in the dam and then beneath the shattered glass of a cell-phone screen had been a new migrant to the area, and had been renting a sleeping space in the yard of the putative assailants. The same man who had described the politics of inter-ethnic feuding only a few minutes before now narrated the events with a combination of matterof-factness and pity for an innocent victim: “The guy was not involved with those guys with guns. It just happened that they shared the same yard. They lived in the same house. So, when those guys [the community members] wanted to pay their revenge to the ones who had guns, that one [the dead man], he just came, he knew nothing about the situation of what’s happening here.” He had been mining and, as sometimes happens, had found a rich vein of gold, so had come aboveground to replenish his supplies before returning to the shaft. “He was fresh from the [under]ground. And he came here to buy food just to go back to do . . . his job there. But when those guys [the vigilantes] saw him, they thought he was with those guys [the alleged criminals] all along. But the guy didn’t know nothing. They chased him. They stoned him to death.” It was then, after vigilante justice had gone awry, that the community members attempted to call the police again, and out of desperation. “We had a community meeting to discuss this issue of crime: what is the solution, every thing.” Having “decided that there are two groups of Basothos,” and that the community’s own authority fgures could neither enforce a separation of members within the group nor take on armed opponents themselves, they “call[ed] the police to come and sort out the situation. We called the police, police never come. . . . That guy died around four o’clock. We called the police: they didn’t come. As always. They came the following day.”

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A week later, the man telling me this story was shot in an apparent robbery, his wife gang-raped. Both survived, although they suffered grave injuries. Once again, there were three perpetrators. Following the failed response of the police to the previous assaults and murder, the community determined that it had to bear the burden of responding anew. The residents were especially aggrieved by the fact that the victim was himself an advocate of justice and a respected peacemaker. But this time, after weeks of intensifying violence, the specter of inter-ethnic war posed itself as a possible outcome of escalating tensions. If the structure of vengeance cleaved to the lines of ethno-linguistic difference, people feared, there would be virtually no way to end it. In such a case, the crime would lose itself in the identity of perpetrator and every act of vengeance would demand further vengeance. The longterm residents’ response aspired to contain the possibility of inter-ethnic warfare while also announcing in its extremity a force that could outdo all other forces—and thereby end the conflict. The bloody spectacle that culminated the process displayed a counterforce attempting to absorb what had become understood as an excessive criminal violence into itself. In this sense, it exhibited a statist impulse to monopolize violence—both mimicking the state and indicting it for a failure to perform the role and function of the monopoly on violence (Weber [1921] 1946; Tilly 1985, 170), but also the function of recognition. This desire for the state to act in this manner should not be underestimated, and it is precisely in the shadowed space of expectation that vigilante justice assumes its most frenzied forms. None of the residents to whom I spoke ever expressed a desire to be rid of the state, only that it conform to the ideality that grounds its claim to monopoly. Their hopes for recognition and response from the police, and for a form of justice as absolute as it would be instantaneous conferred on the state the halo of a nearly divine power. Bereft of any auratic potency at the center of their gutted world but longing for a power so absolute that it could outdo all violence, they did what they could: they imitated it. In this case, the putative perpetrators were identifed and hunted down, then stoned in public—to the satisfed and encouraging clamor of many who did not know the details of the preceding events—and before the eyes of many children. One of the accused was rescued by the police, but only after another had been stoned almost to death and following the intervention of a local NGO worker who was well known and respected by both police and residents. The third man escaped the crowds and fled underground, but he was pursued

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there and bludgeoned to death with stones, his body left to rot, unclaimed and unmourned.

Sovereignty: The Right of Sacrilege In this awful scenario, a few principles or patterns are observable. The frst is that the preferred quality of strangers is self-enclosure. This ideal is given unadorned expression in the approving statement that “even when they fght, they fght among themselves.” Fighting is assumed to be a natural part of sociality, the inevitable expression of envy, covetousness, thwarted desire, insult or injury. It does not presume enmity in any political sense (Schmitt [1932] 2007). Given the linguistic basis of these communities, fghting is understood not as that which can be substituted for by language (pace Clastres [1972] 1988) but as that which is contained by it, in the sense that the fght must remain within the ethno-linguistic group and not be permitted to spill out of it, lest it become war. This logic materialized itself most dramatically in the stoning and bludgeoning deaths of the men accused of attacking the peacemaker and his wife. For when the residents gathered after the shooting of their neighbor and the rape of his wife, when they determined that justice demanded the suspension of law because the police had withheld its ambivalent preservative force and could not be counted on to enact its equally ambivalent retributive powers, they were also careful to assign the particular task of execution to those who shared the ethno-linguistic identity of the perpetrators. Effectively, these compatriots were told to fnd the villains in their midst and expunge them in an exemplary fashion. And they did so. The violence was brutal and blunt. Not incidentally, it did not entail burning, which is often used for those designated as foreigners or political traitors, according to a tradition inherited from the days of the anti-apartheid struggle and recently revived in xenophobic riots. The (no doubt overly simple) explanation offered for stoning is that bullets are hard to come by and expensive, even when available. Whatever the reasons, stoning, at least temporarily, has become a preferred method of popular execution. In a world where rock is money, a fateful irony ensures that people both live and die by stone. It is the medium of what can appear to be a verily transcendental economy. Appearances can be deceiving, however. In fact, in this frayed and heterogeneous space, abandoned by the state, untethered from any overarching political institutions, and lacking a shared set of ideological commitments,

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the transcendentalized grounds on which a distinction between vengeance, sacrifcial violence, and legal punishment might be made are tenuous at best and often absent. As René Girard has taught us to expect, the absence of these distinctions often shows itself in virulent and intensifying cycles of vengeance and in the avowal of vengeance as the necessary and only effective response to violence. I can think of no more potent enunciation of this principle than that which followed a conversation among zama-zamas about one their members who, after having been stabbed, decided—against the advice and beyond the understanding of his fellows—not to seek vengeance. Half-jokingly, one of them said (in isiZulu), “A person who doesn’t take revenge is good to rob,” and then mused, in Chitonga, “Unbelievable! A person who doesn’t take revenge.” In Girard’s reading, it is not that a more formally juridicalized system of punishment lacks the violence that is clearly present in the brutal executions meted out by mobs, but that such systems can enact violence on a scale so much beyond that of vindictive individuals or groups that they can at least appear to have the power to contain it, to interrupt it for a sufficient period as to appear to have brought it to a halt. Such is the monopoly on violence: the appearance of a power so concentrated and so violent that it could outdo every other violence arising from within the social body. Recall that, for Girard, religion is but the mystifcation of this drive to cancel violence with an intensifed and expanded violence ([1972] 2006, 23). Its repetitious sacrifces reenact an originary and constitutive violence at the heart of all societies. To the extent that the symbolic forms and mimetic processes of religions dilute the force of that originary violence in rituals that claim to be the mere simulations or symbolic re-enactments of violence, they aim at containment without ever promising an escape from violence, according to Girard. However, the substitution of representational violence for a more primal and more immediate brutality is insufficient to save society from itself. In his analysis, the work of producing unity is achieved by substituting a new kind of victim, the foreigner, for that which would otherwise come from within the community (102). This argument sometimes seems to come close to an avowal of state violence, and I do not endorse that tendency, but what remains of great utility in Girard’s account is his recognition that “the surrogate victim . . . appears as a being who submits to violence without provoking a reprisal; a supernatural being who sows violence to reap peace” (86). Girard refers to this surrogate as “the fnal victim” (86). In his tentative historicization, systems based on the sacrifce of one’s own community

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members give way to those in which the foreigner comes to provide the ideal victim through which a community may purify itself (94). The ostensibly later development of a system of accusation and a “concept of guilt,” which is to say a formal legal system, merely abstracts (rather than eliminates) the primary logical structure common to ritual systems in which violence appears as the only means by which to cancel violence (21). However, if there is a fnal victim, there must also be a fnal perpetrator who is unsullied by the fact of bloodletting, one whose judgment goes unjudged, whose executions demand no reprisal. Such is sovereignty. When Giorgio Agamben returned to the question of the pharmakos in the wake of Foucault’s writings on governmentality, he argued (no less teleologically) that the origin of Western political institutionality is to be linked to a kind of sovereignty that is paired in a symmetrical relation with a form of killability. “The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere (1998, 83; italics in original). Under certain conditions, whole classes of people become categorized as homo sacer, becoming “the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (84). This is what Agamben calls “bare life,” an exposure to a form of action that has “except[ed] itself from both human and divine law” (84). One aim of Agamben’s argument is to overturn the understanding of the polis as an originator of boundaries; rather, he says, it is their negation. Not a prohibition on killing, but the creation of a right to kill with impunity (an act of “inclusive exclusion”) marks the polis (85). In a similar vein (but critical of Agamben), Jacques Derrida has argued that the Christian humanist tradition works by making the animal killable; but this means that its liberation of all animals for killing from every religious prohibition actually entails the “denegation” of murder (Derrida 1995, 283; also Fontenay 2015). It is thus not incidental that the cri de guerre in xenophobic attacks in South Africa often begins with the naming of foreigners as animals (Morris 2011). Girard’s and Agamben’s theories lead us to speculate that if the modern state, dependent on indifference and abstraction, is to prevent the metamorphosis of that very indifference and abstraction into the general killability of all (transgressors) by anyone, it will produce a reservoir of irreducible foreignness while elevating and absorbing the right to kill into itself—as the very locus and origin of that abstraction. In other words, the sovereign needs his other.

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When the legislation that enacted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission defned political violence as that for which punishment would be withheld, it drew on the tradition described by Girard and Agamben, but it also inverted it. In its exemption of perpetrators of political violence from retribution, it attempted to create a space—a new polis—in which vengeance for some forms and acts of violence would be prohibited. Its purpose was to contain a possible (and prophesied) cycle of relentlessly reciprocating violence within the national body. The cost of this gesture was high; it retrospectively made the victims of political violence killable. At the same time, it sacralized political violence by relinquishing its own right to hold culpable the agents of that violence. And insofar as the transition to South Africa also included the relinquishment of capital punishment, the new state sacrifced the sovereign’s so-called right to and of killing. This was its luminous, if incomplete, promise. It nonetheless retained the right to judge while doing little to prevent xenophobic attacks against black noncitizens. The aftermath of so-called democratization has seen waves of xenophobic violence even as racialized conflict has been largely allayed—except in the idiom of crime. These waves testify to the simultaneous promise of and desire for a state that would absorb the dispersed violence of social life into itself as well as a failure to realize that aim. This is also why, in the informal settlements such as the one I have described, one sees a vacillation between the formation of communities of belonging on the basis of ethno-linguistic identity and a desperate labor to prevent inter-ethnic warfare. If the former aspiration sometimes permits or even encourages attacks on those designated as foreigners, the latter is sometimes thought to demand the sacrifce of one’s own. That is to say, the former parody a kind of power that would other wise defne and sustain a state. The latter—the internally policing, self-sacrifcing practices of the ethnicized groups who agree to eliminate their own criminals in avoidance of inter-ethnic vendettas—arises in the shadow of a dreamed-of and wished-for authority that would other wise transcend the boundaries of the local world. These gestures do not preclude the ongoing cycles of violence and counter-violence which are enacted by criminal gangs, who seek no such transcendence but who, to the contrary, revel in their capacity to enact a ferce economy. But they do express the ironic recognition that the par ticu lar organization of political life to which they are heir demands that only those who sacrifce their own members will be exempted

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from being killed by virtue of their own association with and contamination by the familiar foreignness of the undocumented migrants within. Unable to abstract and absolutize sacrifcial violence in spaces where the state has no presence, they enact it—with a vengeance, as it were. This is how, I think, we might begin to understand the intensity of the violence of these executions. One cannot turn away from it. Sacrifce is often brutal, to be sure. Blood must be spilt. But in their form and nature, I believe that these executions are not merely sacrifcial. They are also theatrical performances of sacrilege, given to be seen in the racialized terms that come from the past. And it is in this sense that they are also claims on sovereignty. They are intended both to assert the prior possible sacrality of the one who is executed (his identifcation with the executioners, on ethnic grounds) and to efface or deface that quality. Thus, executioners pay ironic homage to the forces that defne sovereignty as the right to kill with impunity, but they also acknowledge their own limits to make such a claim. This is why I continue to speak of the sacrifce and sacrifcability of the criminal, and not merely his killability, pace Agamben. Insofar as the one sacrifced in these public executions is a member of the ethnically defned community and not an outsider, he shares something of the being of the executioners. This is the law of retribution in the scenarios I am describing: execute your own, give him up, in order to preserve the state of not-war (which must never be confused with peace)—the state of the state, one might say. Kill your own, lest you become generically killable. Let us admit that the one killed, in his or her subjective singularity, is not considered. His poverty, her desperation, their upbringings—none of this is taken into account. Such is the indifference of this impatient effort to enact justice—not because an abstract knowledge and thus the linkage between truth and justice demands it, but because knowledge in this world is inseparable from identifcation. To know someone is to be entangled with him or her, to be obligated by the demands of humanity, as the term umuntu or ubuntu is often described—and it is invoked in casual conversation as much as in formal philosophical discourse. Only a radical defacement can sever the possible identity between the criminal and his executioner here, thereby exempting the latter from culpability for the more mundane crime of murder (compared to the exalted feat of execution). This is why the violence—the bludgeoning, the bloodletting, the mutilation—seems on so many occasions to be a “protesting too much,” a protest against identity in the mode of excess, one that calls forth and repudiates the rationality of that post-sacrifcial regime which would make of bodies mere corpses, and of corpses, mere signs

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in the system of power/knowledge. And this why the perpetrators of this mimetic statism are accused of archaic brutality.

The Failure of Evidence The drive to ethnocidal scapegoating arises in a world which, in many ways, has been reduced to and by the material infrastructures of natural resource extraction at a time and in a place where it is declining but against the backdrop of a global economy in which the “world is viewed as a mine that must be exploited” (Anders 1956). But the statist claims on sovereignty—often tragic, sometimes parodic—are rarely, if ever, really successful in informal settlements, or if they are, the circumference of that success is narrow. The powers of sovereigns, as Foucault has taught us, typically include the right to display the mutilated bodies of the executed as an example. I call this the right of sacrilege, which can also be turned back on the sovereign. The tale of the innocent victim functions in these contexts as a crucial method for impugning the sovereign’s judgment, whether that sovereign is the state or its miming mob. The innocent victim whose image surfaced on the cell phone was a young man pursuing gold. Again and again, in descriptions of what happened, people emphasized that he had committed no crime, hurt no one. He was caught and killed only because he lived with those said to have guns. In fact, he lived with them because he had traveled along the networks of migrant laborers laid down at the foundation of the mining industry in South Africa and because newcomers tend to fnd their frst residences with others from their language groups. They do so partly because they have no money and cannot expect loans from “foreigners.” The young man stoned to death was only seeking gold. As a novice zama-zama, he was something more and less than a Basotho man. Gold is money, here. It is not mined for its beauty, nor loved for its luster. The aesthetics of bling belong to those who have left need behind (Thompson 2015). But as Dumisani’s statements quoted at the outset of this chapter suggest, it can buy recognition. This is why being robbed is so doubly humiliating. Zama-zamas constantly rail against the police for converting the function of preventative violence into a mere means of extracting money in the form of bribes. Daily, uniformed officers visit the territories inhabited by undocumented miners and the women who assist them with crushing, demanding monetary payment in exchange for a suspension of the state’s prerogative, namely to expel them. Sometimes, zama-zamas concede that the

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police are forced to take these payments because they themselves are underpaid and overly exposed to the threat of poverty. But mainly they describe it as a violation and a betrayal. A violation of themselves, and a betrayal of the dream-image that they embrace: of a lawful state. Undocumented zamazamas do not often speak about the fact that the police would actually have to arrest them if they were doing their job. Their complaints are less a misrecognition of the police function than they are a passionate expression of the desire for recognition and inclusion within the South African polity, because it means access to the state’s resources— and especially education and health care, as well as access to energy, sanitation ser vices, and running water. Most zama-zamas embrace the promises of the welfare state. The form of their homage to its powers is, as we have seen, sometimes a violent imitation. However, the rites of such obeisance are always also testimony to the inevitable failure of the state to end violence through violence.11

Back to the Future of an Illusion Let me then return to the questions with which I began this chapter, questions about the problem of knowledge, evidence, the corpse, and the relationship between the dead and death. The cell-phone image of a man floating in the dam, killed by virtue of a misrecognition, and abandoned by the state even after death, was narrated as evidence of a killability made real by both the inhabitants of the state and the state’s representatives, who did not intervene to prevent the death or the cycle of vengeance that threatened to extend it. On the other hand, the phantom image of a murder, lying dormant on the retinas of a dead man, allowed the perpetrators of that killing to assert their refusal of the state’s authority and its recognition-granting powers. It conjured another image—of a savage cruelty—which the enforcers of the informal settlement were eager to resist. Their efforts to resist being subject to gangsters’ brutality generated their own cruelty, modeled on that of a state whose governmentality had been grounded in ethnicity. But together, these counter-posed images, in which people give themselves to be seen as the illegalized bearers of law’s desired force, represent a social order in which the function of the state has been defned as the maintenance of law and order. In South Africa, as in many decolonizing nations, the sovereignty of the new state is fragile. Under conditions of neoliberalism it has withdrawn from even

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the exercise of preventive and punitive violence in zones occupied by undocumented migrants, leaving a gaping chasm where the abandoned yearn for recognition and, in its absence, take on the task of declaring their humanity in the compromised imitation of a sacrifcial system in which they can valorize themselves only at the expense of enduring the violence that a state might other wise absorb. They are not only victims of a desire for sovereignty modeled on the state; they are victims of the colonization of the human by the state and the ideal of sovereignty. They are also, therefore, victims of the Western humanist colonization of the human (Wynter 2003). The belief in the persistent presence of the dead in the society of the living, and of the living enveloped by the society of the dead, so crucial in a world where the ancestors are invoked in almost every conversation (if only as a ritual gesture), is perhaps familiar to and even desired by posthumanists who claim (if I may extend Latour’s conceit) that we have never been modern and should never have been humanist. The people who work as zama-zamas or who live in this territory have never been humanist, if by humanist we mean a certain disposition organized by a belief in the radical distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, one that is grounded in a self-same consciousness that makes of all other creaturely and inanimate existence a mere instrument of its own self-realization. The dream of humanism in its Kantian formulation prohibited the instrumentalization of persons. But as we know, that ideal was not only not realized but explicitly contravened by the forms of racial capitalism that grounded colonial, segregationist, and apartheid rule in South Africa. What I have described is the consequence of being made to live in the aftermath of a state that promised to foreclose civil war, but without being granted membership in it or recognition by it. Of an abstraction on whose basis justice could be elaborated but which has turned out to be mere indifference. Of a belief that knowledge is the basis of power, but which has become a mere fetish of documentation. To give evidence of one’s humanity in this context, sans papiers, is to be forced to return to sacrifce. Notes 1. For an account of the distinction between the logics of segregation and formal apartheid, see Wolpe 1972. On the role South Africa in the development of biometrical technology, see Crush 1992. 2. As Jean and John Comaroff have recently argued, “Criminality [has become] the vernacular in which politics is increasingly conducted” and “citizens tend increasingly to construe social reality . . . through the allegory of law-making and law-breaking” (2016, 7).

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3. At the time of this interview, 80 rand was equivalent to $5.75. 4. This interview was conducted in English, but in other discussions in a mixture of isiZulu and this speaker’s’ native tongue, namely Chitonga, he used the term “ubuntu” when describing what he needed to do. That is to say, he spoke of the necessity of living in a manner consonant with humanity as a social form and not merely “as a human being” in the species sense. 5. In fact, some very poor people do use newspaper as insulation beneath their clothing, to cut the wind in Highveld winters. 6. The anthropological canon is, of course, redolent with descriptions of scarifcation. But it is Pierre Clastres’s theorizing of this inscription in terms of the opposition between society and state that proved so signifcant for later theories of law and its force in the very different writings of Deleuze and Guattari, on one hand, and Foucault, on the other. See Clastres 1998; Deleuze and Guattari 1977; Lefort (1992) 2000. 7. Chumani Maxwele (2017) has argued that “the violent confrontation between black students and black police at the University of the Witwatersrand last year is a precursor and metaphor for the inevitable and forthcoming wave of violence and contempt by generations of oppressed and silenced South Africans.” This reading of civil war as the long-deferred expression of outrage against white supremacy and racialized governance has as its flip side the analyses of the conservative press abroad, which saw Jacob Zuma’s ANC-led promise to expropriate land from white farmers as the harbinger of civil war (for example, Malone [2017]). The latter perspective is consonant with much conservative white discourse in South Africa. 8. Matthew Kentridge (1990), for example, referred to the conflict in what was then Natal during the 1980s as war. In this case, he was describing the armed conflict between the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), noting that white South Africans generally referred to politicized violence between black South African factions as mere “inter-tribal feuding” rather than war. 9. Summary statistics are available at https://www.usip.org /publications/1995/12/truth -commission-south-africa, accessed December 29, 2020. 10. Fanakalo is a mixture of Afrikaans and isiZulu, and is dominated by imperatives and structures of command, a fact derived from its use in the racialized hierarchy of the formal mining industry. Recently, however, the militant alternative to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), has adopted Fanakalo as a primary language for much labor organizing, reclaiming that instrumental creole from its previous status as the medium and signifer of apartheid discourse in the mining sector (Morris 2017). 11. I do not want this failure to be confused with that commonly discussed in political science literature, namely “failed states.” The latter term is invariably used to identify bureaucratic and operational failures due to corruption or institutional underdevelopment. I am speaking here of a different order: at once logical and phantasmatic.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. (1995) 1998. Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Anders, Günther. 1956. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Bd. 1, Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution [The obsolescence of human beings: On the soul in the age of the second Industrial Revolution]. Munich: Beck. (Unofficial English version available at https://libcom.org/fles/ObsolescenceofManVol%20IIGunther%20Anders.pdf.) Chamber of Mines. 2017. Mining SA 2016. Johannesburg: Chamber of Mines. Clastres, Pierre. (1972) 1998. The Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. Translated by Paul Auster. New York: Zone Books. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2016. The Truth About Crime. Chicago: University of Chicago. Crush, Jonathan. 1992. “Power and Surveillance on the South African Gold Mines.” Journal of Southern African Studies 18 (4): 825–44. Davis, Stephen M. 1987. Apartheid’s Rebels: Inside South Africa’s Hidden War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 2016. Of Grammatology. Rev. 40th  anniversary ed. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1972) 1981. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated and introduction by Barbara Johnson, 63–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” In Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, translated by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Evans, Arthur B. 1993. “Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man’s Eye.” Science Fiction Studies 20 (3): 341–61. Fontenay, Élizabeth de. 2015. “Return to Sacrifce.” Translated by Catherine Porter. Yale French Studies 127:200–204. Foucault, Michel. (1997) 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France. Translated by David Mackey. New York: Picador. Geschiere, Peter. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Authochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Europe and Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Girard, René. (1972) 2005. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. New York: Continuum. Goulet, Andrea. 2005. “Ret i nal Fictions: Villiers, Leroux, and Optics at the Fin-de-Siècle.” Nineteenth- Century French Studies 34 (1/2): 107–20. Hertz, Robert. (1909) 1960. “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death.” In Death and the Right Hand, translated by Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham, introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 29–86. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Kentridge, Matthew. 1990. The Unofficial War: Pietermaritzburg Under the Knife. Johannesburg: Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Lefort, Claude. (1992) 2000. Dialogue with Pierre Clastres. In Writing: The Political Test, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis, 207–35. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Legassick, Martin, 1974. “South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence.” Economy and Society 3 (3): 253–91. Malone, Andrew. 2017. “Is South African Heading for Civil War?” Daily Mail (UK) online edition, April  28. http://www.dailymail.co.uk /news/article-4457280/Is-South-Africa -heading-civil-war.html. Maxwele, Chumani. 2017. “The Civil War Is ‘Inevitable.’ ” News24, March 26. http://www .news24.com/Columnists/GuestColumn/the-civil-war-is-inevitable-20170324. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjies. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Morris, Rosalind C. 2011. “Crowds and Powerlessness: Reading //kabbo and Canetti with Derrida in (South) Africa.” In Demenageries/Animals, edited by Anne Berger and Marta Segarra, 167–212. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Morris, Rosalind C. 2017. “Mediation, the Political Task: Between Language and Violence in Contemporary South Africa.” Current Anthropology 58 (17): 123–34. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. “The Spirit of the Gift.” In Stone Age Economics, 149–84. Chicago: Aldine. Schmitt, Carl. (1932) 2007. The Concept of the Political. Expanded ed. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, Krista A. 2015. Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by P. B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol, 169–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wa Azania, Malaika. 2013. “The Problem in South Africa Is Not the ANC.” Mail and Guardian Thought Leader (blog), March 20. http://thoughtleader.co.za/malaikawaazania/2013 /03/20/the-problem-in-sa-is-not-the-anc/comment-page-1/?wpmp_ switcher​= ​desktop. Weber, Max. (1921) 1946. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Francis. 1972. Labour in the South African Gold Mines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolpe, Harold. 1972. “Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid.” Economy and Society 1 (4): 425–56. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.

CHAPTER 2

Speculating on Death Treasure Hunting in Present-Day Moush Alice von Bieberstein

Although few scholars fail to note the dimension of material and cultural destruction accompanying and following the murder of Armenians during the 1915–16 genocide, often even pointing to the devastating effects of treasure hunters dismantling the architectural and material remains of Armenian and other non-Muslim communities in Turkey, the phenomenon and practice of treasure hunting as such has not received any sustained intellectual engagement. At most, it has been scandalized within a transnational Armenian public as a continuation of the original violence. Pointing to the more or less open toleration by the Turkish state, the descendants of survivors and others around the world lament a destruction that is intimately tied, if at some greater distance, to the original loss of life, land, and sociality. Contingent upon asymmetries of power that reach still further back in time, treasure hunting partakes in a history of pillaging that constitutes the economic dimension of the foundational violence of the Republic of Turkey. This is a history that, in the eastern regions, where research for this chapter was conducted, features Kurds as willing accomplices. Signifcant parts of the local Kurdish population partook in the killings, abductions, and subsequent looting of property. One could thus approach the practice of definecilik, as treasure hunting is known in Turkish, as the material vector that traces the reverberations of the genocidal violence of 1915 into our present moment. And yet, I believe

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that much is to be gained from taking a closer look at the particular temporal dynamics at play here, and in par ticular at how temporality articulates with death and the generation of value in this post-genocide locale, still riveted by violence and hardship in the ongoing war of the Turkish state against the Kurdish political movement. What I want to highlight at frst, then, is the essentially speculative nature of treasure hunting, involving an investment in the here and now in equipment, the acquisition of specialized knowledge, and social relations in the hope of actualizing the probability of possible riches in some undetermined future. As a speculative means of generating value, it can be understood as the in/formal, ir/regular and il/ legal kin of the speculative operations familiar from the feld of fnance and economics. My engagement with “reverberations” is thus not only about tracing the riddles of violence over space and time, but also about tracing affinities between treasure hunting and other contemporary practices, as well as with particular strands of posthumanist thought. Reverberation evokes a resounding rhythm or pattern. It is this sense of temporality that is at the heart of the affinities under investigation. Speculative endeavors, for instance, are marked by a rush or race toward the future, toward the object of anticipation. Time, understood as a process of perpetual becoming, differentiation, and transformation involving matter conceptualized as vital and agentic, is also central to much of posthumanist thought. In a second part, this chapter will thus sound out the affinities between treasure hunting and posthumanist literature, tracing in par ticu lar their common attachment to a fantasy of immortality and to a future free of the burden and constraints of the present. Consequently, death drops out of vision. Within bodies of posthumanist thought, it is effectively dedramatized. Within the feld of treasure hunting, it lurks in the ever-present threat of accidents, failure, madness, loss, impoverishment. But it is also constitutive of the very possibility of treasure hunting, as it cannot be thought independent of the history of genocide and mass dispossession that has formed the region. Following an excursion in how speculation, the future, and death is thought together in studies on contemporary forms of biopolitical governance, I will therefore move on to elaborate how treasure hunting can be conceived as a speculative investment in death, a death that is historical. I argue that together with life insurances that had been held by Armenians in 1915 but were never cashed, treasure hunting marks the material-economic excess that could never be domesti-

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cated within a Turkish national economy founded on the mass transfer of non-Muslim wealth.

The Art of Treasure Hunting On the 24th of April 2015, while Armenian communities and sympathizers around the globe were commemorating the centenary of the Armenian genocide, I was sipping tea with a group of friends and acquaintances in a tea garden in Moush, a city a few hours west of Lake Van. Krikor, the most notorious of descendants of Armenian survivors, who had crowned his vocal reclaiming of Armenian ancestry with an official name change,1 had brought to the table the newest edition of AGOS, an Armenian weekly from Istanbul. While the paper made the rounds, Şereffetin was fumbling around with his phone and suddenly turned to me to ask whether I knew anything about old signs. There was a grave in his village, he said, the grave of a warrior. No one had ever touched it. He showed me the picture of a stone with a swirly round marking on it. Cevdet, who until that moment had been posing to have his picture taken reading AGOS, intent on posting it on his Facebook page in a gesture of solidarity with Armenians on this genocide memorial day, leaned over the table to get a closer look. Others, too, wanted to see. Slowly, everyone turned to Krikor. Şerefettin gave him the phone, expecting him to reveal some expert knowledge on account of his ethnic roots. Krikor had a look and then took AGOS back in his hands to show everyone the wheel that forms part of the newspaper’s logo on its front page. Şerefettin was obviously very pleased with this answer. His face lit up with a kind of naughty, mischievous smile that makes an appearance in almost every conversation on treasure hunting. The congruence between AGOS’s symbol and the marking on the grave was for him a real insight. It invested his exploration with potential. Somehow attention dissipated again, but I remained baffled. Serdar, sitting next to me, jumped to my aid when I threw out the question of how all of this functions, how one goes about looking for treasures or gold. He explained: “There are specifc spots, obvious signs that one has to understand. Like our friend here, he takes a picture of a sign with his phone. This sign is also on the cover of AGOS, the two of them talk and he says, look, the same sign is here.” I needed more clarifcation: “And that means money, the sign of AGOS?” Serdar answered: “It’s also on Armenian graves. It’s also on the city walls of Diyarbakır.” I enquired whether people dig there too, and Serdar

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replied: “Wherever the treasure hunter sees a sign, that’s where he will put his mind. Last year two treasure hunters dug a grave. When they hit the body, they dropped their shovel and ran off. People work without any sense. Every sign has a different meaning.” He proceeded to tell me how, as a child, he used to accompany his father on treasure hunting expeditions. “Whenever Armenians came to Moush, they would come to my father, there was friendship. They gave us a list with 105 symbols and their meanings.” Serdar took out his phone, pointed it this way and that and elaborated: “So, for instance if the telephone points this way, then it would say you have to go that far in this direction. You can research the facts and fnd something. If you become an expert in this, you can fnd the place by means of symbols. But those who are not experts, they dig beneath the stone and fnd a corpse. The slightest undulation points in another direction. Back then people left symbols on stones. That is how I learned too, from the Armenians. But one day, the police came to my house and my grandma threw my stuff into the oven and burned it all, all my notes and fles.” Intense hopes for great gains and the immanent threat of massive loss are joined closely together in the talk and practice of definecilik. As spelled out in greater detail elsewhere (von Bieberstein 2017), definecilik has been held in a position of illegality yet complicity with the state apparatus. Marked by encounters between mostly poverty-stricken locals and bureaucrats, soldiers and policemen, it charts a space of accentuated masculinity. Bonds formed by the shared thrill of transgression experienced as “freedom” easily make way to aggressive manifestations of denunciation and mistrust. Gender thus plays a determining role in constituting this space, resulting in issues of security that have been the major reason why I have personally so far not participated in an explorative dig—that is, beyond accidental opportunities for observation while walking around town. The internet, though, has proven to be an invaluable site of research, providing a safe distance yet also forming a space in which treasure hunters produce and share knowledge as well as stage performances of prowess and expertise. The online cosmos of definecilik encompasses YouTube videos and blog discussions, news items, practical tests and reviews of various metal detectors, lessons in how to read signs and symbols, and rather amateurishly flmed documentary videos of expeditions giving a sense of the libidinal excitement that drives these pursuits. Shot by men with their mobile phone cameras and subsequently posted online, such footage takes its viewers onto descents into caves or turns them into witnesses of digs and excavations. More

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generally, it follows the adventurous hunters as they wander through the landscape, scanning it for lines and shapes that, upon closer look, might cease being haphazard and reveal an intentional shaping or marking of stone and soil. As the camera zooms in on rock formations, the producer comes to the aid of his viewer and highlights the pattern he has made out through red lines laid over the image.2 Other videos showcase scattered ancient gravestones bearing different markings, the camera slowly roaming amid derelict cemeteries in an evocative gesture. Purposefully aiming at an effect of mystery, these videos thus aesthetically assist in imagining treasure hunters as members of a secret society, initiated in the arts of decrypting lost symbols and languages, keys to accessing undisclosed wealth. Definecilik is thus a fundamentally speculative and explorative undertaking, relying on an imaginary that turns this land of burned villages, interior colonization, and genocide into a land of dormant economic power, of an invisible plenty whose riches await those witty and skillful enough to uncover them.

Maddening Speculation Speculation commonly involves a conceptualization of the contingent and unknown as chance or risk. It is embedded within a broader approach that engages with the future in terms of anticipation, calculation, and pre-emption. Within the economy, speculation draws on an entire infrastructure of instruments to turn the unknown into an opportunity for creating value. Positioned outside this tight system of regulation, treasure hunting nonetheless shares an affinity with fnance capitalism, insofar as it mobilizes what Anna Tsing (2000) has called an “economy of appearances,” a spectacular staging of equipment, expertise, and connections that just might make it all happen. Treasure hunters thus similarly follow strategies for managing the unknown. The radical uncertainty as to where the treasures might lie can be assuaged and brought within a horizon of controllability by assembling relations, tools, and knowledge in such a way as to raise the chances of a fnd. Definecis (treasure hunters in Turkish) with sufficient fnancial resources elicit the assistance of gold detectors. Alternatively, they might try to gain access to maps of buried treasures. As indicated by Serdar above, the cultivation of relevant relations, particularly to Armenians, is thus crucial. And then, as we have seen, there is the acquisition of an expertise in the semiotic reading of signs and symbols. Someone considered a real expert in these matters once

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shared at length with me part of the lexical knowledge he had acquired over the years on the symbolic practices of various groups of people that had inhabited the region throughout time, from the Urartus to the Byzantines to gangs of Armenian bandits that had, according to him, pillaged the area between Kars and Batman in the nineteenth century, hiding their booty in carved-out stones and underground chambers. When we look at these signs, we have to distinguish, are these signs from the Romans or the bandits? The fgure of the snake was used both by the Romans and the bandits, but the meaning is different. The snake represents a woman, but a rich woman, maybe a queen. All the goods belong to her. . . . Then there are measurements. Imagine a snake that turns like that or think of snakes intertwined like that, they all have different meanings. But then on the stone you fnd very fne lines like that, almost not noticeable, they are measurement lines. Every centimeter amounts to ten meters, for instance, or one meter. These are different topics. We did not work superfcially on this but we worked by learning the science and the history. First we learn what civilization lived in a particular area and when. Then we can know what period the signs we fnd belong to. Every group in every age, then, used different animal fgures, other symbols, and signs of measurements as sets of ciphers that, when correctly read together, could guide the knowledgeable treasure hunter to his target. The internet, again, constitutes a crucial platform for the production and circulation of related knowledge. One par ticu lar genre of YouTube videos thus appears to aspire to a kind of demystifcation by adding explanatory voice-overs to the panorama of targets and objects. In one example, two definecis, treasure hunters, parade in front of a series of caves, pointing to and explaining various symbolic details in a posture of heritage practitioners lecturing their audience in a voice of academic sobriety. The video ends with the following text: “Treasure hunting is not science fction, sophistry/nonsense, superstition, or rock fortune-telling. It is the work of expertise, experience, and curiosity. We feel honor to provide the people with what is true and real.”3 Such pedagogically minded videos as well as the informant mentioned above introduce us to one subject-effect of the practice of treasure hunting, namely the self-cultivation as mature and controlled, embodying a kind of sober and scientifcally operating expertise. Within the speculative

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practice of treasure hunting, it is thus the acquisition of knowledge and the embodiment of expertise that are presented as key to success. But these components are also a fortifcation against the force of desire, summoned to ward off the threat of a loss of control that appears forever imminent. Rao (2014, 19) writes: “In its press over the limits of the evident, speculative practice is always disappointed, estranged from its desired object by a host of possible states and conditions of being. Its object is always another, that which is suspected to lurk behind what is seen and apprehended as form or as forms in a mirror.” Speculative practice, fueled by avarice, leads reason astray into erratic movement as objects of desire multiply and yet slip away. A much more common subject-effect is thus that of madness. The self-controlled expert appears as an exceptional case among the vast majority of treasure hunters who fall into an addictive behavior, losing their minds over the possibilities of momentous discoveries. While the expert might be able to lay his shovel to rest, in general, treasure hunting can thus be characterized by what a local archaeologist described as pure forward-moving optimism. Every sign points to another or to an elsewhere, in an unending chain of deferred meaning and potential. Even when it comes temporarily to rest on a found object, it is again charged with purpose and the potential to speak of more. I was once shown a small bronze statue of Mary that had been found in a feld, and then watched as my companions took Mary’s head in their mouths to taste the metal, as they imitated her posture in the hope that this would formulate a clue, as they speculated on what she was holding in her arms or what the faded lines and relief on the pedestal might once have been an inscription of. All in order to gauge its worth when exchanged for cash, or its subterranean connection to other treasures. On another occasion, talking about a relative, a friend of mine exclaimed: “If he were to dig somewhere and fnd dirt, he would say it was an antique thing. He always exaggerates. His power of imagination is so great that he can make himself believe in something that is just not there!” As a speculative practice, treasure hunting thus features strategies of capturing what lies invisible beneath the ground. And yet, attempts at control tend to be overtaken by a force of desire that races ahead toward an ever-shifting elsewhere. Treasure hunting is characterized by a breathtaking and dizzying maelstrom and by a transformation of vision. It makes the ground beneath and the rocks and metals above come alive as they teem with riddles and play games of deception. People talk about hazine, another word for “defne,” or they simply talk about altın, gold, or more precisely ermeni altın, Armenian gold. Michael Taussig (2004, 4) calls gold “the mother of all commodities,

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including money itself.” A “transgressive substance” (xiii) with fetish qualities, gold always appears as more than just mineral matter; it has person-like qualities and yet carries the promise of immortality. Echoing his work among precious metal miners in Colombia (Taussig [1980] 2010), in Moush, too, there are stories of magic, poison, and spells, there is both exuberance and destruction. Taussig took these beliefs and stories to form a kind of meta-commentary on the introduction of or movement onto new stages in capitalist modes of production. These can procure unfathomable riches, yet never come without risk. Jean and John Comaroff (1999, 2000) followed this line of analysis in their work on “occult economies,” referring to comparable efforts to conjure wealth out of nothing, often by appeal to techniques defying explanations in conventional terms of practical reason. Similarly committed to speculative methods, gold mining, occult economies, and treasure hunting not only give rise to all kinds of mysterious stories, they also constitute felds for a performance of expertise and control forever haunted by the threat of madness and loss. Affectively, its practitioners swing between rushes of feverish anticipation of a wealth whose arrival will ultimately always appear accidental and the protracted wear of anxieties over the ability to survive into the near future. Instead of instantly drawing a line of continuity from the violence of 1915, we can therefore frstly recognize the affinities, including those at the level of affect and subjectivity, between treasure hunting and contemporary capitalist formations. We might read the former as an expression of or a commentary on the latter, reflecting its speed and high-risk modality and prizing the ability to convince oneself and others of a value that can be cashed in an undetermined future. And yet, such a severance from the past would not only empty the phenomena of its historical depth, but place the analysis close to the status quo of denial that has reigned over the foundational violence of the republic. In short, where would such an interpretation leave the reverberations of the violence of the Armenian genocide of 1915?

Posthumanism and the Suspension of Death My attempt at arriving at an answer will not be straightforward, but proceed by frstly tracking the reverberating affinities between treasure hunting and particular strands of the posthumanist literature. I do so because the latter’s purposeful privileging of force over substance and futurity over genealogy very much resonates with the intense draw toward the future that characterizes

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treasure hunting. Working through posthumanist theorizations of matter and time, though, will lead us to an important conceptual blind spot, namely death. Within the humanities and social sciences, the call to attend to matter, things, and objects has been paralleled by a reconceptualization of materiality as “excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (Coole and Frost 2010, 8). Matter and materiality, then, are no longer thought of as substances or states, but as forces, intensities, energies that never are, but are always in a process of becoming (Bennett 2010; Connolly 2013). Temporality is thereby posited as central to any understanding of matter. Within the posthumanist strand of “speculative realism,” these developments have been methodologically paralleled by a displacement of textual critique in favor of an interest in speculation on the nature of “reality itself” (Bryant et al. 2011b, 3). Speculation is here disassociated from the analysis and management of risk and recuperated in its “pre-critical sense . . . as a concern with the Absolute” (3). It is embraced as enabling the reconceptualization of uncertainty as potential, indicating an approach to the future not driven by calculations of probability that would tie the future to the order of the present, but by a mode of creative experimentation and a different sense of futurity as such (Rao 2014; Savransky et al. 2017). Speculation allows taking the future out of the present by cultivating “a sense of the possible that concerns, but does not owe its existence to, the ways in which the actual determines the distribution of what is probable” (Savransky et al. 2017, 7). The turn to matter has thus been accompanied by theoretical gestures that privilege the role of time, change, and the future as such. At the same time, posthumanist theory has also pushed for a suspension of linear understandings of temporality. Quantum physics, for instance, shows the past, present, and future to be threaded through one another in a nonlinear unfolding of spacetimematter. A fundamental indeterminacy consequently undoes classical notions of identity and being. While ontological indeterminacy can be collapsed into determinate states through procedures of measurement, the entanglements endure, as do those “between life and death” (Barad 2010, 252). This disintegration of stable ontological states also proceeds through reconceptualizations of matter that foreground generative powers and capacities. As these are shared by human and non-human entities, the possibility for upholding a distinction between organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, and thus also between life and non-life, is challenged. To quote Rosie Braidotti (2013, 115), “A focus on the vital and self-organizing powers

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of Life/zoe undoes any clear-cut distinctions between living and dying. It composes the notion of zoe as a posthuman yet affirmative life-force.” Life as energy and speed is, according to Braidotti, impersonal and carries on beyond death, leaving death itself as “a creative synthesis of flows, energies and perpetual becoming” (131). Within anthropology, this echoes Tim Ingold’s (2011, 3–4) proposal “to replace the end-directed or teleonomic conception of the life-process with a recognition of life’s capacity to continually overtake the destinations that are thrown up in its course.” Braidotti and others (such as Bryant et  al. 2011a) position themselves against an understanding of life in terms of a constitutive and shared vulnerability, as bound to a horizon of death. For Jane Bennett (2010), a focus on human suffering works to separate humans off from others. Similarly, Braidotti urges us not to think in terms of fnitudes tout court. According to her, this would betray and foster ego-laden attachments to life that seem to equate to a white, heterosexual male privilege. Her “affirmative posthuman theory of death” (Braidotti 2013, 110) instead advocates “making friends with the impersonal necessity of death [as] an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor.” (132). Theoretically disinvested, death is de-dramatized. Interestingly, N. Katherine Hayles (1999), in one of the frst scholarly references to posthumanism, already noted how the idea of the posthuman was pervaded by fantasies of a disembodied immortality. Her point of departure was cybernetics, information theory, and the cognitive sciences. These re-imagined life in terms of information codes, rendering human beings akin to intelligent machines. As information patterns are privileged over their material instantiation, life becomes dissociated from embodiment and biological life processes. Life thus extends beyond death, as it does roughly two decades later in posthumanist reconceptualizations of life as energy or force not delimited by any embodied life course.

Gold, Immortality, Death The affinities between posthumanist thought on life, death, and temporality and treasure hunting are striking. Not only that, treasures are themselves objects that can be thought of as having survived death, as lingering on by the force of their matter. Gold in particular has always been associated with and stirred the passion for immortality (Bernstein 2012, 5). Gold neither rusts nor

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tarnishes. It is imperishable and incorruptible. It cannot disappear or be consumed, which may account for its aura of purity, perfection, and otherworldliness, and its apparent force to vest its owners not only with wealth and power, but also with a sense of divinity and immortality (Zorach and Philips 2016). Ethnographies of gold mining echo this power of gold to suspend the specter of death. Aletta Biersack (1999) recounts how a gold rush in Papua New Guinea raised millenarian expectations of the arrival of a cosmic order unmarked by the principle of life’s essential self-exhaustion. Life would no longer be consumed in the process of reproduction, but would instead be miraculous and long-lasting (in short, “white”). Alchemy provides another point of connection between gold and posthumanist thought. Later derided and ridiculed during the Enlightenment, alchemy was in fact for long a kind of experimental science, based on assumptions not that different from modern science (Zorach and Philips 2016). Its goal of fabricating gold and other substances from base materials and creating forms of artifcial life not only resonates with vitalist understandings of matter, but also evokes recent programmatic proposals for understanding speculation as creative experimentation that frees the possible from the probable. Like treasure hunters, alchemists generated and assembled their own body of knowledge that circulated mostly within initiated practitioners. And like treasure hunters, many fell victim to the obsessive quest for (artifcial) gold, ruining their bodies and lives in the pursuit of eternal life (Artun et al. 2013). Gold often fails to function as a hedge against uncertainty, leading instead to impoverishment and death. Treasure hunters, as we have seen, always race ahead of fnitudes. And yet, this does not signal becoming or the arrival of alternative futures, but undoing. It is this suction toward an everreceding horizon that itself harbors death. The expert mentioned earlier told me of a friend who had lost his mind: “He had gone crazy because of this stuff. He was a member of the municipality. Every day he thought about this. He used to say: I must to fnd gold. He found gold dust. They turn that into gold by melting it. In the old days, Armenian money changers used gold dust. He found one bag. We sent it to Bursa or Istanbul but no one could solve it. They would not accept it because the value was little. That is why he went crazy. He lost his mind when he found it. I fnally found the treasure, he said. But when it did not turn into money, he got very sad. He died of a heart attack.” It is the fact that gold is only ever coming or becoming, never arriving, staying, or simply being, that is maddening to the point of being deadly. To quote Taussig (2004, 5) again, “Gold drives men crazy because the desire it

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stimulates is boundless.” Having consciously emerged in rejection of an approach to matter and objects that attends to its histories, poetics, and Marxist (i.e., fetish) properties (Taussig and Pereira 2012), posthumanist thought is blind to the death that precisely lurks in the force and speed of a life driven by the desire for the liberation from hardship and death.

Speculating on Death It is within discussions on the contemporary formations of biopolitical governance that such deaths-to-come matter. They matter because reconfgurations in the relation between economy and governance have pushed the commercialization of life capacities. Death is not just an incision that permits the elimination of social and economic costs within a logic of abandonment, but is mobilized as productive and generative of value (Amoore 2013; Clough and Willse 2011). New technologies recalibrate the relation between the present and the future by enabling new and more differential calculations of risk that inform preventive and pre-emptive measures. Insecurities are multiplied, invested in, and circulated with great speed and vitality because they can be made to generate value: “Death grants life because of its own presence as an economic vitality” (Clough and Willse 2011, 9). Rosalind Morris (2008) has described such a case in which gold becomes the object of a rush, only to lead, in the context of post-Apartheid South Africa, to panic around the HIV epidemic. This panic is in turn seized upon by insurance companies, which translated it into a rush for capital by means of an actuarial practice that calculates risk and assigns monetary value to life by reference to its estimated end: “What we might call speculation on and investment in death is occurring—in complex and highly mediated ways—through new forms and domains of risk management” (209). Through speculation, death can thus be made to generate value by featuring differentially on a horizon of futurity. As opposed to a vitalist perspective, death is thus an incision that makes a difference, not least economically. And yet, in the context of Moush, insurance schemes capitalizing on the risk of death are largely absent. The only case concerns earthquakes and was initiated as an obligatory insurance program by the state in 1999 (Gurenko et al. 2006). No official schemes exist that cover the risks to life that have pervaded the region, neither for those guerrilla fghters who have lost their lives in the war against the Turkish armed forces and whose bodies often lie buried beneath unmarked graves, nor for those friends

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and relatives whose dead bodies continue to return from the war in Syria.4 But even beyond the extremes of military conflict and violent state repression, everyday life in Moush is saturated by existential insecurities. Economically neglected over decades in tandem with military strategies against the Kurdish political movement, employment possibilities are highly restricted and increasingly dependent on alliance with the ruling AK party. Under the pressure of social expectations and holding little in terms of resources or capital that could be invested in secure assets, treasure hunting provides the rush that accommodates the panic over a life with no future (cf. Morris 2008). Many treasure hunters who I talked to return to a moment of boredom, free time, and friendship as marking their initiation into definecilik: “I was twenty-three years old, my friends were into these things. They asked whether I want to come. I went in the hope that maybe we would fnd something.” And then, “Gold attracts everyone’s attention, and especially that of poor people,” says Cemal. He continues: “After that day, sardı beni bu iş [the thing captured me]; öyle bir heves sardı beni [such a desire embraced me] and I have been wandering like that for fourteen years.” He never found anything. Nor did his father-in-law, whose old metal detector he is using. The machine had cost roughly four thousand euros, and an equivalent sum was spent getting it repaired over the years. More top-shelf models are available for roughly seventeen thousand euros. In addition, cars must be rented and fellow treasure hunters hosted. All of these investments—for nothing. And all from nothing. Treasure hunters incur enormous debts buying machines, renting cars, and hosting helpers, debts that are drawn from their own future, troubling life trajectories, and most violently, those of their closest kin. Those who rush into this panic are those dealing in fake maps and cheap machines, and usurers offering loans at excessive rates. Insecurities thus motivate, come to circulate, and are mobilized within the feld of treasure hunting, with the result of benefting machine producers and loan sharks. As there are no certainties, only possibilities that can be brought within reach of the probable through the kinds of semiotic expertise that I have described, years of searching in vain are no indication of what might happen tomorrow. As with gambling, lack of success in the past actually increases the felt chances of success in the future. Experiences of failure only cast greater light on the stories of those who found something and now live an easy life in the West. Yet, besides their appearance as omnipresent failure and impoverishment, the fgures of scarcity and plenty inform definicilik in yet another way. The

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treasures, especially insofar as they appear as statues, jewelry, ancient coins, or other types of antiquities, are coveted as singularities predating the age of mechanical reproduction (see also von Bieberstein 2017). It is as ciphers of the original, as fetishized emblems of a past’s pastness, valued by reference to their inherent fnitude and scarcity, that they promise wealth. Their constitution as original and authentic is a prerequisite for their commodifcation within a market of antiques. It is only because these objects belong to a past that is defnitely past that they can harbor such potential for future redemption. It is thus that death comes to generate value, not as a certainty on the horizon of the future, not as death to come, but as historical. Definecilik speculates on the dead, some of which were never even given a grave.

Moush, 1915: Gold, Insurances

Posthumanist scholars focusing on matter and materiality are not much interested in the fetish qualities of objects. Such an interest would require an enquiry into the historicity of objects, into their insertion, mobilization, and mediation within the histories of religion, world economy, capitalism, and modernity. Systems of meaning, in short, whose importance posthumanist thought wishes to see diminished in our understanding of the material world. And yet gold mining, Taussig says (2004, 7), is about entering “into a game . . . with the history of the world.” What he has in mind, though, is natural history, geology to be precise, as he is concerned with actual gold mines. In the case of gold digging in Moush, the history is not “natural.” One day in September 2015, a man took me to a feld near his village. A few stones were scattered around and he pointed to the crosses that had been left as marks on these Armenian gravestones. This treasure hunter goes straight after the dead. He prefers to dig graves because, he says, people used to be buried with their valuables. As I looked around, I made out a hole in the ground. As I approached, I saw a single bone at its bottom. I turned to look at him, forming a silent question, but he would not say anything, instead showing off the familiar impish defineci smile. I then asked audibly, why he does not cover them up again. “It’s just matter,” he said. “Their soul has gone to heaven anyway.” While the catastrophe followed the same horrifc routine pretty much everywhere throughout Anatolia, the case of Moush during the summer of 1915 is peculiar. In late June, the plain of Moush with its over one hundred Armenian villages was raided within a day and a half and its estimated seventy

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thousand Armenians were massacred on the spot. There were barely any deportations. Instead, a great majority were burned alive in sheds and barns (Svazlian 2004; Ter Minassian 1999). As everywhere else where Armenians were either murdered or deported, their movable and immovable assets were looted, confscated, and appropriated. Land and houses were either distributed directly to migrants and Muslim notables or sold and revenues then distributed to the state budget, to the génocidaires themselves and their families, or to Kurdish feudal lords. According to Uğur Ümit Üngör and Mehmet Polatel (2011, 66) the Ottoman government collected an equivalent of thirty thousand kilograms of gold, which they deposited at the German Reichsbank in Berlin (see also Baghdjian 1987; Der Matossian 2011; Kévorkian 2007). Thus a new Muslim bourgeoisie emerged, the economy was Turkifed and a web of complicity spun, providing an affective glue for the new political project. Yet one movable asset proved difficult to confscate: life insurances. As the Ottoman Empire opened up to foreign capital in the mid-nineteenth century, Western insurance companies were quick to rush in and offer their products. It was particularly wealthy non-Muslims who bought life insurances, not so much in response to an increasingly precarious political climate, but simply as a way to make money.5 We know that in late 1915, Talat Pasha, interior minister and responsible for the deportation and death orders, asked the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau for a list of Armenian insurance policyholders in the United States (Morgenthau 2004). They were not going to claim their policies and therefore, according to the minister, they should pass into the hands of the state. Morgenthau refused. Held by private insurance companies, these policies thus constitute, to my knowledge, the only kind of movable asset that could not be expropriated to become a productive asset in the Milli Iktisat, the national economy (cf. Kévorkian and Sarafan 1995). Instead, they were added to the profts of these companies, until some ffteen years ago when descendants and relatives of Armenian policyholders launched a number of spectacular lawsuits in the United States with regard to insurance claims that had never been paid (Yacoubian 2010).

Conclusion It is thus that speculation on death-to-come makes a re-appearance, but here as a remnant of the past. While differently oriented in time, these life insurances share with treasure hunting the fact that both are speculative investments in

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death—past, future-past—that, I argue, form the economic excess of the genocidal violence of 1915 that could never be integrated within the Turkish national economy. Death, as I have shown, largely disappears from the scene of posthumanist writings. The future, in combination with speculation as a recalibrated method distinct from risk calculations, is claimed as that to which we owe the realization of alternative realities by means of creative experimentation. Concomitantly, materialities are analyzed frst and foremost in terms of a vital, agentic, and apparent thereness, a positivity of matter in becoming that effectively dedramatizes death. Treasure hunters can be seen to move within such a processive stream. They seek to forever connect up tools, technologies, and matter, to make a return on their material investments. With its hope for a life without hardship, treasure hunting is a rush that is driven by the wish for a kind of immortality. Eyes and will fxed on a horizon of possible redemption, death drops out of view. And yet it is therefore all the more part of the rush. It is not only that the speed and intensities of treasure hunting can themselves be lethal and accumulative of debts that weigh heavily on the families of treasure hunters. A future-oriented momentum also permits deflecting questions that might arise from the anachronism of the objects as traces or from their occasional proximity to actual corpses. As I have elaborated elsewhere (von Bieberstein 2017), even though the treasures are indexed as “Armenian” and revered for their value as antique objects, no genealogical inquisitiveness is directed at the makers of the objects, except as those who hold the secret key to decrypt codes and riddles. Embedded in a history of looting and legalized expropriation, definecilik thus constitutes a speculation on death, not the type of speculation that has been examined within the framework of studies on contemporary biopolitical governance, but speculation on death that has been severed from the present under a denialist status quo. Michael Taussig ([1980] 2010) remarked on the phenomenon of disproportionate spending as part of gift economies surrounding precious metal mining in Latin America. Following Bataille, Taussig conceives of such mindless spending as transgressive and thereby unsettling tendencies toward order and equilibrium within socialities. Incidentally, he describes the gold gained from contracts with the devil in these mines as essentially nonproductive capital, something that is echoed in other ethnographies of gold mining around the world (Clark 1993; High 2013). Money thus gained harbors barrenness, illness, and death. It must be either kept in constant circu-

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lation or spent on useless luxury goods. In the tales of treasure that circulate in Moush, gold is marked by an intrinsic evasiveness. The gold detector signals its presence, and yet, the soil is suddenly too hard to pierce through. An underground cavity is hit, and yet what bursts into the open is not gold but a swarm of hornets or ladybugs. The treasure is lifted, and yet it runs off with perfdious collaborators or state agents. For many, destitution only grows, with mounting debts. Some break their limbs by falling off rocks or into holes. Others, while hammering on walls and digging through foundations, end up crushed by collapsing building parts. And then there are the stories of those who actually score, only to die sudden deaths or fnd their lives other wise impaired. Treasure hunting is thus marked by excessive investments and excessive losses. As a speculation on death, it forms, as argued above, and alongside life insurances, that remainder of the violence of 1915 that lingers on the margins of a formalized economy built on the criminal appropriation of nonMuslim wealth. Its spectral quality, however, functions almost to exorcise or domesticate this formal economy, blurring our vision and making it more difficult to see that the latter is, in fact, just as ghostly as the practice of hunting for Armenian treasures. It is thus worth listening to the definecis. It is the government party, the AKP, they say, that has the biggest machines, gold detectors the shape of helicopters that scan what lies underneath from high, high above, only to show up the next day with the plan to build a new road, covering up their own lust for gold with infrastructure projects for the people.

Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank, from the bottom of my heart, Necmiye Boz, whose generous heart, humor, and spirit turned feldwork “assistance” into lifelong friendship—something that the prison walls behind which she has been kept for many years will neither break nor erode. I am furthermore grateful to the many other friends and acquaintances who supported my feldwork or simply made me feel welcome and at home. I stand in solidarity with all those among them, too many, who have equally been imprisoned since or forced into exile. Celal Şeker in particular, who was left to die in prison as a result of medical neglect, will never be forgotten. I would further like to thank Yael Navaro for inviting me to be part of the Remnants project, and I am grateful to our research team, including Zerrin

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Özlem Biner and Seda Altuğ, for the intellectual, emotional, and political companionship. Gary Hurst enriched the project with his own wonderful aesthetic and visual sensibilities. Notes 1. All names are pseudonyms. During the carnage of 1915, many mostly young Armenian women and children were abducted or other wise “rescued” by local families and converted to Islam. These survivors were mostly forced to renounce the identities they were born into and their children and grandchildren continued to bear the brunt of racialized anti-Christian discrimination. Over recent years, there have been struggles to reclaim this Armenian heritage and craft some kind of local “Armenian” identity in contradistinction to the Kurdish majority. 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v​=​WdZeTWdhV7k&spfreload​=​1. 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v​=​2Z6 _TZeylXQ&list​=​PL55468B47B7D0ED15&spf reload​=​10 (my translation). 4. This is not to say that war-related death in the region does not become the object of monetary transactions. The 2004 Compensation Law has introduced compensation payments for losses and damages incurred as a result of “terrorism” and “the fght against terrorism,” in the wake of the heightened military conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdish militant PKK (Biner 2013). However, not only are these retroactive payments generally perceived as acts of state charity, but eligibility has also been denied to relatives of PKK guerillas. 5. I would like to thank Ümit Kurt for sharing this information with me.

Works Cited Amoore, Louise. 2013. The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Artun, Tuna, Nir Shafr, and Chris Gratien. 2013. “Alchemy and the Ottoman World.” In Ottoman History (podcast) no. 132. Avanessian, Armen. 2013. #Akzeleration. Berlin: Merve Verlag. Baghdjian, Kévork K. 1987. La confiscation, par le gouvernement turc, des biens arméniens— dits “abandonées.” Montreal: K. Baghdjian. Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3 (2): 240–68. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernstein, Peter L. 2012. The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Biersack, Aletta. 1999. “The Mount Kare Python and His Gold: Totemism and Ecology in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.” American Anthropologist 101 (1): 68–87. Biner, Zerrin Özlem. 2013. “The Logic of Reconciliation: Between the Right to Compensation and the Right to Justice in Turkey.” Humanity (Spring): 73–91.

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Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. 2011a. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. 2011b. “ Towards a Speculative Philosophy.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 1–18. Melbourne: re.press. Buchli, Victor. 2013. An Anthropology of Architecture. London: Bloomsbury. Clark, Jeffrey. 1993. “Gold, Sex, and Pollution: Male Illness and Myth at Mt. Kare, Papua New Guinea.” American Ethnologist 20 (4): 742–57. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Craig Willse. 2011. “Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death.” In Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, 1–16. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1999. “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279–303. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Connolly, William  E. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self- Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Der Matossian, Bedross. 2011. “The Taboo Within the Taboo: The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire.” European Journal of Turkish Studies (online) Complete List 2011. Gurenko, Eugene, et al. 2006. Earthquake Insurance in Turkey: History of the Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool. Washington, DC: World Bank. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Litera ture, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. High, Mette. 2013. “Polluted Money, Polluted Wealth: Emerging Regimes of Value in the Mongolian Gold Rush.” American Ethnologist 40 (4): 676–88. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Kévorkian, Raymond H. 2007. “Patrimoine monumental et ‘biens nationaux’ arméniens de Turquie: Bilan d’une politique d’État.” Revue arménienne 7:51–62. Kévorkian, Raymond, and Ara Sarafan. 1995. “Documents consulaires américains sur la déportation des Arméniens de Samsoun durant la Première Guerre mondiale.” Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine 1:101–25. Morgenthau, Henry. 2004. United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913–1916. London: Gomidas Institute. Morris, Rosalind C. 2008 Rush/Panic/Rush: Speculations on the Value of Life and Death in South Africa’s Age of AIDS. Public Culture 20 (2): 199–231. Rao, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli. 2014. “Speculation, Now.” In Speculation, Now: Essays and Artwork, edited by Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Carin Kuoni,

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15–24. Durham, NC: Duke University Press in association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Reeves, Keir, Lionel Frost, and Charles Fahey. 2010. “Integrating the Historiography of the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes.” Australian Economic History Review 50 (2): 111–28. Savransky, Martin, Alex Wilkie, and Marsha Rosengarten. 2017. “The Lure of Possible Futures: On Speculative Research.” In Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures, edited by Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky, and Marsha Rosengarten, 1–17. London: Routledge. Svazlian, Verjiné. 2004. The Armenian Genocide and Historical Memory. Yerevan, Armenia: Gitutiun Publishing House of the NAS RA. Taussig, Michael. (1980) 2010. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Taussig, Michael. 2004. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taussig, Michael, and Godofredo Pereira. 2012. “Bodily Unconscious: A Conversation with Michael Taussig.” In Savage Objects, edited by Godofredo Pereira, 169–81. Guimarães, Portugal: Guimarães 2012—European Capital of Culture, in partnership with Imprensa Nacional– Casa de Moeda. Ter Minassian, Anahide. 1999. “Un Example: Moushe 1915.” In L’Actualité du Génocide des Arméniens, edited by H. H. Ayvazian, H. Heratchian, H. Kosseyan, B. Legras, and C. Mouradian, 231–52. Créteil, France: Edipol. Tsing, Anna L. 2000. “Inside the Economy of Appearances.” Public Culture 12 (1): 115–44. Üngör, Uğur Ümit, and Mehmet Polatel. 2011. Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property. London: Continuum. von Bieberstein, Alice. 2017. “Debt of the Dead: Hunting for ‘Armenian’ Trea sures in Postgenocide Turkish Kurdistan.” Subjectivity 10 (2): 170–89. Yacoubian, George S. 2010. “Financial, Territorial, and Moral Reparations for the 1915 Armenian Massacres.” War Crimes, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity 4:59–98. Zorach, Rebecca, and Michael W. Philips Jr. 2016. Gold: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books.

CHAPTER 3

Culture of Dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic Land, Ethnoreligious Difference, and Violence Seda Altuğ

All this land used to belong to Armenians. Here everyone knows to whom the land originally belongs. Not only its owner, but the villagers, too. But, no one speaks it out loud. How can they deny it anyway while all these remnants persist and we continue to live among them? Canals, hills, trees, hollows. . . . They are all named after their old owners. —Evdê, October 2014 To the Ministry of Interior, Within the provinces of Diyarbekir and Si’rt, such as the districts of Mutki, Gharzan, Sason, Beşiri, and its environs, an illegitimate tax resembling the feudalism of Middle Ages, namely hafir, is still today being extracted from the non-Muslim residents of the region by the Yuzukan of Mutki, Musi of Khayan, Sason, and the tribes of Bekirhan, Reshkotan, Elikan, Pencinar, and others. Before the promulgation of freedom [1908], the notables of these tribes subjugated the local Armenians

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through brigandage, threats, killings, and oppression and presented this illegal and illegitimate tax as protection tax. We demand its abolishment as a way of getting consent from the landlord in matters of marriage. Even within this one year of freedom and constitutional period, poor, desperate, and helpless peasants are forced to pay shepherds tax [akçe-i çoban] and collect animals and the like. This situation is against the spirit of the constitution, and we ask the government to take the necessary measures. In Sasun and its dependencies, the tribal leaders continue subjecting the miserable Armenian peasants to the illegitimate tax of hafir and other protection taxes. As it is outlawed with the promulgation of freedom, we demand yours truly to punish those who dare to extract it by force and return the collected amounts to the peasants. We also ask the Sublime Porte to remove those notorious landlords who penetrated the Armenian and Kurdish villages by force and grabbed their lands. In addition, the immediate execution of the parliamentary orders that were confirmed by the sultanate on 31 March 1325 [13 April 1909] concerning the land issue [arâzi meselesi] and rights of agriculturalists [hukûk-u zürrâ]. —Kegham der Garabedyan, MP of Moush, and Vahan Papazian, MP of Van, 20 August 1325 (2 September 1909)

The frst quotation about land and topography is from a Kurdish peasant of Armenian origin who currently resides in a village in Beshiri (Arm: Bisherig, Kur: Qubinê),1 a district in the city of Batman in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey, a devoted Muslim and a fervent supporter of Kurdish rights, as well as outspoken about his Armenian origins. His great-grandfather, originally from the village of Melkishan in the neighboring region, Kozluk (Kur: Hazo), survived the Armenian Genocide (1915) at the age of six and migrated several times, alone, as an orphan, between different villages belonging to the Reshkoti (Reşkotî) tribe in Beshiri. Surviving terrible hardship, he fnally was adopted properly by local Kurds and lived with the new family as a Muslim

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Kurd until he got married to another “convert” (Kur: bafla), a young girl in the same village.2 Explicit about the forms of violence(s) directed at Armenians in the form of land grabbing, forgery and intimidation in land registration, clientelism, plundering, overexploitation, abduction of women, and illegal taxation, my interviewee arguably knew by heart (almost) the exact limits of the holdings that his grandfathers used to “own” before 1915, in local measures, number of trees, and length and depth of the water canals, acknowledging the labor they invested in digging up the canals and opening their felds to agriculture. The second quotation is an official report drafted by the outspoken Armenian MPs of Moush, Kegham der Garabedyan (1856–1918),3 and of Van, Vahan Papazian (1876–1973), in the Ottoman Assembly of the Second Constitutional Period (1908–1914), and sent to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior in 1909. Promising equality, fraternity, and freedom to all Ottoman subjects regardless of their religion, the new regime was welcomed with high expectations by all ranks of the Ottoman Armenians, who hoped that it would bring political reform and settlement of the land question. Der Garabedyan, along with other Armenian MPs of the Ottoman eastern provinces, stood out as a fervent supporter of Armenian political and economic reform. He spent much of his time in his hometown, in Moush and its surroundings, meeting Armenian peasants, witnessing their dispossession. and reporting their complaints about debt, land grabbing, and intimidation to the Ottoman central authorities in Istanbul and to Armenian political organizations. He died in Istanbul in 1918. The two excerpts above were conveyed almost a hundred years apart. The former’s subjectivity was formed decades after the Armenian Genocide in the ongoing-conflict zone of the Kurdish southeast, while the writer of the latter bore direct witness to numerous forms of violence before and during the Genocide. The former witnessed neither the mass killings nor its immediate aftershocks, but violence still formed the backdrop of his imagination of the past as well as the present. He could see its evidences and traces all around in and through the material environment. In this sense, his words reveal how materiality in the form of rural topography as well as land dispossession is constitutive of a sense of community and belonging in the post-genocide world in a Kurdish rural setting in the late 2010s. The latter directly witnessed the Hamidian massacres (1894–1896) and the ongoing dispossession of the Armenian peasants, yet contended that the foundation of a new political

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order in its aftermath in 1908 should redefne sovereignty and its relation to people and things by actively demanding the fulfllment of the new regime’s promises of equality, fraternity, and freedom. Despite the temporal difference between the two narratives, they arguably still speak to each other as they equally draw attention to the relation between a notion of community and socio-political claims about land, namely a human-made environment. My aim is not to craft a continuity between past, present, and future. Instead, I argue that in both of the narratives, materiality in the form of agricultural felds, villages, and dwellings as well as material claim-making forms the channel through which par ticu lar notions of community are violently contested and endorsed. In more general terms, it is through the transformation in the property and labor regimes with their accompanying discourses and ideologies that par ticu lar notions of community are performed and reproduced.4 Religion in both narratives refers to one of the most important constituents in both access to property and a particular labor regime that are authorized and confrmed by the state/local institutions. Building on Ottoman archival material and feldwork in the region, this chapter aims to inquire contemporary local discourses about past violence(s) in the present-day context of unsettled political/economic questions and struggles whose histories date back to the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it intends to elaborate the ways in which the controversial land issue in the late Ottoman Empire, which was exponentially exacerbated by the mass violence against human and material lives in 1915 and which continued in a similar fashion under the nationalist property regime of modern Turkey from 1923 onward, reverberates in today’s discourses about land ownership and topography in Beshiri and its environs. One immediate reason underlying this chapter’s engagement with the land issue and land as a material remnant is due to the sources saying so. The reminiscences of those who were uprooted from their lives, yet remain in the same place, spoke of the ruinating and violently contested property— villages, felds, canals, and religious and civil buildings, as well as topography such as caves, holes, slopes, plains and rocks. Their narratives confrmed how property and access to resources are intimately bound up with the exercise of power and authority.5 They alluded to the change in the meanings attached to religion where the latter is transformed into a social and economic marker revealing the limits of one’s entitlements in the new ownership regime in modern Turkey. They, moreover, revealed how violence is

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embedded into the process of authorizing property claims and legitimizing politico-legal institutions.6 The Ottoman archival and published sources dating from the promulgation of the Ottoman Reform period, Tanzimat (1839–1876), onward displayed that the control and harnessing of land and natural resources was an important source of rivalry between local notables and an aspect of new political rule in the region. Numerous peasant petitions sent to the provincial councils and Istanbul; reports drafted by Armenian MPs sent to the Ministry of Interior immediately before and during the Ottoman 2nd  Constitutional Period (1908–1914), and Armenian patriarchate reports drafted under the reign of the late Abdulhamid II (1876–1908) pointed out the different ways of peasant dispossession and indebtedness. Based on these sources, this piece suggests looking at imperial formations in Beshiri rather than only at empire in order to register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation.7 According to Stoler, while empire denotes a fxed form of sovereignty, imperial formations indicate processes of becoming, shifting the focus to gradated forms of sovereignty as well as sliding and contested scales of differential access and rights.8 The chapter, too, will delve into the “opacities” that imperial formations produce by perusing “lasting tangibilities” in which ruination operates. By doing so, it strives to relocate the processes dislodged from their specifc histories and disjointed from the connections that made some people and places susceptible to ruin and abandonment.9 Batman (Kur: Êlih) is a middle-size province in the battle-weary southeast of today’s Turkey, lying on a plateau, near the confluence of the Batman River and the Tigris. Located in the western high plains of once-Armenian, Syriac, Kurdish landscape, Batman received a district center status only in 1957.10 Until 1884, two districts that form today’s Batman, Sasun and Beshiri, were administered by the Diyarbekir province (sanjak), yet afterward were part of the Siirt sanjak of the Bitlis vilayet until 1923. Today’s district center used to be a village and its population did not exceed 915 in 1950 until the Raman oil feld was discovered in late 1940s. Over the next ffty years, Batman was rebuilt from onestory houses to multi-storied buildings and its population reached 150,000.11 Occupying an area of 5,000 square kilometers, the city is currently divided into six districts—namely, Batman, Beşiri (Kur: Qubîn),12 Gercüş (Kercowz), Hasankeyf (Heskîf), Kozluk (Hazo), and Sason (Sasun)—with 270 villages. While seemingly an insignifcant town close to the eastern stretch of the Turkish-Syrian border, several controversial manifestations of the late

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Ottoman and modern Turkish state’s ethnoreligious politics are disclosed in the region in their most evident and distressing forms. Along with other towns in the Kurdish east, the Turkish state has implemented rather the most devastating socio-economic, ideological, political and military projects in this region. Today’s Batman province at large and its surroundings have directly witnessed and are gravely affected by two consecutive waves of state-sponsored mass violence, namely the Armenian Genocide (1915) and the Kurdish Sheikh Said Revolt (1925).13 Once the initial phase of the Genocide in the form of annihilations and deportations came to a standstill at the end of World War I and the following advent of the Turkish Republic (1923–), the Armenian survivors’ material dispossession unfolded in yet other forms of violence. It arguably took place against a background of increasingly anti-Kurdish ethno-politics and a Turkish nationalist property regime. The Sheikh Said Revolt was one such turning point, having ferce social, political, and administrative effects on Kurds and the Christian survivors in the region at large, if not directly in Beshiri. Following the military suppression of the revolt, “new architectures of occupation” were embarked on in the region.14 While population engineering policies in the form of settlement laws, exiles, and confscation of property aimed to govern the local Kurds, especially the leadership of the revolt; material dispossession through the Abandoned Properties Law (emval-i metruke), demolishment, confscations, liquidations, crude force, and intimidation formed the primary means to subdue the genocide survivor Christian population and the space similar to other tiny towns in Turkey’s Kurdistan.15 Violent confrontations between the Turkish state and the Kurds’ quest for freedom, manifested in different mediums, marked the political history of the region from 1925 onward. The last armed confrontation between the Kurds and the Turkish state was initiated by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) in 1978 and still continues today, demanding Kurdish political autonomy and cultural rights. The Turkish state’s counter-insurgency methods against the PKK in the 1990s engendered an abrupt increase in violence, particularly in the city centers but also in the countryside, evoking and adding to the memories of past violence(s).16 The tangible effects of the continuum of violence and turmoil in various forms denoting the socio-political history of the last 150 years in the region reverberates through material ruins, “what people are left with,” and ongoing ruination.17 While the majority of the current population of Batman is MuslimKurdish (with a signifcant number of mainly obscure Islamicized Arme-

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nians/Syriacs) and to a lesser extent, Muslim-Arab,18 not more than four decades ago, it was home to a socially, culturally, economically, and religiously mixed population with Kurds, Arabs, and several Christian groups from different sects as well as Jews and Yezidis.19 Social and economic diversity among ethnoreligious groups was the norm rather than the exception. Overall, Christians used to form the majority of the settled agricultural population before 1915 together with a relatively lesser number of their Kurdish fellowmen. The majority of the Kurdish population was semi-nomadic, gradually embarking on agriculture, while still travelling along winter and summer pastures with their herds. “Kurdish tribes dominated the region socially and politically, incorporating both the non-tribal Kurds and Christian peasants into semi-feudal structures of control.”20 The accounts of the local Christian and Kurdish survivors who found refuge in post-Ottoman Syria under the French mandate (1921–1946) demonstrate that the peasants from different religions used to share a common culture and a common respect for agricultural cycles. They were bound by similar secular hierarchies and submitted to the same landlords (aghas). As can be observed in various French ethnographic reports about the newcomer refugees in French-Syria, belonging to a religious group was usually intertwined with a number of other secular identities such as family, village, town, and tribe.21 Somewhat similar to the case of intercommunal relations in Mount Lebanon before the Tanzimat, religious affiliations of particularly the tribal Christians were entangled with “discourses of obedience” to the local aghas and prominent tribal fgures.22 However, the post-1915 world was an unfamiliar one in the villages of Ottoman-Beshiri, such as in Bleyder (Binatli), an Armenian-Syriac mixed village, Bolindê (Bilek), Barincê (Bahçeli), Korîk (Uğurca), Melkishan (Kavakdibi), and Zercil (Danalı), an Armenian-Yezidi mixed village, where most of the Beshiri survivors in French-Syria originate from.23 Through dislocation and dispossession, people were dispersed, the self was disintegrated, the landscape was bewildered, the home as a whole crumbled. Survivors were dispersed geographically among French-Syrian/Lebanese towns, Istanbul, and Yerevan and Muslim or Syriac villages in the larger region. Depending on the place of dispersal, they may have kept their religious sects, such as in Istanbul, Syria/Lebanon, and Armenia, despite the meanings attached to religion having been greatly transformed. Those who stayed in the same region, mainly females, were converted to Islam and became Kurdifed/Arabized. Christian socio-political subjectivity was totally flattened, plurality of livelihood highly diminished. Gradual monotypization among Christian survivors has

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ensued in the sense that small land–owning peasants or sharecroppers were transformed into landless sharecroppers, agricultural seasonal workers, or, later, proletariat in the urban centers in western Turkey. Former Christian villages were settled with immigrants from the Caucasus or Kurdish semi-nomads, while religious and civil architecture came to be gradually wiped away.24

Materiality and Violence in the Scholarship The feld under scrutiny required a coalescence of different scholarly literatures on sectarianism, property-making, and state in imperial and postimperial settings.25 While the vast literature on sectarianism lucidly displayed the role of the violent colonial and imperial politics of difference in the construction of sectarianism, the aspects of the non-human and materiality are somehow marginalized in the literature. The political economy literature, on the other hand, demonstrated the constitution of the modern economic feld, the constitution of property regimes, and the role of states in their making; however, violence is rather underrepresented in the literature on property. This neglect has become more obvious when it comes to Middle Eastern studies. At best, the complex relationship between property, violence, state, and race is tackled as an intermittent issue that is disclosed in empire studies concerning the political economy of colonialism and the post-colonial period. Critical race studies, too, contributes to the theoretical literature on the non-human and materiality mainly through its conceptualization of racial capitalism and discussions on slavery—namely, “whiteness as property”— however it is usually the (settler) colonial past and the post-colonial present that the literature on race, property (land), and law deal with.26 Amalgamation of critical race theories with “geographies of color” like the Middle East is a recent endeavor.27 A co-reading of these literatures demonstrates that productions of socio-cultural difference—namely, ethnic and religious identifcations—have not been bound up solely with political, social, and even epistemological projects of difference-making, but also with economic projects. Hence, the material is intimately related to the governance of cultural difference that often but not always provided the political and social underpinnings of the contest over property, in par ticu lar, land and natural resources. Hereby lies one of the aspirations of this chapter: to discern the

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ways in which the Ottoman land issue from the mid-nineteenth century onward has become intertwined with the imperial/national state’s attempt to govern the ethnoreligious and political difference as revealed in the ruinating materialities and in the re-imagination of the relationship between self, community, and the nation today. A critical reflection on the scholarship on politics of difference for the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish studies, in par ticular in the scholarly debates regarding the Armenian and Kurdish issues, reveals that the ethnic question is usually viewed as a product of competing nationalisms—that is, political ideologies built around conceptions of communal belonging and statehood.28 Paradoxically enough, a brief glance at the history of the Armenian question from the last decades of the nineteenth century up until 1914 divulges the magnitude and centrality of the land issue, above all, in relation to the survival and livelihood of the Armenian peasants (which amount to 90 percent of the whole Armenian population) and also in relation to local, communal, and imperial sovereignty. Contestation over land in the post-Tanzimat period in the Ottoman East (1878–1914) became a key vector in the changing conceptions of ethnoreligious belonging that were transmitted back and forth from locality to state. The effort to take control of land and natural resources at a time of privatization of land ownership (1858) fueled local identity formation in a context of state-sponsored violence of powerful Kurdish landlords against mainly Christian and Kurdish peasants.29 With the advent of the 1908 revolution, demands for land reform, reclamation of the usurped land under the reign of Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), and elimination of extra-legal taxes paid by the Armenian peasants to the Kurdish lord formed the main demands of the Armenian MPs in the Ottoman parliament.30 The land issue has apparently lost its weight in the debates on the Armenian conflict in the aftermath of the Genocide, mainly because the possessors and cultivators of the land and their representatives were killed, and because the landscape has been colonized following the constitution of the new nationstate in Turkey.31 Similarly, there is a small number of local monographs on the implementation of the Abandoned Property Law, or the state of the property of those who were killed, deported, or forced to migrate after the issuing of the provisional law concerning the property, credit, debts, and balances of deported persons (30 May 1915). The law formed the basis for the creation of a legal system suitable for the elimination of the material living conditions of the

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Armenians, as it took away from the Armenians any right of disposal of their own properties.32 The seizing and appropriation of “abandoned property,” referred as the “dowry of the state,” whose distribution “served both to expedite the creation of a native bourgeoisie and also to make it beholden to the state,”33 has been described as part of a policy known as “Turkifcation.”34 Following the decree of 30 May 1915, the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government sent secret orders to the provinces about the management of the Armenian properties.35 The end of World War I and the armistice period in Istanbul (1918–1923) brought about the possibility of reversal of CUP policies, particularly with the issuing of the law concerning the return of property to its ex-owners (8 January 1920).36 However, with the de facto foundation of a new nationalist regime in Ankara (1918–), the abandoned properties issue rebounded to the CUP policies. Üngör and Polatel argue that there are striking continuities between the Young Turk regime and the Kemalist republicans regarding expropriation and dispossession.37 Creating ferce debates among the deputies in Ankara, the decrees issued by the new nationalist government registered the liquidated properties as income in the national budget, and the migrants and the nomads who were settled on the abandoned properties were entitled to take the title deeds for these properties.38 Colonization of Armenian property and its distribution to ministries, bourgeoisie, settlers, and the army usually formed the frst step.39 After the promulgation of the modern Turkish republic, existing scholarship demonstrates that the policies of exclusion and economic nationalism continued without interruption.40 The law was in effect until 11 June 1986, yet the circular that was issued by the Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre in 29 June 2001 argued that all abandoned property would be transferred to the state, and the real owners or their heirs would not claim any right to their properties.41 Recent years have witnessed an increase in legal cases in Batman brought by the grandsons of former Yezidi possessors who migrated to Europe after the 1980s. They ask for a rightful return of their former lands which were seized through force, deceitful cadastre surveys, or fake witnesses. Despite the fact that the possessors usually justify their claims of their historical possession and usufruct rights (zilliyet), the absence of old title deeds, difficulty in delimiting the borders of a piece of land, and the abandoned property laws disfavor the plaintiff’s claims.42 This confrms the argument that in order re-access claims to property, they require support by politico-legal institutions in positions of authority such as the

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Ministry of Interior or the Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre Offce; however, the Yezidis, as a religiously heterodox group of sharecroppers, lack the necessary entitlement.43

Imperial Formations in Twentieth-Century Beshiri, Batman: Past Violence and Current Imaginations of Land Hiba Bou Akar in her book on post-war Beirut argues that planning and space making in post-conflict cities mold space and time in labyrinthine ways, where temporalities of future, present, and past have been folded into each other, resulting in an anticipated future that is always shaped by a past of war.44 A similar labyrinthine logic holds true for the Beshiri case, too. Material traces of the past violence(s) and the ongoing low-intensity war create a repository of images to interpret the present and shape the future. The history of the Armenian Genocide and afterward is transmitted through talk, but also through the changing property regimes of the rural landscape. This makes the imagination of Armenianness or Kurdishness more than simply about belonging to an ethnoreligious sect in the past or present, or only about memories and affects. In Beshiri, Batman, it is the materiality in the form of knowledge of rural topography and present-day claims of one’s bygone land ownership that are constitutive of a sense of community and belonging, while in turn, a sense of community reproduces and reiterates discourses about land in the present. Narratives of the past by the elderly in today’s Batman convey moments of envious conflicts between local Kurdish rural notables, such as landlords and (sub-)tribal leaders, as well as between these notables and a multi-religious group of peasants. The state, both in its imperial and nation-state forms, appears as a violent power constituting its authority usually by military means, but also through negotiation with local rural notables and their constituencies. “There was envy and conflict between aghas aspiring for power. One long-standing feud was the one between (Emin) Raman’s and (Cemilê) Çeto’s (the mala Faro, namely the Faro household of the Pencinar tribe). The latter cooperated with the state. Çeto brothers were later executed by the state paying the price of their reliance on the state.”45 It is the (ex-)peasants, again almost exclusively Kurds, who present narratives of hardship, destitution, and distress thanks to the harsh rule of the landowning agha, arduous work, and extra-legal taxation.

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We used to hide our animals in the duvet, so that the agha charges less animal tax. We used to work very very hard to earn our living, which was actually in very low standards. The aghas in the mountainous parts possessed animals and pasture; whereas those living in the plain possessed lands. Similarly, the aghas and the state tax collectors were not able to collect tax from us, thus they sent collectors [tahsildar] with caravans. It was the notorious Fettah Bey from the village of Zoqê who collected the tax from the highlands; while it was Milli Cemil Pasha who was responsible for the plain. Narratives of local history, regardless of one’s gender, past/present religion, and political leaning, are almost always contextualized through one’s village, tribe, landlord, and routes of (forced) displacement where necessary. The old (Kurdifed Armenian/Syriac) and official village names, their earlier inhabitants, topographic details, and the related notorious events (almost always a land-related conflict with the involvement of state authorities) are common knowledge. Almost a century after dispossession, topographical names are still known and referred to by their old possessors, whose names are in a form of Kurdifed-Armenian creole. Mixarê Xaço (cave of Xaço), xirbeyên Mirêd (ruins of Murad), darên Delo (trees of Delo), gazê Hayfo (mountain peak of Hayfo), kaniya Gapo (spring of Gapo), newala Haço (river of Haço), varê Ovê (byroad of Ovê), gazê Verdo (mountain peak of Verdo) are still commonly referenced topographic names in the old Armenian village of Melikê. In Sasun, a mountainous enclave overlooking the Beshiri plain to the south, agricultural lands are still referred to by their old Armenian possessors: Erdê (the land of) Naze, Simon, Sope, Manuk, Migir, Krikor. In Bolindê, another old Armenian-Syriac mixed village, mixarê Boghos (cave of Boğos), kaniya Xaço (spring of Xaço), mixarê Evdê Mado (cave of Evdê Mado), girê dare (a religious site), and delavê Paşo (trough of Paşo) are some topographical site names currently in circulation. The termination of agricultural know-how with the annihilation of the Christian population is also acknowledged. Knife for cutting trees (das), knife for cutting wheat (dasuk), bellows (nixaf ), adze (tavşo), ploughshare (gisîn), and blacksmith (heddad) are cited as extinct agricultural materials following the extermination of Armenians. Some survivor-artisans are recalled to have commuted between Diyarbekir and Gharzan in order to produce these materials in those towns where extermination, and thus extinction, was absolute.

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However, it is the public secrets that are in fact revealed through distinctive discourses and affects, depending on one’s gender as well as personal record of religious conversion. While the history of almost every single village can be accurately discerned in terms of its earlier residents and possessors of land, whether Christian or Yezidi, there is a difference in the affective discourses between the vocal converts (ex-Christian Kurds) and Kurds who do not critically question their religious genealogies regarding the post-Genocide trajectories of places, things, and people. The accounts of the actors with Islamicized Armenian descent, which is usually matrilineal, bear a peculiarity as their narratives are more tangible, corporeal, accurate, and specifc.46 Not only are the plots of the accounts formed by past injustices against Christians and present injustices against Kurds, but also the post-genocide course of events is alluded to in detail. The routes of displacement of local Christian genocide survivors, including the village names migrated to or moved away from, are identifed. So are the tribal connections and events in these villages. As the human and material landscape in the region has radically been altered, with each party having its own web of tragic events to untangle, the survivors who knew little or nothing about one another have been transformed into a community, though they are not necessarily in daily contact with each other. Besides, the identities of the local actors who usurped particular pieces of land over the course of one hundred years, through force or other illegal means, are always specifed; so are the family names and other human details of the dispossessed. The local actors confscating the Christian/Yezidi property and their relations within local and national power structures— namely, the tribal leaders, sheikhs, and big landowners—as well as the limits of authority of the local power holders vis-à-vis the national(ist) polities, are acknowledged. The amounts and sites of usurped land are almost always specifed, too. Land, in their accounts, has an in-between status. It oscillates between private property and collective/communal and historical possession. Similarly, one’s religious genealogy turns into a signifcant marker of one’s self-knowledge as well as the relationship with material ruins and layers of ruination. Religion in the accounts of the converts is depicted as an obligatory condition for being a property owner. Religious affiliation and its performance emerge as requirements for entitlement to have access to property. The role of the PKK’s forty-year-long political struggle against the Turkish state’s oppression of Kurds and denial of their national rights, paradoxically enough, has a catalyzer in the empowerment of Kurdo-Christian selves, too. It

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was this unforeseen emancipation that partly enabled the uncovering of semipublic secrets that were materialized in and through land ownership and topography. As well as this, the increase in re-conversions back to Christianity was made possible by the same political dynamic. The words of a middle-aged Kurdish male peasant who is conscious of his Armenian family history, yet not an actively practicing Christian, reveal the role of political struggle in the construction of self, nation, and community. His demystifcation of state-sponsored denial of Kurdish presence and Armenian absence was made possible by the form of claim-making provided by the Kurdish political movement. “We were silent about our past, because we were afraid. It was the Kurdish movement and its success that empowered us, so that we can speak out now. I do not accept the category of Kurmanj [Muslim Kurds]. In my opinion, there are Muslim and Christian Kurds and we are Christian-Kurds.”47 In his account, actual Kurdishness turns into a signifer of resistance that can revitalize the publicly concealed past Armenianness. His assertiveness about his Armenian roots and the past injustices is viable only through current political struggle in the present. Moreover, it is not necessarily through identity politics or political discourses accommodated by Kurdish politics, but through the various forms of claim-making equipped by the present-day praxis. The current context of Kurdish political struggle facilitated the emergence of other public discourses on land, narrated as “All this land was Armenian,” or “The whole of Gharzan was Christian, there were no Kurds here, the Kurds were in the pastures involved in animal husbandry and pillage.” Such narratives are usually enacted by actors who do not elaborate the issue of past violence and religion as the formative conditions of entitlement to possess things. In these narratives, land is approached in a more fgurative way. Unlike the one adopted by ex-Christian Kurds, these accounts carry the potential of unmaking the tangibility of land and transforming it into an abstract and non-measurable, ahistorical object which cannot be placed at a certain time and place. The land is treated as an anonymous commodity rather than a singular and subjective one. While such narratives try to settle the meaning in the present in an anxious way, they shape an uncertain future, but relatively. However, in the historical accounts of the vocal converts or the involved parties in the controversial court cases, the Yezidis in Batman, asking for reclamation of their possessions, land turns into a tool of self- and communal empowerment and a claim of presence in the past and in the future. Such narratives embrace a potential to settle and fx the meaning in the past and present, while unmaking an unpredictable and anxious future.48

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It is violence as integral and sectarianism as concurrent to the transformation of property relations on land in the Ottoman eastern provinces that we now turn to.

Empire in the Past: Land, Violence, Sectarianism, and Power A glance at the Ottoman archival documents on the district of Beshiri plain and the neighboring mountainous region during the Ottoman reform program, Tanzimat (1839–1876), reveals the local implementation of the administrative, fscal, political, and economic transformations that the wider region has gone through from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The province of Diyarbekir, including its districts, was brought under the Tanzimat program in 1845.49 Accordingly, the province was going to be established and integrated into the center with specifc taxation and land policies. Among the main goals of the Tanzimat state in the region were the confscation and division of the lands of the Kurdish hereditary landowners as well as the establishment of a standardized land system and a rationalized tax system.50 Before Tanzimat, agricultural relations of production in the region were based on the local beg/ agha/tribal leader’s large land ownership and a predominantly sharecropping population in the plains and small land–owning peasants in the mountainous parts. The introduction of Ottoman reform changed the terms of existing negotiation among different sectors of the provincial society and the Ottoman state that entailed a wide range of strategies, including military force.51 However, the Ottoman center did not pursue a uniform strategy of governance throughout the whole region. The strategy and degree of integration of certain territories into the central rule through social, economic, and administrative reforms differed from region to region. Military suppression was deployed only insofar as it made the implementation of these policies easier.52 For example, in Ottoman-Diyarbekir, the integration of the districts of Sasun and Gharzan were not identical at all. With regard to the meticulous issue of tax collection in mid-nineteenth-century Sasun, the mountainous enclave in the north of Beshiri organized in big households rather than extensive nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, the Ottoman center opted for the mediation of local elites and negotiation with the local population: “Within the province of Diyarbekir, the Muslim and other subjects of the mountainous district of Cebel-i Sasun located in the vicinity of Gharzan, have not paid their tax, tithe or poll-tax [jizya] for eighty-hundred years.”53 However, as for the

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local elites’ demand for the “taming” of the nomadic Reshkotan tribe of the Gharzan region, direct military force was employed: “The nomadic tribe of Reshkotan within the province of Kurdistan travels to the pastures of Moush, the Zozan mountains in summer and travels to Beshiri, one of the districts of Diyarbekir, and camps with their tents during the winter. [The document continues with adverse views of the members of the local council regarding the tribe.] This tribe is marked with disobedience and evil and has never paid their debts [zimmet-i miriye] and others with compliance and submission.”54 One of the most signifcant aims of the Tanzimat regime in the empire was to institutionalize individual ownership of land in order to increase control of the central state over the land revenues, accompanied by excluding the entitlements and obligations of persons or groups that formerly constituted the ruling bloc.55 The new land regime as codifed in the Land Code (1858) and the Provincial Reform Law (1864) brought signifcant transformations in the local power relations, property regimes, and land tenure systems.56 The central state’s aim of excluding the entitlements of the persons of the ancien regime and an outright resistance of the old actors against the new regulations can be traced in the trajectory of Fettah Beg, the local beg of Gharzan, between 1864 and 1866.57 Fettah Beg, based in the village of Zoq (Tr: Yanarsu), was one of the local notables (ümera) that the new regime was ideally supposed to estrange, but thanks to his local influence and networks was hardly ever dissociated from the social, political, and economic scene in Beshiri and its surroundings until 1908. A series of complaints drafted by the Armenian patriarchate addressing the Foreign Affairs of the Provincial Council (Makam-ı Vâla-yı Nezaret-i Celile-i Hariciyye) in May, July, and October 1864 begin with a lengthy introduction denouncing the impunity toward Fettah Beg.58 Accused of “repeated murder (qatl-i nufus), usurpation of possession (gasb-i emwal) and hetk-i irz ve namus (violation of honor) towards the local population and impeding the income of the public saltpan (memlaha-i miriyye’nin hâsılatına sekte îrâsı),” the patriarch Boghos complains that “despite that the justice department of the provincial council undertook the necessary investigation and executed orders for Fettah Beg’s disposal, he was still in the local district and hence the danger and fear of the local population.” The patriarch asks for the expulsion (tard) and suspension (ta’bid) of Fettah Beg.59 A series of long reports written by the Justice Department of the Provincial Council addressing the governor of the province of Kurdistan dated 2 December 1864 verifes the claims of the Armenian patriarchate regarding the saltpans. The report states that “Nuh Beg as the subdistrict governor of Zirki, together with

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the director of the Zirki saltpan [a relative of Fettah Beg] and Derviş Beg [the son of Fettah Beg] who died in 1863 malversed their position and peculated 1.165.164 kiyye salt and that Nuh Beg had to pay a fne.”60 The following report dated 21 November 1865, however, pardoned him that he was not going to pay the whole amount as he had no wealth left in his hometown, Zirki, and would be exiled to Vidin.61 On 28 August 1866, a telegraph sent from Diyarbekir addressing the Bab-ı Âli signed by Fettah Beg and his relative Shir Beg of the neighboring town of Shirvan referred to a conflict of interest among local notables as the main reason underlying the complaints against them: “It is the ex-district governor of Siird, Kamil Beg, Hamid Agha [the new district governor of Gharzan after Fettah Beg], Hurshid and Feth Begs, Mahmud effendi and others whom we had previously accused for their brutality (ghadr) and infdelity (khiyanet) are now unmaking our previous telegraph and accusing us with the aim of ending our dynasty (hanedanımızı söndürmek).”62 In seven years’ time on 28 March 1873, in a letter sent by the registry of important affairs in Istanbul, Fettah Beg of Gharzan and Hamid Beg of Gharzan as well as the leader of the Pencinar tribe, Çeto, and the Mirza agha of Beshiri were promoted by the central authorities owing to their assistance in the settlement of the Reshkotan, Alikan and Pencinar tribes.63 Under the reign of Hamid II, increasing European encroachment in the empire, combined with an Armenian nationalist movement demanding political reform, played a role in the Islamist emphasis in Hamidian policies. However, adopting militarist measures to govern the Armenian issue (1894– 1896) through recruiting loyalist Kurdish tribes, namely the Hamidiye Cavalry, and granting them extra-legal rights resulted in an exponential increase in crime and dispossession of Armenian peasants through murder, forced land seizure, forced displacement, and forced conversion and its reporting, as revealed in the tens of telegrams sent from the districts usually signed by peasants or the patriarchate.64 This is particularly true in the aftermath of the Berlin Treaty (1878), signed following the Russian victory in the Ottoman-Russian War. The treaty included clauses about the improvement of the situation of the Armenians living in the six eastern provinces having an Armenian majority (Vilayet-i Sitte).65 However, the Armenian reform program of October 1895 proposed by the European powers and presented to Abdulhamid II was never implemented.66 The repercussions of these imperial developments in Beshiri and its surroundings were paramount. The Ottoman sources on the region suggest that

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rivalry between local notables over resource extraction has exponentially increased as divulged in the increasing conflict over the exploitation of saltpans. In a report dated 9 November 1898, unlike the earlier years, the conflict over the Melfan and Melkishan saltpans is not stated as a form of corruption of officers, but due to bandits, namely the Ahmed Sheyho of Melfan and Ali Younis of Hazo. The writer of the letter warns that military measures should be imposed for the protection of these saltpans.67 In another report concerning the Melfan and Çay saltpans dated 2 November 1905, the bandits are argued to threaten the “security of movement of the salt customers as well as result in losses in salt consumption.” 68 The measures imposed against the bandits would then be military through placing soldiers around the mentioned saltpans.69 The same report refers to the lack of military personnel for the protection of saltpans and argues that the security of the saltpans is impossible to sustain without the security of the roads and the imprisonment of the bandits in the region, such as the sons of Mirze-i İsa of Reshkotan.70 It is in the same years in Beshiri and the region at large that local Armenians would more often be identifed with “organizing harm, imputing it to Kurds and thereby creating fuss (tertibat-i fesadiye, Kürtlere isnad ve bu suretle velevele ve şikayete vesile icadı).”71 A letter written in the same years by the grand vizier and signed by the prominent ministers in Istanbul states that the mountaintops in Diyarbekir, Moush, and Gharzan would be employed as possible “sites of refuge of brigandage”; therefore, military measures should immediately be taken. A visible increase in anti-Armenian policies, along with escalation in military measures during Abdulhamid II, was also manifested in the violent encounters between the peasants and the gendarme who accompanied the state officers for the registration of sheep numbers and calculation of animal tax in Beshiri. In one such instance in a religiously mixed village of Beshiri called Korek, the fghting between the peasants who were alleged to have hidden their animals in order to pay less animal tax turned into a strife between the villagers and the gendarme following the latter’s intervention and resulted in the death of a Kurdish peasant, which eventually turned into an international news item in the Austrian press of Politische Correspondance International.72 Several correspondences regarding this incident between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Interior Ministry in the following weeks, together with similar events that occurred among Diyarbekir, Çemişkezek, and Erzincan Armenians, strove to unmake the “misrepresentation” of these events in the international scene— namely, the governor dismissing the complaints of the Armenians whose

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situation was getting grave due to the threats by Kurds who were arguably armed by the local state officers.73 In line with Aytekin’s argument concerning the Ottoman state’s relative and temporal indifference vis-à-vis rural indebtedness in Western Anatolia in the nineteenth century, material on Beshiri and its surroundings demonstrates that there had been a similar indifference on the part of the authorities at least until the Berlin agreement (1878), after when the Armenian issue was internationalized and explicitly melded into a political land issue.74 More importantly, the ongoing atmosphere in Beshiri at large may be compared to the Ottoman-Balkans in the same period where the countryside in the Balkans arguably suffered from an “endemic nature of crime and violence.” Such crimes in Beshiri, as demonstrated above, were often orga nized by local landowners—the elites of the ancien regime, as well as the Hamidiye cavalry. Looking at the actors and the types of crimes in the region reveals further similarities with the Balkans, that what was at stake was “a bigger social transformation in the countryside, regarding the local power confguration, agrarian relations, inter-religious relations, and law governing these relations.”75 Likewise, what is after 1908 called the Agrarian Question—a title for the question of the Armenian lands usurped during the previous decades, mostly by Kurdish tribal chiefs—points out to such a transformation. The Agrarian Question has never been resolved, and over time it has become intertwined with Abdulhamid II’s efforts to work out a Kurdish policy.76 The 1908 revolution increased hopes about Armenian reform and reclamation of the usurped lands, but it unfortunately was too short. High hopes of settlement of social and economic problems through political reform and equality soon faded away. Reports of Armenian MPs of Moush and Van are signifcant in disclosing the various methods of peasant dispossession and the relationship between political power and access to property in the early days of the 1908 revolution.77 Below is an excerpt from a very detailed report about the forms of Armenian peasant dispossession and indebtedness in the province of Moush and Van drafted by the Armenian patriarchate in İstanbul to be submitted to the Ottoman Ministry of Interior in the capital. One of the methods of Armenian peasant indebtedness was called selef, an advance loan given to the producers by the Muslim landlord with a high interest rate. As the peasant cannot afford paying the principal amount of the initial loan due to the accruing interest, the land is eventually bought by the loan-giver in 1/10 or 1/5  percent of

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its real value. For instance, An Armenian named Serop from the Catholic Armenian village of Oghunk at Moush was supposed to pay 200 piasters, which was equal to three kilos of barley or six kilos of wheat. As he could pay neither of them, the selef-givers seized three of his cattle whose worth was equal to 1,200 piasters. Eventually the lands of the peasant are given as mortgage in return for the harvest. In case the peasant cannot offer harvest, he loses his lands. Illegal tax collection was another method of peasant indebtedness employed before 1908 during the Hamidian period. The tax was collected by the tax officer while the gendarme accompanied him. Following the abolishment of the old tax-farming [iltizam] system, a new tax collection system was imposed, but the new tax collectors were as cruel as the old ones. They used to go to the village and ask for 4,000– 5,000 for lands worth 2,000, spitting, swearing, whipping, and torturing the producers from whom they used to extract the tax. Breaking into the houses and taking peasants’ nourishments and savings have become the usual practice. They would not let off those peasants who could afford paying the tax. They would insult and rape the women. They would lock the men in the barn. There were collectors like the brutal Abdullah Çavuş, and they used to give all kinds of punishment. They used to tie the Armenian peasants on a pile, pour cold water over the peasants and whip them. That’s why, when the peasants heard that the tax collector was coming to the village, they hid inside. The tax collector held the list of bedel-i askeriyye78 and charged 700–800 piasters instead of its real value of 300. The excuse for overcharging was that they charge the villagers for the debts of the fugitives. They take the payments of these debts through selef. They do not give any receipts in return. They receive the payments in cash from those who can “afford,” while adding the amount accruing from the part of the fugitives and poor peasants who cannot afford. The result is the impoverishment of the local society. Plus, the central treasury does not beneft anything. Another method of peasant dispossession was illegal tax collection, or hafir (Arm.: hapir). It was a protection tax exacted on the Armenian peasants by Kurdish tribes or landlords. It was usually levied at a much higher amount than the regular tax collected by the government and was collected by despotic Kurdish aghas, who make the Armenian peasant dependent upon them. Despite the fact that the space of influence of the hafir-collecting aghas has become narrower

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after 1908, they would still continue collecting it. This is a common practice in the Piseng [the east of Sasun], Gharzan, Hazo, Gutsked, Khut-Pirnashen, and Modgan regions, and to a lesser extent in Khiyan and Shatakh. As in slavery, the hafir-collector agha considers the Armenian household as his own property. Tax is demanded from the harvest or animals. A moderate peasant would yearly give seven gods [wheat kernels], which amounts to 60 piasters, and one litre of oil amounting to 40 piasters, and half a kilo of meat that is 15 piasters, as well as two sheep making 70 piasters, and a pair of socks, which in total makes 300 piasters. Four Armenian notables were killed because they did not make the requirements of the hafir. Another method was the seizure of land by using border disagreements as an excuse. Armenians sue the Kurds through local courts, and Kurds win the cases by using the rent contract [icare kağıdı] instead of title deeds (1233). False witnessing was another means. The right of discretion was almost always given to Kurds. There were even seizures in villages where the Armenian villagers held title deeds.79 Against these unresolved socio-economic issues and sectarian violence, the Committee of Union and Progress embarked on a mass annihilation program during the First World War years (1914–1918) that culminated in the killing of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians, and its reverberations continue today. In the new Turkish Republic, non-Armenianness and political loyalty turned into property—that is, a value not encoded in law but defnitely in social and economic relations. The state anxiety of governing of political and ethnoreligious difference still continues to shape the property regime in today’s Turkey.80

Conclusion Despite the tremendous and violent transformation of human and physical geography in today’s Beshiri and its environs from the early twentieth century onward, the space is still known and claimed through material remnants that endure and that people are left with. The knowledge of landscape and physical structures, as well as the dispositions in which the violence has been conveyed, has the potential to mark the dispossessed lives. The past is approached and claimed within the current state of things and through the

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present-day engagements where, in the case of Beshiri, Batman, new imperial/nation-state ideologies and discourses about land and people as much as the denial of the past genocidal violence and ongoing violence against Kurds and political struggle continually endorse and elongate each other. In this sense, narratives about the transformation in land ownership and landscape can be seen as mediators through which more resilient aspects of the ethnosectarian question can be discerned and redefned. Even 150 years after the legal constitution of land as a thing, alienable, disposable, as well as transactable as any other commodity, the violent histories of property-making in Ottoman-Beshiri and afterward in modern Turkey attach a social, communal, and historical meaning to land. Here, land and the landscape become carriers of the past and reminders of different truth regimes. It differentiates the just and the unjust, the licit and the illicit. It challenges the official state legality and its histories on which the property regimes are based. To this end, this chapter attempted to demonstrate how the defnition of imperial/national sovereignty and its relation to people and things have been transformed from Tanzimat onward. In the case of once Armenian-Kurdish lands of the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, violence by the state as well as local power holders has played an integral and formative role in the contestation over property, sanctioning claims, and (un)doing of mainly but not exclusively non-Muslim peasants’ rights and entitlements.81 Based on a case study on Beshiri and current literature, this chapter imposed a certain dose of continuity between different property regimes from Tanzimat onward. Nevertheless, an in-depth exploration is necessary in order to analyze the transformations, cohesions, and discontinuities in cultures of dispossession in the last century in Turkey. One further implication of this piece is to reflect on the intimate relationship between making of private property and governing of cultural difference. Despite the fact that the archival research underlying this chapter is rather limited, it may nevertheless suggest that the making of sectarianism and of private property in the Ottoman East are concomitant processes, and violence is intrinsic to both. This compels us to advance further Huricihan İslamoğlu’s argument about the relationship between state-making and constitution of private property. İslamoğlu rightly argues that “individual ownership represented a dual abstraction of the property claim of the individual from the web of multiple entitlements to land revenue and to diverse and shared claims to land use” and “laws of private property, administration of land and surveying of property—all of which entailed the legal constitution

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of land as an alienable and disposable commodity and took place in relation to changes in the nature of the state power from mid 19th century onwards.”82 She adds that “entanglement of the individual right from the bundle of rights that previously constituted property entailed the legal casting of the property relations in terms of an asset and a person.”83 This arguably represents an objectifcation of that relation—namely, its abstraction from the web of power relations that are constitutive of it.84 Despite the fact that İslamoğlu’s argument concerns the early implementations of the Land Code, where her main concern is to bring the state back into analyses on the making of private property in a non-Western imperial context, her claims may be pushed forward by introducing another dynamic that is intrinsic to and concomitant with the constitution of a private property regime in the late nineteenthcentury Ottoman East: sectarianism. In other words, deconstruction of land from previous representations of land relations—namely, transformation from the representation of bundle of rights to individual ownership—occurred in the same temporal space with the transformation in the signifcance of religion wherein “decontextualized religious identities alone started to defne individuals.”85 Contemporaneousness of the change in the meanings attached to landed property and religion in the late nineteenth century indicates a restructuring of the relationship between religion, land, and modernity whose repercussions continue to this day.

Acknowledgments This chapter owes a great deal to the generous collegiality of Alice von Bieberstein, Yael Navaro, and Zerrin Özlem Biner, and I am grateful for the earnest and inspiring discussions I have had with them throughout and following our ERC project. I am truly thankful to them for their collective devotion and arduous work in bringing this volume into being. Notes Epigraphs: Evdê, interview with the author, Bekirhan, Batman, October 2014; BOA, DH.MUİ (Muhaberat-ı Umumiye İdaresi), 4, 3, 16, 20 August 1325. 1. The current district of Beshiri does not correspond to the district of Ottoman-Beshiri of the sanjak of Diyarbekir, the central sub-province. The district center used to be Al-medine, which was then a village on the banks of the Batmansu, to the west of İluh, now the city of Batman. Verheij, “Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis,” 337.

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2. The rediscovery and later public recognition of people’s Armenian roots in Turkey is a signifcant process that began in the mid-2000s. For more on this, see Yılmaz, Müslümanlaştırılmış Ermeniler (Islamicized Armenians), accessed 20 December 2020. 3. For more information, see the biographical article on Armenouhi Kevonian written by her son, Kegham Kevonian, in 1990 originally in Armenian and translated into English and Turkish at https://www.houshamadyan.org/mapottomanempire/vilayet-of-bitlispaghesh/kaza -of-moush/local-characteristics/song-armenouhi-kevonian.html, accessed 20 December 2020. 4. This argument owes greatly to the work of scholars working on infrastructure, urban planning, and identity in post-colonial and settler colonial urban contexts, in particular Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism, 6, and Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come. 5. Following the Armenian Genocide and waves of anti-Christian violence throughout the twentieth century, there is not one single Armenian or mixed village left in Turkey. 6. Sikor and Lund, Politics of Possession,16. 7. Stoler, Imperial Debris, 8. 8. Stoler, 8; Stoler, “Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty.” 9. Stoler, Imperial Debris, 18. 10. “Batman,” GAP: Republic Of Turkey Prime Ministry Southeastern Anatolia Project Regional Development Administration, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20110310074232 /http://www.gap.gov.tr/gap-provinces/batman. 11. Tuncel, “Batman.” 12. Ottoman-Beşiri was situated in the southeastern corner of the sanjak of Diyarbekir and had a common border with the Gharzan /Xerzan (currently Kurtalan) district of Bitlis province. There is confusion about the exact location of Ottoman-Beshiri in the 1900s, arguably due to a border change between Bitlis and Diyarbekir provinces (Verheij, “Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis,” 316). Verheij assumes that by 1900, Beşiri district was the triangle between Garzansuyu (yanarsu) to the east, the Tigris to the south, and west of the Batman River. The northern border was probably Değirmendere (316). 13. Batman province was outside the region directly affected by the revolt, but it has suffered some consequences in the general military atmosphere. 14. Weizmann, Hollow Land. 15. For the Abandoned Properties Law, see Akçam and Kurt, Spirit of the Laws; Kardeş, “Tehcir ve Emval-i Metruke Mevzuatı”; Baghdijian, Confiscation of Armenian Properties; Polatel and Üngör, Confiscation and Destruction; Onaran, Emval-i Metruke’nin Tasfiyesi; Matossian, “Taboo Within the Taboo”; Kaiser, “Armenian Property”; Gözel Durmaz, “Distribution of the Armenian Abandoned Properties.” 16. “Forced disappearances” by the extra-legal state-sponsored groups and Hizbullah took the lives of more than 180 civilians in the Batman province between 1992 and 1993. Evacuation of villages and extra security measures marked life in Batman and its countryside in the 1990s. For Hizbullah, a local Islamist movement that in the 1990s ran into conflict with the PKK and came to collaborate with the state counter-insurgency organization, see Kurt, Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey. 17. Stoler, Imperial Debris, 1–39. 18. No official population fgures are available regarding the ethnic and religious composition of Batman.

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19. Roughly 20% of the population of Beshiri was Armenian and the number of Christians was 4,000. At least 38 out of 173 villages were Armenian or Syriac (Verheij, “Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis,” 337), based on FO 195/1930, no. 94, 18. 20. Bruinessen, “Constructions of Ethnic Identity.” 21. Altuğ, “Sectarianism in Syrian Jazira”; and Rondot, “Les Tribus montagnardes,” 30. 22. Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism Community, 29. 23. The signifcance of these three villages is due to the high number of survivors, thanks to the protection provided by the local Muslim landlords. The survivors found refuge in Syria under the French mandate in the late 1920s, following the Kurdish Sheikh Said Revolt, whose violent suppression unmade the possibility of making a decent life in the region for the Christian survivors. Altuğ, “Sectarianism in Syrian Jazira.” 24. Ülker, “Assimilation, Security and Geographical Nationalization.” 25. It will draw on two different sets of literatures: law, land, and state-making in the late Ottoman Empire/Middle East and colonial contexts (‘Abbas, Ababsa, Astourian, Bhandar, Bunton, Hanna, İslamoğlu, Klein, Mundy, Schaebler, Smith, Terzibaşoğlu, le Vine); and social history of nationalism/sectarianism, empire/state, violence and memory (Akçam, Bashkin, Bou Akar Cora, mac Dougall, Makdisi, Nucho, Polatel, Robson, Sayed, Üngör, Weiss, White). 26. Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” 27. For a recent discussion of blackness in the Middle East, see Seikaly, “Matter of Time.” 28. Issues of land rights, ownership regimes, nationalism, and sovereignty in the Ottoman eastern provinces, as revealed in various forms since the Tanzimat (1839) onward, such as the emergence of big land ownership, land grabbing, indebtedness, plundering, and taxation, stand as under-researched topics to be elaborated in depth. Klein, Margins of Empire; Terzibaşoğlu, “Land Disputes and Ethno-Politics,” 173; Bayraktar, “Restoring the Property”; Kaligian, “Agrarian Land Reform”; Astourian, “Silence of the Land”; Polatel, “Complete Ruin of a District”; Verheij, “Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis.” 29. For the massacres of the Hamidian period, see Klein, Margins of Empire, and two past issues (10–11) of Études Arméniennes Contemporaines (Adjemian and Nichanian 2018). 30. For peasant petitions from the eastern provinces after 1908, see Gündoğan, “BottomUp Approach.” 31. For the post-genocide Armenian habitat in Turkey, see Ekmekçioğlu, Recovering Armenia; Bilal and Bretèque, “Oror and the Lorî.” 32. Kurt, “Confscation of Armenian Properties.” 33. Lekka, “Legislative Provisions,” 137; Onaran, Emvâl-i Metrûke; Akçam and Kurt, Spirit of the Laws; Karamürsel, “Shiny Things and Sovereign Legalities.” 34. Keyder, “Consequences of the Exchange,” 45. 35. Polatel and Üngör, Confiscation and Destruction, 44. 36. Matossian, “Taboo Within the Taboo.” 37. Polatel and Üngör, 171. 38. Polatel and Üngör, 57. 39. Polatel and Üngör, 144. 40. Akçam and Kurt, Spirit of the Laws, chapter 3.

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41. Polatel and Üngör, Confiscation and Destruction, 58. 42. Batman, Diyarbakır, and Mardin are the three neighboring Kurdish towns where legal cases regarding the historical land conflict outnumber cases in the rest of the Kurdish-majority towns. 43. Verdery, Vanishing Hectare. 44. Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come, 32. 45. Sultan, interview with the author, Beşiri, Batman, May 2014. 46. On conversion, see Türkyılmaz, “Anx ieties of Conversion”; and Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy. 47. Murad, interview with the author, Beşiri, Batman, March 2014. 48. The labyrinthine temporality of the current imaginations of land and its relation to the construction of self and community in the present compels us to critically reflect on the contemporary urban studies debates on neoliberalism and dispossession in Turkey. As Parla and Özgül argue, “Without a recognition of the continuing existence of ethnic privilege that constitutes the basis of claims to urban communal and private property and of the foundational violence against ethnic minorities, any critique of current citizenship practices in Turkey is bound to be a limited critique of neoliberal authoritarianism and the current government.” Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship,” 649. 49. A.MKT.MHM, 387-B5 (Documents 1 and 2), 19 Rabiülahir 1284 (20 August 1867). 50. Özok-Gündoğan, “Ruling the Periphery,” 160. On the impact of the tax issue on the Armenian Question, see Özbek, “Politics of Taxation.” 51. Özok-Gündoğan, “Ruling the Periphery,” 160. 52. Özok-Gündoğan, 160. 53. BOA, A.MKT (Bab-ı Âli Sadaret Evrakı Mektûbî Kalemi), 105/19, 20 Şevval 1263 (1 October 1847). See Özok-Gündoğan, “Cebel-i Sason’un Eteklerinde Osmanlı Devleti.” 54. BOA, MVL.d (Meclis-i Vâlâ Riyâseti Defterleri), 646/27, 15 Şaban 1279 (4 February 1863). See Özok-Gündoğan, “İtaatsizlik ve fenalıkla mecbûl.” 55. İslamoğlu, “Property as a Contested Domain,” 18. 56. İslamoğlu, 18. 57. Fettah Beg of Gharzan has invested in state bureaucracy by frst being appointed as the sub-district governor of Gharzan in 1853, but was replaced by Hamid Beg in 1861. He became the district governor of Gharzan in 1869 and was later appointed as the district governor of Ba’lbak in Lebanon; a year later he was appointed as the district governor of Ceyhan, Adana, in 1916. Çelik, “XIX. Yüzyılın İkinci Yarısında Siirt Sancağının,” 90, 94, 99, 102. 58. BOA, MVL.d (Meclis-i Vâla Riyaseti Defterleri), 698/15, 1 Teşrin-i evvel 1280 (13 October 1864) and MVL 676/18 1 May 1280 (13 May 1864). 59. Ibid. 60. A.MKT:MHM (Sadâret Mühimme Kalemi Evrakı) 387/B/06/8/1,2, 21 Teşrin-i Sani 1280 (3 December 1864). 1 kıyye is equal to 1,282945 kilograms. 61. BOA, A.MKT. MHM, 387/B/06/3/1,2, 5 Mart 1283 (17 March 1867). 62. BOA, MVL.d (724/43), 16 August 1282 (28 August 1866). 63. BOA, A. MKT. MHM (Sadâret Mühimme Kalemi Evrakı), 451/11, 28 Muharrem 1290 (28 March 1873).

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64. Almost 22.5% of the total trials, 199 in number, concerned property issues (tasarrufu emlak). Salname-i Diyarbekir 1319 (1901–1902), in İzgöer, Diyarbekir Salnameleri, 197. 65. Akçam, Shameful Act, 42. 66. Deringil, “Armenian Question.” Abdulhamid II’s policies resulted in the massacre of approximately eighty thousand Armenians and the plunder of their properties. 67. BOA, BEO (Bâb-ı Âlî Evrak Odası), 1224/91744/01/01,2, 28 Teşrin-i evvel 1314 (9 November 1918). 68. BOA, BEO (Bâb-ı Âlî Evrak Odası) 2675/200621/01/01,2, 21 Kanun-i Sani 1321 (3 February 1906). 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. BOA, Daire-i Sadaret, Amedi Divan-u Hümayun, 10 Mayıs 1311 (22 May 1895). 72. BOA, BEO (Babıali Daire-i Umur-i Dahiliye) 12 July 1319 (25 July 1903). 73. BOA, BEO (Babıali Daire-i Umur-i Hariciye) 7 July 1319 (20 July 1903). 74. Aytekin, “Cultivators, Creditors,” 302–3. 75. On a similar atmosphere in the Balkans, see Terzibaşoğlu, “Ottoman Agrarian Question.” 76. Klein, “Hamidiye and the Agrarian Question,” in Margins of Empire. 77. Garabedyan, Hoğayin Hartsı. 78. Tax levied after the Tanzimat and paid by non-Muslims in lieu of military ser vice. 79. The Takrir (report) sent by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ottoman Minister of Justice, Istanbul, 14 February 1911 (original in English). 80. Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” 81. Sikor and Lund, Politics of Possession, 7–9; Verdery, Vanishing Hectare. 82. İslamoğlu, “Property as a Contested Domain,” 5–6. 83. İslamoğlu, 5–6. 84. İslamoğlu, 5–6. 85. Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism, 29.

Works Cited Adjemian, Boris,  and Mikaël  Nichanian. 2018. “The Massacres of the Hamidian Period (I): Global Narratives and Local Approaches” and “The Massacres of the Hamidian Period (II): Perceptions and Perspectives.” Special issues, Études Arméniennes Contemporaines 10–11. Akçam, Taner. 2006. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books. Akçam, Taner, and Ümit Kurt. 2015. The Spirit of the Laws. The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide. New York: Berghahn. Altuğ Seda. 2011. “Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, Land and Violence in the Memories of World War I and the French Mandate (1915–1939).” Unpublished PhD diss., Utrecht University. Astourian, Stephan H. 2011. “The Silence of the Land, Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity, and Power.” In A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman

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Empire, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, 55–81. London: Oxford University Press. Astourian, Stephan H. 2012. “On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict, Sultan Abdülhamid, and the Armenian Massacres.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 21:168–208. Aytekin, Atilla. 2008. “Cultivators, Creditors and the State: Rural Indebtedness in the 19thCentury Ottoman Empire.” Journal of Peasant Studies 35 (2): 292–313. Aytekin, Atilla. 2009. “Agrarian Relations, Property and Law: An Analysis of the Land Code of 1858 in the Ottoman Empire.” Middle Eastern Studies 45:935–51. Baghdijian, Kévork K. 2010. The Confiscation of Armenian Properties by the Turkish Government Said to Be Abandoned. Antelias, Lebanon: Printing House of the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia. Bashkin, Orit. 2009. The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bayraktar, Uğur B. 2016. “Restoring the Property: The Land Code of 1858 and Private Property in Ottoman Kurdistan.” Conference paper presented at Old and New Worlds: The Global Challenges of Rural History, Lisbon, January. Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bilal, Melissa, and Amy de la Bretèque. 2013. “The Oror and the Lorî: Armenian and Kurdish Lullabies in Present-Day Istanbul.” In Remembering the Past in Iranian Societies, edited by Christine Allison and Philip G. Kreyenbroek, 125–39. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag. Bou Akar, Hiba. 2018. For the War Yet to Come. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bruinessen, Martin van. 1997. “Constructions of Ethnic Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey: The Kurds and Their Others.” Paper presented at the Social Identities in the Late Ottoman Empire workshop, New York University, Middle Eastern Studies. https://www.kurdipedia.org/files/relatedfiles/2013/89008/0001.PDF?ver=13022287716 7746929. Accessed 20 October 2020. Bunton, Martin. 2000. “Demarcating the British Colonial State: Land Settlement in the Palestinian Jiftlik Villages of Sajad and Qazaza.” In New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, edited by Roger Owen, 121–59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Çelik, Abdürrezzak. 2019. “XIX. Yüzyılın İkinci Yarısında Siirt Sancağının İdari ve Sosyoekonomik Durumu” [The administrative and political situation of Siirt in the second half of the 19th century]. Unpublished MA thesis, Siirt University. Cora, Yaşar Tolga. 2018. “Female Labor, Merchant Capital, and Resilient Manufacturing: Rethinking Ottoman Armenian Communities Through Labor and Business.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61:361–95. Deringil, Selim. 2009. “ ‘The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed’: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia During the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (3): 344–71. Deringil, Selim, 2012. Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire. London: Cambridge University Press.

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Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna. 2016. Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Garabedyan, Kegham der. 1911. Hoğayin Hartsı Hayapnag Nahankneru Meç (The Land Issue in Armenian Populated Provinces). Istanbul: n.p. Gözel, Oya, 2007. “The Implementation of the Ottoman Land Code 1858 in Eastern Anatolia.” MA thesis, Middle East Technical University. Gözel Durmaz, Oya. 2016. “The Distribution of the Armenian Abandoned Properties in an Ottoman Locality: Kayseri (1915–18).” Middle Eastern Studies 51 (5): 838–53. Harris, Cheryl I. 2006. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106 (8): 1707–993. İslamoğlu, Huricihan. 2000. “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858.” In New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, edited by Roger Owen, 3–62. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. İslamoğlu, Huricihan. 2004. Constituting Modernity: Private Property in East and West. London: I. B. Tauris. İslamoğlu, Huricihan. 2006. “Words That Rule: From Bureaucratic ‘Commissions’ to Governing ‘Boards.’ ” In Words in Motion, edited by Anna Tsing and Carol Gluck, 265–285. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. İzgöer, Ahmet Zeki. 1999. Diyarbekir Salnameleri (Diyarbekir yearbooks). Vol. 5, 1286–1323 (1869–1905). Istanbul: Diyarbakır Provincial Municipality Publications. Kaiser, Hilmar. 2006. “Armenian Property, Ottoman Law and Nationality Policies.” In The First World War as Remembered in the Eastern Mediterranean Countries, edited by Olaf Farschid et al., 49–71. Beirut: Ergon Verlag. Kaligian, Dikran. 2003. “Agrarian Land Reform and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.” Armenian Review 48 (3–4): 25–45. Karamürsel, Ceyda. 2019. “Shiny Things and Sovereign Legalities: Expropriation of Dynastic Property in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51 (3): 445–63. Kardeş, Salâhaddin. 2008. “Tehcir ve Emval-i Metruke Mevzuatı.” https://ms.hmb.gov.tr /uploads/2019/09/Tehcir-ve-Emval-i-Metruke-Mevzuatı.pdf. Keyder, Çağlar. 2003. “The Consequences of the Exchange of Populations for Turkey.” In Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey, edited by Renée Hirschon, 39–52. New York: Berghahn Books. Klein, Janet. 2011. The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kurt, Mehmet. 2017. Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey, Islamism, Violence and the State. London: Pluto Press. Kurt, Ümit. 2013. “The Confscation of Armenian Properties: Interview by Varak Ketsemanian.” Armenian Weekly, 23 September. https://armenianweekly.com /2013/09/23/the -confscation-of-armenian-properties-an-interview-with-umit-kurt/. Lekka, Anastasia. 2007. “Legislative Provisions of the Ottoman/Turkish Governments Regarding Minorities and Their Properties.” Mediterranean Quarterly 18 (1): 120–37. Makdisi, Ussama. 2000. The Culture of Sectarianism Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth- Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Matossian, Bedross der. 2011. “The Taboo Within the Taboo: The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire.” European Journal of Turkish Studies, 1–20. https:// doi.org/10.4000/ejts.4411. Mundy, Martha, and Richard Saumarez Smith. 2007. Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria. London: I. B. Tauris. Nucho, Joanne Randa. 2016. Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Onaran, Nevzat. 2013. Emval-i Metruke’nin Tasfiyesi I and II, Osmanlı’da Ermeni ve Rum mallarının Türkleştirilmesi” and “Türkiye’de Ermeni ve Rum Mallarının Türkleştirilmesi (The Turkifcation of Armenian and Greek Property in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey). Istanbul: Evrensel. Özbek, Nadir. 2012. “The Politics of Taxation and the Armenian Question During the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876–1908.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (4): 770–97. Özok-Gündoğan, Nilay. 2012. “A Bottom-Up Approach to the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire: Rural Conflict in Post-revolutionary Diyarbekir.” In Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915, edited by Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij, 179–215. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Özok- Gündoğan, Nilay. 2013. “İtaatsizlik ve fenalıkla mecbûl: Göçebe Reşkotan Aşireti ve Osmanlı Devleti.” Kürt Tarihi 7:58–62. Özok- Gündoğan, Nilay. 2014. “Cebel-i Sason’un Eteklerinde Osmanlı Devleti.” Kürt Tarihi 12:58–61. Özok-Gündoğan, Nilay. 2014. “Ruling the Periphery, Governing the Land: The Making of the Modern Ottoman State in Kurdistan, 1840–70.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34 (1): 160–75. Parks, Robert. 2011. “Local-National Relations and the Politics of Property Rights in Algeria and Tunisia.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Parks, Robert. 2018. “From the War of National Liberation to Gentrifcation: Conflicting Claims over Property in Algeria.” Middle East Report Online (MERIP), 10 August. https:// merip.org /2018/08/from-the-war-of-national-liberation-to-gentrifcation/. Parla, Ayşe, and Ceren Özgül. 2016. “Property, Dispossession and Citizenship in Turkey; or, the History of the Gezi Uprisings Starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery.” Public Culture 28 (3): 617–53. Polatel, Mehmet. 2015. “The Complete Ruin of a District: The Sasun Massacre of 1894.” In The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics, edited by Y. Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian, and Ali Sipahi, 179–98. London: I. B. Tauris. Polatel, Mehmet, and Uğur Ümit Üngör. 2011. Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property. London: Continuum International. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robson, Laura. 2017. States of Separation Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Los Angeles: UCLA Press.

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Rondot, Pierre. 1937. “Les Tribus montagnardes de l’Asie antérieure: Quelques aspects sociaux des populations kurdes et assyriennes.” Bulletin d’Ethnologie Orientale de l’Institut Français de Damas 6:1–50. Seikaly, Sherene. 2019. “The Matter of Time.” American Historical Review 124 (5): 1681–88. Şekeryan, Ararat, and Nvart Taşçı. 2015. Yok Edilen Medeniyet (Destroyed Civilization), Conference Proceedings. Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation. Sikor, Thomas, and Christian Lund. 2009. The Politics of Possession: Property, Authority and Access to Natural Resources. Oxford: Wiley, Blackwell. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2006. “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty.” Public Culture 18 (1): 125–46. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Terzibaşoğlu, Yücel. 2004. “Land Disputes and Ethno-Politics: North-Western Anatolia, 1877– 1912.” In Land Rights, Ethno-Nationality, and Sovereignty in History, edited by Stanley M. Engermann and Jacob Metzer, 153–180. London: Routledge. Terzibaşoğlu, Yücel. 2015. “The Ottoman Agrarian Question and Making of Property and Crime in Nineteenth Century.” In Ottoman Rural Societies and Economies, edited by Elias Kolovos, 309–332. Rethymno, Greece: Crete University Press. Tuncel, Metin. “Batman,” TDV, İslam Ansiklopedisi, https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/ batman. Accessed 10 January 2021. Türkyılmaz, Zeynep. 2009. “Anx ieties of Conversion: Missionaries, the State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire.” PhD diss., UCLA. Ülker, Erol. 2008. “Assimilation, Security and Geographical Nationalization in Interwar Turkey: The Settlement Law of 1934.” European Journal of Turkish Studies 7. https://doi.org /10.4000/ejts.2123. Verdery, Katherine. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Verheij, Jelle. 2012. “Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis of 1895—The Fate of the Countryside” [Annex B]. In Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915, edited by Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij, 333–44. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Weiss, Max. 2010. In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weizmann, Eyal. 2006. Hollow Land: Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. White, Benjamin. 2012. The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yılmaz, Altuğ, ed. 2015. Müslümanlaştırılmış Ermeniler (Islamicized Armenians). Conference Proceedings. Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation.

CHAPTER 4

Violence and Spirituality Khidr Cosmography at the Turkish/ Syrian Territorial Interface Yael Navaro

11 May 2013 marked one of the frst bombing incidents within the borders of Turkey that was related to the war in Syria. The town of Reyhanlı, in the southern district of Hatay, was shaken with (at least) ffty-three casualties, and many people were wounded. The interpretation of the incident was almost immediately claimed by Prime Minister Erdoğan who, visiting Reyhanlı soon after the bombing, publicly condemned the killing of “Sunni citizens” of Turkey.1 This sectarian demarcation of the victims of the violence on the part of the prime minister was received, at the time, as a public pronouncement of Turkey’s position in the Syrian war. With this declaration, Erdoğan had also brought the sectarianism of the Syrian war straight into the political landscape of Turkey. By implication, the prime minister had targeted the Arab Alawi citizens of Turkey as culpable for the bombing. Arab Alawis were already being very problematically portrayed in Turkey’s government-supporting mainstream media through sectarian representations as “Nusayris,” and were being ethnically associated with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime. Through his declaration after the Reyhanlı incident, Erdoğan had also delineated himself as the leader and representative of the majority “Sunni citizens” of Turkey—portrayed as such—rather than citizens of Turkey as a whole, therefore minoritizing the Arab Alawis. In related as well as subsequent such public speeches, Erdoğan also presented himself as the advocate for “Sunni” Muslims in the Middle East

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(and across the world), manipulating having allowed refugees from the Syrian war some form of harbor in Turkey, and picturing himself as their savior. By framing the victims of a violent incident at the Turkish/Syrian border as “Sunni,” Erdoğan encouraged a sectarian analysis of the event. His public discourse drew a line of differentiation between “Sunni” and “Alawi/Alevi” citizens of Turkey, where he embraced the former, taking them under his wing, and targeted the latter as potential internal enemies.2 I was conducting feldwork in the city of Antakya and its circumference (officially in the district of Hatay) at the time. Following the sectarian template proposed by Erdoğan in his public appearance after the Reyhanlı incident, analyses of the bombing were markedly split along communal lines. Or rather, it can be argued that Erdoğan’s naming of the victims of the Reyhanlı incident as “Sunni” made possible (or actively sponsored) the interpretation of political events on a sectarian basis. In Antakya and Samandağ, very near the town of Reyhanlı, those who identifed as Arab Alawis predominantly blamed the jihadi al-Nusra organization, fghting against the Assad regime in Syria, for the bombing in Reyhanlı, reading it as a provocation organized conspiratorially by Prime Minister Erdogan’s AKP regime. In turn, many of those who identifed as Turkish and Muslim blamed the far-left Assad-supporting organization Acilciler for the incident, by association incriminating the Arab Alawis. But worldly analyses based on contrasting speculations about human agency in politics were not the only resource available to the inhabitants of Antakya and Samandağ in the period of the Reyhanlı bombing. At that time when the Reyhanlı incident was considered the biggest atrocity within the borders of Turkey as related to the war in Syria, an unlikely fgure appeared as a possible political agent, a supra-human being promising a wishful form of protection of the kind that was not granted to certain citizens of Turkey by their prime minister, on the grounds of their communal identifcation (and assumed political inclinations by sectarian association). I was doing research in Samandağ (previously called Suwaydiya), at the site of the famous Hızır Aleyhisselam Ziyareti, the holy visitation site locally identifed as the meeting place of the Prophet Moses and the spiritual being Khidr according to sura 18 (60–82) of the Qur’an. In this town almost completely inhabited by Arab Alawis, the mother of the family who were the caretakers of the Khidr holy visitation site, Melike Hanım, recounted the following story: One day, two men arrived in Samandağ. They said that they had heard that there is a black stone inside the Khidr holy visitation site [ziyaret].

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They asked if they could see it. We showed it to them. A relative of theirs, an Arab Alawi woman from Adana who now lives in America, had seen this stone in her dream. She asked these two men to tell us that we ought to throw this black stone in the sea, that otherwise, terrible things would happen. The Reyhanlı incident had just taken place, but the Gezi resistance had not yet commenced. It was the middle of May this year [2013]. I asked for the woman’s phone number and called her. The woman talked to me about the Reyhanlı incident. “Look,” she said, “they placed that bomb only to kill us, the Alawis. But no Alawi died, their own people (Sunnis) died. Then a plane fell,” she said [referring to a Turkish plane which had been shot down]. “That plane was brought down by Khidr. All this area, our whole region is being protected by the Prophets Khidr and Ali,” she said. “The Prophet Khidr is also protecting Syria,” she said. “He is holding his hand over Syria and shielding it. Look,” she said, “Turkey’s AKP has been attempting to invade Syria, but they haven’t succeeded. The Prophet Khidr is guarding this area; he is looking after the people of our community. If I call you again, you must throw that black stone in the sea,” she said. Melike’s son Adem took care of the Khidr holy visitation site. He contextualized his mother’s story, as follows: The Reyhanlı incident happened and they blamed the Arab Alawis. The stain of this blame stuck on our skin. Since the beginning of the AKP’s government, the Alawis have been feeling very anxious. The AKP cannot enter Samandağ; they are unable to earn any votes from here. But there is a tense atmosphere here; we feel we could be targets, once again, of the Sunni majority, and of the state. We have the memory of violent attacks against Alevis in Çorum, in Sıvas, in Maraş. . . . And, even when we don’t actively remember, these events have been ingrained in our subconscious. We Arab Alawis have to stand in solidarity with each other. One of us is for all, and all of us is for one. If we don’t do this, we will be made to disappear. Adem very frequently prefaced his contemplations with the phrase “we, the Arab Alawis” in the period when we held our conversations (from summer 2012 onwards into 2018), emphasizing the need for inner-group solidarity in

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an environment of rising antagonism, and vis-à-vis the marked targeting of Turkey’s Arab Alawis in the government-supporting media in response to the Syrian war. He reflected that prior to the Syrian war and the AKP government’s support of the Syrian opposition, he and his mates did not use to emphasize so much their “Arab Alawi identity,” nor did they use to ponder so actively, as they have done more recently, over how to protect “their community” against the possibility of being targeted with violence. The political atmosphere surrounding the town and its hinterland, Erdoğan and his AKP regime, the marginalization of Alevis as a minority in Turkey, their specifc targeting in public discourses and through violent events, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the position of his regime, jihadists from elsewhere in the world taking over the Syrian opposition, and the Syrian refugees in Turkey were subjects of fervent everyday discussion. These heated conversations about the catastrophic violence that had engulfed Syria and Turkey were often interlaced with references to miraculous occurrences, the appearance of Khidr in dreams, healings after visitations at the ziyaret dedicated to him, or visualizations of divine light associated with his spiritual presence and his extraordinary protective powers.

Political and Cosmological Cross-References This chapter studies the cross-referentiality between human and non-human agencies, potencies, and resources at a time of cataclysmic violence at Turkey’s border with Syria, at the height of the Syrian war and the cusp of Turkey’s augmenting authoritarianism under Erdoğan’s AKP regime. The “bordering” that I trace here is spatial and political, but it is also cosmological. It refers to the actual political border between Turkey and Syria, consolidated in 1939 with Turkey’s annexation of the Sanjak d’Alexandrette (Liwa Iskandarun), renaming it “Hatay” (Gilquin 2000; Shields 2011). This reterritorialization of the Liwa and its national incorporation by the Turkish Republic has been contested by Syria (Jörum 2014). The Hatay province is a space where “bordering” is therefore accentuated.3 It’s a territorial interface. But the interstitial quality of social life in this region is not only spatiopolitical; it is also cosmological. The betwixt and betweenness of Hatay is, in other words, multi-nodal. The bordering of life in this region incites intersections and cross-interpellations between political and cosmological, secular and spiritual, human and non-human, worldly and otherworldly forces

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and resources, calling into question these very conceptual differentiations. The interstitial positionality of Hatay may also mobilize critical analytical questions about the distinctions that some anthropologists make between “ontological worlds,” pitting them against one another through constructions of “radical alterity,” and therefore as incommensurable with one another, and relegating their interlocutors to one of these “worlds” in exclusion of (or contradistinction from) the other (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2004; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Mahmood 2005). In this analysis, I study my interlocutors’ cross-referencing between political and cosmological experiences as alternate modes of existential reflection. I study how the Syrian war has tapped into palimpsests of structural violence in Turkey, including the residues of massacres and genocidal events, but I especially address the ways in which these sedimentations of violence that reverberate in Hatay are tackled by my interlocutors through criss-crossing engagements with both worldly and otherworldly resources, human and non-human agencies, and political and cosmological imaginaries at the same time. This leads me to question the persisting conceptual bifurcation between “politics” and “cosmology” in anthropology, where some scholars treat politics or economics as the base for their analyses, while others approach cosmology as all-encompassing.4 Anthropology suffers from a conceptual distinction between “politics” and “religion” that appears to be re-erected after every effort at its deconstruction. On the one hand, the anthropology of politics predominantly employs conceptual apparatuses that are largely confned by methodological secularism or atheism.5 On the other hand, the anthropology of religion has been re-charting its terrain (notably in the study of Christianity) by delineating a “theological” sphere distinct from the study of “power and conflict” (e.g., Robbins 2006). A long time ago, Talal Asad critiqued anthropologists (such as Geertz) for having defned (and reifed) “religion” as a “distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other” (1993, 27). He argued that this idea of religion as a distinct entity and separate domain is not a fact sui generis, but the result of specifc historical events which confgured it as such, referring to the secularizing effects of the Reformation (28). This modernist distinction between “politics” and “religion” (as though they were separate things, referring to distinct spheres, and therefore deserving their own unique term) has had ripple historical effects in Turkey, as well, through institutionalized secularism as well as Islamism (e.g., NavaroYashin 2002; Özyürek 2006).

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The separation between “secular” and “religious” forces and domains was also in the conceptual repertoire of my interlocutors in Antakya and Samandağ. It was a familiar analytical apparatus that was employed to differentiate between people and spaces, as well as to qualify different types of incidence or occurrence. People would call themselves laik (secular) or Atatürkçü (Ataturkist) to identify themselves in distinction from others whom they would characterize as dindar (religious) or İslamcı (Islamist). On the other hand, however, or at the same time, people in Antakya and Samandağ did not merely replicate the reifed modernist conceptual distinctions between “politics” and “religion,” nor did they just mirror the associated analytics of institutionalized secularism. If these demarcations existed at the level of public discourse (e.g., “I am an atheist; I don’t believe in irrational forces”) and that of institutions (separate spaces for state offices, on the one hand, and mosques or ziyarets, on the other), in lived experience (which includes dreams, miracles, and apparitions) “the worldly” and “otherworldly” were co-implicated. Recent anthropological studies of ethics have been imposing a splitting in the discipline between those who study “power and conflict” and those who study “religion and values” (Robbins 2006). But lifeworlds are far more complex than to be ftted in the straightjacket of modernist differentiations between secular and religious forces or between human and non-human agencies. Here I am reminded of Bruno Latour’s famous dictum, “We have never been modern” (1993). I would amend that by suggesting that modernist concepts are only one among the resources available to people who inhabit spaces that have been dramatically modernized. There are other resources that have remained in the interstices and that emerge from the gaps of the boundaries erected between politics and religion, in spite of the massive effects of the bombastic modernizing and secularizing projects of French colonialism and Turkish nationalism in the region. Khidr, as a supra-human being and transcendent entity, is one such powerful resource in the lifeworlds of people in contemporary Antakya and Samandağ, several decades down the line after the implementation of Turkey’s modernist nationalist project with the annexation of Liwa Iskandarun from, at the time, French-held Syria, and its transformation into an administrative district of the Republic of Turkey under the allocated toponym of “Hatay.” In this chapter, I study the appearance of Khidr as a spiritual force in the interstitial territory between Turkey and Syria that carries the residues of the genocidal violence of the Ottomans against the Armenians in 1915,

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the palimpsest of structural and recurrent violence against the Alevis/Alawis in Turkey, and the sediments of the cataclysmic violence of the ongoing war in Syria.

A Territorial Interface The spatial area in which I locate this ethnographic query has historically undergone several signifcant transformations in its political geography. Modern Antakya was built beside the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Antioch on the Orontes which was once considered one of the three most impor tant cities of the Roman Empire. Called “Antiochia” in Greek and “Antakiyah” in Arabic, the contemporary city of Antakya (in Turkish) forms the center of the Hatay province of Turkey. It is located near the ancient port of Seleucia, what used to be known in Arabic as the seaside town of Suwaydiyah. Under the Ottoman Empire, the city of Antakya and port of Suwaydiyah were part of a territorial province administered as “the Sanjak of Antakya” that was a component of the “Damascus Eyalet” or region. The broader circumference was governed as “Bilad-al Sham” under the Ottomans (“the country of Syria”) (Sluglett and Weber 2010). When the French created the Mandate of Syria and Lebanon in 1922, they territorially subdivided it into six administrative areas. Antakya and Suwaydiyah were to be part of the administrative district that the French called the “Sanjak d’Alexandrette,” by reference to the large port city of Alexandretta (today’s İskenderun) and its hinterland (Gilquin 2000). This colonially demarcated administrative district was called “Liwa Iskandarun” in Arabic (Jörum 2014). The Sanjak was governed as a sub-province of the French Mandate of Greater Syria and Lebanon until 1938, when, with political pressure from the Turkish Republic, an independent “Republic of Hatay” was formed. “Hatay” was a name that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Turkish Republic’s founding leader, had attributed to the Sanjak, by reference to a mythological link with the ancient Hittites that he wanted to forge for the area’s inhabitants. Atatürk claimed that Hatay was “a homeland of the Turks for forty centuries” (kırk asırlık Türk yurdu), the Hittites being construed as “early Turks.” In 1939, as the result of a staged referendum followed by a pact between France and Turkey, the territory of the Sanjak was annexed by Turkey. Those who were against being incorporated

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by Turkey fled to Syria. To this day, Syrian official government maps show Liwa Iskandarun as what would have rightfully been part of the independent Syrian Arab Republic had it not been for the fait accompli, involving the French, that led to its annexation by Turkey. In the historiography of the region, the Sanjak is sited as a sore point in modern Arab-Turkish territorial contestation (Jörum 2014). The disputed quality of this space has been carried over to the present, where Hatay is considered an ambiguous place betwixt and between Turkey and Syria, as well as “Turkishness” and “Arabness.”6 Antakya is now the key city of the administrative district of Hatay and the place where the governor (vali) holds his seat (in the building that was once that of the Sanjak’s French governor). The small port town of Suwaydiyah’s name was altered from the Arabic to Turkish, as was toponymically done across the Sanjak following its annexation by Turkey, and was renamed “Samandağ” in 1948. As a caretaker of the Antioch Orthodox Church said to me one day: “They call Antakya ‘Hatay,’ but I don’t know where or what is ‘Hatay!’” Indeed, as the result of a symbolic blur, the toponym “Hatay” is used today interchangeably with “Antakya” to refer not only to the administrative district that was once the Liwa, but also to the city of Antakya itself, still creating confusion. As it was named “Hatay,” the Liwa and its inhabitants underwent radical governmental measures oriented at what could broadly be described as a Turkifcation campaign. A large majority of the Liwa’s population in 1939 spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Though Turkey had employed a population policy even prior to annexation (sending Turkish-identifed communities to settle in the Liwa, forming Turkish nationalist clubs, and founding local Turkish-language newspapers), Arabic was still the lingua franca of the city of Antakya and its hinterland when it became part of Turkey. The local Alawis, Orthodox Christians, and Jews, as well as some Sunnis, spoke Arabic as their mother tongue and among themselves, and Turkish-identifed Sunnis felt largely surrounded by Arabic speakers even if by then (and as a result of Turkey’s population policies) they were no longer outnumbered by Arabicspeaking communities. In towns neighboring Antakya, such as Suwaydiyah, at the time, as well as its associated villages inhabited by Alawis and/or by Orthodox Christians, only Arabic used to be spoken, in its local dialects. A lot of this was covered up in Turkish official representations of the district. The state invested in publications on what was called “the liberation of Hatay” (Hatay’ın Kurtuluşu) through its “unifcation with its motherland Turkey.” Local Turkish intellectuals (Antakya’s urban notables, or the eşraf )

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eagerly participated in representing the Sanjak’s incorporation into Turkey in celebratory tones. This was rendered symbolically akin to the implementation of the Turkish Republic’s secularist modernism, as a legacy of Atatürk, in the district. Anti-colonial frameworks were used by local Turkish notables who praised the annexation by Turkey as a triumph over the French, alongside Orientalist depictions of Arab government as more backward in comparison to what was construed and represented as “Turkish modernity.”7 Joining Turkey was identifed as a merger with a future-oriented narrative of progress that would, in taking a Turkish ideological orientation on board, leave behind what would eventually become redundant or anachronistic cultural practices. What was at stake, and under scrutiny, as a target for modernist, secularist, and Turkish nationalist transformation were the life practices of the inhabitants of the district, which distinctively included their mother tongue Arabic, but also their religious and spiritual beliefs, their political identifcations, their gendered bodies, as well as their spatial and materially implicated ways of going about their lives. As Turkey assumed the territory of the Liwa, declaring sovereignty, the state undertook the management of the district’s population. Schools were entirely attached to the Turkish Ministry of Education and the mode of instruction was enforced singularly as Turkish. Local Arabic-language newspapers were shut down, as their publishers fled for Damascus. Speakers of Arabic faced humiliation and discouragement in public institutions, especially in schools. Young men from the district started to be conscripted in the Turkish army. And a Turkish modernist ideological orientation was conflictingly pitted against an Arabic one that was deemed spatially parochial, politically out of sync, and temporally out of date. Atatürk’s secularism was presented as the only valid symbolic repertoire. This was promoted with hype and fervor, inciting people to turn their backs on their religious practices. In other words, the Turkish sovereign show of force in the district (in its cohanded nationalist, secularist, and modernist tones) was bombastic. A tremendous territorial (as well as ideological) reshuffling had taken place, with results that appear, decades later, to have been to a large extent effective. However, and yet, much in the lifeworlds of the district and its surrounding associated regions appears, at the same time, to have somehow survived, in spite of the draconian enforcement of modernist Turkish governmentality. Arabic continues to be spoken as a mother tongue by Alawis, Orthodox Christians, and the few remaining Jews and Armenians, as well as by Sunni Arabs in Antakya and the towns and villages that surround it, at home as

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well as in public, even if less well known by the younger generations who are schooled, conscripted, and employed in Turkish. But further and more, despite the territorial and governmental management of the district through a show of ultimate sovereignty by the Turkish state, what could be called a cosmological lifeworld appears, if reconfgured, to have at the same time survived this massive territorial and political transformation. Here, I chart what I will call the “cosmography” of Antakya and its hinterland in the shadow of the territorial and governmental measures that have been imposed on it and its population, as well as being implemented, through several decades of Turkish sovereignty. In doing so, I focus specifcally on the mystical fgure of Khidr (in the local Arabic; Hızır in Turkish) that holds the centerpiece in the cosmological world of Hatay’s inhabitants, today particularly among the Arab Alawis. Antakya, Samandağ, and their environs are full of holy visitation sites that are called ziyara in Arabic, ziyaret in Turkish. Built mostly out of cement and painted white (sometimes green inside), these sites are composed of a domed roof over a small square, circular, or rectangular structure. They are found often in nature, on hilltops overlooking villages, or by the sea, but also in neighborhoods, in the backyards of modern apartment buildings, in squares connecting back streets, as well as in the middle of highways on pavement stone. These sites are not necessarily saints’ tombs (türbe). What distinguishes the ziyarets is the fact that many of them do not contain the grave of a deceased sheyh or sanctifed human person. Instead, their sacredness often pertains to their association with an extraordinary, miraculous occurrence, such as the sighting of divine light (nur) descending from the sky upon a specifc location, or the appearance of Khidr in someone’s dream. There are hundreds of ziyarets in Antakya, Samandağ, and the region that surrounds them. This is apparently similarly continuous in Syria. The small built white-dome structures can be sited in towns, villages, and in nature, marking a distinct mystical topography. While certain of these ziyarets harbor the graves of local sheyhs, a distinctive number of them are named after Khidr, to refer to an extraordinary occurrence associated with his miraculous powers.

Hızır and Khidr According to the Turcologist and Islamic theologian Ahmet Yaşar Ocak (1985), though Hızır has a place in the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammed’s sayings (the hadith), “when suf (tasavvuf ) sources are analyzed

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chronologically . . . one encounters [in Hızır] a supra-human (insanüstü) fgure with extraordinary (fevkalade) characteristics” (87). “The main characteristic,” writes Ocak, “fnding its basis in the Qur’an-i Karim, is Hızır’s knowledge of the divine grace and its secrets” (87–88). Hızır, in Ocak’s reading, is “a composite fgure who is the combination of a normal human person, a prophet, a saint and a supra-human heavenly being with his own peculiar characteristics” (88). He has “the ability to change his real physiognomy, and appear in infnite shapes and forms. He may appear as an old man or as a child; and he may turn into a bird or rabbit. He may travel long distances at the flick of a second. And when his help is sought, he appears suddenly, and upon completing his work, disappears as rapidly” (88). Ocak notes that the cult around Hızır can be traced geographically through the sacred places (makam) dedicated to him (127). “These sacred places are mostly those believed to have been associated with events involving Hızır as recounted in the Qur’an, sources of water or lakes believed to be related to the Life Source drunk by Hızır, the locations where Hızır was sighted by human beings,” or those where Hızır is considered to have met other prophetic fgures (127). Ocak notes that sacred places (makams) pertaining to Hızır are present in the geography of “every Muslim country” (127), and yet, that the cult around Hızır far transcends the boundaries of any so identifed religion. Though he bases his analysis on Turkish-Islamic sources (using Qur’anic and suf references), Ocak notes that the mystical Hızır has been considered akin, by Orientalists, to Elijah (80–81) and St. George (135–37). Following the work of his mentor, the historian Mehmet Fuad Köprülü, Ocak’s work enmeshes the cosmological components of Turkey’s geography within a broad contour of Turkish-Islamic ethnology.8 Hızır, then, emerges as a fgure whose spiritual characteristics span across Turkish-Muslim communities as a shared feature of their cosmology. In turn, here I highlight the distinctively Arabic and Alawi features of Khidr veneration in Antakya and its hinterland, tracing how this saintly being has been embraced as a spiritual entity that distinctively protects the Arab Alawis in the contemporary period. I refer to him through his Arabic interpellation as “Khidr,” rather than the Turkish “Hızır,” in order to follow how he has been especially appearing to the Arab Alawis, and I trace the transformations in his effects in light of the violent conundrum of the Syrian war and its reverberations in Turkey. What interests me is the presence and pervasiveness of Khidr in the mystical topography of Antakya and its environs today, especially among, and in places inhabited by, Arab Alawis.

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Where he exists in peoples’ cosmological world, Khidr also has spatiomaterial places dedicated to him in the associated topography which are considered sacred. In other words, the presence of Khidr can be read as a cosmological and geographical commentary in tandem. Or, mysticism associated with Khidr has an intrinsic spatio-material counterpart to it, what I conceptualize as a “cosmography.” Antakya and its environs are spotted with numerous holy visitation sites (ziyarets) named after Khidr and his extraordinary deeds. White dome structures on road sides, hill tops, at street ends, in back neighborhoods, as well as the famous “Khidr Peace Be upon Him” holy visitation site by the sea in the town of Samandağ, associated with Arab Alawis. I am interested in the relation between this Khidr-centered cosmography and the modernist Turkish governmentality that was imposed upon Antakya and Samandağ in re-territorializing them as “Hatay.” To what an extent, I ask, has this “cosmography” been subsumed under “political geography”? Is there perhaps a “cosmography” that transcends territory and its modernist forms of governmentalization, including the power politics at play in this region between Turkey and Syria at the height of war? What does “spirituality” (“the supernatural,” “the supra-human”) in this geography imply, mean, or refer to? Is any component of it distinct from (or in excess of) regulated, organized, institutionalized, and circumscribed “religion”? Are there spiritual entities that escape the governmentalization and designation of “religion” as a separate sphere? Do mystical beings such as Khidr have lives apart from power politics, if they are, nevertheless, able to bear an impact upon it? Should we conceptualize spiritual agents like Khidr as forces that exert a presence through an “other world” parallel to this one? If such an “other world” (in an other spatio-temporal plane) can be interpreted to exist, from the point of view (and experiences) of the cosmological lifeworlds of this region, then to what an extent is it interlaced with “this world”?9 Khidr’s extraordinary supernatural deeds bear upon historical events in “this world,” but is he, in turn, reconfgured through this history? Or is Khidr an autonomous entity, a non- or supra-human, super-natural force (imagined to appear in the shape of a human) that cannot be curbed or reconstituted by the forces of history? A lot of contemporary political geography is focused on the interpretation of “territory” and “governmentality.” Most signifcantly, and building on the legacies of Lefebvre and Foucault, the geographer Stuart Elden (2009, 2010) has been studying “territory” as the space where the state exercises its

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sovereignty through the governmental transformation and management of everyday socio-spatial relations. His work charts the power of states to transform land and soil they have acquired, including the populations that inhabit them, in reconstituting them as “national territory.” Following Lefebvre, Stuart Elden conceptualizes “territory” as the space in which states orchestrate their reign and power to transform through nationalization processes (2009, 2010). Earlier in this chapter, I gave an account of the making of “Hatay” through the annexation of the Sanjak by the Turkish Republic. I outlined the modernist governmental measures undertaken to transform and adjust social and political life in the district as it was spatially and administratively included in Turkey’s national territory. As accounted for by the sociologist Hakan Mertcan (2013), Turkifcation broadly defned the Turkish state’s governmentalizing project, and it was imposed upon inhabitants of the district, especially targeting the Arab Alawis, in a drastic manner. In fact, what Brenner and Elden call “the territory effect,” that illusion created by states that naturalizes and glosses over that which was created through their own spatial interventions (2009, 373), is quite true for “Hatay,” having been normalized, as though sui generis a part of Turkey’s “national territory” (see Gilquin 2000; Shields 2011; Mertcan 2013; Duman 2016). And yet, the feld of political geography is limited (with what could be analyzed as a “methodological secularism”) insofar as it focuses on “territory” as the form that overarchingly organizes social relations that are construed in space. Interestingly, the arrogant power of states, including the enforcement of their sovereignty through the curbing of populations in their spatial domains, has an inability to thoroughly interfere with cosmological lifeworlds that invoke spaces that cannot be territorialized and modes of existence that cannot be thoroughly governmentalized.10 Working at the Turkish/Syrian territorial interface, I ask, are there mystical/mythical topographies (and/or cosmological lifeworlds) that have survived territorial manifestations of state sovereignty and their associated modes of governmentality? And, if so, have they been reconfgured in the process? The “cosmography” of the region in question, invoking Khidr, appears to have survived not only annexation by Turkey in 1939 and the modernist governmental measures that ensued, but also previous political formations, including Ottoman imperial and French colonial claims over this “territory.” This cosmography appears to have endured several consecutive reterritorializations and forms of historical reconfguration as imposed upon

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it spatio-politically through rather different state practices and their declarations of different kinds of sovereignty. In other words, though impacted upon by historical transformations and reconstituted, another spatiocosmological reality appears to have run in tandem in this geography, alongside that of “territory,” what I call “Khidr cosmography.” I therefore ask, to what an extent is this cosmography autonomous from territory? Is it autonomous? Is it a parallel world? I also ask, does Khidr transcend history? Or is he potentially, possibly also historically reconfgured? Veneration of Khidr in the broad circumference of Damascus has been documented by historians all the way back at least to the twelfth century. The Near East historian Josef Meri writes that during the Middle Ages a common form of commemoration became widespread among Jews and Muslims—the veneration of al-Khadir and Elijah at shrines. No other prophet or holy person in Judaism was venerated at as many shrines, especially in Syria. Likewise, the Islamic shrines of al-Khadir were widespread throughout Syria, particularly in Damascus and Aleppo. . . . [Jews and Muslims] constructed cults that they legitimized and maintained through ritual enactment and pietistic acts, dreams and visions and the appropriation, manipulation, and reinterpretation of verses from scripture and symbols from religious tradition. In invoking the Prophet [al-Khadir/Elijah], devotees sought to reclaim and rediscover the sacred in tradition and physically and ritually represent it. (1999, 238–39) Meri notes that “Arabic-speaking Jews often referred to Elijah as ‘al-Khudr,’ ” that this may be “a tradition which may have been in circulation ever since the early Islamic period,” and that for the purposes of his study, Elijah and al-Khadir are “one and the same” (1999, 238n2, 252). By reference to sources from the end of the seventeenth century, Meri accounts that “Jews sought to recreate the historical moments captured in scripture by linking them to their physical environment and through the constant evocation of Elijah. Since Elijah was immortal (2 Kings 2:1), devotees believed that he would always maintain a presence in and around these sanctuaries” (247). Meri further notes that unlike the Jewish sanctuaries to Elijah, which were unique to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, Islamic shrines of al-Khadir (makams), suf hospices, caravanserais, prayer rooms, and mosques were found throughout the Near East, from Egypt to Anatolia, all the way through Iraq, Persia, and India (254).

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Signifcantly for our query, Meri writes that “during the Middle Ages Greater Syria was the locus for the cult of al-Khadir” (254). He notes that “a common feature of the shrines of al-Khadir and other holy personages is that visitors sought baraka or blessings at these sites, prayed, supplicated, and made votive offerings” (255).11 Khidr, then, spans across time and space, and is cross-religious as a mystical fgure. If some, like the anthropologist Jens Kreinath, have called him a “Muslim saint” (2014), this is a limited rendition, as Khidr appears to have been venerated, albeit at times under different names and the guise of other saints or prophets, by members identifying with religions other than Islam too.12 In Antakya and its environs, sacred sites dedicated to Khidr have been “shared” across religious communities; they are frequented by Alawis and Orthodox Christians, as well as by Sunni Muslims.13 Arabophone Christians of the Orthodox denomination who are autochthonous to this region identify Khidr with Mar Curcoz, their St. George. In her historical work on the conceptualization of Khidr in the medieval Middle East, Ethel Sara Wolper (2011) provides some insight into the interstitial quality of Khidr which may assist us in exploring the relation between the cosmological worlds developed around his presence with the question of “territoriality.” Wolper notes that Khidr sites and cults especially proliferated in medieval frontier zones: “His appearances followed military victories and population transfers that marked much of the Middle Ages” (122). She further remarks that Khidr, like St. George, who has been associated with him, emerged with a distinctively “military” character in periods in medieval Middle Eastern history especially marked by massive violence, such as during the Crusades. “Like George and Elijah, Khiḍr shares traits with the gods of fertility, and all three have tended to become militant heroes. This is signifcant for understanding the transformation of recently conquered regions. Naming elements of the landscape after Khiḍr was a way of acculturating a new population to a foreign landscape” (123). In other words, Wolper argues that the veneration of Khidr, which arrived hand in hand with sites dedicated to him, coincided with particularly turbulent periods, such as conquest, wars leading to the changing of frontiers, and subsequent violent political transformations that ensued (123–24). Therefore, rather than emblematizing a romanticized pre-modern time of cross-religious co-existence around shared sacred sites, as a lot of the anthropological work on “shared sacra” would have us believe, the historical records lead us to develop other conclusions about the emergence of Khidr

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as a presence, where violence appears to have a central role. Like St. George, Khidr seems to appear as a warrior fgure. Sites have been especially dedicated to him at times of war, the reshuffling of frontiers, major violence, and great turbulence in the medieval Middle East. Wolper writes that “beginning with the wars between Islam and Byzantium and continuing through the Crusader conquests, local elites built, supported, and described Khiḍr sites in a process that supported local sacred sites while buttressing new religiopolitical formations” (122). And fnally, Wolper notes that rather than Khidr being stable as a fgure, the notions mobilized around Khidr also underwent historical transformation (122). On the basis of this interpretation, then, we are assisted in analyzing the enigmatic appearance of Khidr in the contemporary time-space between Turkey and Syria, with the ongoing war in Syria and the massive reshuffling of frontiers, involving Turkey as a major political force in the region. Might Khidr have re-appeared with a crescendo today by reference to the cataclysmic violence of the Syrian war and the challenges to the region’s territoriality at this time of major turbulence? Something distinct appears to have happened to Khidr in the contemporary period in Antakya and its hinterland. Sacred sites dedicated to Khidr are to be found especially in villages, neighborhoods, and towns inhabited by the Arab Alawis, in the Harbiye neighborhood of Antakya, in the villages of Döver (the old Duveyr) and Çöğürlü (the old Sabuntucilli), and in Samandağ (the old Suwaydiyah). The Arab Alawis particularly invoke Khidr in their everyday prayers and frequent sites associated with him for supplication. Khidr seems to appear especially in the dreams of Alawis, and further ziyarets continue to be dedicated to him in the event of such dreams in Alawi spaces. And Khidr, in this time-space, appears to have transformed into an interlocutor for the plight of Arab Alawis, in light of their marginalization and political targeting as a minority in Turkey’s Sunni-dominant politics. Interpellated in Arabic when summoned for help (Ya Khidr, Ya Allah!), Khidr, in this historical conjuncture, has arguably transformed into the Arab Alawis’ personal and personable Prophet. It is to where Khidr emerges, in such spaces associated with Arab Alawi autochthonous belonging, at the height of turbulence and massive violence in Syria and Turkey, and at their territorial interface, that I turn to in the latter part of this chapter. Has the sectarianism that has been accentuated since the start of the Syrian war historically reconstituted the mystical apparitions of Khidr? Was the spiritual being Khidr, who used to be venerated across the religious communities and denominations (at times as Elijah, at

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others as St. George) transformed at this time of cataclysmic violence (a major time of crisis at the Turkish/Syrian territorial interface) into a prophet/ protector of a specifc “community,” progressively identifying (in the shadow of augmenting ideological sectarianism, and the fear of being targeted as a minority) as such?

Khidr Cosmography We are sitting as a group in front of a small grocery shop in the town of Samandağ, twenty-fve kilometers from the city of Antakya. Across from us is the Mediterranean, hitting long sandy beaches with feverishly giant waves. Looking to the left is the coastline from Turkey reaching all the way into Syria. Lights across the border, from Syria, start to become visible from where we are placed, as the evening emerges. Young men on motorcycles whiz by, as do cars carrying large families. We are sipping tea and talking. Across from us is the famous holy visitation site (ziyaret) dedicated to Khidr. The site is hugely popular. Mothers accompanied by children, sisters, aunts, whole families, all leave their shoes at its entrance. Women take scarves to cover their heads before going in. Incense (pohur) is burnt, considered holy. People wave the smoke of the incense over their faces and shoulders while praying. And the circumambulation begins, around the big white rock in the site. Some take Qur’ans lying on the marble stone and kiss them in blessing themselves. Others touch the marble stone surrounding the rock and place their foreheads on it. They turn around the rock counterclockwise, at least thrice in a row. Some hold their palms upward to face the dome of the ziyaret as they walk in meditation. Murmurs of prayer create the sound of a polyphonic hymn in the site which is open for visitation round the clock, under a fluorescent green light.14 It was summer 2013 when I wrote these observations in my feld notes. The war in Syria was raging. Turkey had taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria running away from the war, seeking harbor from the cataclysmic violence perpetrated by the Assad regime as well as from the various rebel groups that had violently taken over their towns or villages. While some refugees stayed in camps administered by the Turkish government, most had settled in towns and cities across Turkey. Hatay had become quite a signifcant place of refuge for Syrians. Around one million refugees from Syria were estimated to be living there, at the time. However, unlike other parts of the Hatay district, the town of Samandağ had not taken in refugees

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from Syria, especially refusing to do so, fearing a sectarian conflict that might potentially develop. What characterized this town at the time of my research was its embracement of communal identity. Almost all of Samandağ’s residents (except for members of the small Arab Orthodox Christian community) identifed as “Arab Alawi” and considered themselves in distinction from “Sunnis,” whether they be Sunni Muslim refugees from Syria or Turkish-identifed Sunni Muslims who form the large majority in Turkey. Calling themselves Arap Alevi (Arab Alawi), or minnina (i.e., “one of us,” “those who belong to our community”), Samandağ inhabitants largely associated their town with their community. Accounts of their marginalization and targeting as Alevis in Turkey reverberated in everyday conversations, with references to the eventful massacres of Alevis in Sıvas, Çorum, and Maraş (see Çaylı 2018). In the time-space under study, the height of AKP’s authoritarianism in Turkey under Erdoğan and its Sunni-majoritarian practices, as well as the sectarian effects of the Syrian war (2012 onward), Arab Alawis of Antakya and Samandağ intensifed and accentuated, embraced, and especially promulgated their “communal identity.”15 This emphasis on both “ethnic” (Arab) and “sectarian” (Alawi) identity, delineating “community,” was solidifed under French colonial rule in Syria and Lebanon, of which Sanjak d’Alexandrette formed a part. Scholars who have studied the colonial (and therefore modern) origins of “sectarianism” in this region at large (encompassing Syria and Lebanon) have argued that sectarianism was not a political form that has existed in the region since time immemorial, but one that was rigidifed and consolidated through West European colonialism (Makdisi 2000; Weiss 2010; White 2011; Altuğ 2011). However, Turkey’s own nationalist and sectarian practices as a republic, heir of the Sunni-dominant Ottoman Empire, must also be noted as the backdrop against which “Arab Alawi” communal identity is emphasized, as well as defended and safeguarded among Samandağ inhabitants today. There is not only a post-colonial but also a post-Ottoman and modern Turkish influence and precipitation in contemporary ways of self-identifying as “Arab Alawi” in the Hatay district.16 Here, I additionally argue that there was an augmentation in the scale with which inhabitants of Samandağ would emphasize their communal identity as Arab Alawis, in differentiation from Sunnis of Syria and Turkey, as a result of Erdoğan’s Sunni-oriented favoritism and that of Syria’s sectarian-inflected civil war.17

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Markus Dressler (2013) has compellingly documented how the very concept of Alevi is a result of a historically specifc “religiography” (theological scholarship) developed under the auspices of the early Turkish Republic and the influence of its nationalist and secular-modernist ideology. He argues that Alevis have been influenced by this religiography, adopting a term of othering as one of self-identifcation. While agreeing with Dressler’s analysis that Alevis have been re-subjectivated as such (in the Foucauldian sense) under republican Turkish governmentality, I would argue, at the same time, that the Khidr cosmography I chart is in excess of the religiography that Dressler has analyzed. In other words, if religiography about the Alevis was a modern Turkish nationalist project, the Khidr cosmography that I trace transcends it. I argue that Khidr cosmography refers to those aspects of spirituality that have not been subsumed under modernist forms of religiography. We sit once more in front of the grocery shop across from the ziyaret in Samandağ dedicated to Khidr. “We may swear at God [Allah], but not at Khidr,” says Adem. The holy visitation site here is considered the centerpiece for this strong attachment to Khidr. The kitchen and communal space beside the site is used for the celebration of Arab Alawi festivals and rituals. The shop across from the famous Khidr site in Samandağ is owned by the family who has taken care of it for more than a century. Adem is the grandson of the sheyh who used to be in charge of rituals around the site, as well as its maintenance. But, though part of this lineage, Adem considered himself an atheist. He quite openly criticized “religiosity” (dincilik, dindarlık). He often ironized about forms of “belief” (inanç), calling them irrational. He considered himself a socialist, like many of Samandağ’s residents, some of whom, one generation back, used to be members of radical left organizations in the 1970s, and faced prison terms in different parts of Turkey under the 1980 military coup for their activism.18 In conversations, like other young men in their thirties who were his friends, Adem would bring up Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Lenin, holding them up as idols, alongside Turkish left heroes like Deniz Gezmiş and Mahir Çayan. Atatürk, distinctively called “Mustafa Kemal” by Adem (“in order not to emphasize his Turkishness”), was highly revered by members of this town, as well. But alongside his socialism, atheism, and secularism, and his conceptual pitting of “rationality” against “belief,” Adem also spoke of having experienced Khidr’s presence: “I have seen divine light [nur] falling upon the Khidr ziyaret many times,” he said. “It happens at night and, when it descends, every thing

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lights up. The heavenly light I saw was very real, if I wasn’t hallucinating. ‘What is this?’ I said to myself. I was astonished, why should I lie? I remember one of these occurrences very clearly. My mind and my eyes are witnesses to this. This was Khidr.” Adem took care of the Khidr site and oversaw the festivities of members of the Arab Alawi community in the space adjacent to it. In fact, he was considered, as the grandson of an Alawi sheyh, a facilitator of the community’s attachment to Khidr. He sacrifced animals for Alawi families’ ritual ceremonies and organized the festivals, cleaning the communal space after its use and keeping a record of the site’s use by members of the community. And when he took breaks from his work there, Adem discussed politics with his friends, starkly describing the atmosphere in Samandağ in this period. He stated that there were only two areas of concentrated Alawi inhabitation in the Hatay district, that most of the rest of the province was a stronghold for right-wing political parties (the AKP and the pan-Turkist MHP), that the whole region (including Syria) had been surrounded by jihadists, that the Alawis of Samandağ and Antakya felt under threat, that violence against them was imminent, that there was mounting antagonism in the air, and that the Alawis would need to organize to defend themselves in light of imminent violence against them as a community, reminiscent of previous such targeting of Alevis in Turkey. The evening was gripped by the bitterness of our conversations. As we spoke, people continued to enter the Khidr site, turned around the white rock, prayed to Khidr, and supplicated to him. Some asked Adem if he would sacrifce a sheep or rooster they wanted to dedicate to a specifc purpose (adak). Adem would disappear into the ziyaret’s communal abattoir (mezbaha) to perform the sacrifce (kurban). He would return, tired, and continue to discuss politics with everyone. Murmurs of prayer to Khidr would emerge from the ziyaret. People would come out of the holy visitation site, walking backwards, in order not to turn their backs against the site. They would kneel down to put on their shoes. Women would fold their scarves away. The night light of the ziyaret would be switched green. There was an interlacing to be observed in conversations in Samandağ, as well as in embodied actions, at many levels. On the one hand, terms referencing distinct political lines and demarcations (socialism, secularism, atheism, Islamism, jihadism), as well as sectarian ones (Alawis, Sunnis) were thrown about in speech, vocally and verbally. Political convictions were expressed with an affect of intensity and fervor, expressing anger as well as

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worry under the political climate, with the AKP government scaling up its monopoly over Turkish politics, openly favoring Sunni Turks and encouraging sectarianism against Alevis/Alawis. On the other hand, and at the same time, such explicit politics, increasingly assuming sectarian demarcations, was interspersed, in a subtle and un-emphasized manner, with the appearance of Khidr in dreams or miraculous occurrences associated with or attributed to him. People turned around the Khidr site, made votive offerings to him, and resumed their conversations about politics. Or the politics which intrinsically influenced their lives referenced and was referenced by the presence of a spiritual agency. And Khidr appeared to exceed as well as supersede the lines of differentiation that were discursively drawn between “politics” and “religion,” “rational” and “irrational,” “the secular” and “the religious” in everyday conversations.

Conclusion There may be something historically contingent for that which appears to be in excess of history; that is, it is perhaps precisely because Arab Alawis (like Anatolian and Mesopotamian Alevi communities) were considered outside the bounds of proper (Sunni) Islam and its reconfguration as a distinct realm under the secularism of republican Turkey that some of their spiritual engagements possibly escaped modernizing Turkish governmentality. I therefore study, through the notion of “spirituality,” that which is in excess of “religion” as well, institutionalized as a separate domain through secularist state practices. What, I ask, might be experienced “spiritually” that references and is referenced by history and is yet, at the same time, in excess of it?19 I am interested in the cross-referencing of the spirituality around Khidr with experiences of violence. According to my interlocutors in Samandağ, the turning around the Khidr ziyaret has been historically continuous. And yet, in this continuity around the veneration of Khidr, I would like to know whether there has been a historically specifc reconfguration in the contemporary period? What, I ask, is the potency of Khidr in light of the escalation of sectarianism and threat of violence experienced by the Arab Alawis of Turkey’s border with Syria in the last decade? How have evocations of Khidr changed in light of the cataclysmic violence of the Syrian war? Why does Khidr especially appear to Arab Alawis of this border region between Turkey and Syria today? Has Khidr been reconstituted as a spiritual entity

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through the historical unfolding of this region into war? Has he been reconfgured as a supernatural force who promises to protect a specifc community that is in danger of being targeted in light of mounting sectarianism? There is a precipitation of violence across time in the experiences depicted in Samandağ. And this violence is historically specifc. The appearance of Khidr as divine light, in dreams in the form of the ziyaret dedicated to him, or as miraculous occurrence invoking his prowess, is relational to these experiences. Therefore, though Khidr makes an appearance sui generis, as an autonomous spiritual force, and is therefore in excess of history, insofar as his appearances are entangled in people’s specifc experiences of personal, social, and political violence, the manifestations of Khidr are also historical. This spirituality, in other words, is simultaneously historically contingent as it exceeds history’s constraints; it is historical and in transcendence of history at one and the same time.

Acknowledgments The feldwork for this chapter was conducted with Emrah Gökdemir, and a lot of the analyses here have been discussed with him. This chapter has also benefted from comments by Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, Seda Altuğ, Ruth Mandel, and Esra Özyürek. I additionally thank participants in seminars I gave based on the material in this chapter at the University of Edinburgh, Birkbeck College, University of Cambridge, Université Libre de Bruxelles, the NIMAC Centre in Cyprus, and Oxford University. Notes 1. See “Erdoğan: Reyhanlı’da 53 Sünni Vatandaşımız Şehit Edildi,” Radikal, 14 June 2013, and Constanze Lesch, “Syrian Conflict Brings Sectarian Tensions to Turkey’s Tolerant Hatay Province,” The Guardian, 3 September 2013. 2. See Karakaya-Stump 2018 for a study of the augmenting sectarianism in Turkey under Erdoğan’s AKP regime, especially targeting Alevis. 3. For brilliant ethnographic studies of border areas in engagement with which I conceptualize “bordering,” see Green 2013 and Reeves 2014. 4. On the one hand, we have studies of spiritual phenomena (such as the occult, witchcraft, and the devil) that would situate them in distinct (“capitalist,” “neoliberal,” or “modern”) political economies (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Taussig 1983; Geschiere 1997), therefore privileging politics and economics as the primary analytical templates (or base) for the assessment of supernatural experiences. On the other hand, and in critique of the former,

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we have studies of “indigenous cosmology,” “spirit worlds,” or “spiritual entities” that treat cosmology ontologically, as the essential existential frame through which politics or economics will be experienced (e.g., Englund and Leach 2000; Abramson and Holbraad 2014; Pedersen 2014; Blanes and Espirito Santo 2014). In this analysis, I take issue with both these approaches, which arguably reproduce the modernist conceptual binary “politics versus cosmology.” 5. For critical engagements with methodological secularism and/or atheism in anthropology, see Ewing 1994; Stewart 2001; Bialecki 2014; and Oustinova-Stjepanovic 2015. These authors argue that the anthropology of religion has suffered from methodological secularism or atheism, failing to take on board the potency of religious or spiritual phenomena as forces that are real to anthropology’s interlocutors, and therefore neutralizing the effects of these forces. I, in turn, argue that, by and large, the anthropology of politics (when construed as a domain of analysis distinct from “religion,” and cast apart as such) has been limited by methodological secularism/atheism. 6. For a study of borders as spaces of “ambiguity,” see Green 2005. 7. For a study of Ottoman modernist ways of othering Arab communities, see Makdisi’s “Ottoman Orientalism” (2002). 8. For critiques of the Turkish nationalist framework inherent in the ethnological and historical works of Ahmet Yaşar Ocak and his mentor Mehmet Fuad Köprülü, especially by reference to their studies of Alevis and Alevism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, see Karakaya-Stump 2020 and Dressler 2013. 9. For a fantastic study of Elijah (and the calendar around Elijah’s Day) as referring to an other temporality, see HadžiMuhamedović 2018. 10. In the feld of critical international relations, Costas Constantinou (2004) has studied contestations over sovereignty in the Himalayas. “State sovereignty has not always been the principle the various people of the Himalayas employed to describe their political organization,” he writes, “That is, they did not employ the term before their encounter with the colonial reifcation of sovereignty and the violence of territorial delimitation” (37). And he asks, “Does mythical topography matter in modern ‘rational’ representations of sovereignty?” (36). 11. For a study of the place of Khidr, among other saints, as a manifestation of “everyday religion” in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, see Grehan 2014. 12. Safet HadžiMuhamedović (2018) has studied “Elijah’s Day” in Bosnia as a holiday shared across communities other wise differentiated ethnically. 13. For studies of “shared sacred sites,” see Bowman 2012; Albera and Couroucli 2012; Bandak 2014; Stadler and Luz 2014. 14. Procházka-Eisl and Procházka (2010) also describe what they call “the ritual practices performed during a typical ziyara” in their book on the sacred places of the Arab Alawis of Cilicia (195–97). Bellamy (2011) describes “dargah culture” in South Asia as a “(religious) culture in and of itself” that cannot be studied or subsumed under the dominion of any religion (6). Here, I observe how “ziyaret culture” came to be associated especially with the Arab Alawis in a distinct period marked by violence. 15. For a comparison with Anatolian Alevis’ turn to identity politics from the 1980s onward, see Massicard 2012. It must be noted that the notions of “identity” (kimlik) and “community” (cemaat) were preferred in the period under study to that of “sect” (mezhep). This

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could be read also as a result of the rise of “identity politics” (kimlik politikaları) in Turkey in the 1990s, the long-term aftermath of the 1980 military coup (see Navaro-Yashin 2002). 16. Prager (2013) notes the historical differentiation between the Alawis of Syria and those of the Liwa, including Antakya and Samandağ. With the annexation of the Liwa by Turkey in 1939 (and the Turkifcation process that led to it and followed its suit), the Arab Alawis of Hatay were differentiated from their counterparts in Syria (43). Prager therefore calls the Alawis of Hatay “Turkish Alawis” to demarcate their historically situated difference from Alawis of Syria (43). I use the term “Arab Alawi” (the English translation of the Turkish language Arap Alevi), currently used by members of the community in Antakya and Samandağ. The term Arap Alevi is used to connote difference from the dominant Turkish-identifed Sunni majority, as well as from Anatolian or Mesopotamian (Turkish, Kurdish, or Zazaki-speaking) Alevis. For a genealogical study of the construction and constitution of “Alevi” identity, see Dressler 2013. 17. See Şule Can 2017 for a study of the sectarianizing influence of the Syrian war on Turkey’s border regions with Syria. 18. Tambar (2012, 655–56) has noted how Alevis of Turkey were particularly targeted during the 1980 military coup due to their association with left-wing organizations in the 1970s. One interpretation mentioned by Tambar is that the Islamicization practices of the Cold War inflected post-coup state in Turkey, bringing Sunni Islam more and more into the public domain of politics, marginalized the Alevis with their left-wing inclinations. See Mertcan (2013) for oral history accounts of Arab Alawi experiences of the 1980 military coup. Also see Navaro-Yashin (2013) for a brief study of the shadow of the 1980 military coup on the Arab Alawis of Antakya. 19. The works of anthropologists Charles Stewart (2012), Anand Vivek Taneja (2012), and Amira Mittermaier (2012) are particularly relevant to the concerns of this chapter, in different ways exploring the contiguity as well as the paradox between otherworldly and historical forces.

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CHAPTER 5

Icons of Uncaring Borderland Cartographies of Icon Making Connie Gagliardi and Valentina Napolitano

An icon acts as a bridge for one to experience the communion of saints who are in light. Icons image these holy persons, not by the use of realism or naturalism, in an effort to make the depiction resemble what the person actually looked like, but rather through the use of symbols and theology, utilizing line and color. —Sister Nancy Lee Smith, Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, Illinois

This chapter explores conditions of emergence (and states of emergency) surrounding the making and the spatial orientations of two borderland icons. The examples we draw from are an icon of Santo Toribio Romo located in the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Mexicantown, downtown Detroit, painted by a nun of the American order of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary; and the icon of Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls, painted on the Palestinian face of the Israeli Separation Wall in Bethlehem by a British Catholic iconographer and commissioned by the Emmanuel Melkite Catholic Monastery. Both icons evoke the plight and violence surrounding the Christian communities of Mexican/Latinx migrants in the United

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States and Palestinians under Israeli Occupation. We analyze here the histories and affective felds which are embedded in the making and the enthroning of such icons, as well as the cartography of their religious and political imaginations. We begin to interrogate how icons might mediate material forms of critique. If religion is a contemporary “new battleground,” icons can be its outposts. The study of icons encompasses a vast and an interdisciplinary debate we can only briefly signal here. And we cannot fully address how icons are material signs, different from linguistic signs, and thus better approached through the semiotics of Peirce rather than that of de Saussure. In fact, the potency of the two icons we briefly illustrate here manifests because of the presence of an active perspective in time and space (Thirdness, for Pierce) in the process, and performativity of their signifcation. Our approach then is to situate these “living icons” within the local and global, material and structural conditions that enable and constrain them, so that we can flesh out some of their transformative potential (Salih and Richter-Devroe 2014). To interrogate the transformative potential of these icons, we signal the nexus of creation and the political landscapes which produce them and consider how traditionally Orthodox iconographic formations are re-imagined by non-Orthodox Christian actors. The iconographers of Santo Toribio Romo and Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls operate within localities of long, different histories of dispossessions. Those histories strongly tint these iconmaking productions and index, we argue, affective histories of uncaring in America (vis-à-vis current Latino immigration in the United States) and in the Holy Land (vis-à-vis the Israeli Occupation). Moreover, affective elements of these icon-making and enthroning contribute to and illuminate debates on borderland theories via a perspective on the sacrality of borderlands. Borderland theories have illuminated how processes of mestizaje, transculturation, religious syncretism, and indigenous mythologies can open up possibilities for critiques of nation/state sovereignty. If border studies have privileged a “secular” point of entry into interdisciplinary research on the changing nature of states and nations (Wilson and Donnan 2012), we highlight here the importance of religious materialities emerging in contact zones within and between nations/states. These contact zones cannot be fully understood by resting in either one of the side-camps of the unhelpful divide between secular and religious spheres, but instead should be located in their continuous co-production.

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On Santo Toribio Romo Las Americas has long been the stage of many contemporary forms of religious iconography, with one of its most well-known examples being the production by Franciscan Father, Robert Lentz. Here, we focus on one example from this rich landscape—an icon of St. Toribio Romo, a twentieth-century Mexican saint from Jalisco, who well before and since his canonization in 2000 has become the patron saint of undocumented immigrants, the noncitizens crossing into the United States. Calls for his canonization were mobilized and masterminded by the conservative Christian order the Legionaries of Christ, as part of their re-narrativization of the Mexican Cristero Wars and the violent martyrdoms it entailed.1 Here, we are interested in how a contested saint’s icon, standing to the side of the nave of the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Mexicantown (downtown Detroit), can be understood as a material knot of the multiple perspectives from within the Catholic Church on the invisibilization of transnational migration and the sin of a “globalization of indifference.”2 Toribio Romo González, from Los Altos de Jalisco and born of mixed Mexican/Spanish/French heritage at the turn of the twentieth century, is part of the wave of saints from Las Americas canonized by John Paul II. Toribio’s popular hagiography describes the beauty of his blue eyes and white skin, as well as his dedication to the sindicalismo Cristiano (Christian labor unions movement) and his pedagogía catequista (catechist pedagogy), directed particularly at children. His popular hagiography is tinted with an attachment to land and faith and evokes a cry of hope and fantasy for the rootedness of the patria. St. Toribio stands as an interesting kernel in relation to a Mexican Catholic Church concerned with the current restrictive and racist policies of the United States, vis-à-vis undocumented migration (in both the Obama and Trump administrations). Toribio is reported as having despised his contemporary fellows for migrating to the United States, citing that they were “betraying the [Mexican] motherland.” In fact, through the 1920s and 1930s, up to the 1960s, the Mexican Catholic Church privileged a sedentary population and discouraged migration to the North, in fear of family dissolution and the dilution of faith across the border. It was only in the 1970s and with the intensifying work of the order of the Scalabrinians that the Mexican Church began to see emigration to the United States under a rubric of management of souls, and through an emerging lens of (the human) “right” to

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emigrate. So while on the one hand, the story of Toribio Romo is one of a “white-ish” ranchero saint who mobilizes an affective history of a church under attack (by a perceived too secular and anti-clerical Mexican state), the story is also a staunch call for rootedness in a (Catholic) land. Clearly rooted in that land, now he blesses routes out of it. In fact, Toribio is also the Santo Coyote, the saint of “illegal” crossing. Narratives proliferate that he appeared offering water to migrants crossing the desert—while he is still described with his blue eyes and unblemished white skin. A giver of a “common” life source across the border (Muehlmann 2013), his road to official canonization shows once more that canonizations are a contested, political process within the Catholic Church, revealing at the core an ultimate cannibalization of a peripheral vitality that threatens to break away—a paragon of differentiation contained (Mayblin et al. 2017). Hence St. Toribio Romo’s story is part of a discourse of martyrdom; in a Catholic Church perceived to be under attack, his fgure, as a diocesan martyred priest, brings attention to an affective power of the liturgical sacrality of priesthood, while as El Santo Coyote, his presence signals a theology centered on the tensions around legality/illegality, documented/undocumented migration, and citizen/noncitizen belonging. In the icon in the Church of the Holy Redeemer, Toribio appears in a Russian-like iconographic style (painted by Sister Nancy Lee Smith), holding a yellow warning sign of a family running, indexing (noncitizen) crossers at the U.S./Mexican border. As such, we ask, what may it mean to put (or push) this Mexican saint into such an aesthetic Catholic pantheon? One direction of inquiry is about the “legality” of the immigrant family, imagined and revealed through an iconographic aesthetic of (un)caring. Sara Ahmed suggests that orientations carry an affective force of what sticks on subjects and spaces, in the toward, or in the against (Ahmed 2006). We are not only oriented toward certain (devotional) objects (such as the icon), but we also orient our bodies around them, while we develop attachments of toward-ness or away-ness. These orientations render the affective nature of attachments to these objects with, but also beyond, an exegetical understanding of the role of these same religious objects in ritual action. Orientations are vital not only to saintly politics, but also to political theologies of borderlands. This icon of Toribio Romo (but also Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls) generates multiple orientations of vision in space and time (its Thirdness), and foregrounds issues around politics of (un)caring toward immigration. There is a story of orientation and dis-orientation around Toribio’s

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icon, hosted in the Church of the Holy Redeemer in downtown Detroit. In fact, its iconographer, Sister Nancy Lee Smith, has been concerned with this icon’s “orientation” in space.

On Iconographic (Un)caring For Nancy, iconography is about “making visible” sainthood. Nancy Lee Smith is a tall woman, with a slight limp due to years of a faltering hip. She uses a wheelchair aide to move around the large, early 1930s compound of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Monroe, Michigan. This is one of the most prominent female convents on American soil, arranged with well-trimmed landscaped gardens. It contains a large, once-thriving but now closed-down, Catholic school for girls. Yet, this convent is still one of the headquarters of the powerful Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). Once in Nancy’s studio, after walking through a small exhibition of her icons and reproductions available for sale, we enter a large drawing room where she sits daily to make her icons. Beside her desk is a series of shelves, where icons are laid to rest while still in the process of completion. A subtle but persistent flm of light dust covers the many utensils and pieces of paraphernalia used over the many years that Nancy has been on the iconographer’s journey. She and Valentina talk about Nancy’s becoming an iconographer and the politics of sound of Hildegard von Bingen’s soundtrack, which she often plays for inspiration. The icons she gives forms to are a “window into a saintly resurrected body,” hence icons cannot show particular and specifc parts of a body; they are about the wholeness of a resurrected body. We are sitting close to the heartland of Michigan’s borderland, which hosts a wealth of documented and undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America, some of whom now gravitate around Mexicantown in downtown Detroit. Nancy talked to some of them before starting the making of the icon of St. Toribio, to feel “what they did go through,” “to understand their pathways,” pathways that she parallels to the one of the saints. For her then, if an icon is a “pathway,” to make an icon is “like a vision,” and one needs to “nurse it toward perfection” while “putting on the golden leaves.” Icons are, for Nancy, living and breathing sacred entities, to be venerated (not adored). If sainthood is ever-present, icons are that which make it visible. The making visible for Nancy starts from using soil and other elements of the earth in the making of icons. There is an intimate connection in creation

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between geology, mediation, and sainthood, which she draws back to the debate of St.  John of Damascus and Leonid Ouspensky’s Theology of the Icon (1992). Yet, she also situates the icon and iconographic space of St.  Toribio Romo within a current politics of the archdioceses of Detroit, which, since the 1990s, has witnessed increasing (white) middle-class flight from downtown to the suburbs. The archdioceses have been ridden with conflicts. One kernel of conflicts has been the clustering of parishes, a top-down mode of archdioceses’ territorial intervention, which has left pulsating traces of social deprivation, even more crushing now with recent incoming histories of gentrifcation. The Toribio Romo icon was sponsored by an American parishioner and deacon of the Church of the Holy Redeemer. Successful Guadalajaran immigrant families have added more funds to embellish the Toribio side nave in this church. Originally, this icon project was endorsed by Bishop Donald Hanchon, who was then the priest in charge of that parish. Once he was nominated auxiliary bishop of the archdioceses of Detroit in 2011, Nancy noticed the parish’s landscape changed. She waited and waited to be called in for an official ceremony to “enthrone” the icon in the church, but it never happened. In response to her queries, she also had a string of delayed messages and “miscommunications” with the priests in charge at the time. She recounts one day going in and noticing the icon had been moved behind a flowerpot in the side nave. Never, never, she repeats, should one block the view of a saint’s icon, as that is interrupting the saintly loving gaze upon us. While talking to one of the new priests in charge, she realized that the icon was not perceived as a “proper” icon, but rather an improper one. St. Toribio is carrying, and caring, in his lap an index of the undocumented migrant family crossing the borderland—an index of the material, visual warning sign that is often found on American soil at the U.S.-Mexican border—but for some priests, the message may have been too explicit. For Nancy, the yellow placard is a reminder of the sacrality of the family, a sacrality that should not be blemished by the label of alien/undocumented attached to a certain type of transnational migration. Yet, the family in migration is a contested terrain for the Catholic Church, as pedagogies of family reunifcation, so much championed by the Catholic Church, fall short of capturing and responding to the complexity of migrant experiences, where conditions of (family) betrayal and out-of-wedlock relations are a constant reality (Napolitano 2016). The saintliness of this icon’s gaze interrupts some of the “diplomatic” positions of the Detroit Catholic archdiocese, which has wished to “stay neutral”

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(in Nancy’s words) on the immigration debate that has riven the United States during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Yet this Toribio icon is a “visible” presence of the saintly wholeness of his resurrected body, which contains the contested migrant family’s index. This icon’s orientation has a living prismatic effect. St.  Toribio carry ing/holding/caring (cuidando) that placard in the Church of the Holy Redeemer stirs different affects around the Church’s position toward the federal government’s (in)action on undocumented migration reforms. With this panel on his lap, the presence of Santo Toribio Romo’s icon problematically indexes a condition of (un)caring which produces partitions of families and distribution of death across migrant (desert) terrains (de León 2015).

On Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls Bethlehem is a small city in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is historically known for being the birthplace of Jesus Christ, whose manger is enshrined within the city’s Church of Nativity. But in 2002, when the Israeli government constructed the Israeli Separation Wall to “separate” Israel from the people and territories it occupies, Bethlehem was transformed into a city at the margins. The eight-meter-high Separation Wall mars Bethlehem, as it skirts in and out and around the 53.5-kilometer length of its municipality (Gandolfo 2016; Weizman 2007). It effectively severed the city from Jerusalem, though they have long been imagined together within Christian tradition. From the Palestinian vantage point, the Wall marks the sedimentation of the “Occupation” in the physical landscape, creating a “sea of checkpoints and military roads . . . an archipelagic logic” of Israeli governmentality that continually asserts that Palestine is occupied territory (Kelly 2016, 725). In time, the Wall’s high concrete slabs became a haven for graffiti, and as such, has become a tourist spectacle, laden with haphazard layers of images and messages that are sometimes political, often satirical and nonsensical. The Wall culminates in Bethlehem at Checkpoint 300, the main entryway into Jerusalem. Five hundred meters away from Checkpoint 300 is the Emmanuel Melkite Catholic Monastery. During the Second Intifada (2000– 2005), the area surrounding the monastery was used as an outpost for the Israeli military due to its proximity to Bethlehem. Bullet holes still mark the buildings of the monastery, affective residues of the violence that continues to permeate Palestinian life. In 2010, the Sisters of the Emmanuel Monas-

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tery commissioned British, Catholic iconographer Ian Knowles to write an icon of the Virgin Mary onto the Separation Wall. This icon has come to be known locally as “Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls” (Kawas 2016). Since its creation, “Our Lady” has been a place of weekly pilgrimage and worship (Stadler 2020), as people flock to pray before the icon and marvel at the incongruity of its beauty against the ugly cement slabs it adorns. In 2013, when we frst encountered the icon of “Our Lady,” she stood “serene and immaculate,” uncompromised by the graffiti tags that surrounded it. The icon features a weeping Virgin Mary with beautiful olive skin, enrobed in vibrant red and golden hues. The gold of her robe is enhanced by the golden gleam that emanates from her sizeable halo. Precisely flled in with gold leaf flament, her halo possesses a sensorial quality as it glistens under the strong Middle Eastern sun. The Virgin sits high above a wall, which is beginning to crack beneath the weight of divine presence, an allusion to the Separation Wall itself. Along the wall, an oblong doorway is depicted, through which the outline of the city of Jerusalem is visible. The Virgin is thus revealing a secret entranceway to the sacred places of worship that Palestinians are otherwise prevented from accessing freely. The potency of the icon of “Our Lady” lies not only in its symbolism and aesthetics, but also in its affective orientation toward the de facto borderland. “Our Lady” stands as powerful Christian attestation to the realities of the Occupation as it replicates the material realities of Occupation by creating an image of the Separation Wall on the actual Separation Wall. This spatial reiteration is powerfully affecting, asserting a redemptive sign of hope by suggesting the current political situation in Palestine cannot hold. In fact, the depth of these cracks implies that the “bringing down of the wall” is imminent. In this regard, “Our Lady” depicts its own eventual destruction, as it fulflls the intercessory calls of Palestinian Christians. The affective resonances of “Our Lady” are best exemplifed in the narratives that circulate in Bethlehem surrounding the icon. The conditions of the Separation Wall as canvas, whereby graffiti is everywhere haphazard, lend themselves to these affective resonances. That the icon remained untouched and unfaltering amid the surrounding graffiti, was testament to its very sanctity. Inspiration for the icon of “Our Lady” was drawn from the biblical story of the Woman of the Apocalypse from the book of Revelation (12:1). It details a pregnant woman, clothed by Sun, chased into the desert by a beast. The beast sends torrents of water after the woman to drown her and her child, but the earth opens and swallows the water. The woman is thus saved and

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able to give birth to her child. In the icon of the Virgin Mary as “Our Lady,” she is depicted in typical Orthodox convention as the Theotokos, or Mother of God. She is noticeably pregnant, clutching her belly with one hand, while holding her head in consolation in the other because, as iconographer Knowles recounted, “she sees and feels the suffering of her children here and she is suffering with them. . . . She is the Mother of the Church.” However, the potency of the icon was compounded when the surrounding graffiti on the Separation Wall began to intersect with the “life” of the icon. A few weeks after the icon of Our Lady was written, a particular graffitied image appeared further along the Wall. It was an image of a snake-like dragon whose stomach was flled with children, parallel to the beast in the story from the book of Revelation. The uncanniness of this beastly image lent credence to the potency of the icon and its biblical metaphor, as a living icon, sacralizing the plight of Christians in Palestine. The appearance of this beast who seemed to slither in the direction of Our Lady imparted the belief that the Divine had played a role in manifesting this image, thereby adding weight to the icon’s divine presence. The Thirdness of the performativity of this icon is embedded not only in its affective orientation (of attraction and of repulsion), but also in the biblical temporality that it brings forward into the present. This continuum of Christian plight through the fgure of the weeping Virgin Mary, who weeps from fear as the woman from the book of Revelation, but also for the suffering of the Church in contemporary Bethlehem, is what sanctifes this borderland. The icon of “Our Lady” can be read as a “material knot” within a longer historicity of iconography and its cartographies of the Holy Land. Such an unravelling helps explain why the icon of “Our Lady” bears such an emotional charge. Kamal Boullata, prominent Palestinian artist and art historian, has written about the foundations of Palestinian art as rooted in a tradition of Christian iconography. In the seventeenth century, there was even a Palestinian “school” of iconography—the “Jerusalem School, which Boullata postulates as the frst “indigenous” Palestinian pictorial tradition. Many nineteenth-century Palestinian artists who would forge distinctive ground in a nascent nationalist Palestinian pictorial tradition were frst trained in iconography studios. However, following the dispossession of Palestine in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel, the traditional craft lost its prominence as Christian shops in Jerusalem’s Old City began to shutter their doors (Boullata 2013). In contemporary Bethlehem and Jerusalem, iconography is understood as a traditional craft with theological and historical importance. There are a

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small number of local and foreign iconographers committed to restoring and teaching the craft, which they believe is impor tant given Christianity’s steadily declining presence in the Holy Land. Many of these iconographers look aspirationally to the prestigious Jerusalem School of iconography of the seventeenth century. In fact, in today’s Church of the Nativity, just above the descending staircase that leads into the manger’s grotto, there is a Jerusalem School icon of “Our Lady of Bethlehem.” Here, the Virgin appears incredibly idyllic, with a rounded face, olive-toned skin, and bemused smile, as she clutches her child. This is because Jerusalem School icons characteristically depicted divine fgures with softened, Arabized facial features. The Jerusalem School was a distinctive local iconographic style that flourished under the historical conditions of the newly established Uniate Melkite Catholic Church. Formed in rebellion against the hegemony of the Greek Orthodox Church under the Ottoman Empire, the Melkite Church would continue to follow the Byzantine liturgical rite, while recognizing the primacy of the Latin papacy. The Melkite Church naturalized the use of Arabic in their liturgy, but also in their iconographic programs and icons on the walls of their churches. Thus, a local iconography style of the Jerusalem School flourished, distinctively using Arabic inscriptions, emplacing local Palestinian scenery into the iconographic space, and depicting divine fgures with distinctively Arab facial features. The seventeenth-century Jerusalem School is evocative for contemporary iconographers and those committed to restoring the craft in Bethlehem as it indexes the long tradition of locally made, Palestinian icons. However, the Jerusalem School also indexes the historical bridging of Eastern and Western traditions through the localized Byzantine-Catholic Melkite Church, within the iconographic space. This history of local Palestinian iconography, implicitly indexing a more heterodox approach to the icon in formation and fguration, is integral to understanding the imaginative potential of the modern, locally made icon of “Our Lady.” The icon of Our Lady was commissioned by the Sisters of the Melkite Emmanuel Monastery, an autonomous religious convent of Benedictine nuns who fall under the Greek Catholic (Melkite) patriarchate. Their Benedictine order was formed in Algeria in 1945 with the intention of bridging the gap between the Eastern and Orthodox Christian rites. In Bethlehem, the Emmanuel Monastery is made up of mostly French nuns who have dedicated themselves to a quasi-monastic life of contemplation and spiritual exercises (such as icon painting) while maintaining a pilgrim guesthouse and following routine Byzantine liturgies, which are open for local Christians to join.

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The Sisters commissioned Ian Knowles, a British Catholic iconographer involved in restoring the craft of iconography to Bethlehem. In 2010, when Knowles frst visited Bethlehem, he was hosted by the Sisters, whom he reciprocally began to teach iconography. And in 2015, when Knowles established the Bethlehem Icon Centre, complete with an icon classroom and workshop, he would receive institutional support from the Greek Catholic patriarchate. Knowles, a former Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, and the Benedictine Emmanuel sisters, who follow a Byzantine liturgy entwined with rituals of the Orthodox and Latin rite, are non-Orthodox Christians, engaging in a traditionally Eastern Orthodox “aesthetic formation” (Luehrmann 2018). Their understandings of the sacred place and ritual role of the icon could thus be interpreted as less orthodox, perhaps explaining how the emplacement of such a holy icon of the Theotokos upon such an unholy surface was even conceived. However, the icon of “Our Lady” reveals the way theological understandings of the icon collide with a historically inflected imaginary of the icon’s revelational possibility. Her unorthodox appearance is thus an index of a very local understanding of the icon, as “Our Lady” “lives” in the interstices of Israel’s border project. Moreover, the commissioning of “Our Lady” also followed the 2009 Catholic Synod of Bishops in Vatican City, when Pope Benedict XVI held a Special Assembly for the Middle East. Benedict declared that there were fundamental issues facing Christians in the Middle East, of which he named violence in the name of God and the integrity of the family. To highlight these issues, Benedict drew on the story of the pregnant woman from the book of Revelation, whom Benedict said was symbolic of the suffering state of the Church in the Middle East. This metaphorical orientation of the Church as a suffering mother was interpreted by Knowles to symbolize the Palestinian Christian woman “who must give birth to the next generation of Christians, but ‘evil’ is trying to intercede and destroy this regeneration.” Like Toribio Romo, the family is a central nodal point of concern within the Catholic imaginary. For Knowles and the Emmanuel Sisters, the Separation Wall is the materialization of evil in space. It is an unholy infrastructure that works in sinister ways upon the local populations of the Holy Land, further dividing communities and prompting more sectarian violence. The emplacement of such a holy icon into the drab, industrialized concrete Wall was thus an affective orientation into the “evil” of the Wall, sacralizing its material evilness with divine presence. Fears of divided communities and sectarianism are par-

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ticularly salient for a former Anglican Catholic, and for an Eastern Catholic community committed to bridging the gap between the East and West. They are also reflective of the role of the Melkite Catholic Church in contemporary Palestine, often also called and described as the “Arab Church” because of its employment of Arab clergymen and its pastoral care for the local Palestinian congregation. “Our Lady” thus reverberates with the Melkite Church’s affective historical orientation to the locally made icon and its transformative possibility, but also in its relation to a politics of pastoral care that is said to be foregrounded by the Melkite Church. One day, Connie stood with Ian on the driveway of the Emmanuel Monastery, gazing silently upon Our Lady. Ian turned to Connie and said, “You know, if you asked me, is this icon political? I would say yes, this icon is political, precisely because ‘politics’ are about ‘the polis,’ the public space. It’s about how people live together, work together. And when you can’t do that, when you can’t live with your neighbor, it’s a failure of politics. This Wall is a failure of politics. And this icon is a contradiction into that failure, a contradiction of good and evil into the space.” In focusing on the complexities of these affective narratives and orientations in the icon of Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls, we demonstrate how the icon’s crafting indexes affective histories of uncaring in the Holy Land. In analyzing the nexus of “Our Lady” ’s creation, within a political landscape of Christian diminutive status and against the structures of the Israeli Occupation, the icon of Our Lady and its emplacement on the Separation Wall reveals a material critique of Christian suffering. The icon’s performativity as a “living icon” gives insight into the sacrality that is made manifest at the borderlands, where an affective history of uncaring is most salient. This is why an icon, at the borderlands, as it is oriented in space and toward affective histories, may unravel and reveal that which is other wise knotted. Similarly, in the icon of Toribio Romo, affective histories in Toribio Romo’s hagiography are foregrounded to inspire his veneration as the patron saint of migrants. In the icon’s creation, Sister Nancy Lee cites the affective histories of uncaring in Detroit, in the archdiocese, and in American policies of immigration. In its orientation, the icon of Toribio Romo makes present a saintly wholeness that indexes migrant families, striving to stay whole. That the icon bears an indexical placard within the iconographic space prismatically indexes the affective history of caring and uncaring in the Catholic Church and beyond. As such, the icon of Santo Toribio Romo bears a material critique of that which it seeks to sanctify, at the borderlands.

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In both the icons of Santo Toribio Romo and Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls, iconography can be read within a re-envisioning of sociality. They are both icons written by Catholic actors, and as such are committed to a particularly Catholic theological intervention into formations of the family. Embedded within their iconographic spaces are subtle critiques of the uncaring of the state and how that is made manifest most explicitly at the border. These critiques can also be read interwoven within the icon as a material knot within the American Catholic tradition in Detroit, but also the Melkite Catholic tradition in Palestine. In considering their performativity and affective orientations in the landscapes of downtown Detroit and along the Israeli Separation Wall, we have illustrated how the icon may perform subtle critiques that are both aesthetically and theologically concerned with the “dismembering” and violence that occur across walls and among families. These subtle critiques are illuminated in the borderlands, in the places where the icon is created, placed, graced. The multiple orientations and their material potency animate these subtle critiques. The icons of Santo Toribio Romo and Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls highlight the transformative potential of contemporary icon making. In tracing icon making’s historical complexities, and in thinking about the icon’s performativity at the borderland, we have highlighted how icons may be understood as “outposts.” Icons are material knots of religious felds in movement, of society undergoing major social change and upheaval. But icons may also interrupt, or refuse cartographies of borderlands. They may also sanctify insurrecting cartographies and affective orientations, subtly resisting and critiquing the forms of population enclosure and military surveillance that pervades. Saintly and holy icons are indeed for the living. Notes 1. The Cristero Wars (1926–29, and 1933–36) were violent and death-ridden confrontations between the Catholic Church and the state in matter of perceived “religious liberties.” 2. Pope Francis 2013; Napolitano 2019.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boullata, Kamal. 2009. Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present. London: Saqi Books.

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de León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Necroviolence and the Politics of Migrant Death in the Arizona Desert. Berkeley: University of California Press. Francis (Pope). 2013. Evangelii Gaudium: Apostolic Exhortation of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops, Clergy Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World. http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost _exhortations /documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_ 20131124 _evangelii-gaudium.html. Gandolfo, Luisa. 2016. “Transactions, Space and Otherness: Borders and Bound aries in Palestine—Israel.” Journal of Cultural Geography 33 (3): 253–74. Kawas, Saher. 2016. “Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls: An Icon of Christian Resistance.” Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, June 15. https://www.lpj.org /posts/our-lady-who-brings -down-walls-an-icon-of-christian-resistance.html. Kelly, Jennifer Lynn. 2016. “Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and Solidarity in Occupied Palestine.” American Quarterly 68 (3): 723–45. Luehrmann, Sonja, ed. 2018. Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mayblin, Maya, Kristin Norget, and Valentina Napolitano. 2017. “Introduction.” In The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Companion Reader, edited by Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Maya Mayblin, 1–29. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meneley, Anne. 2011. “Blood, Sweat and Tears in a Bottle of Palestinian Olive Oil.” Food, Culture and Society 14 (2): 275–90. Mondzain, Marie-Jose. 2004. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Muehlmann, Shaylih. 2013. Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Napolitano. Valentina. 2016. Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Challenge to the Roman Catholic Church. New York: Fordham University Press. Napolitano, Valentina. 2017. “ ‘The Globalization of Indifference’: On Pope Francis, Migration and Global Acedia.” In Market and Morality, edited by Daromir Rudnyckyj and Fillipo Osella, 263–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Napolitano, Valentina. 2019. “ ‘Francis, a Criollo Pope.’ ” Religion and Society 10:63–80. O’Mahony, Anthony. 2005. “The Vatican, Jerusalem, the State of Israel, and Christianity in the Holy Land.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 5 (2): 123–46. Salih, Ruba, and Sophie Richter-Devroe. 2014. “Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect.” Arab Studies Journal 22 (1): 8–27. Stadler, Nurit. 2020. Voices of the Ritual: Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso. Wilson, Thomas M., and Hastings Donnan, eds. 2012. A Companion to Border Studies. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Winegar, Jessica. 2006. Creative Reckonings: the Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Digging The Spiritual-Material Imagination of (Dis)possession in Mardin, Southeast Turkey Zerrin Özlem Biner

“They dug everywhere while we were away. They flled all these rooms with the dirt from the holes. There is a rumor that something is hidden in this house. They even believe that we have already taken it away. Absolutely wrong. Even if we had tried, we would not have been able to. Even the best technology cannot break the magic spell. The jinn [cinler] would not let us do it.” Yașar was talking and pointing out the holes in the ground floor of the three-story mansion. The house had originally been owned by an Armenian family killed during the 1915 Armenian Genocide and was later turned into an elementary school. Yașar’s family, Kurds from Mardin, bought it from the National Estate Agent in 1958. His family and the house were subjects of curiosity in Mardin. They were regarded as landowners and notables and at the same time, the “diggers” of their own home. In his early ffties, Yașar, who had been living in Istanbul for the past twenty years, had recently returned to Mardin in order to take care of their ruined property. Selim and Yașar were old acquaintances. Selim had the rented part of the mansion for three years while Yașar’s parents were still living there. Selim was looking at the many fgures carved in the stone arches with a mixture of adoration and while Yașar was training his flashlight on the wells, the basements, the excavated holes and dark corners. “This is a haunted house,” Yașar said. “I saw a scorpion three or four years ago, and my brother saw the same

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one yesterday entering this hole. I looked for it and could not fnd it. I opened the bricks but still could not see it. It was gone.” Selim added to Yașar’s excitement. “I would have helped you get into the hole, but I’m scared of scorpions and snakes. This is an historical house that God protects.” Yașar changed the topic and his tone, and turned toward me. “Might I now learn what are you doing here?” In this chapter, I focus on the lives of people who own, repair, and dig for buried treasure in their stone houses in Mardin’s Old City in southeastern Turkey.1 I am interested here in the ways in which locals like Selim and Yașar dispossess, re-possess, inhabit, and dig up historical buildings identifed as emblematic of cultural heritage in the conflict-ridden environment of the Kurdish region. Between 2000 and 2015, the intense military conflict between the PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane, Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish state was suspended through democratization packages (demokrasi paketi) and peace negotiations that produced a fragile transition period between emergency and normalcy, war and peace. In this political context, the multiethnic historic city of Mardin populated by Kurds, Arabs, Syriac Christians, and Turks became a showcase for local cultural heritage, religious tourism, and restoration projects. Both locals and the government rushed to engage in heritage-related activities. In 2009, the local government (valilik) in Mardin initiated a new state-funded restoration project known as “historical transformation project” (tarihi dönüșüm projesi). It was designed to uncover the original stone façades of the city by removing the cement structures that had been built as extensions or separate buildings over the previous ffty years. The project was to be used as tangible evidence of “care” so that Turkey could apply for further funding from EU institutions and, ultimately, for UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Dreams of this coveted status have lingered since 2000, when the Turkish state sought to advance its political projects of “neoliberal multiculturalism” (Hale 2005) through reclamation of political territory in the conflict region and re-establishment of credibility in the eyes of transnational actors. This impossible project took on a ghostly quality with the approach of 2015, the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. The timing of the restoration project turned the project into a sobering opportunity to demonstrate the Turkish state’s “sensitivity” to the historical legacy of absent “others,” despite official denial of their extermination under Ottoman imperial rule. In 2015, the project was still in progress. Yet, the peace process came to an end, resulting in a reacceleration of the military conflict, use of repressive measures, and destruction of the human and

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built environments of the towns and villages surrounding the city of Mardin. Having witnessed a decade of post-emergency development in the province of Mardin, I decided to conduct ethnographic feldwork between 2013 and 2015 on the material, emotional, and historical connections between people and stone houses. In the Old City, most of the stone houses were originally owned and abandoned by the Armenian families who were either killed or forced to leave during the 1915 genocide and its aftermath. Mardinites, particularly Arabs, were reluctant to acknowledge the history of ownership. And yet it inhabits everyday talk in Mardin through various forms of “public secrecy” (Taussig 1999). I was used to the spellbinding effects that public secrets in Mardin can have on the knowing and revealing of the histories behind these confscated and occupied Armenian properties (Biner 2010). But I was completely unaware of the jinn that wait in the cracks of these buildings for the digger-owners looking for treasure. Too many uncertainties and too many ghosts meant that it was most often impossible to craft an impartial, consistent account of the past. I decided on a different path for studying the historical, one that does not insist on the need for truth, but instead accepts the unresolvable paradox that permits the provision of a hospitable space for spectral house dwellers “out of a concern for justice” (Gordon 2008, 60).2 The scorpion knew one of the entrances to the stone house. The jinn knew the spot where the treasure was buried inside the house. What was the connection between these beings? What clues could they provide? In my research during this period, daily life was flled with overnight success narratives about people who were imagined to have found treasure, received permission to construct high-rise apartment buildings on their infertile, rocky, previously valueless land, transformed their stone houses into hotels, or received state funding for restoration. The uncertainty of the peace process was fraught with fear of the future and an acute, pragmatic desire to gain access to resources and benefts. In this context of urgency and ambition, digging was regarded as the most prevalent daily activity undertaken by a network of people from different ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds. They might be digging up their own house or someone else’s property. It was compulsive. With little cultural or economic capital, people would dig until they ran out of money. They flled up the holes and dug until they encountered the jinn that guard the treasure. While they speculated that the jinn must dwell in these houses either as guardians of buried treasure or simply as longtime residents, they dared not

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spell out the jinn’s purpose in its specifcs. The diggers knew that they had to communicate with these spiritual beings in order to convince them to release the treasure. And at all costs, the desiring digger-owners had to avoid becoming possessed by the jinn as they worked to possess the object guarded by them. This chapter is about dispossession, its moral, material, and spiritual underpinnings, and its potential as a category for exploring connections between subjectivity and property ownership. By defnition, the verb to dispossess implies depriving someone of land, property, or other possessions. As a deverbal transitive noun that always takes an object, dispossession is an ambiguous term that can be used in both the active sense to refer to the practice of dispossessing another and in the passive sense to refer to the experience of being dispossessed by another. In the frst instance, the subject is the agent; in the second, the subject is the target of agency. In this article, I use the term dispossession in two ways: in reference to the agentive practices of digging in an attempt to fnd and possess the treasure or belongings of others buried inside or underneath stone houses, and as a way of denoting the spiritual and material experiences of being dispossessed of one’s self by jinn (called spiritual and/or jinn possession) who are themselves signifcant agents of the treasure-hunting practices that haunt and transform subjectivities. My presentation of the ethnographic material focuses on the jinn and considers the relationship between jinn and humans as a form of dispossession in which the self is targeted by and subjected to the force of a spirit (see Crapanzano 1980, 1992; Mageo and Howard 1996; Lambek 1993, 1996). Here, I explore the nature of the relationship between dispossession of the self by jinn and dispossession of property by diggers. In tracing this connection, my analysis of dispossession attempts a conceptual and ethnographic merging of spirituality and materiality, destruction and restoration, ruination and heritage, the reality of poverty and fantasies about sudden enrichment. Dispossession refers to a form of life defned by local belonging, religiosity, spiritual beings, property ownership, and the heritage-centered economies of protracted conflict. In their discussions of dispossession, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (2013) enumerate the many advantages of denaturalizing and politicizing the connection between property and the moral concepts of personhood and agency. Their project is to discover ways to break the ontological relationship between having and being and to displace the centrality of land and property ownership to contemporary subject formation within “(post)colonial

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capitalist western modernity” (12–13). They lay out their critical concern on two separate and connected levels. First, they examine the links between, one the one hand, the fundamental role that dispossession plays in subject formation within structures of power and the resulting “passionate attachments” of dependency that keep the subject caught in webs of subordination and exploitation (1), and, on the other hand, the violence involved in the dispossession of the rights, lives, and property by “normative and normalizing powers” (2). Thus, they argue, dispossession is fundamentally involved in both subject formation and property ownership. Second, they wonder what kind of countermovement to these dual senses of dispossession can unsettle the defnition of human subjectivity as necessarily propertied. Here, they call for the construction of new idioms of critical agency that may be brought about by “radically questioning the persistent racialized and sexualized ontoepistemologies of self-contained and property-owning subjectivity” (27). These new forms of agency, then, should change the notion and place of the human in a manner that might subvert the norms of “ready-made identities” and open “the human to radical rearticulations of humanness” (34). For these authors, such a call requires a relational view of life that rethinks the materiality of the human through “amalgamations and reassemblages of the animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, animal and human animal, life and death” (37). I concur with Butler and Athanasiou’s argument that in our search for a way to make ethics congruent with politics, we must elaborate other ways of imagining the self. Yet their vision for these new forms of agency relies on psychoanalytic and secularist approaches that do not include spiritual beings as part of the nonhuman. As such, it does not envision the relationship between spirits and humans as a means for subject formation. Ethnography, on the other hand, can provide the critical and dialogic means with which to explore the place of the human within a new space of connection to nonhuman agents that together may enable critical agency to challenge proper(tied) subjectivities. The ethnographic material here focuses on the relationship between jinn and humans in the form of dispossession wherein the self is subjected to the force of a spirit as an external idiom. In other words, what happens when we explore dispossession not as part of an internal process of subject formation, but, as anthropologists suggest (Crapanzano 1980, 1992; Mageo and Howard 1996; Lambek 1993, 1996), as the possession of the self by a spiritual or demonic idiom that comes not from the inner self but from an element ex-

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ternal to the individual? Could the experience of dispossession of the self by jinn lead to a new ethical mode of politics concerning the dispossession of property? I begin my discussion of this topic with reflections on the literature on dispossession, property, and spirit possession, and then situate stone houses and the jinn in Mardin. Next, I offer an in-depth analysis of the historical processes and events that have led up to digging and the changing forms of dispossession by which stone houses have been confscated from their original owners by the state and then appropriated, occupied, and repossessed by locals to be transformed into heritage-quality structures in which to dwell and dig. Finally, I turn to my two interlocutors, Mahir and Sonay, a young Mardinite couple who repaired, expanded, restored, and then dug up their house. In the process of physically transforming their house, they themselves have been transformed. Sonay and Mahir’s connection to the material and spiritual realm will open up space in which to engage with multiple moralities and to explore the relationship between spirit possession and dispossession in the context of Mardin.

Property, Jinn, and the Materialist Turn Anthropology’s many contributions to the analysis of property have demonstrated the multiple relationships it entails between people, things, and the environment (Strathern 1999; Hann 1998; Humphrey and Verdery 2004; von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2006). In their project to denaturalize the historically and culturally specifc notion of property-tied subjectivity, anthropologists have documented diverse forms of ownership, indexing in ethnographic detail the many ways in which the material and immaterial aspects of property and ownership have effects on individual subjectivity (Miller 2005; Henare et al. 2007; Collins 2008; Strang and Busse 2011; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Gordillo 2013). This research corroborates these analyses of discrete forms of ownership in an ethnography where appropriation inevitably means dispossession and digging entails appropriation, identifcation, and belonging to land. Through digging and dispossession, I unpack the meaning of propertied subjectivities in contemporary Mardin’s Old City. In addressing these relationships, my approach dwells on expanded meanings of materiality. Materiality in this context refers not only to the production of commodities and the transaction of the exchange value of goods and labor within the

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capitalist and neoliberal economic system, but also to the physical labor invested in destruction and construction of houses and objects and the effects of the built environment on people. Building on the new materialist turn (Latour 2005; Weizman 2007; Coole and Frost 2010; Bennett 2010), I approach materiality as more than an inert substance in my analysis of dispossession, viewing it as an “active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” feld (Coole and Frost 2010, 9) with forces and energies that transgress the distinctions between the human and nonhuman. In the new materialist turn, Bruno Latour (2005,76) proposes an objectcentered approach in which he names material things as “nonhuman actants,” ascribing to them agencies independent of their relationships with humans. According to the interpretation of Latour’s theory offered by Jane Bennett (2010, 9), an actant can be human, nonhuman, or a combination of the two. “An actant is neither an object nor a subject but an ‘intervener’ . . . an operator which by virtue of its par ticular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place in the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.” The difference “needs to be flattened, read horizontally as a juxtaposition rather than vertically a hierarchy of being” (10). In this ethnographic context, I consider the material and spiritual not as background to or as representative of violence, but rather as nonhuman actants (Latour 2005) that transform regulate, mediate, and act upon the experience of violence. However, my analysis differs from the new materialist turn at several levels. Here, I consider the jinn neither as nonhuman agents that exist exteriorly as separate and clearly bounded entities nor as spirits with value and agency equal to that of humans. Rather, I choose to trace the many relationships between the human and the nonhuman in their historical and political specifcity rather than in their ontological generality (see NavaroYashin 2012; Kohn 2015). The jinn act at least partially as what Bruno Latour calls mediators (2005, 39): without the free-floating agency of Latour’s examples of mediators, they nevertheless have the potential to “transform, translate, distort and modify” the meaning of interactions that take place within a wider discursive heritage assemblage that emerges from the stone house remains of lost histories. Jinn exist in Mardin not only as spiritual evidence of otherworldly powers existing alongside humans. Through possession’s entanglement with religious beliefs, the daily spectral reality of the jinn is generated from two sources: the materially and affectively charged relationship between the stone houses and the locals and the social relationships

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determined by the political economy of treasure-hunting practices. These latter relationships involve material transactions between diggers, owners of houses or land, illicit traders, and mediators who facilitate communication with the jinn. This coexistence of the stone house, the digger, and the jinn engenders a tripartite relational nexus that is in effect constitutive of property. How do the diggers experience such impasses between their fear of the jinn, religious sensibilities about the forbidden (haram) and the sanctioned (halal), and desire for treasure? What is the connection between jinn possession and property dispossession?

Defining Spirit Possession and Dispossession Discussions of jinn stories in the anthropological literature posit a number of complex psychocultural arrangements involving memory, subjectivity, violence, mental illness, inequality, and religious difference (Crapanzano 1980, 1992; Rothenberg 2004; Pandolfo 2000; Khan 2006; Taneja 2012, 2013). In this line of discussion, spirit possession has long been portrayed as an active communication system, an idiom, where individuals structure, articulate, and interpret their wishes, desires, fears, and sense of loss through their exchange with spirits.3 Individuals use possession to envision a different form of themselves that is not self-bounded and that exists together with other beings in multiple realms. As such, they are flexible, transformative parts of daily experience and existence that produce meanings and practices concerning matters of morality, resistance, and domination (Boddy 1994; Crapanzano 1980; Lambek 1996). In this line of thought, spirit possession has also been interpreted as an act of critique of colonial, national, and global hegemonies, a way to lay bare the destructive effects of colonialism, capitalism, apartheid, and other hegemonies (Taussig 1980; Ong 1988; Lambek 1993; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Taneja 2012, 2013; Gordillo 2013). Inspired by these interpretations, I take jinn possession to be an external idiom of communication and a form of cultural knowledge that allows us to interpret the ordinary sites of the political and the ethical in the conflictridden environment of the city of Mardin. Here, I explore the question of whether or not possession by jinn opens up space for new articulations of critical agency that can resist the political and economic hegemonies in Mardin and the Kurdish regions. Intimately tangled up with violence and material dispossession, does jinn possession hold the promise of a new politics of

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ethics? I argue that jinn possession in effect exists in entanglement with violence and dispossession, not against it. Seen as a practice, jinn possession both constitutes and is constitutive of the material and political conditions that underlie the processes of exploitation, repression, and dispossession in Mardin. Possession by jinn in Mardin does not end in the articulation of a critique of Ottoman or Republican violence. Nor is it an expression by the jinn-possessed of their repressed desires or petitions concerning their domination within the various structures of power that they endure. As opposed to the jinn, who retain their own agency separate from that of humans, those who are possessed and haunted by the jinn fnd their own agency cramped and hemmed in. Stretched across the tension between their willingness to act as jinn-possessed mediators for treasure hunters, their own obsession with the search for treasure and property, and their fear of an encounter with the jinn, human agency in this ethnography remains fraught with (dis)possessions.

Jinn in Mardin The concept of the existence of jinn, of there being a relationship between the jinn and humans, is widely accepted across the Islamic world (see Lebling 2011; Khan 2006; Taneja 2012, 2013). Within the discursive space of everyday life in Mardin, my interlocutors refer to the jinn as special beings created by God whose origin predates Islam and whose existence is mentioned in the Quran. These Mardinites point to their Muslim identity and the spatial proximity of Mardin to Gırnavaz, a Neolithic archaeological site on the Turkish–Syrian border, as the main evidence for their coexistence with the jinn. In their spatial and political imagination, the jinn appear as spiritual remnants of the periodic occupations that the city of Mardin has been subject to historically. Since antiquity, untold empires, kingdoms, and tribes have conquered and collapsed, their subjects vanished or spread in diaspora across the world. The jinn have remained as the site’s originary residents. Alongside Mardinite implicit knowledge, the jinn have recently been recalled in Mardin’s tourism booklets where they feature as intangible artifacts of the region’s Mesopotamian cultural heritage. According to the locals, the jinn live in dark, damp places: cemeteries, public bathhouses, narrow walled street corners, basements, old stone houses. They appear in various shapes: as scorpions, snakes, birds, cows; as humans

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or hybrid creatures half-human, half-animal. Should the jinn occupy a public site, the locals give repeated warnings to passers-by to cite the name of God so as to avoid its appearance or attack. The relationship between the jinn and humans takes different forms: love, hatred, protection, warfare, punishment (Crapanzano 1980, 1992; Pandolfo 2000; Rothenberg 2004; Khan 2006; Taneja 2013), and can create destructive and disruptive effects in the form of haunting and possession. Mardinites describe haunting effects with reference to the jinn’s ability to move things in and around the house, to make sounds, or to become visible in different shapes and forms, even to leave marks on bodies. Distinct from haunting, possession entails the jinn’s capacity to enter into and seize bodily and mental control of an individual. Possession shows itself through trance, epilepsy-like attacks, sudden fainting, and loss of consciousness. A breach in moral conduct, the flouting of religious obligations, and the weakening of physical strength can turn a person into an easy target for the jinn. Punishment and revenge are also reasons for possession. Or the jinn may choose to possess a human for reasons of attraction and passion, choosing in par ticular to live in women’s bodies. A woman might choose to continue hosting a jinn in her body, to remain possessed as a subject or target of desire and passion. Sudden and unexpected events may cause possession by jinn: burning a jinn or its children by way of cleaning bodies and places with hot water is the most common account for inexplicable possession. The jinn can also be motivated to possess bodies through mischief-making, envy, or the evil intentions of one person toward another. People avoid taking baths on Wednesdays and Saturdays. They cite the name of God (Allah) before they drop hot water onto surfaces. They keep needles in young girls’ dowry chests so as to prevent her being abducted or possessed by the jinn before marriage. The jinn can take the appearance of a human being and work as a servant or as someone from a different religion. Muslim locals talk about the presence of the Muslim jinn, Christian jinn, and Jewish jinn and compare and contrast their characters given their attitude toward diggers at the excavation sites. People often go to healers or sheikhs, who act as intermediaries between the jinn and the possessed and counter the destructive effects of possession. Sheikhs are expected to diagnose the jinn’s presence, explain the reason for the attack, and prepare special prayers for the protection of the possessed from repossession. To release buried treasure from the jinn, sheikhs either communicate directly with the jinn or persuade good-natured jinn to possess the bodies and minds of children who act as mediums.4 This possession

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manifests itself therefore as trance. The possessed child either reports in a nonstop narrative what she sees or hears from the jinn that guards the treasure, or she channels the conversation between the good-natured jinn that has possessed her and the guardian jinn that possesses the treasure. The trance ends when the sheikh gives up his attempt to release the treasure from the guardian jinn’s possession, recalls the good-natured jinn, and releases the child-medium from its possession. In his interpretation of the presence of the jinn as a poetics of postcolonial loss inscribed in the Muslim landscapes of Delhi, Taneja describes the roles of the long-lived jinn as transmitters of theological authority that connect humans from different times and as eyewitnesses that remember events that took place a long time ago (2013, 141–42). He argues that an orientation toward Islamic theology emerges when the genealogies of human memory are “confronted with the amnesic forces of an obliterated landscape” (139) and are then superseded by an “other-temporality” involving jinn (142), which he calls jinnealogy. In his view, jinnealogy provides “ironic commentary on the impossibility of human memory, on the destruction of the intricate webs of genealogy, memory, and belonging . . . in the post-Partition city” (142). I fnd the idea of jinnealogy signifcant. Taneja’s interpretation of the jinn inserting other temporalities as historical eyewitnesses resonates in the case of Mardin. As described above, Mardinites perceive the jinn as part of the historical and cultural heritage they have inherited through their strong connection to Islamic theology and through the histories of occupation the city of Mardin was subjected to. Yet I am reluctant to interpret the meaning of jinn stories as image/counterimage to the illegible violence of the state. The role of the jinn as transmitters of authority from bygone eras does not necessarily settle once and for all the many meanings attached to loss or violence. It need not generate practices of conflict resolution about the past or practices that act upon the politics of the present.5 Living with the jinn creates a state of permanent disruption of meanings and allows open-ended interpretations of the past and the present. Possession and dispossession happens not simply in relation to what has been transferred from the past, but also in relation to what has never been named or what was misnamed in the past.6 In what follows, I will describe the historical and political settings where Mardin’s oldest residents, the jinn, dwell, illustrating the various historical and political forms that dispossession of the property, particularly dispossession of the stone houses, take. While a complete history of dispossession

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in Mardin is outside the scope of this chapter,7 an abridged ethnography of the connections between the changing ownership of the houses and various forms of belonging and identifying with property follows.

Mardin’s Many Layers of Dispossession The historical architecture of the Old City of Mardin is shaped through a layering of ruined stone buildings from different historical periods. The city sits at the crossroads of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. At the top of the Old City stands the castle. During the eighteenth century, the city was expanded beyond the walls of the castle to the south, where new stone mansions were erected atop ruins dating back to 4500 b.c. Until the nineteenth century, Mardin was home to a cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and multireligious population of Armenians, Syriac Christians, Chaldeans, Jews, Semsis, Kurds, and Arabs. The social and political structure of the city underwent drastic changes as a result of the Ottoman government’s heavy-handed measures during World War I (Aydin et al. 2000). The 1915 Armenian Genocide and its aftermath led to a long period of destruction and dispossession in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire (see Üngör 2011; Altuğ 2013). With the exception of those who converted to Islam or pretended to belong to the Syriac Christian community, the presence of Armenian locals was erased from the city. Armenian property was destroyed and looted, then dispossessed through legal orders enacted by the Ottoman authorities that allowed for their confscation and liquidation (see Ternon 2013; Çetinoğlu 2013; Üngör and Polatel 2013). The new Turkish state adapted this approach and enacted the law of emval-i metruke (abandoned properties) which legitimized the dispossession of the property of those Ottoman citizens who had left during the war and who had not returned before the publication of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923. When a property was considered to have been “abandoned,” a liquidation commission would liquidate it through the treasury, giving it either to local Muslim and Syriac Christian residents or to newcomers whose properties elsewhere had been demolished by the government or the enemy during the war (Üngör and Polatel 2013, 56–57). In this way, the state allocated houses belonging to Armenian families to local Kurdish, Arab, and Syriac Christian families who had participated in the extermination of their neighbors and to the Muslim migrant population of Chechens who had been expelled from their hometowns after the Balkan Wars (Çetinoğlu 2013).

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Property continued to change hands over the next three decades due to economic and political migration movements in the region and throughout Turkey. In the 1950s, affluent local Arab and Syriac Christian families who were the frst occupier-owners of these houses sold the properties to recently arrived wealthy Kurdish families and other local Arab and Syriac Christian families before they left the city. Well-off Kurdish families who made their money as landowners, traders, or smugglers began to use concrete to extend their stone houses by building additions or new floors. Families without means who settled in single rooms in the stone houses used concrete to build walls separating their space from that of their neighbors with whom they shared a courtyard. In 1979, the Old City was declared a cultural heritage site and three hundred stone houses were registered as cultural patrimony. But following the 1980 military coup and the state of emergency enacted during the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state, the status of the Old City as a protected historical area became all but irrelevant. In 2000, when the intense military conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state came to a temporary end, Mardin was a spatially and socially segregated city. The Old City itself was a zone of abandonment and neglect inhabited by a mixed population of Arabs, Mhallamis, Kurds, and Syriac families, the majority of whom lived behind closed doors on properties that belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Church Foundation. In 2001, the Turkish Ministry of Culture nominated the Old City for UNESCO World Heritage Site candidacy as part of the post-emergency rehabilitation projects. The end of the intense military conflict and the lifting of the state of emergency attracted new visitors, culturally sensitive tourists, and national and international experts with the aim of implementing various projects to rehabilitate the city in a way that would enhance Mardin’s bid to become a World Heritage Site. Mardin’s World Heritage Site application was submitted to UNESCO in early 2003. A few months later, officials withdrew the application due to a negative evaluation report from the International Council on Monuments and Sites. The stone buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged during the addition of concrete structures. Despite the withdrawal of the application, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had come to power in 2002, supported the local government and municipality and continued to push the projects further in an effort to promote the city’s cultural heritage. While these spatially oriented policies led to new accumulation strategies, the daily imaginary was fraught with discourses and practices surrounding change in and exchanges of the built environment—selling a house, buying a house,

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securing funds for restoration, waiting for demolition of cement structures. Heritage-quality houses have altered social coin in Mardin’s public space, assigning their residents new status in the value system of the national and global market. House owners recognize this as an opportunity to increase the economic value of their property. Some have restored their houses, believing that exposure of the original stones will return lost value to their property. Some have begun searching for treasure believed to be buried beneath their houses, which they see as the real source of property value. Some have done both. In the Old City of Mardin, the line between restoration, reparation, and digging has become blurred.8

Digging Up the Old City Digging has been an ongoing form of ruination in the city of Mardin and in other parts of Turkey. In Turkey’s internal colonized geographies, it is a signifcant component of the looting economy enmeshed with foundational violence (cf. Navaro-Yashin 2012; von Bieberstein 2017). In Mardin, the abandoned spaces of churches, houses, tunnels, caves, and bathhouses had always been attractive to the locals, particularly to those who remained in the city after the massacres and displacements. What had changed, however, was the frequency and visibility of treasure-hunting practices. People boldly talked about digging for treasure, publicly revealing both their desire for sudden wealth and their curiosity about history. The publicity and speculative value of the houses inspired fantasies about the treasures buried inside. Stories from eyewitnesses about pots of gold coins found during infrastructure and refurbishment activities spread throughout the cities, towns, and villages of the Kurdish region (see von Bieberstein 2017). The stories circulating were of the improbable experience of fnding an item with real exchange value and gaining recognition through the value it fetched on the market. Here, hazine (treasure) was a generic term that referred to many different objects with a high exchange value: gold coins, jewelry, stone carvings, and other objects that could be turned into cash. Diggers often refused to reveal the nature of the objects they had found or the knowledge they had concerning their probable owners. Diggers were not only poor, unemployed, or underprivileged. They included painters, plumbers, construction workers, housewives, teachers, and both old-moneyed and newly wealthy Mardinites who bought old stone mansions and turned them into luxury hotels. People perceived the flow of cultural

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and economic capital into the Old City as further proof of what they had believed for many years: that previous residents had left buried treasure behind; that it is the sacred belongings of Christians and Jews that underpins the economic value of these houses. This imagined source of wealth created a new network of actors that included restoration workers, sheikhs, magicians, jinn experts, estate agents, and lenders who facilitated the organization of the search and removal of treasure. In the daily act of digging, religious, ethnic, and political differences have been worked into the weave of the desire for hoarding, the ruined heritage generating capital for all. During my last visit, in March 2017, in the midst of the new war between the PKK and the Turkish state, digging was still an ongoing practice beneath the stone houses in the Old City, undertaken diligently if more secretly. Unlike earlier times, people were now reluctant to talk and dig in an open manner. Digging continued to shape both people’s relationship to the built environment and the invisible economy of the city and the region. When they could not dig, people continued the practices through transactions, selling and buying illicit objects that they had earlier found and stored inside or beneath their houses, in the tunnels that lie underneath the city, or in remote villages. To explore the connection between jinn possession and property dispossession, I begin with the stories of people who have spent their whole lives in pursuit of possessing and repossessing their stone houses as their only property, then move to the parts of their story that contain multiple encounters with the jinn. For those who shared with me their experience of possession, past, present, and future coalesce around a central story of dual transformation of the house and the self.

Inside and Beneath the House The house was cool and dark, with a beam of light coming through the door and up the high ceilings before hitting the stone walls. The interior was full of objects—flowers, furniture of different sizes including big armchairs with embroidered pillows, a bureau with a mirror, a dinner table with chairs, and a child’s bunk bed, all in one room. The main room opened onto two smaller rooms and a bathroom. One of the rooms was a little cave. The other was a spacious bedroom decorated with shiny purple linens. There was not a single empty spot in the room except for a space near the high ceiling. The light was reflected by glistening objects: crystal lamps, candleholders, mirrors, a big TV.

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Mahir and Sonay had been introduced to me as a family that had put all of their resources into the restoration of their home. They were longtime residents of the Old City. Poor but hardworking, they were aware of the value of what they owned and where they lived. They were familiar with the critical discourse on “promoted” cultural heritage, “enforced” multiculturalism, and “confscated” Armenian properties. They peppered their fragmented biographies with disclaimers emphasizing the transaction history of their house. Mahir’s family, a Mardinite Arab family, did not acquire the property through confscation or seizure. The house had originally been owned by a Syriac Christian family. His father bought it from a Muslim family who had purchased it from the Christians. In the 1960s, his father expanded the house by building three floors on top of the original structure. The elder brothers settled in the new floors. After his military ser vice, Mahir returned to Mardin and moved into the original stone part of his family home. Mahir believed that there was no spiritual or material trace of dispossession in their life. Theirs was a story of conversion and repossession of a property that they had fnally managed to enjoy after years of bearing the burden of having inherited it. The physical transformations involved in the inheritance and splitting the property between the brothers after his father died, the damage done to the stone architecture through the addition of the cement structure, and the ongoing treasure-hunting excavations were all part of the uncontrollable contingencies of life. But theirs was not a narrative about rupture or loss. For Mahir, the only aspect of the story that could be regarded as exceptional was the fact that they had managed to restore their house and return it to its original stone structure with such limited resources. They frst built a bathroom. Then they extended the kitchen. Next, Mahir and his four brothers bought the one-room stone house next to theirs and connected them up. The next step was to remove the cement from the stone walls. They researched traditional techniques for changing the texture of the walls and the floors and explored potential connections between the interiors and exteriors above and beneath the house. Sonay visited hotels and other restored buildings and studied how their owners had treated the stone. Motivated by their own needs as inhabitants and by the public fantasies that circulated about the stone houses, Mahir and Sonay invested all of their money and effort in restoration. Houses once regarded as caves were being turned into heritage properties and people once regarded as terrorists were now seen as cultured and civilized. Mahir was happy with this public imaginary.

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When I frst asked them about the treasures buried inside the houses, Mahir and Sonay seemed indifferent and claimed that they were not interested, saying that treasures existed only as rumors in Mardin. When I asked them if they had ever dug up their house, their demeanor changed. Digging had a different connotation, particularly for Mahir. The real Mardinites who had grown up as wanderers were sensitive to the different textures of the landscape. They would go up to the mountains surrounding the city. They would explore the caves in the vicinity of the city. They would dig as part of their exploration. Mahir spent his younger days walking through the water tunnels that run beneath the city. The experience of walking underground profoundly affected his perception of textures, surfaces, and movements in his surroundings. Then again, he was a plumber. He was interested in architecture and the mechanisms of wells and water tunnels. “I have the courage to go into the tunnels. I’ve done it before and I can do it again. I am not afraid of snakes, monsters, or whatever.” He could map connections beneath and above the surface. He was alert to the smallest of movements around him. Digging was not a new practice. Both Muslims and Christians had started digging up empty houses before. Muslims had learned to make sense of the sites of their Christian neighbors and were now excavating their own houses. According to Mahir, the practice of digging up one’s own house had started twenty years before. Prior to that, people would not have dared to dig up the houses they inhabited together with their families because they were generally one-room houses like the one he had lived in with his paternal family before he got married to Sonay. Now, destruction and restoration, and the reality of poverty and fantasies about getting rich went hand in hand, like two sides of a mirror. “One morning when we were at work restoring the house,” Mahir explained, “I noticed that the water flow changed direction while I was cleaning the floor.” After watching this happen for a few minutes, Mahir became curious and called a few people he trusted. He marked off the area in the main room and they began to dug there. They discovered two marble graves, six marble boxes measuring thirty-fve by thirty centimeters with pistols lying beside them. Each time Mahir repeated the description of what he saw, he offered more information about the size of the boxes and the tombs. “Give me a piece of paper,” he said. “I can’t read or write, but I do not forget what I see.” He drew an image of the excavation site, which was located just a few meters under where we were sitting. “I was not the only one who knew that there were tombs underneath this house.” Many people had previously of-

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fered to help him dig up his house. Sonay, Mahir, and the other diggers from the team were afraid of the tombs. Mahir had once worked as a gravedigger, but this was different—it was underneath their living room where they sat, ate, and breathed every day. They closed up the hole. A few years later, Mahir decided to give it another try, this time with a team that included a sheikh. In the middle of the excavation, they felt a sudden movement. The house was shaking. The sheikh, who had gone home to take a short nap, dreamed that the house was crumbling and ran back to Mahir’s house to tell him to close up the hole. Although Mahir was unconvinced, he followed the order. But he not was afraid of an encounter with the unknown. Mahir believed in the presence of jinn, good and bad. One could protect oneself by reciting certain prayers. His curiosity was not laid to rest. In fact, the event only fueled his desire to keep digging.

Dispossessed Selves Mahir saw the house as the only piece of property he would ever inherit and own in his entire life. The house promised a better future. His wife, Sonay, accepted the house as her kader (fate). She had lived in stone houses all of her life. She had actively participated in the maintenance and restoration of the home, and in its destruction. She was attentive to all the material and spiritual changes, motions, and movements in the house. She knew them inside out. Sonay’s life was made up of material and spiritual attachments and labor she invested in looking after her house and family. She learned handicraft skills very early on from her mother, who had learned them from her Syriac Christian neighbors. Her mother had been the main breadwinner, cleaning houses and making handicrafts. Sonay had learned these skills from her mother and used them to run her own household. Like her mother, she was the main breadwinner, making and selling handicrafts and spending the money on maintenance and restoration of the house. Sonay was deeply pious, also as a result of her mother’s influence. When she was ten, she had a serious accident that kept her from walking for a year. She could not worship during that period. Soon after the accident, she had a dream in which a gray-bearded old man told her that she had forgotten how to recite the Quran. Sonay woke up panicked and ashamed. Her mother interpreted the dream as evidence of Sonay’s extremely well-mannered and submissive nature. She believed that it meant that her daughter was an

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admirable believer and that the dream was a sign of God’s will for her return to the Quran. Sonay resumed her religious education with great passion. One day, their landlords visited the house to check for sites to excavate for treasure. They noticed Sonay and thought her to be a naïve, well-mannered young girl. With the permission of her mother, they integrated her into the treasure-hunting business. She was selected to act as the medium between the diggers and the jinn. She was hypnotized. The team’s sheikh sent his benevolent jinn to possess her body and mind so that they could communicate with a guardian jinn that was to take the form of a snake. The jinn in the service of the sheikh was to tell Sonay what to do and Sonay would voice it to others. In the paragraphs that follow, Sonay recounts her trance experience. They hypnotized me. I found myself in a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, I saw three snakes coiled beside a pot, their heads rearing up. The sheikh and the others were telling me what to do. They told me to ask the snakes to withdraw, and the snakes responded, “No, we will not. We are here to protect the pot.” I did every thing I could to get rid of the snakes, but they refused to leave. Then I woke up. The next day, the landowners returned and hypnotized me and sent me into the tunnel again. The snakes were still there, and they again refused to release the pot. I woke up again, and they hypnotized me again. This time, they read a few prayers. The snakes left, and then they told me to open the pot. When I opened it, the treasure inside the pot turned into bees. We could not catch the bees. The sheikh [later] claimed that had we managed to cover them with a cloth or had we had the right words, the right spell, the bees would have turned into gold and fallen on the floor. Soon other people heard about this experience and they too wanted to hypnotize me. The same thing happened. I saw the snakes protecting a pot. This time, they split up, turning into small snakes and then disappearing. After a while, the snakes entered my dreams. I had terrible nightmares. That was the end of it. My mom did not let anyone else approach me ever again for treasure. Later in life, Sonay dreamed about the treasure that the landowners had been searching for. “I dreamed about it three times. I saw the place where the treasure was buried. I told my mother. She was a deep believer, too. She said, ‘We are tenants here. We will leave this place soon. How can we walk out with sin on our shoulders?’ My mom did not let us dig up the house. She

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told me, ‘How can we beneft from something that does not belong to us? How can we make use of it if the Christians who buried it did not beneft from it themselves? Leave it there. It is of no use to us.’ ” These dreams and fears never left Sonay. They followed her to her new house. She had her frst dream the night she moved into her husband Mahir’s house. “He was working that night. I was alone. I heard the sound of hymns coming from the well, like the sound of the azan [the call to prayer]. I lifted the lid. It got louder with the sound of hymns, of the arbanes I recited the name of God. I was clean enough to offer my prayer. There was nothing forbidden in what I was doing. Then I fell asleep. I dreamed about a stone in the kitchen. I lifted it up and oil splashed all over the house.” Sonay told her mother about the dream, and she interpreted it as the sign of future prosperity. After that incident, Sonay was afraid to stay in the house alone. “I was afraid that they [the treasure hunters] would come to this house, to dig a tunnel. They would come and fnd me.” Fears, bad dreams, and real and imagined sounds haunted Sonay in her new home. “It is because I got sick,” she said. “The three-lettered ones [the jinn] were harming me.” Sonay refrains from uttering the word “jinn” for fear of inducing them to manifest themselves. She was possessed by the jinn in one of her relatives’ homes when she went to help them move. Sonay had just started washing down the floors. “I always recite the name of God before I start to do any work.” A few moments later, she was in pain and fainted. When she woke up, everyone was standing around her. She fainted again and lost consciousness. Her tongue was sticking out. She turned purple. She was not in control of herself. Mahir called her mother and relatives to the house and they took her to the sheikh in another town. The sheikh sat down facing a glass of water and asked her, “What happened to you?” Sonay explained, “I saw an image of a headless cow with no skin. She was swishing her tail and running after me.” The sheikh said, “The three letters have come to you.” He laid a piece of paper on top of the water and summoned and talked to the jinn. He said, “They came to you because you burned their children when you dropped hot water on the floor.” The sheikh also said that the jinn told him, “We only wanted to scare her, not harm her.” He prepared a special prayer for protection and gave it to Sonay, but it did not help her. Whenever someone hurt her, she fainted and could not wake up. “I would bite my tongue and my skin would turn purple.” She visited other sheikhs and doctors and received medical treatment in a mental hospital. When I met her, Sonay was feeling better but was still fragile,

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particularly whenever she felt offended or hurt. She was still surrounded by jinn. She saw them in the form of birds or cats every Wednesday and Saturday. “They bother me whenever I make a mistake.” Sonay did not mention what might have hurt or offended her. She never mentioned any issues with Mahir or her family of origin. She used narratives of economic survival to describe her life, focusing on the factors that had pushed her to work hard from an early age, the spiritual and affective labor that put her in charge of worshiping God and caring for others, including the elders of her Syriac Christian neighbors, and encounters with the jinn. She identifed the jinn as the main cause of her grief and constant anxiety. She never explained why her parents had allowed her to be subjected to the trance and the possible destructive effects of the jinn in the frst place. Her mother had not opposed her possession by the jinn under the supervision of the sheikhs who were working with the treasure hunters, although she had prevented the dispossession of treasure that did not belong to their family. All she had done was to interpret Sonay’s dreams in which she saw the location of the treasure buried in the house. But she had stopped there. Sonay never explained this contradiction, perhaps because she did not perceive it as one. In her narratives, Sonay inhabited her own agency and power in dreamlike moments when she could see the invisible and the hidden without relying on the sheikh’s instructions. Yet she attributed her vulnerability to the jinn to her early encounter with them. She believed it possible that her possession by the jinn during the search for treasure had impaired her mental and physical capacities and had turned her into an easy target for possessive spirits. All of her possessions by the jinn took place in the stone houses against her will. Her fears literally materialized in these places. The stone houses shaped her fate in life. She knew that she would always be vulnerable to the spirits, would always feel the smack of the jinn’s hands on her face whenever she felt hurt or vulnerable. Her connection to the jinn world did not emancipate her or give her space in which to articulate her thoughts or desires. Both her accidental and forced engagements with the jinn involved the desires of others, either that of treasure hunters or of jinn injured by the touch of hot water. She held onto her religiosity so as to protect herself from the destructiveness of the jinn, and her religiosity strengthened her connection to that otherworldliness. Sonay remained tied to her dreams and vulnerable to the attacks of the jinn. Yet at the same time, she was the sole breadwinner and continued to invest her entire salary in the running of the household and the restoration

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of the house. She continued the renovation until Mahir decided to open up another hole in the floor.

The Promise of Possession Returning to the initial questions of this ethnography, what does the narrative of Mahir and Sonay reveal about double forms of dispossession and possession? What does an anthropology of dispossession reveal when we ground our analysis in the stuff of other forms of life outside that of the human? Throughout this article, I have studied dispossession by mapping out an interdependent and interrelational mode of life between the human and the nonhuman, which includes both spiritual beings and material entities. Viewing ethnographic life in this dual mode allows for diverse forms of imagining the self, agency, and responsibility, forms that operate spontaneously across multiple realms of life—the visible and invisible, the material and spiritual, the worldly and otherworldly. These interdependent modes attest to two different classes of imagination: one is related to space and matter, houses, and stone; the other to spiritual connections and insights that take form in dreams or communication with the jinn. My informants experienced these realms of spirituality and materiality as complementary and supplementary to each other. Access to these double modes of life allowed them to move between the different forms of dispossession. In the case of Sonay and Mahir, the spatial knowledge accumulated through dwelling and digging, the longing to possess, and possession by the jinn displaced the subject outside of the boundaries of the inner self, thereby creating an interrelational agent that both acted upon others and was itself acted upon (Mittermaier 2012). The protagonists of this ethnography were aware of these interdependent forms of coexistence. They were conscious of the limits to their agency. Sonay knew that her strong spirituality would attract desire-flled dreams that would allow her to see the treasure. She also knew that she could not control whether or not she had the dreams. Her relationship with the jinn followed a parallel pattern. As the pious young teenager, she was possessed by benevolent jinn and mediated communication with guardian jinn. But her mediation could not force release of the treasure. The jinn retained their own agency, even to the point of being able to stop excavation by creating physical movements such as changing the direction of flowing water or making the earth shake,

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as happened at Mahir and Sonay’s house, or, as they believed, by barring access to the treasure or changing its place or form. As the possessing spirit, the jinn could paralyze the body and mind of an individual as an expression of anger or rage for having been harmed. Both inside and outside the excavation practices, the jinn acted as agents that regulated, distorted, and negotiated the material, moral, and social relationships. They mediated the outer edges of dispossession at the material and spiritual levels. On the other hand, jinn possession did not open up new felds for alternative articulations of the self. While jinn possession evoked feelings of fear and guilt that were couched in religious sensibilities and defnitions of what is just and unjust, it did not generate a critique of histories of violence or engender articulations of the self with reference to the practices of domination and exploitation of gender-based inequalities (e.g., Boddy 1988; Ong 1988; Rothenberg 2004; Bellamy 2008). As we have seen in Sonay’s case, possession caused a displacement of the subject from language when she spoke for the jinn but not for herself. It caused a displacement from everyday life when she was para lyzed with pain and loss during her childhood, even after the healing she received from the sheikh. What most deeply affected her was concealed within her account of her jinn possession. In effect, it is her jinn possession that kept her from acknowledging other narratives about those aspects of her life that troubled and possessed her—the violent history of dispossession that remains in Mardin’s Old City and of which she and her family are a part, her own suffering at the hands of the landowners and sheikhs, her mother’s willingness to allow her to be used for jinn possession, her experiences as the sole breadwinner, as a wife. It is within these contingencies that the complex system of mediation and possession between the house, the jinn, and the digger runs counter to the critical agency that Butler and Athanasiou (2013) had hoped for. Importantly, it fails to challenge the propertied subject of neoliberal capitalism. Despite— or, perhaps more to the point, because of—the precarious circumstances that underpin these practices, the diggers naturalized and depoliticized the connection between jinn possession and digging. Their “passionate attachments” have kept them bound to the structures of subordination and exploitation within which they are embedded. Sonay’s experience of possession as a mediator and victim of the jinn did not cause her to stop the act of digging in their house or elsewhere. Her spiritual and pious self, formed through her affective and material attachments to God, her family, and her house, was fearful of the destructive effects of the jinn. Hence her reflections on the ill

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effects jinn possession for treasure hunting had had on her mental capacities and her sense of inner peace. In the same space of reflection, Sonay recalled her mother’s sense of guilt for having violated Islamic principles concerning others’ right to ownership—others with whom they were familiar. Yet none of this created a sense of responsibility about the appropriated property which they believed to have belonged to the Christians. Nor did it end their desire for treasure. Like other diggers, Mahir and Sonay dug up their house more than once. They spent all of their earnings and then borrowed money to pay the diggers and the sheikh, only to be told to close up the hole. Here, the visible and invisible, the spiritual and material all converged again, perpetuating the conditions that feed the debt economy between diggers, jinn, and other mediating actors. During our last encounter, I asked Sonay if she would ever dig again. She giggled and looked up at the ceiling with a childish smile. She turned to Mahir. She was silent, but her gestures were expressive. Her experience of possession and exploitation would not stop her from helping her husband. The next chunk of money that they earned would be spent on repair or restoration or digging. Which of these property-centered practices they ultimately chose would depend on the prevailing circulation of treasure rumors, speculation about housing prices, the flow of international visitors, and the entry of unencumbered cash into the heritage and construction economy of Mardin. That afternoon, Mahir came home with ffty Turkish liras in his pocket that he had earned by selling an old knife that he found in the street. He bought a pack of cigarettes for fve liras and saved the rest to get food for dinner that night. Life was made up of short flashes of the promise of possession.

Acknowledgments This article is based on postdoctoral research conducted in the city of Mardin between July and September 2013 and in July 2014 and June 2015 as part of the ERC-funded project “Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey.” I am most grateful to the Mardinites for sharing their knowledge of their houses and the Old City. I am most grateful to Yektanurşin Duyan for helping me think through the jinn stories in Mardin, and Manuel Arroyo-Kalin for encouraging me to explore these narratives in comparison with other settings. I am thankful to Evin Sevgi Baran and Fırat Ulaş Tur for their precious support in conducting

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the feldwork for this research. The frst draft of the article greatly benefted from our initial conversations and exchanges with Yael Navaro, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ. I am grateful for their feedback and support. I am also thankful to the participants of the Remnants conference, Esra Özyurek, Basak Ertür, Eray Çaylı, Mayur Suresh, and Özge Biner, for their critical reminders and illuminating questions on different versions of this article. I owe special thanks to Theresa Thruax-Gischler for her precious work in editing this article. It goes without saying that all errors are my own. Notes 1. Located on a hill, the Old City refers to the early settlement area with stone architectural landscape that was registered as an historical heritage site in the 1970s. 2. Avery Gordon (2008) builds on Jacques Derrida’s point about repression (1993) in her classic work on haunting and ghosts. Gordon and Derrida’s insistence on the necessity of learning how to recognize, acknowledge, and live with ghosts forms the throughgoing tactic of this chapter. 3. For signifcant ethnographic analysis of spirit possession, see Crapanzano 1980, 1992; Boddy 1994; Lambek 1993, 1996; Mageo and Howard 1996; Khan 2006; Bellamy 2008; Rothenberg 2004; Pandolfo 2000; Mittermaier 2011, 2012; Taneja 2012, 2013. 4. See Khan 2006 for a detailed and fne analysis of the position and perception of children in Islamic theology. 5. Although my ethnographic material concerns the encounters with the jinn and spirit possession, my analysis benefted greatly from the wide anthropological literature on ghosts and haunting, Kwon (2006, 2008), Gordon (2008), and Morris (2008) in par ticu lar. Gordon’s provocative point about the necessity “to recognise the ghost and to reconstruct the world it conjures up” (2008, 66) has become the underlying principle of this chapter. Her defnition of haunting as “the language and the experiential modality” provided a productive tool to think about the signs and symbols associated with the spiritual beings of this analysis. 6. My analysis here is indebted to Wendy Brown’s (2001) reading of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology as a methodology for handling specters in history making. 7. For a more penetrating ethnography, see my book with the University of Pennsylvania Press, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey. 8. For examples of ethnographic studies that critically analyzed the process of making heritage out of ruins, see Abu El-Haj 2001; Breglia 2006; Collins 2008; Szmagalska-Follis 2008; Kavuri-Bauer 2011. For examples of the studies about the politics of cultural heritage in Turkey, see Biner 2020; Atakuman 2010; Zencirci 2014; Girard 2015.

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Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1988. “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia.” American Ethnologist 15 (1): 28–42. Pandolfo, Stefania. 2000. “The Thin Line of Modernity: Some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity.” In Questions of Modernity, edited by Timothy Mitchell, 115–47. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rothenberg, Celia  E. 2004. Spirits of Palestine: Gender, Society and the Stories of the Jinn. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Salemink, Oscar, and Mattias Borg Rasmussen. 2016. “After Dispossession: Ethnographic Approaches to Neoliberalisation.” Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 74:3–12. Strang, Veronica, and Mark Busse, eds. 2011. Ownership and Appropriation. Oxford: Berg. Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press. Szmagalska-Follis, Karolina. 2008. “Repossession: Notes on Restoration and Redemption in Ukraine’s Western Borderland.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 329–60. Taneja, Anand Vivek. 2012. “Saintly Visions: Other Histories and History’s Others in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 49 (4): 557–90. Taneja, Anand Vivek. 2013. “Jinnealogy: Everyday Life and Islamic Theology in Post-Partition Delhi.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 139–65. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Taussig, Michael. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ternon, Yves. 2013. Mardin 1915: Bir Yıkımın Patolojik Anatomisi. Istanbul: Belge Yayınları. Üngör, Uğur. 2011. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913– 1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Üngör, Uğur, and Mehmet Polatel. 2011. Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property. London: Bloomsbury. von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, and Melanie Wiber. 2006. Changing Properties of Property. Oxford: Berghahn Books. von Bieberstein, Alice. 2017. “Trea sure/Fetish/Gift: Hunting for ‘Armenian Gold’ in PostGenocide Turkish Kurdistan.” Subjectivity 10 (2): 170–89. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Zencirci, Gizem. 2014. “Civil Society’s History: New Constructions of Ottoman Heritage by the Development and Justice Party.” European Journal of Turkish Studies 19. https:// journals.openedition.org /ejts/5076.

CHAPTER 7

Maskun Two Landscapes of War Munira Khayyat

Two Trees There is a tree in South Lebanon very close to the front line and border with Israel. It is an old tree, an oak tree, that has been twisted and hollowed by long time. The tree is maskun1—in it lives a spirit, or ruh, who the locals call saleh, “good.” The tree, a vegetal being (Irigaray and Marder 2016), and its spirit dwell, entwined, on a hilltop in a semi-ruined hamlet on the outskirts of a small tobacco-farming and goat-herding village; they keep each other company in a violated yet verdant geography unfurling all around. The spirit has given its name to the surrounding landscape, but not many people recognize it anymore. Since 1948, this landscape has been seasonally visited by violence; it is a place of farming and living and also a place of perennial war. The tree and its dwelling spirit are resistant beings in a landscape of devastation and erasure that persist, resist through seasons of war. They can tell us something about the freighted afterworlds of violence and the ways in which human and other beings continue to “live in this very place of devastation” (Das 2007, 6). There is another old tree on another hilltop—also in South Lebanon, but along another border that stopped existing in 2000: the front line between the Israeli occupation zone of South Lebanon and the unoccupied rest of the country. This tree lives on in the midst of a militarized and museumized topography, the “Resistance Tourism Landmark,” and currently lends its blessings, or

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baraka, to Mleeta, the cultural landscape project designed by Hizbullah, the Islamic Resistance that liberated South Lebanon. This ancient oak would not be uprooted as the bulldozers frst broke earth to build the landmark that commemorates and documents the military struggle of Hizbullah against Israel. The tree’s resistance indicated to the architects of the landmark, as they narrate it, the immanence of the divine here, the resistance of nature’s sacred forces that protect this place and those who fought here and were victorious. The landscape has long housed sacred spirits (Albera and Couroucli 2012), and Mleeta, the Resistance Landmark, draws a part of its authority and affect from the resistant spirits that continue to inhabit its nature’s forms. This chapter explores in ethnographic counterpoint two hilltops that materially and spectrally, sacredly, and mundanely bind lifeworlds and landscapes of war. Following a Sebaldian attunement to landscapes of ruination (Sebald 2004, 2016; Wood 2017; Weston 2011), and informed by Navaro’s (2009) reading of the affective power of melancholic objects and spaces, I journey through two maskun, “inhabited” landscapes that heterogeneously hold war’s continuing presence in their textures, forms, and beings, long after conflict has abated. A temporal (Ingold 1993), intermeshed, multivocal, and multilocal (Rodman 1992) document of experience, landscape can be framed, scripted, and instrumentalized, but it constantly exceeds these bounds (Mitchell 2002; Wylie 2007). The landscapes in this chapter are juxtaposed to bring out the multiple, layered, often contradictory narratives and histories that landscape can hold at once. One landscape is a crinkled collective, a heterogeneous assemblage of resistant residues that silently embody the ebb and flow of social worlds, the various movements of space-time, various life-forms, histories of destruction and regeneration. This spirited and ruined hilltop is a bright “constellation” (Gordillo 2014), a “patchy landscape” that collects “multiple temporalities and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans”; it is a borderland and battlefeld but also a place of life ongoing, alive with unruly rubble and “chthonic ones” (Haraway 2016) not easily contained by man-made fences, borders, or ideologies. Life here in the borderland, despite recurrent seasons of destruction, continues to thrive, survive, and the landscape, embodying natural histories of destruction, reverberates with resistant remains. The other landscape is a carefully curated communal space of political pedagogy celebrating the military history of Hizbullah, the Islamic Resistance in its victorious and ongoing struggle against Israel. Mleeta narrates and memorializes Hizbullah as resistance utilizing the landscape as medium. The Resistance

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Landmark is built upon a former battleground, but nearby linger all but forgotten shrines, and all around, sacred affect ripples through the landscape, giving the landmark affective power as well as spiritual authority. Spirited nature animates the symbolic, narrative, and pedagogical heart of this politicized and militarized landscape.

The Ruin on the Hill The South Lebanon borderland is a margin, a formerly occupied place (Jabir 1999), and a place of recurrent war whose dwellers are bound to the landscape largely through tobacco farming for the state-owned tobacco monopoly the Regie Libanaise des Tabacs et Tombacs, as well as subsistence agriculture. This land-based existence has kept people steadfastly in place through decades of violent upheaval encompassing the 1948 dispossession of Palestine, Palestinian guerrilla war along the southern border throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), two massive Israeli invasions (1978 and 1982), the twenty-two-year Israeli occupation of the borderland (1978–2000), numerous Israeli aerial bombing campaigns and countless commando operations, assassinations, massacres, displacement, resistance activity, operations and ambushes, and the 2006 July War—to name a few (Hirst 1999; Norton 2000). The South Lebanon borderland is a place where “afterworlds” (Wool and Livingston 2017) of violence entwine with regenerating nature and everyday life, and continue to flourish after a fashion. To be able to grasp ordinary lifeworlds in places of headlining violence and wars one must, as Navaro writes, search in the “interstices, in the gaps, creaks and crevices not entirely smothered by the bombastic politics at play nor flattened by the conflicting governmentalities in the region” (2017, 211). Sacred landscapes also thrive in margins: they are “traditionally situated on frontiers, on territorial boundaries where conversions and conflict have taken place” (Albera and Couroucli 2012, 4). The southern landscape echoes with reverberating presences in “caves, fountains, or sacred trees where the holy men [and women] can manifest themselves, chthonian spirits living in the underworld” (6). Many of these enchanted spaces transformed into strategic geography during the wars and occupations. The landscape by now is deeply entangled with the warscape. Its sacred nature and material remnants of war blend together into a charged affective geography that Navaro refers to as ruination, “the material remains or artefacts of destruction and violation,

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but also to the subjectivities and residual affects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of war or violence” (2012, 5). As wars erupt and subside, remains of war tangle with regenerating greenery and the lives of humans and animals and resistant spirits, and fuse into a resonant topography, as in this ruined and enchanted hilltop at the very edge of Lebanon’s nation-space. I stumbled upon this haunting place during a walking tour of the little southern village that was my home during my feld research (2007–2009) in the aftermath of the July War, or harb tammuz, the 2006 Israeli air and land assault on Lebanon (Achcar and Warschawski 2007; Harel and Isacharoff 2008) that in a little over a month killed over a thousand civilians, flattened scores of southern villages, displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes, destroyed the entire tobacco harvest (the main livelihood of most of the poor southerners), and left the landscape peppered with cluster bombs (HRW 2008). The hamlet weathered this latest assault stoically. By this time it had largely fought its worst battles and was what the locals referred to dismissively as a ruin, khirbeh. The ruined hamlet sits atop a snug plateau overlooking the mined borderline and militarized border fence that runs west to east from the Mediterranean Sea inland, slashing through a cascade of gently sloping hills a few hundred meters to the south. To the north, a deep and narrow trench falls away suddenly, bifurcating the geography all the way to the sea. Periodically visited by villagers, guerrillas, international peacekeepers, goats, stray dogs, and wild pigs, the hamlet is composed of an abandoned pastoral nomad campsite, a smashed mosque with a stopped clock on its wall pointing to a quarter to eleven, a grapevine, a fg tree, an olive grove, a huddle of eroded stone and cement dwellings, and in summer, brief, bright felds of tobacco. In the middle of the rubble is a burnt-out stone cottage containing a hearth, a wooden wardrobe on its side, and some broken chairs; charred walls and some graffiti complete the scene of reckless use and dank abandonment. A fg tree bearing fat fruit for nobody hugs the outer wall of the abandoned abode, and a thick vine twists around the collapsed rubble, green grapes mingling with the dirt. Nearby is a massive stone olive press, next to which a seasonal goat enclosure has been cobbled together. On the southwestern edge of the hamlet, overlooking the border and front line with Israel, are a few shallow terraces where tobacco grows around some gnarled olive trees, and on the southeastern approach, where the rutted dirt path from the village ends, stands a circular clump of trees encircling a deep hollow gorge. There, at the edge of the plateau, where the land begins to gently fall away, stands the spirittree at whose roots lie a collection of graves.

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Since the end of the Israeli occupation, the inhabitants of the nearby village reclaimed the hamlet as an extension of their everyday lifeways. It is where they go to get away from their daily tasks that largely revolve around the life cycle of tobacco, a labor-intensive cash crop that is planted in the spring, harvested, strung, and dried in the summer, and stored and sold in the winter to the state monopoly. The hamlet is a popu lar picnic spot where villagers congregate, forage for wild herbs, and grill under the trees; it is a layered and lively place that variously contains the violent pasts and the ongoing lifeworlds that comprise it. On my frst visit, I take in the beautiful and thrilling topography, exclaiming at the view, shuddering at the closeness of the border (Palestine!), the vista of the landscape sliced by a front on one side and a precipitous rocky natural trench on the other. My companion, who is from the nearby village, used to fght with the Communists but now is aligned with Hizbullah, a common political trajectory across the South. He draws my attention to the military and agricultural terrain, the mined border, the settlements in Israel beyond, the fertile red earth below, the quarried white earth yonder, the remains of a former Israeli outpost on a nearby hill. He points out the spirit-tree and speaks of a nut that it occasionally bears. But he does not mention its spirit. My companion underlines to me the advantage that local fghters have in such terrain (Gordillo 2018; Gregory 2016; Pearson 2012), since they are intimate—and hence intimately allied—with the landscape. I note some litter on the ground attesting to recent picnickers, pet an inquisitive goat, eat the sweet late-summer fg that is offered to me. The ramshackle piles of rubble, the big hollow tree, the lonely graves at its roots, the melancholic air of ruination that clings to the stone structures combine and contrast with the flora and fauna in a lively jumble of textures that capture my senses. Later we sit together in the blueness of the deepening twilight in a home along the main road, right under the border fence, with my companion’s family, who I am close to in the village, and speak of usual things: the tobacco harvest, its daily drudgery, poison, and pain, its ever-falling prices, the increasing prices of every thing else, sons abroad sending remittances home from many corners of the globe, state neglect, political corruption, and the endless cycles of war. I ask about the hamlet on the hill, the graves under the tree, and a deep silence falls. Soon it is broken by the old man, father of my companion. He has lived in this place through all the wars and occupations and never budged. “The tree is maskun. A good spirit lives there,”

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he says. And some stories are dislodged, unfurl, that until now were silently coiled up in the ruined matter on the hill. In times now past the tree was a natural shrine that was visited by all the nearby communities, a diverse lot: Christians, Shi’a, and the bedu, the pastoral nomads of Galilee and Jabal ‘Amil, who accompanied their beasts to their summertime pastures upon the hill. Pilgrims and supplicants at the tree made offerings and vows, tying knots of torn cloth to its branches, or pouring libations of water—gathered at a freshwater spring deep in the valley and lugged all the way up the hill—at its roots, to ask the good spirit of the tree for healing, for fertility, for wealth, for health, among other things. For a long time the spirit-tree was a lively participant in local affairs, centering a landscape and lifeworld, maintaining a commonality of practice, familiarity, an eclectic, cross-border, local network, that has almost, but not entirely, vanished. On some nights the tree lights up and glimmers with a light that is echoed by a luminous halo around another tree, called um al-zeinat—mother of beauty/goodness—on a neighboring hilltop. “God forgive those who say they have seen it if it’s not true!” murmurs the eldest daughter of the old man. Despite being skeptical, she does not disavow this well-known phenomenon, either. A slapstick story from the life of the spirit-tree bubbled up from the gathering as night fell: a young boy from the village accompanied his mother to make an offering at the tree and put the water bucket used to carry the libation to the tree upon his head. This was punished by the spirit. The bucket stuck to the boy’s head and would not dislodge until his mother took her irreverent son to the tree and made a pledge, by way of apology on his behalf to the spirit, who fnally relented, and released him. This boy’s misfortune became a comedic ditty that is still sung by the villagers. The young boy is now an old man. In the 1920s borders were drawn between the areas of French and British control in the Levant, defning the shared edge of the nascent nation-states of Lebanon and Palestine. The border ran very close to the hamlet, yet during this period it did not cause too much disruption in the lifeways of the locals. But in 1948 Palestine suddenly became Israel. War flared up. Palestinian refugees escaping the violence in their Galilean villages flowed across the border and settled on the Lebanese side of it, under this and other trees, waiting for the war to subside so they could return to their hastily abandoned homes just over those hills. But war took hold and the porous border between Lebanon and Palestine, now Israel, hardened into a dangerous front. The summer of 1948 became winter and then spring and summer again and again, and the refugees did not return home but instead were rounded up by the

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Lebanese Army and resettled in refugee camps on the outskirts of the major coastal cities of Lebanon, where their descendants remain today. The spirittree, a deciduous oak, faithfully kept the seasons as the borderland became a battlefeld when the Palestinians returned as guerrillas. It stayed steadfastly rooted as war transformed the hilltop into strategic military geography that exposed enemy country across the nearby border and front that was more and more intensively militarized and mined. Pastoral nomadic life was no longer possible in this fractured and deadly wartime environment, yet the bedu found new uses for their practiced knowledge of terrain: their familiarity with its nature became an invaluable asset to the Palestinian guerrillas, who were strangers to and hence unfamiliar with this landscape. The bedu under the cover of night expertly pi loted guerrillas across enemy lines to spring ambushes and operations, evading advanced military technology by a deep knowledge of the landscape, its natures. The campsite on the hill was overtaken by guerrillas and their shepherds, and the spirit-tree kept watch. Some of the young bedu were killed during this time and are buried under the spirit-tree, in their old camping grounds, their names and dates of death scrawled in petrifed wet cement: 1949, 1968. The hamlet is no longer inhabited by humans; its last human residents, an old couple who lived there all their lives, are also buried, alongside the two bedu, under the spirit-tree, which lives on. Date of death according to gravestones: July 1983. Only the fg tree now grown wild outside their front door really knows how they died, but the villagers whisper about a grenade (thrown by who knows) that exploded as the couple sat down to a never-touched dinner. These were the days of the Israeli occupation, when the occupiers were establishing aggressive new military confgurations on the ground to viciously wrest control of the borderland and hilltops from its long-term dwellers—and the emerging (grassroots and multiple) resistances to this violent occupation that were forming in response. Hilltops exposing surrounding country were “secured” by the Israeli occupiers, a strategy used in occupied Palestine (Weizman 2007). The old couple living on in their home and tending their tobacco and olives and vine and fg had to go. After their violent death, the hamlet’s homes became full-on military barracks, frst for the Israelis and then for their local allies and militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA) recruited from among the villages across the occupied border zone. The stone dwellings absorbed waves of destruction, melting into the hillside as the forces of nature and war battered them collaboratively. The mosque remained in occasional use by the SLA militiamen until it was destroyed in the last war to blow over the area in

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2006. Today, each smashed wall frames life-size rural scenes. The stopped clock on the wall points uncannily to a moment of ruin now past. Its frozen hands separate the wheat from the chaff: this is no place for metronomic time. But the spirit-tree and its vegetal companions—the grapevine, fg, olives, and others—enrolled as protective cover for military elements and also perhaps for good blessings, continued to proliferate and steadily keep the seasons. In May  2000, after years of persistent homegrown resistance that was gradually taken over, perfected, and monopolized by Hizbullah, the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon suddenly collapsed over a handful of days (Norton 2000). Quickly, the frst wave of the present order under the military dominance of Hizbullah—the last and most successful of the resistors and the ones who were victorious—came to reign over the borderland and hamlet. Inhabitants of the nearby village, who were not allowed to move freely during the Israeli occupation, returned to hilltops that had been off-limits to them, walking paths, traversing meadows, picnicking under trees, tending olives, keeping goats in the tumbledown stone dwellings, and planting tobacco in any accessible flat space with some soil-cover. And this is how things remain today, more or less. This place is multiple. It contains many histories, stories. It is not easily fenced in or contained by a dominant narrative or even just ignored. War and seasons of destruction have shaped it, as have seasons of living, and these continue to exist as landscape. Of course, the place is not protected from the violent encroachment of the cadastre, capitalism, agribusiness, quarries, or development projects. And military sediments pepper the earth like deeply embedded shrapnel, and borders cleave it. But the tree still stands as a complex resistant presence disrupting the flattened, capturing, saturating forms of the present, momentarily unsettling them. Recently I was told by a young villager that I need to revisit the hamlet: “They have fxed it up and made it really nice!” she exclaimed excitedly. I fear what I will fnd upon my next visit—or more precisely, what I will not fnd, and I did not ask if the resistant spirit of the place remains steadfast in the tree, or if the forces of the political present have prevailed.

Nature’s Resistance Mleeta sits atop a hill that transformed into a site of culture and memory, years after it was a place of actual war, concealed in the maquis and deep

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underground. Those who fought here and have built this place as a testament to their struggle jihad are Hizbullah (Norton 2014), the muqawama, or Resistance, that successfully took over the front line of resistance to the Israeli occupation after the 1982 Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon. Inheriting the banner of resistance from Palestinian, Communist, and other groups that came before them, Hizbullah took control of the border strip in the wake of the sudden collapse of the twenty-two-year Israeli occupation in May 2000. Hizbullah is the hegemonic power along the borderline today, with its narratives, orientations, practices, traditions, and fashions increasingly usurping, overwriting those of others. This militant organization, social movement, and political party has been successful at disciplining and cultivating a cohesive constituency and community, and has done so in part by innovative cultural projects like Mleeta that tell Hizbullah’s story. This is the story of downtrodden, dispossessed tobacco-farming Shi’i peasants who suffered terribly in Ottoman times and the early years of Lebanese independence at the hands of ruthless feudal lords and political big men, who rose up as a formidable grassroots resistance through the crucible of the Lebanese Civil War, the wars with Israel, and the Israeli occupation to resist and repel one of the world’s most power ful armies (Saad-Ghorayeb 2002; Qassem 2012). This history and war-seasoned sectarian identity is what Hizbullah as present-day voice of this community has put on convincing display at Mleeta in the hills above Saida (Sidon). Sujud hill, where the landmark is located, enfolds an entangled (multisectarian, multi-species) genealogy, and spirits continue to inhabit its nature. The hill takes its name from that of a Jewish prophet, whose blessings are still recognized by the inhabitants of the region, who today are predominantly Shi’a Muslims. The whole hillside is copiously sprinkled with sacred spots, many of which hark back to pagan times (Thubron 2008), but the most prominent shrine on this hilltop 1,200 meters above sea level is that of a Jewish prophet who is “commonly known as Nabi Sujud, both by Jews . . . and by Muslims, who also venerated the place, visited regularly, and prayed in the building that stood beside it” (Abou Hodeib 2015, 387). The shrine, whose caretaker was a Shi’i man from the village of Sujud, was a multi-communal interface in a landscape of hardening borders that brought together Jews and Shi’a, humans and spirits, at a time when Arab-Israeli wars were making such enchanted, shared worlds politically impossible. And war prevailed. Jewish visits to the shrine of Nabi Sujud petered out, then ceased as Sujud hill, which soars to lofty heights, transformed into a stra-

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tegic front line of the Israeli occupation and an underground Lebanese resistance position fghting that occupation: the story that is narrated and celebrated at the landmark. Today, the hill is claimed by Hizbullah; its former multi-communal, spirited nature is re-formulated in discourses of a single community and constituency, that of the Shi’i Islamic Resistance. Yet traces of these shared sacred rites and spaces still haunt the hillside. Mleeta is described in its brochure and website as a “natural museum”: “Being the frst of its kind, this place engraves into memory a continual stage in the history of Lebanon. This is a natural museum, surrounded by captivating nature and mountains. Its aim is to preserve the places where the [resistance fghters] lived, giving people the chance to be better acquainted with the unique experience of the Islamic resistance against the Israeli enemy since its occupation of Beirut in 1982.” Carved into a soaring hillside that swoops into a deep, wide valley, the landmark utilizes the heterogeneous textures of the terrain to enact the singular history and practice of Hizbullah guerrillas in South Lebanon. Mleeta is designed to merge Hizbullah’s political project with the hallowed natures and formations of the earth upon which its guerrillas and constituents fght and dwell, and it does so by enrolling various spirited natural objects (shrines, trees, caves, hills), harnessing the earthy materials of Sujud hill and their resident spirits in the ser vice of its particular political project and present. I frst visited the landmark on a bright morning only a few days after its inauguration on May 25, 2010, on the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the borderland. Crowning the hilltop, the landmark lies sparkling new in the bright early summer sunlight: geometric, minimalist, sharp-edged, lowslung, bunker-like buildings of unadorned cement and glass. Most of the visitors to the landmark are families, who are here to combine an outing in nature with a sound political education. The atmosphere is one of leisure, with various groups making use of the green landscaped setting to stretch their legs, get some air, and absorb some history, culture, and politics. Here and there, black-capped male fgures are seen lecturing to knots of attentive listeners. Wandering around on my own, I was adopted by a guide who led me to the ancient tree that would not be uprooted as the bulldozers frst broke earth to build the landmark. The tree, a thick oak, ancient and scarred, with a rooted, steadfast aura, continues its long life in a quiet, unobtrusive spot away from the bustle and chatter of visitors. This sacred oak, my guide told me, embodies the steadfast resistance of nature, the spiritual and physical connection of the Resistance to nature, of the earth and sky to the divine and

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earthly success of the Resistance. The connection is explicitly stated in the slogan of the landmark: “Where the Earth Speaks to the Heavens.” In one of my conversations with an architect of the landmark, he said to me: Our frst concern was to cooperate with nature because there is an organic connection between the resistance fghter and the oak tree. This is the tree that protected the muqawim [resistance fghter], in addition to its natural qualities of purifying the air. We consider this a strategic connection, so we attempted to preserve the area as a natural reserve. We are extremely mindful of preserving the site’s natural surroundings and working with them. Let me tell you a story that happened during the occupation. Israel was extremely bothered by the hirsh [maquis, or woodland] that has the oak sindian trees [that protected the fghters] and so they burned it all via helicopters by pouring napalm over the trees and igniting them. But the wind blew the fre away from the trees to an area that has no trees, and the trees were spared. This is an example of the graces of God. In reflecting on the purpose of this landmark, the architect is clearly indicating the immanence of divine purpose in nature and those who fght for the divinely sanctioned cause. Taking my leave of the tree and the guide, I move up the manicured, neatly cobbled promenade and stop to study the landmark’s plan. The layout is a large cross with a central feld called, like many village centers, “the Square,” al saha, where a large circular pool reflects the sky, a form quoting the raincollecting pools at the heart of many southern villages. Curling off from the main quadrant down the precipitous decline of the hill is a long and twisty footpath that eventually, by way of deep into the earth, brings one back to the center of the landmark and then up, up to the very top of the hill. The frst order of business for visitors is a short flm that sets the scene by dramatically narrating the history of the landmark and linking it to the history of the muqawama that culminated in the “Divine Victory” (which invokes the name of the current secretary-general of the party, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah) of the 2006 July War. Outside, beyond the village square lies “the Abyss,” al hawiya, where half a dozen Merkava tanks snatched from the Israeli army in 2006 during the doomed and bungling ground invasion are arrayed in a surreal confguration with twisted guns, amid Hebrew lettering

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spelling out “defeat to the enemy,” who are expected to view it from above with their spy drone aircraft. After winding around this pit a few times, I follow the path into the underbrush, the sacred landscape of war, the maquis, the natural habitat of the Resistance fghter. Al masar, “the Pathway,” is a rough-hewn footpath under a protective canopy of dancing trees making dappled shadows on the ground that takes me steeply down the scrub-covered hillside where I almost expect to see families barbecuing on a Sunday outing. But as it is the warpath, I encounter instead scenes of war-making in a nature setting such as camouflaged rocket launchers, makeshift feld hospitals, and protective natural shrines like the “Sayyid Abbas Barricade,” where Sayyid Abbas al-Musawi, the martyred secretary-general of the party—assassinated by an Israeli Apache helicopter as he drove with his wife and child in 1992—prayed when he visited “the boys” on the front. His prayer spot, a leafy alcove, has been transformed into a nature shrine like those of the good spirits and prophets that dot the countryside. This “shrine” is a testament to his continued spiritual guidance and ongoing presence among the fghters, despite his violent and early death: his voice wafts through hidden speakers and envelopes the visitor, who is invited to pray upon the reed mat covering the dirt floor beneath his picture, beside a casually placed Kalashnikov. This space is an enchanted portal, a place of sacred affect that is inhabited by a lingering spirit replicating the widespread rural practice of worship in nature. But here and now it directs the worshiper to a specifc object: Hizbullah’s ongoing military struggle. The end of the woodland warpath delivers me to “the Cave” (al mghara) and “the Tunnel” (al nafaq) that sucks me into the stony and dark heart of the mountain and to the ideological and pedagogical core of Hizbullah’s landscape project, at once naturalizing and sacralizing their struggle, fusing the party’s ideological and political goals with the very materials of this earth upon which they struggle and fght, the long arc of the eternal struggle (jihad) with the shorter but ever-replenished cycle of (human) life. Deep underground I breathe in the damp, close air, and once my eyes have adjusted to the gloom, I view there between cold, sweating walls the technologically outftted operations room where a detailed area map is laid out on a tabletop and illuminated with a basic oil lamp, while a laptop flickers nearby. Staticky, urgent radio commands are piped through the sound system and echo tinnily in the gloom. I experience the constant night and cramped darkness of the underworld, in stark contrast with the bright airiness of the daylight under the trees outside. Here, one is cocooned in a living earthly grave and

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must face the stark realities of war alone in the depths of the mountain, the inevitable fnality of death. Along the tunnel walls piles of Kalashnikovs, the celebrated and familiar Russian-made machine-gun, companion of guerrilla fghters around the world, are on display in glass panels built into the walls of the snug passage. I enter the barracks: bare stone walls, thin mattresses, a prayer mat, a small battery radio, tinned goods on a shelf, a braid of onions (famous in this region), and the writing on the wall: “My weapons and my soul are twins.” Weapons are equated with souls and souls impregnate nature: it is a military-spiritual-natural complex, this place, and I am being guided to sensuously, “naturally” recognize it. In the heart of the mountain I am made to feel the spiritual and physical communion of earth and man, nature and war. The medium is the message. Being there where they were between the same walls of stone is thrilling. A communion is taking place—if not exactly a shared ideology then a deep, almost primal affect is roused from its bodily home, deep in this resisting earth that sensuously, affectively delivers its political message. This place connects the goodness of nature and its alliance with the Resistance as proof of the Resistance’s ultimate goodness and God’s sanction for their moral-political project. The architects of the landmark designed it to mimic this communion with the good earth and to blend with its materials, textures, and forms, like a Resistance fghter in the undergrowth or underground. The protective arm nature extends to shield the fghters taking refuge in her womb and utilizing her natural formations for strategic and tactical gain in warfare is acknowledged as a recognition by the Divine of the inherent righteousness of the Resistance’s cause. This is an organic and sacred alliance drawn from forms of spirituality and supplication once widespread and now waning, but still resonant across the rural communities of the South (and elsewhere) where good spirits are known to reside in trees and in other natural formations and are the “sources of personal blessing, fortune and luck and the good life” (Henig 2012, 754). Emerging from the ever-night darkness of the tunnel into the dazzling daylight halfway up the hill, I stumble blinking onto “the Outlook,” al matall. It is breathtaking, like flying in place, like a bird of prey suspended in mid-air above a cascading valley dotted with miniature, toylike villages. Hizbullah fghters have no control of the air; the earth is their element. But with the help of the topography of their home turf they can acquire strategic advantages like this position here. The wind is sharp and whips at me, and the Lebanese and Hizbullah flags flap and snap insistently overhead. The tunnel

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has delivered me halfway back up the hill, so I turn and continue my ascent on the surface through a thickly wooded hillside among the embedded heavy guns of the Resistance along “the Line of Fire,” khatt al nar, and thus proceed through an enacted and embodied history of Hizbullah’s kind of warfare. Winded, hot, and dusty, I fnally arrive back at the top of the hill to “the Freedom Field,” maydan al tahrir, where I stroll through an exhibition of Hizbullah’s heavy arms, anti-tank missiles, and other more technologically advanced weaponry compared to the basic artillery and guns encountered in the woodland. These weapons systems are on display in a cheery, rambling rose garden where children run laughing and giggling among the missiles and flowers. A young boy, too young to have lived through any war (yet), rides on his father’s shoulders and asks him about the weapons, and his father explains them to him: “Listen habibi, my love. . . .” In the “Freedom Field” there is a wall that serves as a mihrab, or prayer niche, that is inscribed with excerpts of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah’s famous speeches during the 2006 war in which he addressed his listeners as ahiba’i, my loves. To stand and pray here is to spiritually connect with the collective taking shape, to participate in its principles and to support its virtuous and victorious trajectory. Praying is an act of spiritual communion with a natural place that is simultaneously molding you as a moral and political subject and placing you in a physical, sensuous, and earthy yet also transcendent, enchanted, divine landscape. The last stop of my walk through the war- and spirit-laced landscape is the “the Hill,” al talleh, a common geographic formation found in any village that is often simultaneously (as we saw above) a military outpost and the enshrined dwelling of a local prophet. Here, it is a rounded mighty buttress that presides on the highest ground of the landmark. It at once invokes the Crusader castles (such as Beaufort) that dot the southern landscape across its highest points as well as the many military fortifcations that the Israelis (and other invaders and occupiers before them, from ancient times to the present) built on top of them. When approached from below, its gigantic height makes one feel small, earth-bound, vulnerable, mortal, a little akin to what one feels like when under bombardment. Upon this high point is the “Martyrs’ Garden,” rawdat al shuhada, where I ascend a wide and steep and very long stairway. As I climb the stairs I get tired, weighed down by the pull of gravity and pierced by the already mean rays of the early summer sun high in a bare blue sky. As I stop to catch my breath, my sense of physical exhaustion allows me to connect bodily with the effort (juhd), passion, and sacrifce of the fghters, mujahideen (those who strive). The pinnacle, a peaceful

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rose garden with running water, exposes the wide vista of the rolling and lush southern countryside that had been occupied by Israel until 2000. Standing here one appreciates the strategic military value of this position and somatically participates in its posture of empowerment. The scene that one absorbs is all about (military) power and its culmination in absolute victory, but also about the (spiritual) culmination of the soul’s journey in martyrdom and its eternal reward in heaven—janna, the heavenly garden. Mleeta’s narratives, affective objects, places, materials, and movements sensuously quote and affectively emulate the traditions and practices around the sacred in nature alive in the various rural communities of the Mediterranean. As Couroucli writes, “Traditional practices of sharing sacra were not informed by any top-down multicultural policy or ideology. They belonged to the historical heritage of Eastern Mediterranean societies, where the coexistence of more than one religious group within one territory, under one authority, represents a legacy of the Byzantine and Ottoman systems” (Albera and Couroucli 2012, 5). These practices and objects are familiar, recognizable, and here in this setting endorsed by those empowered to narrate in order to empower their narrative. In re-presenting and thus re-confguring a heterogeneous and heterodox topography and terrain to conform to a particular narrative, Hizbullah effectively transforms Sujud hill, a “multi-vocal landscape” (Rodman 1992) and “polyphonic assemblage” (Tsing 2015, 23), into a singular, tangible, recognizable marked object frmly placed within the grammar of the political present, a specifc site of remembrance where a present-day political community encounters itself in place, surreptitiously excluding its multiple pasts (and potentials). The guide who showed me the spirit tree recounted to me, gesturing to a nearby hilltop, the presence of a prophet he referred to as bou rkab, who he was unable to identify further beyond postulating that the name probably comes from the practice of approaching the shrine on one’s knees. Nevertheless, he still heartily invoked him to underline the holy nature of this place and project. This place is built on continuously reverberating spiritual remnants. As Gordillo writes of another context, “The ruins . . . were manufactured as an orderly, positive object because they sit on the disjointed, fragmented rubble of a destroyed city. This also means that the aura of the ruins draws from the rubble they cannibalized” (Gordillo 2014, 9). The landmark unfolds a landscape evocative of any southern village and encloses many pasts and heterogeneities and beings, but here it is subtly re-

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arranged into a singular master narrative serving a specifc socio-political project. As Harb and Deeb write, In Mleeta, historical narratives are shaped and transformed through emphases and exclusions and become hegemonic through their incorporation in the durable environment. The Mleeta narrative of resistance history is one that privileges Hizballah as the only resistance in Lebanon, and in so doing, erases other histories of resistance, including those of the Communist Party, the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party and Amal. It is also a narrative that privileges military resistance over other forms of resistance, effectively ignoring civilian casualties and steadfastness and the direct and indirect support provided to fghters by men and women in multiple capacities throughout their history. (Harb and Deeb 2011, 26) Mleeta, the landmark, consolidates, fxes, and naturalizes the sacred landscape of Sujud hill (and by extension all of South Lebanon) as the source of a particular kind of culture, community, politics. In this way, it molds docile subjects, knits a moral community, and produces a natural/ized and divinely protected place and way of life and war. In and through an affective and tactile encounter with a carefully scripted landscape, moral and political subjects of the Islamic Resistance are cultivated, educated, nurtured. Mleeta weaves together the materials of warring and (rural) dwelling and is the place where a certain present political community encounters and enacts its mystical and militarized (and also naturalized) past and future. Here, subjects of a “war society” mujtama’ harb, encounter the personalities, temporalities, ideas, paths, and objects that contain, explain, propagate, and propel their history and constitute their specifc present-day culture of resistance. “In Mleeta, the tree, rock, flower, bird, sky, cloud and mountain are each (and all) symbol(s) of Hizballah’s resistance which is equated with (one) history, which is associated with (this) nature, (this) land, which forms (our) culture, and these correspondences are made to be incontestably right, or righteous” (Harb and Deeb 2011, 29). Every thing in Mleeta—like village life in South Lebanon—expresses a continuity, connection, and communion with habitat. In Mleeta the connection is carefully scripted and interwoven with the hegemonic narrative of a political party and path; and in Mleeta this naturalized/sacralized narrative

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is there to be interactively encountered, contemplated, and absorbed. A recognizable object that can be touched, experienced, and contemplated. Yet the power and signifcance of Mleeta that claims this landscape as testament to and enabler of a par ticular history and community and political-theological trajectory is sourced from reverberating affective presences and practices stored in trees, rocks, springs, caves, valleys, and hills in the landscape that exceed this particular history. The landmark seeks to recognize the sacrednatural remains of South Lebanon as a source of Hizbullah’s power and project. But beyond the perimeter of the Resistance Landmark, the landscape nurtures in its scrubby forms and life-forms other histories of life and war in resistant spirits and other reverberating presences. Note 1. The villagers call the tree with the spirit maskun, and this refers to all forms of spiritdwelling in nature. A spirit dwells and hence the tree (or cave or river or hill, etc.) is dwelt-in by this spirit or soul, it is maskun. Maskun derives from the Arabic root s-k-n that proliferates along the unexpectedly connected meanings of dwelling and silence and the manifold meanings that crouch in between: quiet, calm, tranquility, blessing, peace, rest, repose, lodge, inhabit, haunt, home, settle, reside. . . . The different words that extend from this root allow us to contemplate the diverse modalities of dwelling in spaces of violence, in par ticu lar the silent ones that resist and persist, haunting the naturalized forms of the present.

Works Cited Abou Hodeib, Toufoul. 2015. “Sanctity Across the Border: Pilgrimage Routes and State Control in Mandate Lebanon and Palestine.” In The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, 383–94. London: Routledge. Achcar, Gilbert, and Michel Warschawski. 2007. The 33-Day War: Israel’s War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Its Consequences. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Albera, Dionigi, and Maria Couroucli, eds. 2012. Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gordillo, Gastón R. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham NC,: Duke University Press. Gordillo, Gastón. 2018. “Terrain as Insurgent Weapon: An Affective Geometry of Warfare in the Mountains of Afghanistan.” Political Geography 64 (May): 53–62. https://doi.org /10 .1016/j.polgeo.2018.03.001. Gregory, Derek. 2016. “The Natures of War: The Natures of War.” Antipode 48 (1): 3–56. https:// doi.org /10.1111/anti.12173.

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Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientifc Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harb, Mona, and Lara Deeb. 2011. “Culture as History and Landscape: Hizballah’s Efforts to Shape an Islamic Milieu in Lebanon.” Arab Studies Journal 19 (1): 10–41. Harel, Amos, and Avi Isacharoff. 2008. 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Henig, David. 2012. “ ‘This Is Our Little Hajj’: Muslim Holy Sites and Reappropriation of the Sacred Landscape in Contemporary Bosnia.” American Ethnologist 39 (4): 751–65. https:// doi.org /10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01393.x. Hirst, David. 1999. “South Lebanon: The War That Never Ends?” Journal of Palestine Studies 28 (3): 5–18. Human Rights Watch (HRW). 2008. “Flooding South Lebanon Israel’s Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006.” Human Rights Watch, February 16. https:// www.hrw.org /report /2008/02/16/flooding-south-lebanon/israels-use-cluster-munitions -lebanon-july-and-august-2006. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25 (2): 152–74. Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. 2016. Through Vegetal Being. New York: Columbia University Press. Jabir, Munzir. 1999. Al- Sharit Al-Lubnani Al-Muhtall: Masalik Al-Ihtilal, Masarat AlMuwajahah, Masair Al-Ahali. Beirut: Muassasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah. Navaro, Yael. 2017. “Diversifying Affect.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (2): 209–14. https://doi.org /10.14506/ca32.2.05. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Norton, Augustus R. 2000. “Hizballah and the Israeli Withdrawal from Southern Lebanon.” Journal of Palestine Studies 30 (1): 22–35. Norton, Augustus R. 2014. Hezbollah: A Short History. New paperback ed. Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pearson, Chris. 2012. “Researching Militarized Landscapes: A Literature Review on War and the Militarization of the Environment.” Landscape Research 37 (1): 115–33. https://doi.org /10.1080/01426397.2011.570974. Qassem, Naim. 2012. Hizbullah: The Story from Within. London: Saqi. Rodman, Margaret C. 1992. “Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality.” American Anthropologist 94 (3): 640–56. Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal. 2002. Hizbuölah: Politics and Religion. Critical Studies on Islam. London: Pluto Press. Sebald, W. G. 2004. On the Natural History of Destruction. Translated by Anthea Bell. Modern Library paperback ed. New York: Modern Library. Sebald, W. G. 2016. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions.

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Thubron, Colin. 2008. The Hills of Adonis: A Quest in Lebanon. London: Vintage. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Weston, Daniel. 2011. “The Spatial Supplement: Landscape and Perspective in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” Cultural Geographies 18 (2): 171–86. https://doi.org /10.1177 /1474474010397596. Wood, James. 2017. “The Other Side of Silence: Rereading W. G. Sebald.” The New Yorker. Wool, Zoë H., and Julie Livingston. 2017. “Collateral Afterworlds: An Introduction.” Social Text 35 (1 (130)): 1–15. https://doi.org /10.1215/01642472-3727960. Wylie, John. 2007. Landscape. Key Ideas in Geography. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Infrastructural Violence in Jerusalem Abjection, Incorporation, and Resistance in the “Cyborg City” Hanna Baumann

In July 2014, Palestinian youths attacked the new Jerusalem light rail, demolishing stations and infrastructure where it passed through East Jerusalem. This highly visible attack on the frst major urban infrastructure project to beneft Palestinian neighborhoods in fve decades of Israeli occupation appeared confounding. Hadn’t Palestinians long demanded better ser vices, protesting against underinvestment in and municipal neglect of East Jerusalem? Hadn’t they gladly made use of the light rail for the preceding two years? Using the lens of urban infrastructures, this chapter seeks to examine this tension between Palestinian Jerusalemites’ exclusion from and their inclusion in the Israeli-administered city. It argues that both the disconnection from and the connection to the city’s networks contain an element of “infrastructural violence”—one that reverberates with the deeper and longer-term violence of settler colonial dispossession and assimilation. Understanding what is unique about violence in the city requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of humans and the non-human in urban space. In examining particularly urban forms of violence, Coward (2006) has criticized the prevalent “anthropocentric bias.” The post-human notion of the “cyborg” has been adopted as a useful concept for understanding urban spaces as assemblages of the human and non-human, embroilments of organic and artifcial matter, and may thus also prove useful for understanding how

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violence operates in and through urban space. The cyborg was originally articulated by Donna Haraway as a political and intellectual project to challenge antagonistic dualisms underpinning domination (such as self/other, culture/ nature, male/female, civilized/primitive) and break down the boundaries between them (Haraway [1991] 2000). The notion of the “cyborg city” thus highlights the hybrid nature of the city, which is both natural and cultural, environmental and social (Swyngedouw 2000), with physical infrastructures acting as the “material interface between the body and the city” (Gandy 2005). Jerusalem itself is a hybrid city on several levels. Claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians as part of their national capital, the Palestinian east of the city has been occupied by Israel since 1967. East Jerusalemites carry Israeli ID cards but do not hold full citizenship, placing them in an interstitial and legally precarious position. While East Jerusalem was annexed under Israeli law, according to which it forms an integral part of the Israeli capital,1 this was never recognized by the international community, which continues to view the “Green Line,” the pre-1967 armistice line bisecting the city, as the legitimate border between East and West Jerusalem. Since 2002, Israel has introduced another de facto border in the form of the Separation Wall, which cuts through East Jerusalem, effectively annexing most of its land to the western part of the city but excluding approximately one-quarter of the city’s Arab inhabitants. They now inhabit a no-man’s-land that is neither part of the Israeli municipality nor under the jurisdiction of the Israeli army occupying the West Bank or the Palestinian Authority. Furthering the amalgamated character of the city, Israeli settlements are planted like islands across East Jerusalem, while traces of pre-1948 Palestinian life remain in many areas of “Israeli” West Jerusalem. This makes it difficult to speak of a “divided” city. Instead, its multiple constituent parts may best be understood as fragmented yet entangled— socio-politically as well as in terms of spatial practice and materiality. Examining the question of infrastructure in East Jerusalem through the lens of cyborg urbanism raises several questions: How do the various parts of this composite city interact—what forces hold a cyborg together and which participate in processes of division? Specifcally, what is the role of infrastructures, as human–non-human interfaces of the city, in transmitting such force? How can we reconcile their seemingly contradictory effects of simultaneous exclusion and incorporation? And what are the timescales across which violence travels along these networks? Based on eight months of research in and around East Jerusalem,2 this chapter examines urban contestations around infrastructure in East Jerusalem in recent years.

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The frst part of the chapter discusses how infrastructure (or lack thereof) serves to exclude Palestinian residents through the symbolic expulsion of abjection. This form of violence is particularly apparent in areas of Jerusalem cut off by the Wall, such as Shuafat Camp and Kufr Aqab. Most studies of “infrastructural violence” have focused on such exclusion from (equal) access to infrastructures as a form of urban injustice (Graham and Marvin 2001; Graham 2010; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012; Graham and McFarlane 2015). Yet, as the second section details, some infrastructural projects seek to incorporate East Jerusalemites, and constitute them as subjects in the city. While less overt, this infrastructural inclusion—most apparent in middle-class areas of East Jerusalem such as Shuafat and Beit Hanina— nonetheless constitutes a form of violence, I argue. In expanding on the existing understanding of “infrastructural violence,” this chapter reveals how the latter can also be caused by the incorporating effects of infrastructures. It does so through a focus on the affective and symbolic nature of infrastructural violence, following from Larkin’s (2013) observation that infrastructures act on several registers. That Palestinians perceive both infrastructural abjection and incorporation as violent can be seen in their reactions to both the absence and the expansion of infrastructure—demanding inclusion or refusing incorporation. This Palestinian resistance to infrastructural violence, often using infrastructural means, is discussed in the fnal section. Thus, the chapter shows how infrastructures create the potential for both conflict and vulnerability, but are also key sites of calibrating the manner in which the cyborg city’s disparate parts interact—sites of negotiating urban inclusion and exclusion.

Infrastructural Abjection Exclusion from urban infrastructures has been argued to constitute a structural form of violence, because “the materiality of the city . . . plays a concrete role in the sedimentation and workings of unjust social relations, conventions and practices” (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012, 404–5). Beyond reinforcing unequal access to urban resources in this way, infrastructural violence also operates on embodied, affective, and symbolic levels. In par ticular, the metabolic circulations of water, sanitation, and waste have exclusionary and abjecting potential. The territorial stigma of abjection is a symbolic bordering process that can have very tangible spatio-political consequences. Furthermore, this

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symbolic expulsion functions as a way to externalize the constitutive violence of the state. In Jerusalem, it is widely acknowledged, Palestinian areas have long been signifcantly marginalized in comparison to Jewish neighborhoods (Bollens 1998; Ir Amim 2014; ACRI 2015). Although Palestinian Jerusalemites constitute one-third of the city’s population, the portion of the municipality’s budget invested in Palestinian East Jerusalem is only approximately 10  percent (Margalit 2006, 111). This results in severely neglected public works and services across all arenas—ranging from education to recreational facilities—but it affects in particular urban infrastructures (Cheshin et al. 1999). More than half of the houses in Palestinian areas are not formally connected to the municipal water system or sewage lines. Palestinian areas thus suffer from low and irregular water supply levels, causing residents to ration their showers and laundry (Nidal and Amneh, Kufr Aqab, August  2014).3 In some cases, water supply ceases entirely, as when residents of Shuafat Refugee Camp were entirely without running water for several months during 2014. The marginalized state of Palestinian areas becomes especially evident when viewed in contrast to nearby Jewish areas or settlements, which enjoy urban amenities of much higher standards. The differing waste management in Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli parts of the city gives some indication of the severely skewed distribution of services: while there is one rubbish bin for every thirty-nine residents of West Jerusalem, in the east of the city, there is one per 5,641 residents (Margalit 2006, 126). Because they lack waste disposal facilities, Palestinians in many areas burn rubbish in the streets, causing the spread of toxic fumes. The infrastructural violence in East Jerusalem as a form of urban inequality, then, is a relational one, with the proximity of Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods making the inequitable distribution of resources starkly apparent. This infrastructural inequality is the result of a complex assemblage of factors, including urban planning decisions, legal arrangements over land ownership, and the topography of the city—making it difficult to point to a direct cause. Thus, “infrastructural violence” can be considered a form of structural (or systemic) violence in the sense of Galtung. Unlike in cases of direct violence, here there “may not be any person who directly harms another person.” Instead, the “violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power,” resulting in “unequal life chances” (Galtung 1969). As infrastructures are physically “built in” to the city, and often run underground, they can easily be taken for granted as banal spatial givens, or even become invisible, as has been widely argued (Lahiji and Friedman 1997; Star

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1999; Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Graham 2010; Amin 2014). As such, their effects appear to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular at once. Because the acts of exclusion reinforced by infrastructures are not always declared policies, but may be incremental acts of omission, we might think of this violence as “creeping” (Yiftachel 2005). Yet structural questions of urban planning also manifest themselves in rather direct forms of violence, as infrastructural exclusion affects residents’ embodied experience of the city. We rely on transport links to maintain our social lives, on water networks and electrical grids to maintain our humanity. Sewers funnel human waste, that which is no longer human, making infrastructures the ultimate nexus of the human and the non-human components of the city. Thus, Gandy (2005) refers to the infrastructural provisions of the modern home, on which we have come to rely for hygiene, warmth, light, and other essential needs, as an “exoskeleton” of the human body. The under-served areas of Jerusalem are prone to public health problems due to the lack of clean drinking water, openly running sewage, and garbagerelated pests. Among residents of Kufr Aqab, a suburb of Jerusalem cut off by the Separation Wall and not served by municipal waste removal, for instance, the lack of infrastructure, and the resulting pollution, have led to high levels of respiratory and skin disease (lawyer for Kufr Aqab local council, August 2014). In the cyborg city, then, humans depend on technological extensions of our bodily selves and become vulnerable when the circulations of the urban metabolism they facilitate break down. We have seen how the disconnection from urban circulations makes us vulnerable in physical ways. This exclusion is structural, but also experienced in embodied ways which affect residents’ sense of their own place in the city. In addition, infrastructural violence underpins Palestinian political exclusion when material conditions in the city are used to portray Palestinians as non-deserving subjects and legitimize symbolic, as well as political, expulsion. The lack of hygiene resulting from infrastructural exclusion is utilized in processes of abjection—a rejection of that which is Other within the self, and the ensuing delineation of a border of the self. In Kristeva’s terms, sewage and excrement function as the ultimate abject, because they have been expelled from within (i.e., they are a former part of the self) and because the visceral feeling of revulsion they cause serves to delineate the border between self and Other, inside and outside (Kristeva 1982). In addition to the ubiquity of waste, several Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem occasionally experience raw sewage flowing in their streets due to

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lacking infrastructure (Alyan 2009). Notably, Jerusalem’s former mayor Teddy Kollek recalled “the unbearable stench” of East Jerusalem prior to Israel’s occupation in 1967 (Wohlgelnerter cited in Weizman 2007). By highlighting the smell of native areas, he followed in a long colonial tradition in which expropriation could be justifed through the olfactory dehumanization of locals (Nightingale 2012; Rotbard 2015). Building on Douglas’s ([1966] 2002) notion that flth represents “matter out of place,” Sibley has argued that dominant groups use abjection to minimize ambiguity and achieve a “purifcation of space” (Sibley 1988). Because bad odors, in particular emanating from excrement, are associated with transgression (Stallybrass and White 1986; Cresswell 1996, 97–145), such a characterization of East Jerusalem lays the groundwork for justifying the removal and replacement of residents. Even more than the toxic fumes of burning garbage, then, the organic smell of human waste demarcates the boundary of impurity. Perhaps for this reason, the Israeli security apparatus also actively utilizes the abjecting effect of the smell of sewage. Since 2014, an artifcial liquid with a sewage-like smell called “skunk”—previously only used as a non-lethal crowd control mechanism against protesters in the West Bank—has been employed regularly in East Jerusalem (ACRI 2014). It is used to break up assemblies, as well as in a manner that might be called punitive: entire streets, including homes, storefronts, and parked vehicles are sprayed with the liquid. Its odor clings to surfaces for weeks and causes physical revulsion. The use of “skunk,” then, serves as a means of marking Palestinians as “transgressors,” as “matter out of place.” In a sensory manner, it demarcates the boundary around those areas considered abject and those residents considered external to the Israeli state—or in need of purifcation. While the use of “skunk” may appear more extreme than the longer-term, accretive effects of insufficient ser vices, both the acute and the structural form of infrastructural violence represent a symbolic expulsion of the Palestinians of Jerusalem—they are not considered part of the social body of the state or of Israeli Jerusalem. In processes of abjection, according to Ahmed (2004, 91), a “transference of affect” takes place when signs of disgust stick to other (unspoken, abjecting) notions. As residents wash their clothes, their cars, themselves, multiple times to rid themselves of the persistent odor, “skunk” associates the smell of excrement with the residents of affected areas—the revolting “skunk” liquid becomes a “sticky sign” signaling exclusion. It affects residents’ perception of themselves and their neighborhoods, a constant reminder of their place.

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The repetition of negative attributes in relation to marginal groups in media and political discourses, too, causes signs to stick together and eventually become inextricably linked. In reporting about the failure of infrastructural ser vices in East Jerusalem, Israeli media from across the political spectrum regularly refer to neighborhoods located behind the Wall as lawless and chaotic, highlighting the prevalence of illegal construction and crime (Hasson 2011; Margalit 2014; Yashar 2014). The emphasis on criminality when reporting on lacking infrastructure suggests that such unruly subjects are not worthy of municipal ser vice provision. Wacquant describes this process in which a location is labeled a “lawless zone” as “territorial stigmatisation”: the label suggests the place is “outside the common norm” and thus allows the “authorities to justify special measures, deviating from both law and custom” (Wacquant 2008, 240). And indeed, the municipality uses the lack of security from which residents suffer as justifcation for not providing ser vices. The areas are deemed so dangerous that municipal representatives or ser vice contractors claim they could only enter with military escorts, to repair broken pipes, for instance.4 Thus, in a circular argument, the situation of insecurity, caused by governmental and municipal policy, is used to justify further exclusion—both from infrastructural provision and from the city at large. The Israeli prime minister as well as the mayor of Jerusalem have advocated excluding areas located behind the Wall, which are home to a third of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, entirely from the city by redrawing the city’s boundaries (Hasson 2010; ACRI 2011; Ravid 2015). The incremental steps of infrastructural exclusion can be seen as a form of symbolic re-bordering, advancing a situation of de facto exclusion that will make the de jure exclusion inevitable or unnecessary. The extraordinary measures that Wacquant suggested may create further exclusion, reflecting the persistent stickiness and self-reinforcing nature of signs of marginality. Through polluting and territorially stigmatizing Palestinian areas, the Israeli state is able to outline an inside and outside of its body politic—constituting through abjection what Ahmed (2005) calls the “skin of the community.” Through infrastructural abjection and stigmatization, it retroactively justifes the spatial containment of Palestinians by the Wall and prepares the ground for a more permanent exclusion from the city. The Israel Separation Wall cuts off Palestinians and their daily circulations from Jerusalem, leading to the functional exclusion of many of the city’s Arab inhabitants, who have diminished access to urban life and resources in the city center. As an imposing piece of infrastructure cutting through the

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urban fabric, the eight-meter concrete wall also serves symbolic purposes. While a long-term solution to the territorial conflict is suspended, the visual clarity and imposing physical presence of the Wall create an illusion of defned borders—and the sense that what lies beyond it is external to the city. Abjection is not only part of psychological subject-formation but also, as Wilcox (2015, 84) argues, an essential part of sovereignty, which “is a performance that differentiates wild, ungovernable land from peace and order; it is only the sign of sovereignty that distinguishes a chaotic outside from an orderly inside. . . . The division between the inside and outside, between domestic peace and external anarchy and danger, is produced by abjection.” The Wall, and the infrastructural exclusion of the areas beyond it, performs sovereignty by demarcating the boundary between inside and outside in a highly visible manner, when there is in fact is no such clarity (cf. Brown 2010). The abjection of Palestinian Jerusalem, then, is more than a sum of infrastructural disconnections, but an effective mechanism to symbolize the internal integrity of the Jewish-Israeli nation-state vis-à-vis an “uncivilised out there” (Busbridge 2013). The political purpose of abjection, according to Navaro-Yashin (2012), is to protect oneself from being confronted with the “originary violence” of the founding of the state. Making invisible the zones of the abject allows the creation of zones of supposed cleanliness, seemingly untouched by that which is “rotten” at the core of the state. Israel’s identity as both democratic and Jewish, Azoulay and Ophir (2013) argue, is called into question by its fvedecade rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories—if given democratic rights, these subjects would threaten the Jewish identity of the state, but their continued colonial disenfranchisement undermines any notion of true democracy. In attempting to balance this internal contradiction, Israel must create the illusion that its occupation of Palestinian land and people is external to the state. Following from this, what is externalized through infrastructural abjection in Israel/Palestine is not only the Arabness within the state of Israel, but also the “founding violence” at the heart of the state. The originary violence here lies in the founding of a politico-legal system with internal contradictions, as well as in the mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians which coincided with the foundation of the state in 1948 (Morris 2004). They are the “constitutive outside” which continues to haunt the subject. The Palestinians who remain are a reminder of the incompleteness of this project, which was followed by the expulsion of 350,000 Palestinians in 1967 (Segev 2008). At the same time, they experience the violence as en-

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during. The ethnic cleansing of what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe) might be viewed as an ongoing process, as displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their land continues, albeit at a slower pace.5 Following the reasoning of Jabary Salamanca et al. (2012), who argue that settler colonialism should be studied as a “structure” rather than a singular “event” of ethnic cleansing, we fnd the founding violence of Israel cannot just be read in ruins and traces. Rather, through ongoing abjection, it reverberates in current-day reiterations of violence and violent structures, which serve to functionally disconnect Palestinians from Jerusalem, revoke their symbolic membership in the city, and expel them from the body politic.

Infrastructural Incorporation We have seen how infrastructures can operate in violent ways when they are disconnected; however, recent work has shown that not only the disconnection of infrastructures but also the construction of roads and other ostensibly connective networks can perpetuate violence by hindering circulations (Weizman 2007; Pullan 2013; Handel 2014). Going further, I argue that infrastructural connection itself bears violent potential as it advances and perpetuates Israel’s incorporation of the Palestinian east of the city. For Palestinians, infrastructures, as a material embodiment of policy and planning, become a reflection of the Israeli occupation and annexation of the city as an everyday lived space. Through the metaphor of the city-as-body, annexation through urban circulation is normalized, and framed as desirable. And through the affective workings of modern infrastructures, incorporation takes place on the very bodies of Palestinians making use of these services. Over the past decade, and in par ticu lar during the mayoralty of Nir Barkat (2008–18), the Jerusalem municipality has sought to increase investment in the city’s east, focusing in particular on the “upgrading” of the built environment and linking the east to the west of the city using connective infrastructures (Ministry of Transport 2012; Government of Israel 2014; Prime Minister’s Office 2014). The Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR or tram) in particular, which passes through Palestinian neighborhoods and began operating in 2011, has also introduced visual changes to those areas, creating a closer resemblance to West Jerusalem. By aligning Palestinian neighborhoods visually and administratively, these “upgrades” made to roads, pavements, street furnishings, and public transportation constitute a “normalization” in

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the sense of Foucault: they seek to “reduce the most unfavourable, deviant” elements and “bring them in line with the normal” (Foucault 2007, 62). The threat of Otherness here is contained not through exclusion but through assimilation. It is commonly asserted that infrastructures are so deeply embedded in our experience of the built environment and are so banal or “taken-forgranted” that they only become visible when they cease to function (Graham and Marvin 2001; Graham and McFarlane 2015, 12). Yet in the case of East Jerusalem, infrastructure also becomes visible as a political question when it suddenly appears. Upon seeing construction works on the road surrounding the East Jerusalem bus station at Nablus Road, a young woman I’ll call Mariam (Kufr Aqab, August 2014) pointed to the new pavement and said: “You see how they are improving the area? It looks nice, right? But this is how you know they will never give it back.” Her statement reflects surprise at construction work in the city’s east after decades of municipal neglect, but also the ambivalence with which Palestinians view any apparent infrastructural improvements, which may ease their daily life in the short run, but are understood as part of a longer-term plan to permanently annex East Jerusalem. Many Palestinians are similarly keenly aware of the implication of “mundane” objects. They have learned to read the landscape for signs of impending dispossession, for the slow but steady introduction of “facts on the ground.” Beyond constituting a material manifestation of violence, infrastructure often serves as its “instrumental medium,” as Rodgers and O’Neill (2012, 404–5) point out. That is, infrastructure not only reflects decisions from the political realm but has the capacity to engender violence beyond the scope intended by human actors. Infrastructural developments, and in particular trains and roads, are “an ideal colonial technology” in that they facilitate access, extending the colonial reach into previously peripheral areas (Freed 2010). Because large-scale material interventions are difficult to reverse, such infrastructure projects are also a powerful means of establishing a permanent hold on occupied spaces. Both the construction of new roads linking East and West Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Light Rail are seen by Palestinians as strengthening the grip of the occupation by linking settlements to the west of the city and making the Israeli annexation of the east more permanent, if not irreversible (Barghouti 2009). Underground, the infrastructural annexation has already taken place, with the nominally independent East Jerusalem water and electricity companies in fact dependent on Israel, which determines the width of their pipes and the capacity of their electrical lines,

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as well as access to sources and distribution centers.6 The possibility of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, of independent and autonomous spaces, is undermined with every new infrastructural connection made (cf. Dumper 1993). Thus the ostensible technical function of infrastructural expansion, improved circulation, has much broader political repercussions in that it quite literally “cements” the annexation of East Jerusalem. The ever-deepening infrastructural linkages between East and West Jerusalem are promoted by advocating “connectivity” as a seemingly neutral urban value (Tsur 2012).7 I read this as part of a discourse in which the functional city is understood through the metaphor of the human body. Notions of health and wholeness naturalize and depoliticize the annexation of East Jerusalem by means of infrastructural expansion as a mere issue of technical functionality. Yet, often this connectivity serves Jewish settlement expansion rather than enabling improved mobility for Palestinian residents. The projects under the umbrella of recent infrastructure upgrading efforts in East Jerusalem include new roads that will connect Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem with the west of the city, while also serving the Palestinian neighborhoods through which they pass. While these roads provide some improvement to congestion issues in East Jerusalem, their primary purpose appears to be the expansion of settlements. Mahmoud, a Beit Hanina resident who uses Road 20, completed in 2013, every morning to commute from his home to West Jerusalem, noted: “It has cut twenty minutes out of my trip to work, but they didn’t do it for us.” Despite the benefts for his daily routine, in other words, he does not see the new roadway as a ser vice the municipality has provided for his beneft, but rather assumes the motivation lies in strengthening the settlements—it links the main road of Pisgat Ze’ev settlement with Begin Boulevard (Mahmoud, Beit Hanina, January 2016). Similarly, according to observers, the main purpose of Road 21, under construction as of 2017, is that it will serve as an access road to the settlement of Ramat Shlomo, forming the basis of its expansion (Bimkom 2013). The notion of the city as sustained by circulation is compounded by descriptions of Jerusalem as one inextricable unit. At the opening ceremony for Road 20, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu—while naming an intersection in East Jerusalem in honor of his father—described the construction as part of an effort to “link Jerusalem with itself” (Lazaroff 2013). His words imply that there is no difference between East and West Jerusalem; they are not even two separate parts of a city to be linked, but constitutive of one “self.” Similarly, Israeli politicians frequently describe Jerusalem as the “heart” of Jewish

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people (Prime Minister’s Office 2012), highlighting the centrality of Jerusalem for Judaism and Israel, or evoke the image of the city as a heart or body whose division would result in death (Jerusalem Center 2010). Swyngedouw (2006) reminds us that the image of the city-as-body has a long history precisely because “circulation” has always been a key tenet of the urban. The discovery of the body’s circulatory system led to health becoming associated with continuous circulation—in cities in particular, with regard to traffic, air, light, and waste. Thus continuous circulation, based on William Harvey’s model of the metabolic processes of the body, became the metaphor used for the functioning city (Sennett 1994; Cresswell 2006; see also Foucault 2007). As the spatial arrangement of the city is often understood as a metaphor for society as a whole (Cohen 1985), and since the notion of the “body politic” had long served to naturalize the political order (Harvey 1999), the newly understood metabolisms of the body served as a useful schema to legitimize the systems of power at work in cities (cf. Usher 2014). In Jerusalem, we see this not only when anatomical metaphors are invoked to suggest indivisibility, but also when unimpeded circulation is framed as central to the health of the city. The focus on circulation in the city-asbody schema depoliticizes the situation in Jerusalem by making it one that can be normalized through technical solutions, for instance related to traffic flow, and glosses over the facts that connectivity merely serves to deepen the grip of Jewish-only settlements on East Jerusalem and that the city’s Palestinian population is not considered part of the body politic. The unity promoted by the metaphors of bodily circulation thus refers to a purifed whole rather than the linkages within a hybrid city. Not only does the city-as-body serve as a metaphor that naturalizes the infrastructural violence of annexation, but this incorporation of East Jerusalem is also achieved through the bodies of Palestinians making use of Israeli infrastructures in the city. This is in part due to the fact that colonial infrastructures, beyond their potential for seizing territory by establishing linkages, also function through symbolic registers, as icons of modernity visà-vis a less “civilized” local population (Masquelier 2002; Jabary Salamanca 2015; also see Shamir 2013). The JLR has similarly been associated with imagery of progress. The tram’s sleek, futuristic appearance has been directly linked to the Zionist project as a modernization of (implicitly backward) historical Palestine. The light rail operator, CityPass, emphasizes that it constitutes part of the realization of Theodor Herzl’s vision of Jerusalem as a modern metropolis (Jerusalem Transportation Masterplan n.d.; Herzl [1902] 2015).

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This explicitly stated link to the vision of the founding father of Zionism emphasizes the tram’s character as a Jewish-Israeli project, yet at the same time, the light rail aims to project a sense of cosmopolitanism (Nolte and Yacobi 2015). Trilingual signage and announcements on the trains include Arabic, a language that is usually excluded from Israeli public transport, and efforts were made to encourage Palestinian participation. Indeed, the municipality aimed for the JLR to promote “peaceful co-existence” (Jerusalem Transportation Masterplan 2014) and “bring all the people and the neighborhoods of Jerusalem closer than ever” (Alstom, promotional video for the Jerusalem Light Rail in Shuafat, March 2010). When the light rail commenced its operations, the response from Palestinians was indeed surprisingly positive. For Palestinians, being offered a high-quality urban ser vice by the municipality, and being included in this showcase project, was unusual and unexpected. They noted the level of comfort of the JLR, with the unimpeded movement of the train resulting in an embodied sense of modernity, what Sheller (2004, 226) refers to as a “co-constitution of motion and emotion.” The old buses of the East Jerusalem bus companies were described as loud, hot, rattling, and often stuck in traffic. The light rail, by contrast, was airconditioned and moved smoothly and quickly, providing an undeniably more comfortable experience. Thus, Hamdi (Shuafat, July 2013), a well-educated young professional, laughed about a colleague who boycotted the light rail although his commute to work led precisely along its route: “He comes to work every morning, late, sweaty, and exhausted from sitting in traffic the whole time. On the same street where the train runs. He could be there in ten, ffteen minutes!” There was a sense that those who didn’t utilize one of the few ser vices the municipality provides for them were adding to their own burden unnecessarily. Modern urban forms have intended uses, Söderström (2013) argues, which require “educating” the population in their proper use. Such pedagogies were also part of the outreach program for the JLR, which sought to raise public awareness of traffic safety. Inside the carriages, too, passengers included in the community of public transport riders are “normalized” to behave within acceptable parameters (Semiaticky 2006; Butcher 2011; Höhne 2015). On the JLR, a variety of explicit prompts seeks to enforce the adherence to such behavioral scripts. Passengers are reminded of proper etiquette: announcements, flyers, markings on station platforms, and videos instruct them to let others off the train frst, rather than pushing ahead, for instance. Further, a sense of community and ownership was invoked that went beyond

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a mere customer-service provider relationship: outreach workers spoke with religious leaders in East Jerusalem, hoping they would encourage Palestinian youths to purchase tickets and arguing “It is your train, please tell them to pay.”8 The role of Palestinian buy-in has been important not only to project an image of harmonious co-existence in the city. Security considerations apparently also played a key role, according the CEO of light rail operator CityPass: “From the security point of view, there were some experts who thought that if Arabs are using a transportation system, they may not harm it. They thought it would be even much more safe and secure than other public transportation in Jerusalem—because Arabs are using it.”9 In light of this, the extensive efforts and community outreach to ensure Palestinian participation take on another meaning. The train was meant to foster more than good inter-communal relations. In this urban conflict setting, the bodies of civilian Palestinian residents were turned into involuntary elements of the security apparatus, their physical presence on the light rail protecting the infrastructure and the Jewish passengers on it. It has been argued that marginalized residents may come to “feel part of the city” through the adherence to shared codes of deportment on public transport, perhaps more so than through the improved access to the city center (Brand and Dávila 2011, 656). Yet, many Palestinians viewed the light rail as an Israeli space in which they were self-conscious. Palestinian commuters related that they were stared at fearfully or targeted by ticket controllers for being Arab (Rania, Ramallah, July 2014; Asma, Shuafat, December 2015). Especially during politically sensitive periods, when “abnormal” behav ior could result in being shot on the spot by security ser vices or armed civilians, they closely monitored their own comportment. Despite the cosmopolitan image projected by the trilingual announcements and signage on the light rail, Hebrew maintains a dominant role. Palestinian commuters said they avoided speaking Arabic on the light rail so as not to be identifed as Palestinian, and potentially attacked (Ahmad, Beit Hanina, August  2014). Through the internalization of certain behavioral scripts, for many Palestinians, the light rail reinforced a sense of difference rather than a feeling of being part of the city. In that it extends public ser vices to previously marginalized urban areas, the expansion of infrastructure appears more benevolent than infrastructural exclusion. Yet this incorporation—advanced through functional links, bodily metaphors, appealing atmospheres, and behavioral scripts—also entails in-

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creasing Israeli control over Palestinian everyday lives. Unlike the disciplinary power of infrastructural exclusion, infrastructural incorporation normalizes: it integrates elements deemed dangerous—such as Palestinian commuters—in order to minimize risk (cf. Foucault 2007). In descriptions of Jerusalem as one circulatory system, body, or self, the abjecting notion of creating a boundary between self and Other appears all but erased. In this ongoing incorporative process, in which infrastructures are deeply implicated, Palestinian Jerusalem is rendered invisible as an entity in its own right, and Palestinian residents come to feel alienated from their surroundings, displaced without having moved.

Resisting Infrastructural Violence The Israeli approach of concurrent abjection and incorporation receives an at times similarly ambivalent response from Palestinians, who are forced to negotiate between maintaining their basic individual quality of life in the city through ser vices, and collective political visions of halting annexation and maintaining the autonomy of East Jerusalem. Thus, rather than refusing infrastructural ser vices or connectivity to West Jerusalem on ideological grounds, many Palestinians focus on the here and now, on improving their quality of life by making use of the resources available to them. They demand infrastructural connections, which they view as a right deeply linked to urban citizenship. At the same time, these pragmatic responses are not a reflection of surrendering all political visions of an autonomous Palestinian city. The refusal to be incorporated was displayed in a sensational manner when residents attacked the Jerusalem Light Rail on its path through Palestinian neighborhoods. Foregoing ease of movement and quality of life, they sent a symbolic signal of refusal. In light of the symbolic exclusion enacted through infrastructures, the demand for infrastructural ser vice provision has become a stand-in for Palestinians’ right to the city in many ways—despite the fact that demanding such ser vices requires appealing to Israeli authorities. Members of the Kufr Aqab local committee pointed to lack of water and irregular waste disposal as examples of how the municipality treats them as “second-class citizens.” In 2012, the local committee took the issue of their infrastructural neglect to the Jerusalem municipal courts. Although the Separation Barrier’s route cuts them off from the rest of the city, they argued, they have a right to the

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same ser vices as other Jerusalem residents, in particular because they continue to pay for these ser vices through municipal taxes.10 The Jerusalem District Court ruled in favor of the local residents (Hasson 2015), a verdict the residents and their lawyers viewed as an affirmation that Kufr Aqab remains part of the city. This was seen as an important symbolic victory, even if in reality the neighborhood experienced little improvement. Rubbish collection is also a signifcant problem in Shuafat Refugee Camp, whose Emergency Committee made a call to action directly referencing the responsibility of the Israeli mayor of the city: “We will make it clear to Mayor Nir Barkat and his colleagues at City Hall: . . . Stop avoiding your responsibilities towards the residents of east Jerusalem! Act to regularize and resolve the efficient disposal of garbage from Shuafat Refugee Camp! . . . The funds allocated to garbage disposal per resident of the camp is only a ffth of those appropriated per citizen in West Jerusalem.”11 By appealing to Israeli institutions and referring to the notion that all residents of the city should be treated equally, the local committees involved in organizing the protest employed a political vocabulary usually reserved for those who are part of a polity, although Palestinian Jerusalemites are considered merely permanent residents, not citizens of Israel. It appears that inclusion in infrastructural circulations is read as a signal of residency rights by those who fear they may soon be excluded from the city. In seeking equal treatment, these East Jerusalemites do not necessarily signal acceptance of Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem. We might instead think of them espousing something akin to what Anand (2017) calls “hydraulic citizenship”—an enactment of residents’ rights through infrastructural claims made and public ser vices provided. Similarly, underscoring that infrastructural services are an essential part of how citizenship is conceived and shaped, von Schnitzler (2008) has shown how new regulations for water consumption in post-apartheid South Africa reflected a par ticular notion of citizenship shaped by neo-liberal logic. The market logic of the Israeli municipality, which constructs Palestinian Jerusalemites as “customers” rather than citizens or residents,12 holds the promise of economic rather than ethnonational criteria playing the main role in determining access to infrastructural resources. Yet it also means that Palestinians appear to have no inherent right to those resources, as access can be revoked if fees are not paid. Thus, Palestinian communities’ supply of water and electricity is frequently turned off en masse in what has been criticized as collective punishment (Ho 2014; Abukhater 2015; Udasin 2015). In the neoliberal and settler colonial setting

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of Jerusalem, both the “infrastructural citizenship” and the residency of Palestinian noncitizens are always precarious, but residents fnd their tenuous links to the city affirmed when they are able to secure infrastructural ser vices. While decades of urban neglect and the looming danger of losing access to the city have caused Palestinians to insist on their access to infrastructural ser vices, they are also deeply aware of the violent potential of infrastructural incorporation, which threatens to erase their claim to an independent east of the city. When tensions around the Jerusalem Light Rail came to a head, Palestinians chose the refusal to be incorporated over improved ser vice provision from the municipality. In undermining Israeli-controlled infrastructure, they not only excluded themselves from the city’s network of connectivity but also made use of the vulnerability caused by urban residents’ “prosthetic” dependency on infrastructure (Freud cited in Larkin 2013). In July 2014, a time when political tensions were on the rise, residents of Shuafat expressed their rage at the brutal murder of a local boy by Israeli extremists, by attacking the tram infrastructure. The destruction of the JLR infrastructure continued for several days, along with protests and clashes with Israeli security forces. Protesters systematically dismantled all installations associated with the tram at the two stations in Shuafat: security cameras, station shelters, signage, ticket machines, tracks, signals, traffic lights, and underground wiring, as well as electricity pylons supplying the train. The methodical destruction of the light rail’s essential infrastructure suggests that the moment functioned as more than an outlet for frustration. Instead, Palestinians aimed to disrupt the very functionality of the light rail. Ser vice was interrupted for over one week; those living in settlements at the northern end of the JLR’s route were forced to take alternative bus routes circumventing Palestinian areas. Palestinians had attacked a visible symbol of the Israeli occupation, however benefcial it was to their everyday lives. Yet, on a functional level, the train was also the physical means by which Israelis accessed the Shuafat neighborhood, and the presence of settlers had become normalized. With the disruption of settlers’ mobility through the neighborhood, the boundaries of Shuafat were temporarily upheld. The cyborg quality of urban infrastructures makes everyone vulnerable—those groups who are more tied into infrastructural networks perhaps more so than those who are excluded. This was demonstrated again when a few weeks later, possibly inspired by the attacks on the JLR, Palestinians cut electricity pylons serving the Dolev

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settlement near Ramallah, causing a blackout in the settlement. Infrastructurally mediated violence, then, is not transmitted only from the top down, but can also be a tool of the marginalized to disrupt dominant circulations. Palestinians’ ability to stop unwanted Israeli movement through their neighborhood resulted in reclaiming a level of territorial control, if only temporarily. The attacks unhinged the functional operation of the infrastructure by disrupting Israeli mobility and its associated quotidian routines. Perhaps more importantly, however, they unsettled the narrative of the city’s harmonious unifcation for which the train had been used as a symbol. Arguing that the picture of cosmopolitan inclusion and modernity projected by the light rail merely obscured its underlying violence, one Palestinian resident stated: “People tried to convince themselves that this train is a civilized thing. But the happy picture is just based on racism; it’s a fake. We don’t want this kind of civilization” (Ahmad, Beit Hanina, July 2014). Some Israeli officials portrayed the destruction of the light rail infrastructure as mindless vandalism that harmed Palestinians’ own interests, or as an outlet for frustration that had accumulated elsewhere.13 Instead, it becomes clear, the attacks were a way to make visible, in a spectacular manner, the less discernible structural violence precipitated and sustained by the infrastructure. While individual residents may see improvements in their everyday quality of life by being included in Israeli networks, the violence of incorporation is a long-term process. By attempting not only to reshape the urban terrain but also to constitute certain types of subjects, it limits spatial possibilities and precludes possible futures of the city. While it works through individual bodies, this incorporative violence is also exerted against the collective and its political future. If continuous circulation, based on the metabolic processes of the body, was long the metaphor used for the functioning city, we might read this disruption of flows through attacks on infrastructure as a refusal to be incorporated into the city and the body politic it represents.

Conclusion The two forms of infrastructural violence outlined here may appear, at frst glance, to be at odds with one another. The violence of exclusion lies in being functionally cut off from the city’s circulation, affectively marked as the

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abject Other outside of civilization and modernity, and thus symbolically expelled from a rightful claim to membership in the city. The violence of incorporation appears as an improvement of quality of life—in practical terms, it involves access to urban metabolisms; in affective terms, it can even come with increased comfort and a sense of belonging to the city, participating in a realm of modernity and progress. However, the collective claim to the city and its political future that is being undermined by spatial annexation and normalization in East Jerusalem lays the groundwork for appropriation. These processes of abjection and incorporation take place simultaneously in Jerusalem because they are attempts to overcome an ambivalence at the heart of the regime in Israel/Palestine as a whole, as well as in Jerusalem as a city—a contradiction which can never be fully resolved. Under settler colonialism, Wolfe (2006) argues, the structural process of elimination and replacement of the indigenous population is continued through assimilation. In Israel/Palestine, we see the two logics—elimination by displacement and by assimilation—taking place concurrently. This is in part because the colonial frontier in Israel/Palestine has not been closed: Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian land has created an extreme sense of ambiguity of borders, as Israel maintains military control over the West Bank (and, effectively, the Gaza Strip—see Li 2006; Jabary Salamanca 2011) while abrogating political responsibility for the inhabitants. Because of the resulting lack of clarity over the location of borders, and the boundaries of Israeli sovereignty, Israel/Palestine has been referred to as “neither two states nor one,” with the paradoxical situation of the occupation referred to as one of “inclusive exclusion” (Yiftachel 2005; Ophir et al. 2009). In Jerusalem, where numerous types of boundaries and frontiers overlap— Dumper (2014) refers to the city as “many-bordered”—this sense of unresolved in-betweenness is heightened. Thus a similar process is at work at an urban scale. Because bordering processes can never be completely successful, the tension between inclusion and exclusion manifests itself in simultaneous processes of abjection and incorporation. Because infrastructures connect the political realm and the lived everyday—the physical manifestation of policy as well as agents in their own right—they are key sites for determining relationships and negotiating who is part of the city, thus enacting violence of various types on the urban scale. Maintaining a Jewish demographic majority in Jerusalem has been the core tenet of Israeli urban planning (Kaminker 1997; Cheshin et al. 1999), an aim for which the city’s Arab population must be dis-enfranchised, or

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excluded through re-bordering. In fact, multiple re-redrawings of the municipality’s outline have had the exclusion of the highest number of Palestinians as their object (Benvenisti 1996; Bollens 2000). The Israeli insistence that Jerusalem will always remain united and undivided does not allow for the reversal of the annexation of East Jerusalem’s territory, however. Abjection serves as a means to construct Palestinian East Jerusalem as separate and outside, to exclude it symbolically without forfeiting the territorial grasp. Yet this abjection can never be complete; it is always challenged. On the scale of the city, the entangled nature of its constituent parts is all too apparent: ethnic fault lines are scattered across dense urban space, fragmenting it into often minuscule segments, intertwined by various metabolic circulations. Abjection is an attempt to develop clear-cut borders where there is ambiguity— but at the same time, the abject is the constant reminder of the impossibility of such clear-cut borders (Grosz 1990). Thus, the court decision in which residents of Kufr Aqab successfully sued the city for better services was justifed with the argument that the neighborhood’s rubbish problem was “exporting disease by bird” to nearby Israeli areas.14 The stark infrastructural division of the Separation Wall was not able to disentangle the ecological connections between different parts of the city, and indeed the issue ultimately affirmed that Kufr Aqab continued to be part of the city. Thus, the abject not only makes boundaries visible but moves to erase them. Because abjection always carries within it the potential of destabilization, the city can never be fully “purifed” so long as Palestinian Jerusalemites maintain their place in the city. The incorporation of Palestinians into Israeli circulations, their normalization in order to curtail their Otherness, serves as the alternative means of unifying the city. Yet while Palestinians demand urban ser vices and equal treatment, they resist normalization and incorporation that undermine autonomous spaces and eradicate collective claims to the future of the city. Due to the impossibility of either full exclusion or full incorporation, then, the bordering and re-bordering in Jerusalem appears as an ongoing, dynamic process. Infrastructures are the main tool used in this constant shifting of boundaries, making them key sites of contestation over the city—participating actors in the struggle over who belongs to the city, and who the city belongs to. As the violent potential of infrastructures lies in their capacity to draw or undermine boundaries, to link bodies into the system or exclude them, the interconnection of human and non-human actors through infrastructures cre-

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ates a particular vulnerability. The violence of infrastructures is experienced on an embodied level—in material disadvantage, bodily harm, or the pressure to alter one’s behavior—but at the same time, the violence they advance is political, and targets the collective. Lefebvre links the fact that “every state is born of violence” to the ongoing violence in that space: “State power endures only by virtue of violence directed toward space” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991). The spatial violence of bordering is not a one-off event of division at the foundation of the state, but a continuous process. Urban infrastructures are not merely reminders of violent acts past; they enact violence on a day-to-day level, and even point toward a violent future. Thus the no longer trivial elements of urban space, such as the street furnishings to which a passer-by assigns signifcance, are not only a memory of past violence, or a symbol of a violent policy. They themselves reverberate with violence that continues to be felt. The notion of the cyborg calls into question singular myths of origin and shows how they are involved in domination. Haraway asserts the impossibility of the autonomous individual subject, which we might take to reflect the impossibility of “purifed,” unambiguous urban space: “To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many” (Haraway [1991] 2000). The Israeli prime minister’s paradoxical-sounding aim to “link Jerusalem with itself” is almost an acknowledgment that, despite Israel’s assertion that Jerusalem is eternally indivisible, it is made up of more than one self, and non-human structures play a vital part in negotiating between those selves. Following Haraway, a denial of the other self/selves promises ongoing conflict. The cyborg city is as always multiple, even if its different parts are intertwined against their will. But perhaps most importantly, the cyborg bears the promise of alliances, of being connected while living with contradictions, of inhabiting a space which is neither two cities nor one. Notes 1. Government of Israel, Basic Law—“Jerusalem, Capital of Israel,” 30 July 1980. 2. Fieldwork was carried out between 2013 and 2016 in the frame of my doctoral research, which was funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust. 3. Respondents who do not hold public office are identifed by pseudonyms and their home neighborhoods throughout this chapter.

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4. David Koren, in charge of the East Jerusalem portfolio at Jerusalem municipal administration, August 2015. 5. Since 1967, over 14,000 East Jerusalemites’ residency permits have been revoked (UN OCHA 2011). 6. Amir Cheshin, longtime adviser to Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek on Arab issues, July 2014; Director of Operations, Jerusalem Water Undertaking, September 2014. 7. Tamir Nir, Jerusalem Municipal Council member holding the transportation portfolio, July 2014. 8. Former CEO, CityPass, July 2014. 9. Former CEO, CityPass, July 2014. 10. Petition by the local committee of Northern Jerusalem, 4 April 2012; Court decision, 26 June 2012 (in Hebrew). 11. Call for protest with Committee Against the Wall on 12 July 2015, by email. 12. David Koren, deputy mayor for Arab Affairs, July 2014. 13. Tamir Nir, Jerusalem City Council, transportation portfolio, July 2014. 14. Kufr Aqab local committee, August 2014.

Works Cited Abukhater, Maher. 2015. “Israel Cuts Off Electricity to Thousands of West Bank Palestinians.” Los Angeles Times, 23 February. ACRI. 2011. “Jerusalem Municipality Is Responsible for Its Residents Beyond the Barrier.” Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 15 December. http://www.acri.org.il/en/2011/12/15 /acri-letter-to-mayor-barkat. ACRI. 2014. “Concerns of Excessive Use of Skunk Spray in East Jerusalem.” Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 10 August. http://www.acri.org.il/en/2014/08/10/skunk-ej/. ACRI. 2015. “East Jerusalem 2015: Facts and Figures.” Jerusalem: Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2005. “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation.” In Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 95–111. Buffalo: State University of New York Press. Alyan, Nisreen. 2009. “Life in the Garbage: A Status Report of Sanitation Ser vices in East Jerusalem.” Association for Civil Rights in Israel, June. https://law.acri.org.il/en/2009/07/08 /life-in-the-garbage-a-report-on-sanitation-services-in-east-jerusalem/. Amin, Ash. 2014. “Lively Infrastructure.” Theory, Culture and Society 31 (7/8): 137–61. Anand, Nikhil. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Azoulay, Ariella, and Adi Ophir. 2013. The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barghouti, Omar. 2009. “Derailing Injustice: Palestinian Civil Resistance to the ‘Jerusalem Light Rail.’ ” Jerusalem Quarterly 38:46–58.

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Benvenisti, Meron. 1996. City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bimkom. 2013. “Palestinian Neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem: Planning Problems and Opportunities.” Jerusalem: Bimkom—Planners for Planning Rights. Bollens, Scott A. 1998. “Urban Planning Amidst Ethnic Conflict: Jerusalem and Johannesburg.” Urban Studies 35 (4): 729–50. Bollens, Scott A. 2000. On Narrow Ground: Urban Policy and Ethnic Conflict in Jerusalem and Belfast. Albany: State University of New York Press. Brand, Peter, and Julio D. Dávila. 2011. “Mobility Innovation at the Urban Margins.” City 15 (6): 647–61. Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Busbridge, Rachel. 2013. “Performing Colonial Sovereignty and the Israeli ‘Separation’ Wall.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 19 (5): 653–69. Butcher, Melissa. 2011. “Cultures of Commuting: The Mobile Negotiation of Space and Subjectivity on Delhi’s Metro.” Mobilities 6 (2): 237–54. Cheshin, Amir S., Bill Hutman, and Avi Melamed. 1999. Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Hillel. 2013. The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem. London: Routledge. Cohen, Stanley. 1985. Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coward, Martin. 2006. “Against Anthropocentrism: The Destruction of the Built Environment as a Distinct Form of Political Violence.” Review of International Studies 32 (3): 419–37. Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. (1966) 2002. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. Dumper, Michael. 1993. “Jerusalem’s Infrastructure: Is Annexation Irreversible?” Journal of Palestine Studies 22 (3): 78–95. Dumper, Michael. 2014. Jerusalem Unbound: Geography, History, and the Future of the Holy City. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 78. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Freed, Libbie. 2010. “Networks of (Colonial) Power: Roads in French Central Africa After World War I.” History and Technology: An International Journal 26 (3): 203–23. Galtung, Johan. 1969. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6:167–91. Gandy, Matthew. 2005. “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (1): 26–49. Government of Israel. 2014. Decision 1775: “Plan to Increase Personal Security and Socioeconomic Development for the Beneft of All the Residents of Jerusalem,” 29 June. Graham, Stephen, ed. 2010. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. New York: Routledge. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.

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Graham, Stephen, and Colin McFarlane, eds. 2015. Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context. London: Routledge. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1990. “The Body of Signifcation.” In Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Works of Julia Kristeva, edited by John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin, 80–103. London: Routledge. Handel, Ariel. 2014. “Gated/Gating Community: The Settlement Complex in the West Bank.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (4): 504–17. Haraway, Donna. (1991) 2000. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 291–324. London: Routledge. Harvey, A. D. 1999. “The Body Politic: Anatomy of a Metaphor.” Contemporary Review 275 (1603): 85–93. Hasson, Nir. 2010. “Jerusalem Official: Areas East of the Fence Not Part of the City.” Ha’aretz, 8 January. Hasson, Nir. 2011. “Israel Gearing for Effective Separation of East Jerusalem Palestinians.” Ha’aretz, 23 December. Hasson, Nir. 2015. “Court: Jerusalem Municipality Neglected Palestinian Neighborhood of Kafr Aqab.” Ha’aretz, 27 October. Herzl, Theodor. (1902) 2015. AltNeuLand: Ein utopischer Roman. Berlin: Hofenberg. Ho, Spencer. 2014. “Deputy Minister: Shut Off Electricity in West Bank, Gaza.” Times of Israel, 22 June. Höhne, Stefan. 2015. “The Birth of the Urban Passenger: Infrastructural Subjectivity and the Opening of the New York City Subway.” City 19 (2): 313–21. Ir Amim. 2014. “Jerusalem Municipality Budget Analysis for 2013: Share of Investment in East Jerusalem.” December. Jerusalem: Ir Amim. Jabary Salamanca, Omar. 2011. “Unplug and Play: Manufacturing Collapse in Gaza.” Human Geography 4 (1): 1–16. Jabary Salamanca, Omar. 2015. “Road 443: Cementing Dispossession, Normalizing Segregation and Disrupting Everyday Life in Palestine.” In Infrastructural Lives: Infrastructure in Context, edited by Colin McFarlane and Stephen Graham, 114–35. London: Routledge. Jabary Salamanca, Omar, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour. 2012. “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (1): 1–8. The Jerusalem Center. 2010. Video: “Mayor Nir Barkat on a United Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Master Plan,” 20 May. https://youtu.be/j628HogfC7o. Jerusalem Transportation Masterplan. 2014. Internal Briefng for Alstom: “The Use of the LRT Line by the Arab Population in Jerusalem.” March. Jerusalem Transportation Masterplan. n.d. “About Us— Our History.” https://jet .gov.il /en /about/. Accessed 22 December 2020. Kaika, Maria, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2000. “Fetishising the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (1): 122–48. Kaminker, Sara. 1997. “For Arabs Only: Building Restrictions in East Jerusalem.” Journal of Palestine Studies 26:5–16.

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Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lahiji, N., and D. S. Friedman. 1997. “At the Sink: Architecture in Abjection.” In Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture, edited by N. Lahiji and D. S. Friedman, 35–60. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42:327–43. Lazaroff, Tovah. 2013. “Netanyahu Opens New East Jerusalem Road.” Jerusalem Post, 6 May. Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Li, Darryl. 2006. “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement.” Journal of Palestine Studies 35 (2): 38–55. Margalit, Meir. 2006. “Discrimination in the Heart of the Holy City.” Jerusalem: International Peace and Cooperation Center. Margalit, Meir. 2014. “Opinion: Shuafat Refugee Camp Is the Writing on the Wall.” Jerusalem Post, 29 April. Masquelier, Adeline. 2002. “Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility, and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger.” American Ethnologist 29 (4): 829–56. Ministry of Transport. 2012. Press release: “Half a Billion to Be Invested in Transportation Infrastructure in the Neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, 22 February. Morris, Benny. 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nightingale, Carl H. 2012. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nolte, Amina, and Haim Yacobi. 2015. “Politics, Infrastructure and Representation: The Case of Jerusalem’s Light Rail.” Cities 43:28–36. Ophir, Adi, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanaf, eds. 2009. The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. New York: Zone Books. Prime Minister’s Office. 2012. Press release: “PM Netanyahu on the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem,” 20 May. Prime Minister’s Office. 2014. Press release: “Cabinet Approves PM Netanyahu’s NIS 300 Million Socio-economic Development Plan for Eastern Jerusalem,” 29 June. Pullan, Wendy. 2013. “Conflict’s Tools: Borders, Boundaries and Mobility in Jerusalem’s Spatial Structures.” Mobilities 8:125–147. Ravid, Barak. 2015. “Netanyahu Mulls Revoking Residency of Palestinians Beyond E. Jerusalem Separation Barrier.” Ha’aretz, 25 October. Rodgers, Dennis, and Bruce O’Neill. 2012. “Infrastructural Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Ethnography 13 (4): 401–12. Rotbard, Sharon. 2015. White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Segev, Tom. 2008. 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. London: Picador.

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Semiaticky, Matti. 2006. “Message in a Metro: Building Urban Rail Infrastructure and Image in Delhi, India.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30 (2): 277–92. Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton. Shamir, Ronen. 2013. Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2004. “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car.” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (4–5): 221–42. Sibley, David. 1988. “Survey 13: Purifcation of Space.” Environment and Planning D 6 (4): 409– 21. Söderström, Ola. 2013. “What Traveling Urban Types Do: Postcolonial Modernization in Two Globalizing Cities.” In Critical Mobilities, edited by Ola Söderström, Shalini Randeria, Didier Ruedin, Gianni D’Amato, and Francesco Panese, 29–57. London: Routledge. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3): 377–91. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2006. “Metabolic Urbanization: The Making of Cyborg Cities.” In In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, edited by Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, 20–39. London: Routledge. Tsur, Naomi. 2012. “Green Jerusalem: A Sustainable Future . . . for an Ancient City!” Jerusalem Municipality. Udasin, Sharon. 2015. “Power Cut Again in Palestinian Cities Despite ‘Collective Punishment’ Accusations.” Jerusalem Post, 25 February. UN OCHA. 2011. East Jerusalem: Key Humanitarian Concerns. March 2011. Jerusalem: Offce for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Usher, Mark. 2014. “Veins of Concrete, Cities of Flow: Reasserting the Centrality of Circulation in Foucault’s Analytics of Government.” Mobilities 9 (4): 550–69. von Schnitzler, Antina. 2008. “Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability, and Techno-Politics in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34 (4): 899–917. Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Wilcox, Lauren B. 2015. Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Yashar, Ari. 2014. “Lawless Arab Neighborhood Petitions Water Shortage.” Arutz Sheva, 26 March. Yiftachel, Oren. 2005. “Neither Two States nor One: The Disengagement and “Creeping Apartheid” in Israel/Palestine.” Arab World Geographer 8 (3): 125–29.

CHAPTER 9

Tenses of Violence Ruination and Accumulation Along the Çoruh Valley, Turkey Erdem Evren

This chapter is a reflection on life and death and how violence in its infrastructural incarnations mediates and reassembles the relation between the two under the dual processes of capitalist construction and destruction, or what I shall call “bulldozer capitalism.”1 The life and death in question are that of nature, built environments, and communities with all their material and immaterial bonds, wealth, and activities: an entire ecology of living and non-living things, in other words. When the commodifcation of this ecology by the state or the corporate form demands demolition or outright obliteration so that a material technology can be introduced to extract value from it, the damage inflicted on organic and non-organic bodies exalts moral attachments to land and elicits nostalgia. At the same time, a similar logic of monetarization—that is, the assigning of monetary values to things and relations—often comes to afflict the strategies of survival in the face of dispossession and displacement. I tell here the story of a semi-rural community that reluctantly comes to tap into its surroundings’ devastation in order to realize visions of accumulation. I explore this predicament as a generative force that embroils infrastructural violence in other social and political injuries—some immediate, others forgotten or disremembered. Elderly residents living in the middle part of the Çoruh Valley in northeast Turkey vividly remember to this day the frst engineers who arrived from

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the capital in the early 1980s to conduct technical surveys on the hydroelectric energy potential of the river. A few among them even speak fondly of their time as construction workers in designated sites. This study followed up on an energy plan hastily brought together about two decades earlier in the offces of the Department of State Planning in the heyday of World Bank– sponsored national developmentalism. Hence, its published outcome, named the Çoruh Energy Plan,2 announced in the best high-modernist fashion the construction of ten big dams on the main tributary of the Çoruh River, with hardly any mention of their human and ecological costs. The belated construction of the frst three dams from the 1990s on quickly set in motion the drastic deterioration of the physical landscape. Billows of dust rising from construction sites after late-night controlled explosions would be blamed for causing decreases in agricultural yields, just like the changes in the Mediterranean microclimate of the valley would be attributed to the drastic damming of the river. With every plot of land expropriated and bulldozed to make space for building sites and sand pits, and with every landmark, such as a historical fountain or bridge, that simultaneously vanished, material destruction created an even stronger sense of loss and uncertainty in the valley’s residents. Nonetheless, the goals of modernization and progress promised to be made concrete in these dams continued to activate strong desires for employment and social mobility. As the portent of destruction, on the one hand, and the embodiment of improvement, on the other, the dilemmas these projects posed for their target communities permeated every aspect of social, economic, and political life in the valley in the following three decades. And yet, distributed unevenly across the local space, their effects would become commensurate with the opportunities and losses determined by the new confgurations of the state and capital in the country brought to life after the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rise to power in 2002. I visited the northeastern part of Turkey for the frst time at the end of 2011 at the height of a new wave of hydroelectric energy rush, this time fueled by private companies, to construct hundreds of small-scale hydroelectric power plants (HEPPs) on virtually every river system in the country. Media attention at the time fxated especially on this region’s coastal towns and villages, which had once been bastions of revolutionary activism. Once again led by socialist groups and left-leaning organizations, its communities were beginning to resort to political, legal, and bodily means to prevent the loss and commodifcation of water and land through the construction of these facili-

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ties. Located further south, about one and a half hours away from the regional capital Artvin by bus (provided that the road is not closed and did not collapse), the political mood in the town of Yusufeli, by contrast, was congruent with its fate, which was by then more or less sealed: submergence of the entire town and its seventeen villages, displacement of thousands of people, and the destruction of nearly all agricultural land with the coming construction of the Yusufeli Dam. My earliest interlocutors, too, were of an antipodean ideological disposition, veering toward ultra-nationalism and conservatism. I was struck, if not startled, by their politics, the scale of destruction awaiting Yusufeli and its surroundings, and how little attention all this was receiving among the activists from the region, let alone the general public. On the second day of Bayram (Eid-ul Fitr) in August 2012, shortly after I returned to Yusufeli, Orhan, my occasional driver in the feld, brought me to the villages half-flooded by the reservoir of the Deriner Dam, so far the most gargantuan project completed on the main tributary of the Çoruh River. On our way, he pointed out to me one by one the locations of a gas station, a school, a cemetery, and several olive groves, as well as the itinerary of the 1994 World Rafting Championship—all of which were now hardly discernable in the opacity of the river-cum-lake. The view from the hilltop where we parked our car was immediately breathtaking and disquieting at the same time. Two dozen houses scattered around the shades of green were disfgured, as antlike shadows below us were industriously cutting, pilling, and loading stuff into trucks. The buzzing sound of chainsaws moving around the ruins made Orhan break into a laugh, an ironic one expressing not only sadness, but also anger. “The villagers are removing the wooden parts of their houses before their village gets entirely flooded,” he explained. “It’s often juniper, very valuable.” He then slowly turned his eyes to the shores of the village, where the land was being swallowed bit by bit by cloudy waters and where the white minaret of the village mosque had already visibly shrunk. “Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers built this place,” he slowly continued. “Now these men are taking every thing with them, as if we’re at war. And they’re doing it on a religious day like this. This isn’t something to be done today.” Twenty minutes later, we were driving back to Yusufeli, where Orhan was working as a temporary rafting instructor and I was asking its inhabitants how they see their own approaching displacement or “coming annihilation” (yaklaşmakta olan yokoluşumuz), in the words of one interlocutor. I asked him if he, too, just like the villagers that we just saw, was planning to sell the ruins of his house before its disappearance. “Yes,” he replied, abruptly and

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visibly uncomfortably. I thought I saw his body slightly twitch. “Yes. We’ll do the same thing.” Orhan’s words and embodied reactions, or more precisely, my ethnographic reconstruction of them here, reveals an evident tension between attachments to and commodifcation of the built environment amid its obliteration. I witnessed this tension under various guises in numerous other occasions in the total of twelve months that I spent in Yusufeli: its residents often spoke of the ceaseless material destruction in the valley as some kind of injury and even explicitly named the scarring of their relation to the landscape and its past as suffering. And yet, during the same period when the horizon of displacement was seizing hold of their lives more forcefully than ever, many of them began to prepare for and chart this uncertain future in monetary terms. Some pursued a form of “speculative accumulation” (Campbell 2014), whereby they invested in or created property with the purpose of making proft out of the not-as-yet fully fxed compensation economy. Others opted for, and are still busy with, valorizing in various ways the past, its remains, and the emotions that they elicit, to be able to render them available for consumption after the town’s submergence. My intention in this chapter, then, is to build on the recent anthropological interest on ruination (Gordillo 2014; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Stoler 2013; Tsing 2015), to ask under what conditions it is articulated with the strategies of accumulation, and to outline what sort of politics these two movements of bulldozer capitalism produce and help to make visible on the local level. The key conceptual category that holds together the vexed relations between ruination, accumulation, and displacement here is temporality. The spatial effects of infrastructural projects are partly contingent on the durations, tempos, and iterations with which the processes of construction and destruction unfold in any given location. As previous ethnographic works have shown,3 these temporal frames are crucial for how people materially and conceptually approach, emotionally experience, and politically respond to the changes in their surroundings and livelihoods. My material suggests that the protracted nature of infrastructural devastation has played a signifcant role in shaping political subjectivities and enabling economic calculations in the context of the Çoruh Valley. The repeated delays and interruptions in the realization of the Yusufeli Dam project gradually bolstered a shift in the dominant subject position in the town from resistance to resignation. Its residents increasingly assigned monetary value to the organic and inorganic life in the valley by making an effort “to estimate the likely time of its expiry”

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(Morris 2008, 205). This effort placed ruination in the same temporal structure with the strategies of accumulation to decisively defeat the earlier antidisplacement activism in the town and created the conditions of possibility for conceiving the past, present, and future in unusual constellations: creating property in the present to be able to proft from its demise in the future, or turning the remnants of the past and the vanishing present into commodities with the intention of selling them in the future. In this unpredictably expansive resource frontier, it seems as if time itself becomes yet another resource that its residents attempt to appropriate from below. But then, bridging timelines under bulldozer capitalism is a tricky business. I discuss below that as residents move from trying to prevent the loss and destruction of things and ways of living to speculating on their dissolution as a source of valuation, they are exposed to the previous acts of violence that have shaped the social and economic life in the valley. This exposure is most commonly manifested through the curious deployment of violent processes (war, annihilation) as metaphors to describe the physical damaging in its different temporal registers. On other occasions, earlier episodes of murder, displacement, and dispossession are explicitly invoked and their victims are remembered to place the suffering of the past in juxtaposition with grievances in the present. The dead of the past, in other words, reappear in discourse precisely at the moment when life in the present, at least in the form and sense that the living know it, is about to be extinguished. This is not haunting. Strictly speaking, it does not serve a ferocious recognition of historical crimes, either. What it nevertheless does at times in Yusufeli is to render the local community susceptible to the ruins that history has accumulated in the past hundred years, opening transitory cracks in its offcial narratives of triumph and victory to which its members are invariably interpellated. Thinking through the rubble of bulldozer capitalism in the mirror of past ruins, as some of my interlocutors do here, highlights the persistence and continuity of violence, its capacity to connect and transcend time and space, and its tendency to transmogrify in its transfers between human, natural, and built environments. This insight reveals the necessity to adopt an analytical gaze that does not limit itself to the here and now of resource extraction projects, but that tries to account for the layeredness of expropriation and accumulation and what this politically and conceptually implies for extinction and survival under capitalism. In some sense, my material on Yusufeli echoes the recent anthropological meditations on how life continues to flourish in

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capitalist ruins, paradoxically thanks to particular patterns of ruination tied to historical legacies of precariousness and valuation (Tsing 2015). However, in place of outright embracing the collaborative survival of multispecies as the ontological model behind history making, in this chapter I am inclined to linger a bit longer on what has already disappeared and how it informs what is about to become extinct. Timid murmurs, pale marks, and fleeting sensibilities of loss and annihilation that I register in this ethnography urge me to pay attention to those instances in which violence shapes and in turn is shaped by the web of relations between and among human and non-human realms. Perhaps, they also offer a glimpse of capitalism’s present and future spaces of contradiction, as they are constituted not only by what endures, remains, or is salvaged, but also by what has irrevocably vanished.

Accommodation, Ruination, and Investment In retrospect, the large-scale extraction and accumulation plan along the Çoruh Valley seems to have been prepared and to have matured under relatively convenient conditions. The plan itself was not made public in its entirety until the late 1990s, in order to successfully conceal the defnitive extent of the social, material, and ecological devastation that its designers destined it to precipitate. The short-lived campaign by Borçka’s residents against the construction of the Borçka Dam was quickly contained, with changes made in the project’s design and with guarantees offered for employment. In the three villages planned to be flooded with the construction of the Deriner Dam, vernacular responses did not even go beyond murmurs of discontent. Yet, despite the absence of any signifcant opposition, the completion of both projects had to be delayed for almost two decades because of their heavy fnancial burden and the threats and protestations from neighboring countries.4 Conceived from the beginning as the tallest and most costly project to affect the most densely populated area in the entire valley, the Yusufeli Dam has become subject to even more remarkable vicissitudes of planning and fnance. The project was unlike the other dam projects on the main tributary in that the Turkish state sought to overcome the challenge of securing investment for it by repeatedly signing bilateral agreements with various European and Asian countries to initiate negotiations with their development banks. This determination bore fruit officially by 1997, when a cabinet minister announced on a national TV channel the beginning of construction by an international con-

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sortium and their domestic subsidiary, as well as the imminent submergence of the town and its seventeen villages. Even if the rumors of a partial submergence had been circulating in the town since the early 1980s, this was the frst unequivocal confrmation by a national politician of the massive involuntary displacement and resettlement awaiting the residents. Quickly mobilizing around a local cultural association, the residents launched a powerful antidam/anti-displacement campaign. On the local level, demonstrations were held to protest against regional governors, and court cases were brought against various ministries and administrative bodies. On the international level, there has been a concerted effort in collaboration with European NGOs to dissuade export credit agencies from providing loans to construction companies involved in the project. To this end, activists utilized international guidelines on resettlement and scandalized the absence of an environmental impact assessment report (EIA). As a result, the realization of the project was prevented for more than a decade as three international consortiums were successfully compelled to withdraw, one after another. Left with little chance of attracting foreign capital, the Turkish state officially declared around 2010 that it will fnance the project exclusively itself. I discussed in detail elsewhere (Evren 2014) that the Yusufeli campaign’s success in impeding the project essentially relied on its ability to internationalize its own tactics as the mirror of the transnational composition of large dam fnance and planning. This was a tactic well understood and put to use also by other anti-displacement groups in Turkey and in other parts of the world in the aftermath of the Narmada Valley struggle in India and the establishment of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), which the World Bank set up in response to the Indian struggle.5 Under the Justice and Progress Party (AKP), the Turkish state responded by nationalizing the project once again, both in rhetoric and in practice, severely curbing the strength of the Yusufeli campaign by stripping the activists of valuable instruments, such as guidelines and EIAs. Some of the regulations to which credit agencies, development banks, and transnational consortiums could previously be made partly accountable lost their binding character for the project’s new fnancier. The point that I want to stress in this chapter is that the renationalization of the project also provided the basis to contain affective reactions to the changes in the local time-space of the town, further contributing to the decline of activist energy. Earlier, the gradual physical degradation of the valley endured in the form of road closures, demolitions, and water pollution, which aroused discomfort among the residents. By the mid-2000s, sudden

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decreases in the flow and volume of the Çoruh River began to severely thwart the commercial rafting activities in the area, adding an economic dimension to their perturbation. State agencies exacerbated this material devastation throughout these years by dissuading the town’s residents from repairing or rebuilding their crumbling houses and local infrastructures, telling them on more than one occasion to expect the beginning of dam construction and their resettlement within a few years. Unlike the international consortiums, however, the AKP managed to steer the senses of loss and uncertainty growing out of these infrastructural transformations. Especially after the party’s victory in the municipal elections in 2009, both local and national politicians increasingly harnessed conservative-nationalist symbols and sensibilities to moderate discontent in the town. More importantly, by partly delivering the old paternalist promises of employment and class mobility through party networks, the AKP began to turn some of bulldozer capitalism’s victims into its laborers and entrepreneurs.6 In summer 2012, shortly after the fnal bidding process delivered the project to a national consortium of three large construction companies, all with close ties to the AKP, and not long before the foundation stone was laid in a ceremony well attended by cabinet ministers, fnding a job as a worker, driver, or security guard in one of the building sites in the valley became the most attractive employment opportunity for lower-class residents. Around the same time, several supermarkets, restaurants, cafés, and shops opened to cultivate a desire for conspicuous consumption among the more affluent inhabitants. Several local people who talked to me during this time and later in my research still spoke critically of the Yusufeli Dam project and pointed to the economic and social difficulties that awaited them upon completion of the project. Remarkably, however, the same interlocutors often explicitly put the blame for their grievances on the decade-long anti-dam struggle and its main protagonists as much as on the dam project itself. Having succeeded in delaying the project twice but fallen short of achieving its cancellation, the local activists and their European allies were accused in these narratives of prolonging the jeopardized existence in the town. After dismissing my questions about the three remaining anti-dam activists’ plans to fle a new lawsuit against the project, one longtime resident and the imam of a local mosque summarized the dominant affect at this point as follows: “We feel alienated. We feel fatigued. In all these years, we couldn’t plan our future because of the dam project and the interruptions to its realization. We want to plan our future now, we want to be able to look forward [önümüzü görmek istiyoruz].”

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Ruination, if we follow Ann Laura Stoler’s (2008) description, may alternatively refer to “an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss” (195). The protracted devastation along the Çoruh Valley by other dam constructions coincided with the repeated deferral of the Yusufeli Dam project to entail all three defnitions. As a condition of suffering that local people such as my imam friend recognize as alienation and fatigue stemming from prolonged uncertainties, ruination resonates with a peculiar version of a kind of injury that Rob Nixon (2013) calls “slow violence”: the suspended, slow-motion, and out-of-sight devastation experienced by the target communities not only of mega-dams, but also of atomic tests and oil spills. What makes slow violence peculiar in the context at hand is that, whereas the suffering it has elicited served to sustain an oppositional political formation for more than a decade, the majority now sees this suffering as the outcome of the political agency behind this formation. I found that “looking forward” has indeed emerged as the emblematic gesture at this juncture. Especially between 2013 and 2015, Yusufeli resembled a truly booming town with four-, fve-, and six-story buildings with central heating and elevators on every corner in the town. My interviews with the mayor and two different contractors confrmed the rumors that construction licenses for seven hundred flats had been issued in the previous two years. Rents for most of these modern flats were roughly triple the amount typically paid for older ones, and the land prices soared at similar rates, especially in the town center. This inflationary tendency was echoed in everyday life as small carpenter’s workshops expanded into spacious furniture stores and some of the former local junkmen established themselves as proud owners of household appliance shops and hardware stores under the watchful eyes of fellow residents. The real estate agent training classes offered by the local community center (halk eğitim merkezi) were also packed during this time. Yet, not only the town itself was witnessing a construction boom. Residents of three neighboring villages showed me the greenhouses and barns that they had recently built and told me of similar projects embarked on by their relatives or acquaintances from other villages, as we sat and sipped our teas in their gardens. Urgent demand for both short- and long-term accommodation, especially among young families, engineers, and migrant construction workers, was visible in the town during my stays. However, my conversations with the contractors and new property owners revealed that a desire to make a proft on the future compensation economy was the primary motive behind these purchases. Locals were investing in real estate based on the calculation that the

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rents they collect, together with the payments they receive after the expropriation of their property, will exceed their initial outlays. The same logic was also in effect in the villages that I visited. The construction of greenhouses and barns, the villagers explained to me, mainly served the purpose of liquidating them in the form of compensation payments in the future, rather than of establishing a permanent infrastructure for agricultural production and livestock rearing. Many of these new property owners and builders were among the wealthier inhabitants, who had enough capital in the frst place to pursue these long-term investments. More interestingly, however, a signifcant number of villagers whose land and houses had already been expropriated as a result of dam and road constructions in other parts of the valley also bought flats in Yusufeli around this time. They used the sum they had received with the expropriation of their assets in the villages to invest in real estate in Yusufeli with the purpose of making a proft in the end. The AKP’s electoral victory in the town was the starting point of this unprecedented wave of construction on the verge of destruction. The mayor and other prominent members of the local AKP branch were playing a crucial role by either turning a blind eye or actively encouraging the construction projects in the town and the villages. The mayor, in par ticu lar, was instrumental in brokering deals with the bureaucrats from the State Department of Hydraulic Affairs (DSİ), who oversee the dam projects and repeatedly expressed their objection to this construction boom, which was drastically increasing the amount of compensation payments to be paid to the residents. Through his connections to cabinet ministers and important politicians from the party, the mayor successfully delayed the ban on new constructions several times.7 Thus, unlike the non-indigenous settlers who create property in the absence of the state in the remote area of Castelo de Sonhos as a means of anticipating the future order of governance (Campbell 2014), the accumulation strategies of the residents living in and around Yusufeli emerge from below, but operate and flourish strictly under the patronage of a political party that comes to represent the state on the local level. What seems to be at stake here is not so much foreseeing the future shape of rules and regulations as making temporary and contextual legal arrangements useful (Chatterjee 2004) for tapping into the economy of things that are about to disappear. Nevertheless, this entire schema of investment remains extremely risky. First, according to current regulations of expropriation and compensation,

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a signifcant sum—based on the depreciation rates calculated according to the building’s age—is deducted from what is supposed to be paid to property owners. Second, because the property taxes due for each immovable asset are proportional to their value, homeowners face the challenge of paying to the state a signifcant percentage of the rent they collect in this heated real estate market. But more signifcantly, given the history of dam constructions in the valley, no one, including the planners, can confdently estimate when the project will be completed and the expropriation start. On the contrary, some inhabitants admitted that there is no guarantee that a proft can be made in the end and openly acknowledged that they would lose money if the construction of the dam takes more than six or seven years. At several points in my research, these new property owners asked my advice whether they should wait until the beginning of expropriation or sell their flats to other residents immediately. The researcher, with his contacts to politicians and company engineers, they assumed, would know how to time their investments. Other forward-looking accumulation strategies invoke what Jane Guyer (2007) calls “fantasy futurism”—interestingly enough, they do so the more they draw from the past and its remnants-in-the-making as their raw material. On my subsequent visits to the village that I described in the introduction to this chapter, the village head Eşref Bey insisted on showing me the artefacts that he spared and carefully amassed in one corner, away from the reservoir of the Deriner Dam: a wooden cradle, rusty utensils that were once used to produce olive oil and wine, an old television set, and a radio. He explained to me that he was planning to exhibit these objects in the ethnographic museum that he was hoping to open in the new village settlement. “We are going to turn our new village into the Bodrum of the Çoruh Valley,” he solemnly stated in one of our conversations. My friend Haydar, the owner of a local photo studio and the older son of a prominent anti-dam activist, similarly told me about his intentions to sell “anything and every thing that will remind the residents of the old Yusufeli” after the submergence. In addition to his plans to enlarge his ongoing side business of printing landscape photos of the valley, which his father and he have taken over the years, on merchandise such as mugs, T-shirts, and clocks, he also mentioned scanning and cata loguing the portrait photos of the residents, including dead ones, to be able to sell them via Facebook once the resettlement begins. Yet, it was the mayor of Yusufeli who clearly had the most ambitious project in mind regarding packaging timelines and artefacts in commodity forms. As part of his broader plan for turning the new Yusufeli into a hub for what he called

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“tourism of longing” (hasret turizmi), he specifcally mentioned the idea of building in the new settlement area the “Minia Yusufeli”; a miniaturized version of the town as it exists right before its disappearance, which would allow its visitors to walk next to and touch its scaled-down buildings and streets. In one of our interviews, he wondered aloud how much the residents would be willing to pay to be part of this experience. Anchored in the musealization, digitization, and virtualization of ruins, these three distinct imaginaries attend to other residents’ strategies for creating or buying property to constitute what Rosalind Morris (2008) describes in a different context as “accommodation to ruination through investment.” I argued above that this process unfolded gradually as the slow-motion destruction of the valley ceased to fuel the opposition to the dam project, instead becoming the material of and the conduit for accumulation strategies. I tried to show as well that this was made possible by the rise of the AKP as the tutelary of local desires of class mobility, employment, and conspicuous consumption and the facilitator of speculative and futuristic visions. One question remains, however: What are the consequences of leading a life in Yusufeli in anticipation of its demise? To be able to answer this question, I now turn to those narratives and practices in which the residents employ the conceptual opposite of “looking forward”—that is, “looking backward.” Following their cue will allow us to grasp a different relation between violence, accumulation, and ruination whose effects continue to reverberate in the valley in the present.

Violence and Its Reverberations Especially in the beginning of my research, virtually all residents described Yusufeli as having been an exceptionally abundant, peaceful, and secure place before dam construction began in the valley. I observed frsthand the extremely fertile fruit and vegetable gardens formed from the alluvial soil carried by the Çoruh River, which give four or fve yields a year; but in earlier times, meat was also cheap and widely available, usually served in a popular dish called kavurma. Shop owners, I was told, used to leave their goods unattended overnight without any fear of theft. The local prison had to be shut down by the authorities by the end of the 1980s, since it has never held more than a handful of inmates, most of whom were incarcerated for minor offences such as writing bad checks. Perhaps more remarkably, the political violence that erupted in the second half of the 1970s to divide neighborhoods

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and towns across Turkey along sectarian and ideological lines hardly touched Yusufeli. Having repeatedly come across local narratives in which violence appeared only in reference to its absence, I must have asked myself around the same time who the miserable child locked in the basement could be.8 From the residents’ perspective, the local bullfghting festivals organized every year between April and September are the main theaters of conflict where the pursuit of dominance and social status plays out over the spectacle of injury and blood. Almost echoing at least one anthropologist’s observation on the sharp difference between tribal communities’ social relations and cosmologies—the more peaceful and egalitarian the former is, the more conflictual the latter becomes (Graeber 2004)—they themselves often reflected on how the overall lack of violence in their everyday lives contrasts with their enthusiasm for watching and taking part as bull owners in the fghts between animals. As a matter of fact, even these fghts are usually without any spectacular violence. Standing still in a rectangular sand feld, two bulls often gaze at each other uninterestedly for minutes as their owners gently provoke them with long wooden sticks. More crucially, however, these festivals are sites where not only is the local web of meanings enacted, but also capital and power accrued during the construction boom are exhibited and rituals for the nation are staged. Previously funded independently by each village council, the events that I attended after 2013 increasingly revealed the marks of shifting class composition and the political underpinnings of the newfound wealth in the town. Banners attached to the sides of the fghting arena displayed the names of the festival sponsors: either representatives of construction companies building dams and roads in the valley or the shop owners who became more affluent thanks to the real estate economy. Each year, the person making the biggest donation to the event—without exception, one of the local contractors—was given the title of master of ceremony (güreş ağası) and had the opportunity to rub shoulders with the visiting MPs and governors for the day. Between the fghts, the presenters addressed the crowd with a microphone to demand prayers and a minute of silence for the martyrs who fell while defending the country. Occasionally, they also publicly honored the relatives of the conscripts from the town who were killed fghting in the Turkish state’s ongoing war against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), and performed long soliloquies on the sacredness of the nation and the flag and the unity and indivisibility of the country. In fall 2013, banal nationalism’s call to arms was partly realized when residents attempted to lynch Kurdish construction workers employed at the

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Yusufeli Dam site. An ordinary fght between two workers that reportedly started after one of them tore an Atatürk poster into pieces in the workers’ dormitories escalated into a full-blown ethnic confrontation. Hundreds of men from the town began to walk to the dormitories near the construction site, demanding that all the “culprits” be handed over to them. After the police forced them to return to the center, the residents attempted to raid the local hospital to which the injured Kurdish worker had been taken. It took the local governor (kaymakam) several hours to convince them to leave the premises and go back to their homes. This militant Turkish-Sunni nationalist ideology was also the political ground on which the local anti-dam campaign flourished. All three prominent members of the local cultural association that launched and coordinated the opposition against the Yusufeli Dam project are sympathizers or even perpetrators of the anti-Kurdish and anti-leftist state and right-wing paramilitary violence. The former head and lawyer of the association, Ragıp Bey, was at the time of my research a member of and a local candidate for the ultranationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP). Muhsin Bey, the founder of the photo studio mentioned earlier, was a militant of the MHP’s paramilitary wing, the Grey Wolves movement, in his youth and subsequently worked closely with the Grand Unity Party (BBP), which is an Islamist-leaning offshoot from the MHP. Hikmet Bey, on the other hand, is a retired policeman who used to head an anti-terror unit in the neighboring city Erzurum. Visibly marginalized politically for having remained staunch opponents of the AKP at the time when the party was successfully swallowing a wide range of right-wing constituencies in Yusufeli, as in other parts of the country, these activists increasingly resorted to this nationalist-conservative rhetoric in order to animate the earlier mobilization against the dam project in the town. To prove their point, they gave me and anyone else who was interested long genealogical accounts embellished with stories from a series of wars from Ottoman-Turkish history in which their grandfathers and great-grandfathers ostensibly took part. I was therefore left bemused when a friendly employee from the local land registry office where I was trying to conduct interviews in 2014 asked me one day if I wanted to see the records of a population exchange that took place between Turkish and Georgian civilians in the 1920s. I knew about countless wars from the past, which have all left a mark in the region, but I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about. A few days later, she took me to a small broom closet–sized room in the basement of the government of-

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fce to show me a mountain of notebooks written in Ottoman Turkish, which was thus regrettably inaccessible to me. A few of them written in Latin script, however, contained records offering a tiny glimpse of the lives of these residents who once lived in the area. Some of the documents that I quickly noted down read as follows: “Field in Kiskim,9 which was passed from Vartan, son of Pertek, to the treasury, is sold in auction in 1926.” “Rice feld in Erkenis, which was passed from Kirkor, son of Kazar, to the treasury, is sold in auction to Ahmet Bumin.” “The entire meadow (832 m2) was passed from Ahamis and Kirkor to the treasury and is sold in auction in 1926.” One thing that immediately caught my eye was that the year 1926 appeared in almost all documents as the date when the treasury auctions took place and the frst installments were paid. The new owners of these rice felds, meadows, and gardens, who were often civil servants then working at the land registry office, continued to make regular payments until as late as the 1940s, which explains why these records were kept in Latin script. Something else that became clear, however, was that the “Georgians” whom my interlocutor said were the object of a population exchange in the 1920s were none other than the Armenians who either fled their homes or lost their lives before and during their deportation from the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Despite increasing attention to the geographical variations in the execution of the deportation orders by the Young Turk regime, few comprehensive local histories have so far been produced on the fate of the Armenians from the Çoruh region.10 In one well-documented case, about ten thousand Armenians from Khodorcur, a large settlement that lies to the southwest of Yusufeli and is today known as Sırakonaklar,11 were exterminated in 1915. Equally importantly, the long and complicated process by which the “abandoned” Armenian property was sequestered on a massive scale remained missing from most historical studies on the genocide until very recently.12 Those records that I serendipitously stumbled upon in the basement archive corroborate the fndings of two recent studies that argue that a major decision made by the government on 13 June 1926 nearly fnalized the judicial framework for the seizure of the abandoned properties by the Turkish state. It therefore removed the latest barrier to transferring the property to Turks as part of the goal of establishing a Turkish national economy set up by the

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Committee for the Union and Progress (CUP) and continued by the new republican government after 1923 (Akçam and Kurt 2012; Üngör and Polatel 2011). More importantly for my purposes here, these documents also give us reason enough to believe that at least some of the land in and around Yusufeli that the current residents dwell in, build upon, and anticipate converting into cash in the form of compensation payments, once belonged to the Armenians who lost their homes and lives.13 In his recently translated memoirs, Raffaele Gianighian (2016), one of the seven people from Khodorcur who survived the genocide, sheds some more light on the fate of the Armenian property that was left behind. Returning to the region as an old man in 1977 from his adopted country Italy “to search for his fatherland,” Gianighian fnds his village in ruins. As he strolls in the streets, he looks at the rubble of the church, the cemetery that bears the marks of destruction, and the mournful faces of old Muslim residents who personally knew his family. A woman who has accompanied him to his village, Kisak, begs him to tell her where the “Armenian treasures” are hidden, crying that she cannot bear living in this cursed place anymore and needs the money to move to the United States. Gianighian recounts the murder of his fellow villagers at the hands of soldiers and Turkish and Kurdish civilians, the deaths of several relatives from illnesses as they are forced to move from one place to another, and his life in his fnal destination, Büyükbağ, where he starts working as a goldsmith for the local Kurdish feudal lord, who eventually forces him to convert to Islam and gives him the name Abdullah. Almost forty years after Gianighian’s return to the region and nearly a hundred years after the genocide, the tragedy in Khodorcur was still a conversation topic to which young men from Yusufeli occasionally turned. One day, in one of the new cafés in the town center, a large group of friends suddenly started to talk about what happened to the Armenians from the region. One acquaintance known for his interest in the history of the region explained to others that all the Armenians from Khodorcur were murdered and their property confscated. His audience became visibly furious with the “ancestors” for committing this crime and began to curse their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Yet, a few of them asked whether there were any Armenians treasures to be discovered. Even though I did not attribute much signifcance to this conversation at the time, I was still slightly surprised by my interlocutors’ reactions, given the Turkish state’s power to consolidate its official denialist narrative of the Armenian Genocide among its contemporary citizens in schools and the media. To

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this day, this narrative relativizes the large-scale annihilation of the Armenian community and the responsibility of the Ottoman-Turkish administrators and civilians by alternatively framing the event as a “mutual slaughter,” attributing the majority of deaths to “unavoidable” illnesses that spread during the deportation, or even disputing the veracity of Armenian deaths by seeking to create a remembrance culture around the Turkish civilians who lost their lives at the hands of Armenian gangs. I was therefore genuinely baffled to encounter the fgure of the dead Armenian reappearing in other conversations with older and markedly more right-wing residents, in the context of the infrastructural violence. One day, Hikmet Bey, the retired police chief who has in part organized the opposition against the dam project for years, was showing me the landscape photos that he recently took with his new digital camera in the valley. Initially cheerful about sharing the products of his new hobby, his face suddenly turned grim as if he just recognized something unpleasant. He told me that even though his grandfather also fought against the Armenians, their old enemies had never violated nature and its beauties. “The Armenian” understood and respected the flowers, rice felds, olive groves, and the river itself, whereas the new enemy—that is, the government and the companies—only intend to obliterate them. This is why, he reflected, their violence is even more destructive. Another resident of Yusufeli, Hasan Bey, who had recently moved to Istanbul at the time I conducted an interview with him, similarly invoked parallels between the displacement in the past and the present: The people still living in Yusufeli will fnd themselves in a situation similar to what we, those who have already left, are now going through. Once you lose your hometown [memleket], you begin to pursue the traces of your identity. Like Armenians who have been doing it since their deportation. How similar these two are, I mean, the deportation [tehcir] from Yusufeli [that the current residents will endure] and the deportation that Armenians became subject to. Of course, the circumstances were different then. We won’t have a place to go back to if we lose our jobs in Istanbul or in Antalya. Those Armenians [who used to live in Anatolia] now living in France don’t have a place to go back. Their land has already been confscated. Hasan Bey’s comparison between the future plight of his fellow townsmen and -women and the fate of the Ottoman Armenians certainly has its limits and problems, as he himself self-consciously notices. What his and

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Hikmet Bey’s narratives nevertheless seem to suggest is that, as much as the hegemonic nationalist inculcation through which certain lives are glorifed and celebrated and certain deaths are glossed over remains a very powerful process, it is never entirely complete. To repeat, this by no means serves to facilitate the beginnings of a proper confrontation with past atrocities and their present repercussions as an ownership regime based on the theft of property. Nor would it prevent, as we saw, the repetition of this crime in the contemporary moment under different circumstances. This is still a transitional sensibility or an affect, reminiscent of what Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012) studied as eeriness or disturbance formed at the interstices of nature, the built environment, and human bodies. This affect emerged, I argued in this chapter, in a context in which the residents began to wait for the coming destruction of their surroundings and habitual ways of living, after they lost the means to contest it. Regardless of whether they actively partake in speculating on this destruction by bringing to life strategies and visions of accumulation, or, on the other hand, continue futilely trying to stop it from materializing, they recognize that they cannot avoid the fate of loss, displacement, and alienation. This is perhaps why the dead of the past occasionally reappear to them as the harbinger of their own unfortunate inability to muster their will to remain viable in the future.14 And this is possibly one reason why the sight of ruination that Orhan and I caught from the hilltop on the second day of Bayram produced much unexpected discomfort. For him, the immediate, personal, and accelerated nature of selfimposed destruction juxtaposed so powerfully with the slow and protracted devastation that he is used to experiencing in the valley that the logic of valorization failed, momentarily, to compensate for the ongoing ruination. Or put another way, “looking forward” collapsed in that instance into its opposite, “looking backward.”

Conclusion Tapping into ruination and its specifc structures of temporality for realizing visions of accumulation, I have argued in this ethnography on the politics of construction and destruction, entails becoming complicit in the death of an entire ecology. This is because participating in the extraction of value from the environment is predicated on calculating its demise. This protracted death gets entangled with other forms and bodies of death and violence, serv-

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ing to reproduce ethnicity and class-based injury, on the one hand, and to summon, at least in discourse, the ghosts of the valley, on the other. Yet, some of my interlocutors found, just like I did, more ruins and ruination as they tried to make sense of, come to terms with, and adapt to the new conditions under which they endure their coming annihilation. Some of them recognized the originary violence at the base of the social and economic life in the valley, as elsewhere in the country, despite its erasure from official narratives, and began to reflect on the originary accumulation that it precipitated in the form of mass-scale confscation and property transfer. Others went as far as noting the affective entanglements between the past and coming forms of annihilation. Insofar as they began to prepare for the uncertain future, they were also compelled to look backward to discover a history formed of wreckage piled layer upon layer. Notes 1. Inspiration for the terms comes from Lovering and Türkmen (2011), which describes the state-led real estate boom and the displacement of the urban poor in Istanbul as “bulldozer neoliberalism.” Adaman et al. (2014), Çavuşoğlu and Strutz (2014a, 2014b), and Eder (2015) also conceptualize in different ways the coexistence of destruction with construction in the context of urban regeneration projects in big cities. 2. Another name that appears in conversations and official documents is Çoruh Basin Development Plan. 3. For example, see Abram and Weszkalnys 2011, Baxstrom 2011, Harms 2013, and Laszczkowski 2011. 4. The Çoruh River originates from the northwest of the Erzurum-Kars Plateau and empties into the Black Sea near Batum, Georgia. Approximately 91 percent of the river lies on the Turkish side of the border. Anecdotal information shared with me by state bureaucrats and hydrologists indicates that the USSR’s objection to the plan, until the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991, was the main reason behind the project’s long delay. For more on the political implications of the Çoruh River’s trans-boundary nature, see Klaphake and Scheumann 2011. 5. Following the Save the Narmada movement’s campaign against the construction of Sardar Sarovar Dam, the dam’s main fnancier, the World Bank, established this committee in the early 1990s to assess the social and environmental effects of large dams in the world (Routledge 2003). Even though the WCD’s initial goal to develop and promote international standards for dam building failed (Fujikura and Nakayama 2009), it nevertheless opened a new battleground for many anti-dam struggles, as some of the committee’s recommendations were partly adopted by export credit agencies and transnational institutions such as the EU. For a comprehensive analysis of several anti-dam struggles from the Global South, see Khagram 2004. 6. In her ethnography of the AKP networks in the Kağıthane neighborhood of Istanbul, Sevinç Doğan (2016) similarly argues that some of the long-term residents successfully managed

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to turn themselves into wealthy contractors thanks to the construction boom and quickly rose in the ranks of the local party structures. 7. A ban f nally went into effect in summer 2015 when satellite images of the settlements designated for expropriation were taken and began circulating in the town. State officials from the DSİ made the announcement around the same time that only the owners of those properties that appear in the images would be compensated by the state. What was unfortunate for some contractors and property makers was that several of their houses and green houses were only half-completed when these images were taken. Complaining about “being caught by the satellite” (uyduya yakalanmak), these residents expressed worries about their prospects of receiving full compensation and immediately contacted the mayor’s office. After a period of uncertainty, the mayor once again convinced the AKP politicians from Ankara to intervene and ensure that these buildings will also be subject to full compensation. 8. The reference is to Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which describes an idyllic city where the happiness of inhabitants depends on the misery of a single child kept under terrible conditions. In my earlier work, I drew from the insights offered by Le Guin on the conscientious objectors’ movement in Turkey (Evren 2012). For a work by an anthropologist that delves even deeper into this parable to make sense of the governance of difference under late liberalism, see Povinelli, 2011. 9. Kiskim is the old name of Yusufeli. During Ottoman times, it was a district administered by the city of Erzurum. A large village named Ersis, today known as Kılıçkaya, was the center of Kiskim until the mid-1920s. 10. For a historical ethnography that discusses the local dynamics of the Armenian Genocide in Van, see Türkyılmaz 2011; for a study on Adana, see Üngör and Polatel 2011. For two exceptional works on the deportation and murder of Armenians from this region, see Aksu 2013 and Kévorkian 2015, 405–31. 11. Khodorcur/Sırakonaklar used to be a part of the Kiskim district at the time when Ersis was the center of this settlement. After it was renamed, it was once again made an administrative unit of Erzurum, whereas the area around Yusufeli became a town of Artvin district. 12. For two detailed books on the confscation of Armenian property, see Üngör and Polatel 2011 and Akçam and Kurt 2012. 13. In our subsequent conversations, my interlocutor from the land registry office revealed that much public property, including those parcels of land where the town’s school and hospital were built, also once belonged to the “Georgians.” 14. Alice von Bieberstein makes a similar argument in Chapter 2 on Muş.

Works Cited Abram, Simone, and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2011. “Introduction: Anthropologies of Planning– Temporality, Imagination and Ethnography.” FOCAAL—Journal of Global History and Anthropology 61:3–18. Adaman, Fikret, et al. 2014. “Hitting the Wall: Erdoğan’s Construction-Based, Finance-Led Growth Regime.” Middle East in London 10 (3): 7–8.

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Akçam, Taner, and Ümit Kurt. 2012. Kanunların Ruhu: Emval-i Metruke Kanunlarında Soykırımın İzini Sürmek. Istanbul: İletişim. Aksu, Cemil. 2013. “Artvin Ermenilerine Ne Oldu?” Tarih ve Toplum: Yeni Yaklaşımlar 16 (Spring): 91–126. Baxstrom, Richard. 2011 “Even Governmentality Begins as an Image: Institutional Planning in Kuala Lumpur.” FOCAAL—Journal of Global History and Anthropology 61:61–72. Campbell, Jeremy M. 2014. “Speculative Accumulation: Property-Making in the Brazilian Amazon.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19 (2): 237–59. Çavuşoğlu, Erbatur, and Julia Strutz. 2014a. “Producing Force and Consent: Urban Transformation and Corporatism in Turkey.” City 18 (2): 134–47. Çavuşoğlu, Erbatur, and Julia Strutz. 2014b. “We’ll Come and Demolish Your House: The Role of Spatial (Re-)production in the Neoliberal Hegemonic Politics of Turkey.” In Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony, edited by Ismet Akça et al., 141–55. London: Pluto Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Çoruh, Mazlum. 2011. Kusursuz Enerji(!) Planı: İnanılmaz Bir Mel’anetin Anatomisi. Istanbul: Self-published. Doğan, Sevinç. 2016. Mahalledeki AKP: Parti İşleyişi, Taban Mobilizasyonu ve Siyasal Yabancılaşma. Istanbul: Iletişim. Eder, Mine. 2015. “Türk Usulü Buldozer Neoliberalleşmeyi Anlamak: AKP’nin Politik Ekonomisi ve Ötesi.” In Türkiye’de Yeni Iktidar Yeni Direniş: Sermaye-Ulus Devlet Karşısında Yerelötesi Müşterekler, edited by Yahya M. Madra, 47–56. Istanbul: Metis. Evren, Erdem. 2012. “The Ones Who Walk Away: Law, Sacrifce and Conscientious Objection in Turkey.” In Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations, edited by Julia Eckert et al., 245–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evren, Erdem. 2014. “The Rise and Decline of an Anti-dam Campaign: Yusufeli Dam Project and the Temporal Politics of Development.” Journal of Water History 6:405–19. Fujikura, Ryo, and Mikiyasu Nakayama. 2009. “Lessons Learned from the World Commission on Dams.” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law, Economics 9:173–90. Gianighian, Raffaele. 2016. Hodorçur: Vatanını Arayan Bir Gezginin Seyahati. Istanbul: Iletişim. Gordillo, Gastόn. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Guyer, Jane. 2007. “Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time.” American Ethnologist 34 (3): 409–21. Harms, Erik. 2013. “Eviction Time in the New Saigon: Temporalities of Displacement in the Rubble of Development.” Cultural Anthropology 28 (2): 344–68. Kévorkian, Raymond. 2015. Ermeni Soykırımı. Istanbul: Iletişim. Khagram, Sanjeev. 2004. Dams and Development: Transnational Strug gles for Water and Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Klaphake, Axel, and Waltina Scheumanm. 2011. “Coruh River Basin: Hydropower Development and Transboundary Cooperation.” In Turkey’s Water Policy: National Frameworks and International Cooperation, edited by Ayşegül Kibaroğlu et al., 251–63. Heidelberg: Springer. Laszczkowski, Mateusz. 2011. “Building the Future: Construction, Temporality and Politics in Astana.” FOCAAL—Journal of Global History and Anthropology 60:77–92. Lovering, John, and Hade Türkmen. 2011. “Bulldozer Neoliberalism in Istanbul: The StateLed Construction of Property Markets and the Displacement of the Urban Poor.” International Planning Studies 16 (1): 73–96. Morris, Rosalind C. 2008. “Rush/Panic/Rush: Speculations on the Value of Life and Death in South Africa’s Age of AIDS.” Public Culture 20 (2): 199–231. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Routledge, Paul. 2003. “Voices of the Damned: Discursive Resistance Amidst Erasure in the Narmada Valley, India.” Political Geography 22:243–70. Stoler, Ann L. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219. Stoler, Ann L. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruin and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Türkyılmaz, Yektan. 2011. “Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia: 1913–1915.” PhD diss., Duke University. Üngör, Uğur Ümit, and Mehmet Polatel. 2011. Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property. London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 10

The Wounded Landscape Mass Trauma, Memory, and Human-Object Relations Shannon Lee Dawdy

Disaster victims often exhibit avoidance behav ior to suppress or detour around reminders of the event. Others sift slowly through the ruins, as a way to come to terms with what happened. Some rush to erase and rebuild. Some hold on to every remnant and curate the scars. While disasters often have the effect of temporarily uniting a community, the process of “recovery” just as often divides it. I explore the reasons why this might be, and focus on the relationship between trauma and materiality via understandings of posttraumatic stress, scarifcation, and ontology. I use evidence from two New Orleans disasters—a catastrophic fre in 1788 that nearly wiped out the city and left a signifcant archaeological imprint, and ethnographic interviews I conducted after Hurricane Katrina and its recent ten-year anniversary. This experimental blend of psychology, ethnography, and archaeology exposes the co-constitution of inner states and outer worlds. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, every thing covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, don’t you?

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Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. —Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006, 12) In English, we refer to landscapes as “scarred”—by war, by disaster, by erosion, by extraction. They can be cut, razed, flattened, stripped, raped, and abused. The events that visibly damage landscapes are often the same ones that leave invisible scars on their human victims. This is particularly true of sudden-event catastrophes such as fres, hurricanes, earthquakes, and war. In Cormac McCarthy’s post-nuclear novel, the landscape is as much a protagonist as the father and son, who struggle to survive against felds, forests, and cities shriveled by fre and covered in ash, as repetitively and devastatingly described by the author. By the end of the novel, the reader knows that only when weeds, trees, and small animals thrive again will there be hope. The landscape must recover from its scars for a human future to become thinkable. This dramatic literary example highlights a dynamic in the contemporary experience of disaster and recovery that is my focus here—the role of landscape and the material environment in mass trauma. The ruins and traces of traumatic events are often sites of controversy as a community struggles to recover. Many have lived through the paradox of a unifying disaster and a dividing recovery. Scholars have written about local controversies over rebuilding war-torn Kosovo (Schwartze 2011) and Beirut (Charlesworth and Nelson 2011), earthquake-affected El Salvador (Sliwinski 2009), and tsunamiswept Aceh, Indonesia (Clarke et al. 2010). In 2015, the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina produced celebration at the national level, but anger at the local level. Many New Orleanians expressed dismay at the insensitivity of politicians and the media in not recognizing that the commemorations were causing disturbing memories to flood back in. For others, the events just underscored the fact that “recovery” and gentrifcation have so transformed the landscape that the city is experiencing another wave of loss. Many left town in August, afraid the commemorations would re-trigger the anxiety and depression they had experienced for months or years after the levee breaks. An article in the daily paper headlined “How Are You Avoiding Katrina Memorial Events?” noted readers’ responses to the commemoration glut, including the fact that a calendar listing for “Things to do in New Orleans Saturday that have nothing to do with

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Katrina” was getting far more traffic than a listing for Katrina commemorations (Grimm 2015). Psychiatric experts have long noted that trauma victims often exhibit avoidance behav ior to suppress or detour around reminders of the event. Crumbled buildings and other signs of matter out of place do not let victims easily forget. Some individuals will want to tear the ruins down immediately, some will want to preserve them as memorials, others will want to salvage and restore their surroundings to a pre-disaster moment. While the argument has been made that post-traumatic stress is a construction of modern medical science and NGO governmentality (Young 1995; Biehl and Locke 2010), it is also true that some of its “symptoms” correspond to contemporary self-understandings about trauma, and to some general post-trauma behaviors that manifest in different settings across time and space. Those that I want to focus on regard the dialectical and co-constitutive relationship between objects and human beings. I argue that this relationship is often radically redefned in the aftermath of a major rupture. This chapter answers a call to return to my frst post-Katrina piece (Dawdy 2006) with a perspective now informed by a recovery period that at that time was difficult to imagine. In that article, I argued that taphonomy— or the processes of burial, decay, discard, or removal that creates the archaeological record—is very much a social process and one made stark by contexts of disaster and its aftermath. I struggled to understand the very divergent reactions I saw among Katrina victims to the material remains of the disaster. At that time, I observed the different responses but was at a loss to explain them. Here I am picking up that question and pushing it a little further. I want to grasp better why recovery is so often such a contentious process. I also want to understand what role the non-human landscape plays in trauma and recovery, and how landscapes are in turn affected by behaviors reflecting different dispositions. I do not mean to suggest that this peculiar blend is the only appropriate frame to explain rebuilding conflicts—those that use a sociological lens attuned to race, class, and/or gender are entirely apt (the demographic story of the storm’s impact is a complex story; see Finch et al. 2010). There is no one analytic that can capture the diversity of human experience, especially in the emotionally heightened and often chaotic context of disaster. If sociological approaches provide the wide angle, here I am going in for a close-up. Both are valid ways of viewing the same scene. I will be sharing the perspective and archaeological imprints of

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individuals and families rather that swaths of residents who could be made to represent a census category. My aim in this chapter is to describe what people experienced, and the material evidence that I have observed. Among the forty-two interlocutors I have interviewed, individuals reacted differently to disaster, without any strong correlations to categories such as race and class. Psychology, to which anthropology has developed a strong allergy since at least the 1980s, is diffcult to avoid when it comes to an investigation of mass trauma—particularly when we listen to how individuals understand their experience. While critical of the ways in which psychosocial diagnosis can foreclose futurities, Biehl and Locke (2010) note that in post-war Sarajevo collective PTSD became a kind of common sense. In my feld site of New Orleans, the public discourse focuses not on trauma but on the three Rs of recovery, rebuild, and resilience. If anything, acknowledgment of the lingering effects of mass trauma is repressed. Here I follow Biehl and Locke’s Deleuzian recommendation to follow a literary listening rather than clinical diagnosis approach, but at my feld site it leads me in a different direction—toward validating some aspects of the reactions we have come to label PTSD, particularly as it relates to memory and landscape. I advocate listening to and respecting this selfunderstanding, particularly since it is uttered most often in private settings. As Margaret Lock warns, “an argument that emphasizes the social construction of disease at the expense of recognizing the very real, debilitating condition of individuals” can itself be misleading and harmful (2003, 123). I want to take trauma seriously as a social fact and at the same time explore a relationship that is often neglected by psychological (or subjectivist) and ontological approaches alike—that is, the emotional bonds between objects and humans. I am trying to understand differential responses to disaster expressed through management of the landscape. Some people want to revert back to the time before disaster—to restore their environment, and perhaps themselves, to a prior state. Others want to erase traces of the past that might remind them of what happened, to build something new and to attempt to forget. These are the same individuals who resist the memorialization of traumatic events. This exercise in literary listening has led me to conclude that the landscape is inside us, but differently. For some, it is forever wounded, for others it is “as it was.” I will use three quite different sets of evidence from two New Orleans disasters—historical accounts of a catastrophic fre in 1788 that nearly wiped

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out the city, archaeological signatures of this event, and ethnographic interviews conducted after Hurricane Katrina and its recent ten-year anniversary. But frst, some preliminaries.

The Shifting Landscape of Disaster and Rebuilding It is now over ten years since Hurricane Katrina weakened New Orleans’ poorly built levee system, resulting in the loss of nearly 1,500 lives. In the years after landfall on August 29, 2005, the cityscape has gone through several phases that I will describe here to elicit the ways in which human interiors and material exteriors are inextricably linked. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the streets were littered with debris and downed trees and power lines, some houses had lost their roofs, and many downtown high-rises were windowless. Approximately three hours after the storm touched down, the frst levee breach was reported. Twelve hours later, officials could not keep up with the tally. Eventually, they counted ffty-three structural failures. All of the drainage, shipping, and lakeside levees had broken. Only the oldest and tallest levees along the Mississippi River had held. In some neighborhoods, water exploded through floodwalls, sweeping houses off their foundations. In others, it crept in with a deceptive lack of urgency, but within forty-eight hours 80  percent of the city was underwater and survivors clamored to get to the remaining high ground and designated shelters. Their route took them through still waters strewn with floating bodies, both human and animal. Residents experienced additional stress and trauma while they waited two to fve days in intense heat without adequate food, water, shelter, or sanitation. Many had guns drawn on them by National Guardsmen who imposed a kind of panicked crowd control. Without melodrama, the internal experience of stranded residents and the physical setting in which it took place can be called apocalyptic. Everyone was affected. In those chaotic days immediately after the storm, suicides were frequent and visible. One of them was the police department’s public information officer. A reporter interviewed the police captain shortly after this tragedy: “Maybe, [Capt.] Defllo reckoned, he killed himself because he lost hope that order would ever be restored in the city. A public information officer, the captain said, turns the senseless—murder, rape, mayhem—into something orderly for the public. . . . But in New Orleans for the past week, the chaos seemed endless” (Burdeau 2005).

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After the mandatory post-storm evacuations were complete, leaving only emergency personnel in the city, agencies worked to block the levees and pump the water out. Thirty-fve days later, in early October, residents were allowed back in to assess their homes and collect personal items if they could fnd them. The landscape they returned to was eerily transformed—the tropical lushness of New Orleans was covered in a gray muck in various stages of drying. Every thing once green had faded to shades of yellow and brown. Houses had water lines outside and mold lines inside. The smell of death and decay was suffocating. Inside their houses, many found a surreal scene, with refrigerators lying on beds and family photos pasted across the floors where they had floated and settled. Many described the arrival scene when they returned to the city as post-apocalyptic. Indeed, at that time, their lifeworlds had ended. In the triage and cleanup period, which began during my most intensive participant observation period (October through December 2005) and lasted for about a year, a visible shift came as the debris moved from inside the buildings to massive piles stacked up on the curbs, almost as tall as the houses themselves, with stinky refrigerators lining the streets. Dump trucks trawled the city continuously, clearing debris. Volunteer organizations from around the country came to help and to publicize their cause through good works. Most neighborhoods still had no power or gas, so when night came the city was pitch black and eerily quiet, almost rural. Although many trees would take a generation to replace, small green growth began to sprout up. In some neighborhoods where few had returned, plants went feral and a tangled jungle of vines quickly overtook abandoned houses. The next major transition was from a wounded disaster landscape in stages of triage and cleanup to one of rebuilding. I would further subdivide this period into two phases. The frst dates from about the fall of 2006 to the end of 2011, when the last demolitions of damaged houses were carried out by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the last of the FEMA temporary housing trailers were hauled away. In this period, renovation took over from debris cleanup as the focus of activity, but it proceeded at very different rates in different neighborhoods. In some areas, the city looked like a trailer park, as residents lived in their driveways while their houses were renovated. Other residents were living with friends or in temporary rentals, some far out of town. Life felt temporary and provisional. In especially hard-hit areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward, demolitions were intensive, took a long time, and transformed whole blocks into open, weedy

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lots. Demolitions were followed by the controversial building of startlingly new house forms sponsored by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation and designed by architects such as Frank Gehry. In some parts of the city, the air was full of the sounds of saws, drills, and hammers. In others, the air was still and quiet, with animal and plant life taking over where humans once dominated. This intra-city contrast highlighted the disparities between rich and poor, insured and uninsured. Racial tensions ran higher than ever and violence wracked neighborhoods where people were living in unrenovated, water-damaged houses, often without utilities. Many residents were caught in a catch-22, unable to rebuild without electricity and water and the city refusing to reconnect neighborhoods until they demonstrated a critical mass of returnees. But as insurance money fnally began to flow, contractors came from all over the country to take a cut. Large numbers of Latino laborers showed up to work. Whole streets of old houses suddenly had new paint. But more typically, renovation proceeded in a gap-tooth fashion, with an untouched ruin of a house sitting next to the empty lot of a demolished one, next to one that had been raised above flood level and renovated to look brand new. Many would-be returnees agonized over the decision of whether to rebuild, as it seemed to represent a large risk—not of experiencing another catastrophe, but of being pioneers on a frontier with an uncertain future. Neighbors watched one another to see if enough would return and recommit. This period of uncertainty, in which residents varied tremendously in their attitudes toward New Orleans’ possible futures, was not helped by the fact that public institutions such as schools and frehouses, as well as grocery stores and retail amenities that make a city enjoyable to live in, were slow to come back on line. In many neighborhoods, fve years after the storm, there was still no place to procure basic necessities like food and gas. Neighborhoods lacking such resources felt like isolated outposts. In the fnal rebuilding phase, from 2012 to the present, a critical momentum has been reached in which infrastructure, real estate, and optimism about the city not only stabilized but entered a period of speculation and hype. Neighborhoods that many thought would never come back began thriving, even if their housing density is lower than before. The latest population estimates put the city at 80  percent of its pre-Katrina level (Data Center 2020). Many old-time New Orleanians are shocked by the gentrifcation that in several neighborhoods has far surpassed pre-Katrina levels. They feel conflicted about this development that has, in ways quite different than the storm, rendered their everyday surroundings unfamiliar. Part of this momentum has

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come from a new settler population of young people and entrepreneurs, primarily white and college-educated, who are contributing to the public life of the city but also driving rents up beyond the means of the largely African American ser vice class that has long powered the tourism industry. The point of this long description of the post-Katrina landscape is to underscore that the material life of the city is connected to its psychic life, but neither is static. We have a tendency to think of landscapes as solid matter, like stage scenery serving as a stable backdrop for the moving, talking human actors. But landscapes are more lifelike than that, even if their temporalities may be different. New Orleans’ cityscape has been as dynamic in its vulnerability to injury and its ability to transform as have its human inhabitants.

Ontology and Psycho-Archaeology The foregoing description also serves as a lead-in to my more experimental aim—the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the relations of humans and things. Following Walter Benjamin, I do not intend my foray into psychoanalysis to be taken as a literal application of a diagnosis but rather as an allegorical comprehension of how major structures, including structures of affect, can shift, and how objects can acquire new human meanings over their history. To be clear, I have never been a huge fan of Freud or classic psychoanalytic approaches. However, when I looked at the relationship between trauma and the human-object relationship, certain insights helped me account for evidence I could see in both the archaeological and ethnographic records. Although he did not call it that, early in his career Freud recognized a phenomenon that my interlocutors now call post-traumatic stress disorder. At frst he considered it a type of hysteria (a term no longer in use). In an 1893 work, he notes, “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (Breuer and Freud 1893). There is a way in which unhealed trauma affects temporality, forcing experience into a negative loop—a story that endlessly replays in the victim’s head. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he makes a statement that is the foundation of all his theories, that “what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past” (Freud [1920] 1961, 19). But in the special case of PTSD or similar states, it is of an unforgotten past. It is the exception to his general repression thesis. Or as a rival of Freud put it, “Forgetfulness, except in certain cases, is not a disease of memory, but a condi-

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tion of life and health” (Ribot 1883, cited in Young 1995, 30). Freud also identifed mass trauma, experienced in groups and often involving the codamage to objects and landscapes: “A condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of ‘traumatic neurosis.’ The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind” (Freud [1920] 1961, 10; see also Young 1995, 36–38). Freud was referring to World War I and twentieth-century war trauma, at frst labeled “ battle fatigue” in English, which pushed the psychiatric establishment to take the condition seriously. But it was not until 1980, with the impacts on returning Vietnam veterans recognized, that the condition earned an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) (Young 1995). Although we now know there are problems with Freud’s understanding of the mechanics of memory, another idea from Beyond the Pleasure Principle may be useful to think with. What Freud rather dramatically calls the “death drive” is “an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of things” ([1920] 1961, 69; emphasis added). As I will show, such a response explains the common and widespread non-PTSD reaction to disaster. So-called resilient individuals are in some signifcant way able to temporally re-set their lives to the period before the event. By emphasizing that time as the more important reference point, they avoid getting caught in the negative loop of a trauma story they cannot un-write. In contrast, mass trauma victims who suffer from something we now call PTSD not only do not want memorials, they do not need them. They have no problem remembering. They have a problem forgetting. That is the essence of the disorder. They are surrounded by the story in material form—contained in ruined houses, damaged heirlooms, and weedy lots. So long as the wounds of the landscape remain open, they are bombarded by material triggers of the traumatic event. Forgetting is impossible. Freud separated out three affects we might colloquially collapse—fright, fear, and anxiety. Anxiety describes a state in which we are on the alert for an unknown and often unspecifed danger. Fear is a reaction to a known object of potential threat. Fright, on the other hand, is “the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it” ([1920] 1961, 11). Victims of a severe fright often have recurring dreams of their trauma, a principle of “unpleasure.” Recurring, realistic nightmares that replay the traumatic event are a specifc symptom of PTSD as defned

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by today’s experts. In contemporary psychological classifcation, PTSD is unique among all the mental illnesses and disorders in that an outside event (defned as pathogenic) must have occurred in order to qualify for the diagnosis (American Psychiatric Association 2013; National Center for PTSD 2020; National Institute for Mental Health 2019). It is, by defnition, an environmental disease. Although there have been some studies suggesting that individual trauma reactions may be influenced by genetics and the balance of stress hormones, PTSD is a condition of history, or “a disease of time” (Young 1995). The main symptoms include hyperalertness, insomnia, nightmares and “day terrors” (intrusive recurring memories while awake), avoidance of places associated with the event, and emotional numbness.1 Allan Young (1995) argues that it is impossible to untangle the development of Western concepts of memory, self, and “hysteria” from the observed phenomenon. In other words, there may be a degree to which the disorder, while real, reproduces suggestions made by society, or even by medical practitioners themselves. Fassin and Rechtman (2009) make a different constructivist argument, that the medicalization of trauma has led to a new political recognition of victims. My interest is not in debating the historicity and effects of this medicalization, but to pay attention to how those who have been through a violent event react to their material surroundings, regardless of diagnosis and social acceptance.2 Of returnees to post-Katrina New Orleans, a 2007 study found that 38 percent of the population exhibited PTSD symptoms (Elsevier Health Sciences 2007), while the suicide rate tripled in the frst year after the storm (Saulny 2006). This number should probably be considered higher if we include all those who avoided the site of trauma completely by never returning from the places where they ended up after evacuation (primarily Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas). In my post-Katrina interviews, many people mentioned family members or friends who never returned to the city of their birth, even for a visit, because it would mean they would have to relive the storm.3

A Diptych of Disaster and Involuntary Memorials I will next describe in some forensic detail two traumas experienced by the human–non-human assemblage that is the city of New Orleans. The frst is a devastating fre that occurred in 1788 that wiped out three-quarters of the city center, and the second is Hurricane Katrina and the related engineering

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disaster of failed levees. In one, we have little more than the material evidence of a wounded landscape and human reactions to it. In the second, we have my frst-person observations of the cleanup and rebuilding period, and interviews with survivors. As the city has been made and re-made over the last three centuries, understanding these major episodes provides us with some insight into the historical processes that form the human-object assemblage (Dawdy 2016b). They also shed some light on the variegated responses to disaster. On the 21st of March, 1788, being Good Friday, at half past one in the afternoon, a fre broke out in New Orleans, in the house of the military treasurer, Vicente Jose Nunez, and reduced to ashes eight hundred and ffty six edifces, among which were the stores of all the merchants, and the dwellings of the principal inhabitants, the Cathedral, the Convent of the Capuchins, with the greater portion of their books, the Townhall, the watch-house, and the arsenal with all its contents. . . . The wind was at the time blowing from the south with extreme violence, and rendered nugatory all attempts to stop the progress of the devouring element. The imagination can easily conceive the scene of desolation; almost the whole of the population of the smouldering town was ruined, and deprived even of shelter during the whole of the following night. (Gayarré [1866] 1974, 203–4) It is unclear how many lives were lost, but the material damage to the city was extensive and the condition of the populace for several months qualifes this event and its aftermath as a mass trauma. New Orleans was a tent-andshack city for many years, quite parallel to the blue tarps and, eventually, FEMA trailers of Hurricane Katrina over two hundred years later. Colonial residents relived the trauma in 1794 when another fre struck the city center, taking out some of the rebuilt buildings but also, perhaps more tragically, most of those in the area that had been spared in 1788. Archaeologically, the rupture of these events is marked visibly across the French Quarter. At every one of the half dozen sites I have excavated in the Vieux Carré, I have found a telltale ash lens, or in some cases, a thick stratum of black charcoal mixed with a broad sample of burned or molten household goods. At one site called Madame John’s Legacy, we found a trash pit flled with fre debris, obviously done in a rush of post-fre cleanup. In addition to whole turtle carapaces and hog legs from the kitchen, we found

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barely damaged creamware dishes and dozens of bone button blanks once attached to smoke-damaged clothing thrown into the pit (Dawdy 1998). Although this was an elite household of the Spanish commander, it was nevertheless surprising that the buttons and unbroken dishes were not salvaged after the disaster. I have long puzzled over this trash pit and now wonder if what we see in it is evidence of a trauma reaction—that of avoidance, or quickly erasing reminders of the event. At St. Anthony’s Garden, a site behind the iconic St. Louis Cathedral where I excavated in 2008 and 2009 (Dawdy et al. 2008, 2014), we found a thick deposit with remains that were probably cleaned out of the adjacent townhouses and even the mendicant priest’s hut. Here too a kind of “everything goes” mentality seemed to rule, as included in the fre trash was a barely damaged crucifx carefully crafted from precious metal. It is, of course, possible that it simply got lost in the debris, but this also means that some fre victims did not conduct a careful excavation, as one sometimes sees victims of tornadoes and house fres doing. And excavation, in its Freudian sense, well applies here—it would mean the upchurning of memory, the exposure of events that the ego judges best left buried. The hut that was lost belonged to a local fgure, now heroic, named Father Antonio de Sedella, or as the local Creoles called him, Père Antoine. After the fre, Père Antoine was named vicar-general of Louisiana. With the powers of his new position, Père Antoine repurposed the space occupied by the Capuchins’ fre-damaged vegetable garden next to the cathedral, as well as the area behind the church that had been used as an informal market space. Archaeologically, we found evidence of an encampment from this period, with tent post holes and fre pits. It was, however, artifactually poor, reflecting the poverty of the disaster victims. Some of these residents (most notably, two free women of color) were devout parishioners of the church whom Père Antoine protected from removal after the encampment phase. He allowed them to build modest cottages on one side of the site. We located the structures in the excavations and also found one likely source for their modest livelihood—a henhouse. In the case of Père Antoine and his new neighbors, it appears that there was some resilience to the trauma and even a move to memorialize it. Still, the lot was the scene of a late fght over rebuilding the city. Père Antoine frequently cited the experience of the fre victims to defend the women’s continued occupation of the site against city authorities who wanted to appropriate the land. Other residents were troubled by this continuing reminder of the disaster and regularly agitated for the city cabildo

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to “remove these unsightly cottages.” Père Antoine’s moral influence in the city was great enough to keep redevelopment at bay, but the argument did not survive his death in 1829. Within two years, the city took control of the property and razed the cottages to the ground and erased the last vestiges of the fre with a vigorously landscaped public park. In other, more dramatic ways, the fre of 1788 reconfgured the New Orleans landscape. For one thing, many residents of the central zone we now call the French Quarter chose not to return. Instead, wealthier residents moved out. The fre of 1788 sparked a rapid expansion of the city into less dense “faubourgs” or suburbs that began to be subdivided in underused land surrounding the urban core. Architecturally, the buildings that replaced those lost in the fre were markedly different from what went before. Spanish townhouses and creole cottages with tile roofs replaced the old French mansions with post-and-beam construction and mansard roofs. Old French New Orleans was essentially erased by its own residents as a reaction to the disaster. Most wanted something different, a home that didn’t remind them of the past. These examples, however, also underscore the differing abilities of rich and poor to control their material environment and thus their continued exposure to the physical triggers of trauma, or what we might call, glossing Marcel Proust, involuntary memorials. One of the factors that pushed me into this topic was observing the startling parallels between the 1788 fre and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In both cases, we witness the effects of landscape wounds on trauma victims—how they embody a story that replays pain and fright. Reactions to these triggers are evident in avoidance and numbness behav ior—reactions that in turn transform the post-disaster landscape. During the debris-clearing period, I noticed three basic types of reactions. In one, residents avoided their home sites as thoroughly as they could, either never returning or sending family or friends as proxies to take a look and rescue a few named items if they could. This group practiced extreme avoidance, but also, when I talked to them, were hyper-alert and even seemed to exaggerate the extent of the damage. Another group did buck up the courage to go themselves but then they engaged with the damaged interiors of their houses—often representing generations of object accumulation—with impatience. This group often effected a wholesale clearing of the materials, transferring every thing, even dirty but undamaged items, into a massive pile of junk mounded up on the sidewalk, awaiting one of the daily dump-truck runs that came in the early days. They usually accomplished this herculean feat in a matter of two to three days. This too,

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might be called an avoidance behav ior. It certainly required a kind of emotional numbness to execute. The third group were the salvagers. These people may have gone to their houses right away or may have taken a while to be ready for the cleanup task, but once they got into it, they did it with an excavator’s care, sorting through the debris and trying to save as much as they could. In many cases, they were unrealistic about what could be restored to a prior state, but that was their goal. One woman had almost every piece of furniture transferred to an out-oftown storage unit, with plans to get them to a restorer who was expected to work miracles on laminated wood and upholstery that had sat in water for three months. In our follow-up interview a couple years later, she admitted that her initial plan was unrealistic but she cheerfully reported on what she did save. Another woman gathered up all of the linens in the house, which were admittedly a bit disgusting after sitting in water, muck, and mold for three months, and threw them hopefully into the laundry. Even more optimistically, she tried to save her soaked stamp collection. Today, her household interior comprises an odd assortment of new necessities and warped, stained things with a story to tell. In terms of architectural renovation, these three groups again appear. The frst are those who simply abandoned their properties, had them razed, or sold them as absentees, sight unseen. Then there were those who thoroughly gutted historically signifcant and repairable houses to have “new” modern makeovers that visually erased the houses that had experienced Katrina. And fnally, there were those who tried their best to restore their homes to their pre-2005 state. In my post-Katrina interviews, I encountered or tracked down residents who ft each of these profles (although the frst, those who never returned, were the most difficult to locate and the most reluctant to talk). I found that the salvagers and restorers seemed to be those who had the most optimistic outlooks and also talked freely of the events of the storm, although the details of their stories were no less dramatic. They included a man who had stayed in the city and had witnessed his aged, dignifed grandfather removed at gunpoint by National Guardsmen, a woman in her eighties who had to be evacuated by ambulance, and a woman who lost all of her pets that she was forced to leave behind and later found their carcasses mixed into the debris of her house, which had shifted off its foundation. Though a small sample, these rebuilders also ran across the social spectrum, from black working class to white leisure class. Some residents have a fond attachment to the stories of the storm and its involuntary memorials. In my interview with the woman who lost her pets,

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whose collection of salvaged things included toys and childhood collections, I asked: “Do you think our attachments to things all trace back to childhood?” She replied: “Yes, but I also think traumatic experiences, things that happened with Katrina, that make us bond with elements of our environment here. It’s an amazing thing. . . . People have bonded with some strange things, like when they moved one of the boats that was stuck on Hwy 90 [a boat that had been used for citizen rescues until the water receded and stranded it], when they fnally got it out of the way, people were upset. They had bonded with that boat.” Trauma can bring things and people closer. For some, this intimate thing-trauma connection is a negative attachment, for others, a positive one. The more ubiquitous example of the memory-versus-erasure response to the storm is in the graffiti tags sprayed on nearly every one of New Orleans’ buildings by search and rescue teams. Some residents painted over the marks immediately upon their returns, and even used them as a pretext to repaint the façades of undamaged houses. Others left the marks for a long time, for years after the storm, until renovations were completed with a fnal coat of paint (even today, one can fnd occupied houses with the tags intact). Still others made the tags into impromptu memorials by painting around them, leaving the house tattoos, as some called them, exposed. One artist made a cast iron replica and attached it to his studio and house as a permanent marker. So here again, we have differential responses to trauma, but overall in two directions—either erasure/avoidance or engagement through “bonding” and memorialization. Interestingly, large-scale formal memorials to Katrina and its victims are hard to fnd.4 Tensions among family members often ran high over what to do about “storm stuff.” One friend whose family lost every thing to Katrina’s strike on the Mississippi gulf coast said she had never seen her parents fght until the post-disaster rebuilding period. Having once lived in a house with an eclectic accumulation of beloved antiques and unique objects, her father wanted to start collecting again. But her mother was adamant that they stock the house entirely with Ikea furnishings so she could easily keep an inventory of stock numbers and restore the household to an identical state should another storm hit. Not only did she not want to be reminded of the experience of losing the family story told through its artifacts, she didn’t want to risk developing an attachment to newly acquired things. She was, through her material behavior, not only avoiding the past trauma but trying to reduce the risk of a future one. When we parse these responses into two basic types—a post-traumatic stress response of avoidance because forgetting is difficult, and a kind of

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high-functioning repression that eventually embraces the objects of memory—we make some headway toward explaining why post-disaster rebuilding is so often a fraught process. There are those who want to erase all traces of the event and its prior landscape, and those who want to return every thing to the way it was while acknowledging the magnitude of the event. Per their own narratives, both are motivated to “get beyond” or triumph over the trauma, but their reactions to the landscape’s reminders of the event pull in opposite directions. And depending on who wins the struggle, object by object, house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, the effects on the postdisaster landscape will be signifcant. These intimate relationships extend beyond the realm of houses and personal possessions to include what we popularly understand as the “natural” landscape. Several of my interviewees stressed the bizarre brown-gray deadness of the normally lush landscape of New Orleans and in the same breath emphasized how devastating and depressing this visual change was to them. Tom could have been citing The Road: “When my son and I snuck in here [in September  2005] . . . we didn’t see anything moving. Maybe a car now and then. It was like the end of the world. Every thing was gray.” Tom was among the long-term local residents who were in no mood for the official celebrations marking the ten-year anniversary in August 2015. They chose that week to leave town and go on vacation, avoiding the official reminders of what happened and what seemed to them an insensitive glossing over of an experience that remains painful to the touch. Paul, a veteran local journalist, recounted how in those long, frayed months after the storm, he couldn’t even talk about the weather for fear of setting off a crying streak. Looking back on the storm and its effect on him several years later, he said: “We were all pretty well traumatized by it. I still admit to some post-traumatic stress disorder. I get worried when I see rain. But I just have to calm myself down and think, ‘It’s only rain.’ It’s not a hurricane. [pause] I think the newspaper staff was pulled together. I was reminded of what I’ve heard about the camaraderie of soldiers in combat except that our war came to us. I mean, war correspondents have nice places to go back to. This was our home. . . . It’s the most visceral experience I hope I’ll ever have to undergo. I just can’t imagine anything worse. It affected the city on so many levels.” Paul’s emphasis on the difference between foreign war trauma and a disaster that strikes at home underscores how the wounds on this intimate landscape compounded the injuries of its human survivors. Another resident, Richard, said very little about his Katrina experience in response to my query on his feelings about the ten-year anniversary hoopla.

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He avoids giving me his Katrina story. Instead, he redirects, wanting to talk about the effects of rebuilding and gentrifcation. Little more than a year after the storm, Richard had to move out of his modest apartment building (which suffered only minor damage) when the owners hiked the rent during the housing shortage. From his new place out in a suburb he disparages, he now regularly drives a route into town to a coffeehouse that takes him through the intersection of Freret and Valence Streets, where he and his mother lived for several years. He reminisces about the Jewish delis, hardware stores, and bakeries that used to line this inner-city business strip. He says: “It is painful for me to drive by that corner. . . . But it’s mental pain I’m talking about . . . yeah, it’s a trigger. I look up every time and I try to imagine what is going on in my old apartment. I have had dreams about that apartment.” His experiential routes through the city and his own precarious economic condition have been affected by Katrina. Rebuilding has altered both the landscape and his own emotional ecology, stirring a deep and painful nostalgia. His sense of self is creased by major changes in the post-storm cityscape. If I had to do it over, if I could go back and tell myself at age twenty: Richard, this will not last. You should enjoy every moment of this experience because not only are you living on the edge of tomorrow, you will never have this experience again of village life. This is sad to me, walking. . . . [voice cracks and begins to cry] You know, I don’t know why it triggers it. . . . [composes himself] So now you walk down Freret Street and you can go from one cocktail lounge and bar and music venue to another but you can’t go to a cleaner’s or a bakery or a grocery store. It’s classic stuff you read about in the New York Times. . . . Yeah, that’s just gone with the wind. Realizing what he just said, Richard laughs, then begins to cry again. “My beautiful New Orleans—gone with the wind.”

Concluding and Considering Following Heidegger, Tim Ingold (1993, 2000) considers landscape as a boundless feld of objects and interactions that unfolds through time. From the human point of view, “landscape tells—or rather is—a story” (1993, 152). He “reject[s] the division between inner and outer worlds. . . . The landscape

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becomes a part of us just as we are a part of it” (1993, 154). Yet, as Knudsen (1998) observes, Ingold’s approach to landscape and environment concerns itself primarily with perception, creating some paradoxes of its own. In my own reading, such a strongly phenomenological approach is only ever capable of a human-centered understanding of the environment. Dwelling is intentional living by human subjects. The materiality and agency of soil, buildings, and trees are not taken very seriously. Ingold’s landscape appears painterly and passive—or like a story, waiting for the moment of human reading. It doesn’t quite act back. It falls short of explaining how a landscape could be so human-like that it could be raped or be so active that it could comfort—or terrify—a human pedestrian who wanders through it. Miyamoto Katsuhiro is an architect based in Kobe, Japan, who survived the 1995 earthquake there. He writes: “Immediately after the earthquake, wandering around the city, I had the impression that the landscape was comforting me. Walking or cycling over this ground I was able to accept, inside me, the earthquake” (quoted in Isozaki 1997). His reaction might strike one as bizarre unless you have lived through a similar experience in which humans and things become damaged in sudden, equal measure. Disaster brings us closer to the landscape, makes us recognize it as an agentive, reactive, vulnerable entity like ourselves. And undoubtedly, during those same days in Kobe, there was another resident wandering the ruins in shock, experiencing not comfort but a penetrating despair coming at them through that scene of devastation. But that each felt a powerful connection—a negative or a positive one—is a recognition that, to paraphrase both Katsuhiro and Tim Ingold, “the landscape is inside me.” The history of build-up between humans and their landscapes acts like the scarifcation that Freud characterized as the process of consciousness emerging. There is a dynamic co-creating that takes place between the big exterior and our little interiors: the give-and-play of adopting trees planted by another generation only to have them fall on our cars after a windstorm, building homes that leak and keep us up at night with worry, and making a neighborhood dive a landmark by contributing our skin oils to its aging wooden bar, which then returns to us the comfort of a grandfather-thing. This is the slow time of landscape and human co-making, of intimate adaptations and a build-up of a patina, both material and psychic. But sometimes time moves all too quickly, in what we call earth-shattering events. This is the quick time of trauma when another kind of human-thing connection gets formed. The landscape lives through the same story, the same injury. Its injuries are

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visible. Ours often are not. Ruins and objects out-of-place are involuntary memorials that work well for those who want them but are unwanted triggers for those who suffer from a surfeit of memory. Conflicts over rebuilding a disaster zone have many causes and dimensions, but the most fundamental ones may be rooted in the “disease of time,” and its inextricability with space.

Acknowledgments Some material here appears in another form in Patina: A Profane Archaeology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), where a complete list of acknowledgments recognizes the institutions and individuals who supported the archaeological portions of this work. For this particular effort in composing my thoughts, I would like to thank the editors, especially Yael Navaro, and colleagues I met at the Reverberations Conference for their insightful feedback. The interviews recorded here were undertaken under University of Chicago IRB protocol #H08055. Notes 1. While nearly all individuals who have suffered a severe trauma, such as witnessing a sudden or violent death, will experience a form of trauma shock, it is when the condition persists or worsens over time that it qualifes as a disorder. Why some individuals will develop PTSD and others will not is a topic of debate and much recent research in psychiatry and neurology, as well as medical anthropology. Divergent evidence suggests repeated exposure to high-stress events can either build resilience or stack up suppressed reactions that make individuals vulnerable. There is growing evidence for a neurobiological basis for propensity (Figley 2012). 2. The most acute symptoms, such as suicide, violence, numbness, nightmare-riddled insomnia, and avoidance behav ior, have been observed in vastly different cultural settings where mass traumas have been experienced (see also Alexander 2012; Casper and Wertheimer 2016). In fact, mass trauma has become a major focus of public health initiatives in the new millennium (Shalev et al. 2004; Galea et al. 2005). Qualifying events include the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, the Haitian earthquake, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A recent meta-analysis of mental health data from countries that experienced war and major conflicts between 1989 and 2015 found that about 26  percent of the population will exhibit signature symptoms (Hoppen and Morina 2019). In the U.S. population, it is estimated that between 3 percent and 9 percent of the population has suffered from PTSD at some time, although it is considered highly treatable and often resolves on its own. 3. The archaeological literature is full of examples of abandoned settlements, the causes often attributed to war or food insecurity. Perhaps we should also consider the not unrelated

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factor of mass trauma. Some settlements come back, over and over again, from hostile attacks and environmental stress. But some do not. 4. In the Lower Ninth Ward, one artist’s installation of sculptural elements mimics the typical damaged house but sits ignored on a busy street fronting real house ruins. Another memorial stands inside one of the city’s sprawling cemeteries, dedicated to the eighty-three unidentifed victims of the storm. A news item during the ten-year anniversary commemorations alerted me to its existence (and neglect): “The Katrina Memorial You Likely Don’t Know About” (WGNO/AOL News 2015).

Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2012. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5. 5th ed. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association. Biehl, João, and Peter Locke. 2010. “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming.” Current Anthropology 51 (3): 317–51. Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. 1893. “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II (1893–1895): Studies in Hysteria, translated and edited by James Strachey, 1–17. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Burdeau, Cain. 2005. “Chaos of Katrina Drives Police Officer to Suicide.” Associated Press, 6 September. http://www.policeone.com/health-ftness/articles/118576 -Chaos-of-Katrina -drives-police-officer-to-suicide/. Casper, Monica J., and Eric Wertheimer, eds. 2016. Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict, and Memory in Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press. Charlesworth, Esther, and Anitra Nelson. 2012. “Reconstruction as Exclusion: Beirut.” In The Heritage of War, edited by M. Gegner and B. Zino, 234–43. New York: Routledge. Clarke, Matthew, Ismet Fanany, and Sue Kenny. 2010. Post-disaster Reconstruction: Lessons from Aceh. New York: Routledge. The Data Center. 2020. “Total Population by Parish.” The Data Center, 30 March. http://www .datacenterresearch.org /data-resources/population-by-parish/. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 1998. Madame John’s Legacy (16OR51) Revisited: A Closer Look at the Archaeology of Colonial New Orleans. New Orleans, LA: GNOAP for Friends of the Cabildo. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2006. “The Taphonomy of Disaster and the (Re)formation of New Orleans.” American Anthropologist 108 (4): 719–30. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2016a. Patina: A Profane Archaeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2016b. “Profane Archaeology and the Existential Dialectics of the City.” Journal of Social Archaeology 16 (1): 32–55. Dawdy, Shannon L., Claire Bowman, Kristen Gremillon, Susan deFrance, and Lauren Zych. 2014. Archaeological Investigations at St. Anthony’s Garden (16OR443), New Orleans, Louisiana. Vol. 2, 2009 Fieldwork and Final Laboratory Analysis for 2008 and 2009 Seasons. Anthropology, University of Chicago.

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Dawdy, Shannon Lee, Kristen Gremillon, Susan Mulholland, and Jason Ramsey. 2008. Archaeological Investigations at St.  Anthony’s Garden (16OR443), New Orleans, Louisiana. Vol. 1, 2008 Fieldwork and Archaeobotanical Results. Anthropology, University of Chicago. Elsevier Health Sciences. 2007. “Post-traumatic Stress Disorder 10 Times Higher in New Orleans Than in the General Public.” Science Daily, 17 May. http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2007/05/070516071603.htm. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Figley, Charles R. 2012. Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Finch, Christina, Christopher T. Emrich, and Susan L. Cutter. 2010. “Disaster Disparities and Differential Recovery in New Orleans.” Population and Environment 31:179–202. Freud, Sigmund. (1896) 1962. “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud III, 191–221. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. (1920) 1961. Beyond the Plea sure Principle. New York: W. W. Norton. Galea, Sandro, Arijit Nandi, and David Vlahov. 2005. “The Epidemiology of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder After Disasters.” Epidemiologic Reviews 27 (1): 78–91. Gayarré, Charles. (1866) 1974. The History of Louisiana. New York: W. J. Widdleton. Grimm, Andy. 2015. “How Are You Avoiding Katrina Memorial Events?” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 29 August. http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/how_ are_you _ avoiding _ katrina _ m.html. Hoppen, Thole Hilko, and Nexhmedin Morina. 2019. “The Prevalence of PTSD and Major Depression in the Global Population of Adult War Survivors: A Meta-analytically Informed Estimate in Absolute Numbers.” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 10 (1): 1578637. Ingold, Timothy. 1993. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25 (2): 152– 74. Ingold, Timothy. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Isozaki, Arata. 1997. “Frattures.” Lotus International 93:34–45. Knudsen, Are J. 1998. Beyond Cultural Relativism? Tim Ingold’s “Ontology of Dwelling.” CMI Working Papers 7, Bergen, Norway. Lock, Margaret. 2003. “Medicalization and the Naturalization of Social Control.” In Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures. Vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology. edited by Carol R. Ember and Marvin Ember, 116–25. New York: Springer. National Center for PTSD, Veterans Affairs. 2020. 29 September. http://www.ptsd.va.gov/. National Institute for Mental Health. 2019. “Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.” May. http://www .nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml. Saulny, Susan. 2006. “A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide.” New York Times, 21 June. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/us/21depress.html?pagewanted​= ​a ll& _ r​= ​0. Schwartze, Frank. 2011. “Symbols of Reconstruction, Signs of Division: The Case of Microvitra, Kosovo.” In The Heritage of War, edited by M. Gegner and B. Zino, 219–33. New York: Routledge.

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Shalev, Arieh Y., Rivka R. Tuval-Mashiach, and Hillit Hadar. 2004. “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder as a Result of Mass Trauma.” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 65:4–10. Sliwinski, Alicia. 2009. “The Politics of Participation: Involving Communities in Post-disaster Reconstruction.” In Rebuilding After Disasters: From Emergency to Sustainability, edited by Gonzalo Lizzaralde, Cassidy Johnson, and Colin Davidson, 177–92. New York: Spon Press. WGNO and AOL News. 2015. “The Hurricane Katrina Memorial You Likely Don’t Know About.” AOL .com, 24 August. http://www.aol.com /article/2015/08/24 /the-hurricane -katrina-memorial-you-don-t-know-about/21226802/. Young, Allan. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Architectural Witnessing at the Former Madımak Hotel in Sivas, Turkey Eray Çaylı

On July 10, 1993, Oktay Ekinci, then chairperson of the Istanbul chapter of Turkey’s Chamber of Architects, wrote an article for the national daily Cumhuriyet titled “The Massacre’s Witness Must Be Preserved As Is.”1 This “witness” was the premises of a hotel named Madımak in the city of Sivas in east-central Turkey, where tens of assailants had carried out an arson attack about a week earlier, on July 2, 1993. The building had “witnessed” the deaths of two of its employees and thirty-three of its guests who were in Sivas to participate in a culture festival organized by an association representing Turkey’s Alevi community. The attack had taken place in broad daylight, and before TV cameras, an inactive law enforcement, and thousands of mostly supportive onlookers. It had been documented extensively and ostensibly live, leading to its being dubbed “the massacre the entire world witnessed.”2 The demand in the title of Ekinci’s article was frst raised just days after the arson attack, at a press conference held by representatives of various leftleaning political parties and professional organizations. A campaign was launched at this conference for what was left of Madımak to be designated a memorial museum. But the hotel was repaired within months of the arson attack, losing its forensic quality as a scene of mass murder. The campaign continued unabated while also increasingly more clearly articulating, alongside its architectural objective of memorial museum, by whom this objective was to be met: the state. Support for it grew throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, inspiring similar campaigns regarding various sites of state-endorsed violence and resonating especially with those who advocated the urgency of

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“facing and reckoning with the past” as a prerequisite for strengthening Turkey’s democracy. While for many years such campaigns fell on deaf ears among the authorities, they fnally elicited a response in 2011. The Madımak Hotel was expropriated and turned into the Science and Culture Center (henceforth: SCC), a commemorative-cum-educational state-run institution open to public visits. This chapter engages with this pivotal moment in Turkey, when a campaign that considered architecture witness to a live-televised atrocity began to achieve material results nearly two decades after its inception. Notably, the late 2000s and early 2010s constitute a historical moment in which, as part of a larger post-humanist turn, spatial and visual technologies came into focus not only in such activist campaigns as those mentioned above but also in scholarly debates on violence. The chapter begins by engaging with these debates, especially with respect to the impact that reconsidering witnessing as a not necessarily anthropocentric phenomenon is taken to have on truth production regarding violence and on the role of human witnesses in that production. I then discuss the notions and experiences of witnessing that have shaped the campaign to preserve Madımak as a “witness” and those that have been shaped by its transformation into the SCC. Based on feldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013, which focused on anniversary commemorations held at the site and daily goings-on inside the building after its refurbishment, I diverge from the two main positions characterizing recent analyses of spatial and visual technologies’ increasingly prominent role in witnessing violence. I argue that this role need not necessarily involve a tradeoff between a forensically underpinned epistemic enhancement and the debilitation of human witnesses. It may instead prompt a reconsideration of witnessing beyond the confnes of the event thought to constitute the singular focus of the violence being witnessed.

The Architectural Turn in Testimony The prominence given to architecture and spatial technologies in both Ekinci’s article and the museum campaign it relayed has recently come to also characterize scholarly analyses of political violence (Herscher 2011; Kenzari 2011; Schuppli 2014; Weizman 2010, 2011, 2014). A prime example of the latter is architect-theorist Eyal Weizman’s work on the architectural remains of recent wars and their judicial signifcance. “A recent epistemic shift,” suggests

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Weizman, has seen “forensic practices . . . replace the (human) witness in international law investigations” (Weizman 2010, 10), ushering in “an objectoriented juridical culture immersed in matter and materialities, in code and form, and in the presentation of scientifc investigations by experts” (Weizman 2011, 6). An example of such practices, for him, is forensic architecture, and the architect-theorist has instituted a London-based agency by that name, providing evidence to courts. Importantly, according to Weizman, this shift has implications for not only the judicial realm but also the wider sociocultural paradigm called “the era of the witness” (Wieviorka 2006), which saw the human witness rise to prominence over the second half of the twentieth century as the most authoritative source on the past. While this era has imbued testimony with a strong anti-establishment, dissident, and pro-subaltern character, for Weizman the identifcation has not been unproblematic: “One of the problems with this form of testimony was that its function was no longer epistemic at all. . . . It was not tasked with revealing knowledge or authenticating claims of historical injustice, but functioned primarily as an ‘ethical’ resource” (Weizman 2010, 14). Contrarily, the new, forensic paradigm places artifacts’ testimony on a par with that of people. Put reversely, now the latter’s role mainly consists in helping physical remnants of violence “speak” (14). This, for Weizman, heralds the hybrid entity of evidence witnesses, a convergence between the testimonial agency of things and that of humans. If this convergence does not necessarily mean that the past can be known “as a conclusive, transparent fact mechanically etched into materiality,” it nevertheless promises to help overcome certain epistemological pitfalls associated with “the era of the witness,” such as its “anti-universalist” notion of truth as “inherently relative, contingent, multiple, or non-existent” (Weizman 2014, 29). If post-humanist methodologies such as Weizman’s have been timely in establishing artifacts’ increasing importance within sociocultural and judicial mechanisms, they have also triggered considerable criticism. Consider Yael Navaro-Yashin’s ethnographic study (2012) of the “affective forces” at work in Northern Cyprus between its inhabitants and their everyday environments consisting of physical remnants of violent histories. While NavaroYashin agrees with the post-humanist emphasis on the need to question “the social-constructionist tradition” of taking material objects, spaces, and technologies for granted as a mere extension of the human psyche, she nevertheless criticizes the “nonpolitical symmetry” that post-humanisms such as actor network theory tend to assign to social relations between humans and artifacts (41–43).

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Navaro-Yashin’s criticism points to sociopolitical agency as a concern that ought to be central to the role architectural spaces, objects, and technologies might play in negotiating past violence. Andrew Herscher engages this concern in an essay on satellite surveillance and remote sensing technologies. While he echoes Weizman in highlighting that such technologies blur the boundaries between the conceptual categories of evidence and witness, Herscher is wary of the resulting effect on the epistemological legitimacy of human testimony: “The capacity to truthfully represent an act of violation passes from the [human] witness who ‘directly’ experiences that act to the satellite that depicts its architectural aftermath. The truth of the witness is replaced by the truth of remote sensing, whose images are narrated as offering an immediate representation of reality. This replacement . . . establishes a continuum between witnessing and verifying, leaving witnessing itself only able to yield unverifed evidence” (Herscher 2011, 141). In a second essay, Herscher (2014) expands on this argument regarding the incapacitation of human beings resulting from the privileging of spatial and visual technologies. The expansion is that, due to digital platforms of witnessing such as websites providing public access to satellite surveillance over war zones at risk of human rights violations, those incapacitated include not just frsthand witnesses to past violence but also mediated ones.3 In the case of frsthand witnesses, over-reliance on spatial and visual technologies deprives humans of their epistemic agency by annulling their capacity to represent the truth about violence. In the case of mediated witnesses, this overreliance robs humans of their sociopolitical agency by equating witnessing with the politically inactive gesture of “watching over” conflict that offers no possibilities for intervening or even meaningfully cogitating about the violence being witnessed (Herscher 2014, 492–93). This overview of the architectural turn in scholarly discussions of witnessing indicates two opposing positions. The frst, represented by Weizman, suggests that the testimony of artifacts, solicited through sophisticated spatial and visual technologies, promises to enhance the epistemic quality of truths produced about violence. The counter-position, argued by Herscher, maintains that the influence of these technologies expands to the detriment of human witnesses’ capacity to testify to or intervene in violence. Vis-à-vis these two opposing positions, this chapter focuses on the Madımak Hotel’s conversion into the SCC as a historical moment which marked the state’s acknowledgment of the commemorative signifcance of the site of a “massacre the entire world witnessed,” as had long been demanded by campaigns

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premised on the building’s status as a “witness” to violence. How might this transformation have impacted on processes of truth production regarding the arson attack, and on the opportunities these processes have afforded human witnesses for acting on violence’s reverberations?

Madımak as Witness The architect Ekinci’s newspaper article, cited at the beginning of this chapter, explained that the campaigners wanted to preserve the Madımak Hotel “as a burnt, ruined,” and thus “the most powerful witness to” the arson attack. Regarding exactly how the commercial establishment would be made to change hands for this purpose, the campaigners’ preference was for the state to assume responsibility by expropriating the building. Moreover, the campaigners thought it crucial to maintain the hotel’s forensic integrity as a scene of mass murder. “Should the authorities turn out to be hesitant,” the campaigners were committed to “realizing this project by launching a fundraising campaign in solidarity with pro-democracy and pro-secular forces across the country,” and so “could purchase the building” to preserve it as a memorial museum. The following months and years saw substantial changes to the site, which frustrated plans to preserve the wreckage “as is.” The hotel was repaired and returned to business weeks after the atrocity, compromising the forensic attribute the museum campaign had been founded on. A few years later, a charcoal grill restaurant opened in the hotel’s ground floor, and its incendiary associations infuriated those claiming the victims’ legacy. But none of these developments discouraged the campaigners from continuing to demand that Madımak be turned into a memorial museum. If anything, the campaign gained further traction thanks especially to activist commemorations held at the hotel on anniversaries, which attracted increasingly larger crowds throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. This occurred in tandem with two signifcant developments that unfolded throughout those years, regarding both the Sivas arson attack and other similarly contested atrocities of the recent past. First, the major court case on the arson attack resulted in sentences only for the forty-seven people who had spearheaded the group of thousands outside the hotel during the arson, thereby excluding their support networks and the authorities who stood by and watched as the attack unfolded.4 That

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the judicial treatment of the atrocity turned out to be rather limited further amplifed the question of the authorities’ culpability, and caused a gradual shift of priorities in the campaign for Madımak’s transformation into a memorial museum. The focus was no longer on ensuring that the transformation was carried out but on specifying who was to carry it out: the state. This was evident as the Confederation of Alevi Unions in Europe, the world’s largest organization representing followers of the faith, debated in 2008 whether they should go ahead and use the large sum of donations they had received for purchasing the hotel and realizing the museum project, but abandoned the idea. Setting up a museum in spite of the state “would mean to unjustly claim responsibility for the Sivas Massacre,” whereas it is “the authorities both past and present [who] are responsible for and guilty of” the atrocity and who must therefore carry the burden of memorializing it on site.5 Secondly, further state-endorsed atrocities like the Sivas arson attack gained visibility in the late 1990s as a topic of heated debate among intellectuals, academics, and members of nongovernmental organizations in Turkey.6 By the mid-2000s the topic had consolidated under the rubric of “facing and reckoning with the past” (geçmişle [with the past] yüzleşme [facing] ve [and] hesaplaşma [reckoning; literally: the settling of accounts]).7 Sites like Madımak were thrust into the limelight as venues where this “facing and reckoning” would take place, as further campaigns to transform such sites into memorial museums were modeled on the example of the hotel and addressed to the state.8 Mainstream political developments in the late 2000s gave such campaigns greater exposure. In 2005, the AKP (Justice and Development Party), which frst rose to power in late 2002 and have since been on a record-breaking trajectory of holding the highest number of consecutive single-party majority governments elected in Turkey’s multiparty system, managed to gain the country EU candidacy following decades of negotiations.9 Such was the context in which members of the government started to speak of a period of “post-coup democratization” that would capitalize on developments both in Turkey (i.e., a military bereft of its political power) and abroad (i.e., EU membership negotiations) toward engaging with vexing social issues ignored by previous administrations.10 In 2009, this discourse led both to a referendum in which the electorate voted the need for a new “democratic” constitution and to a set of initiatives officially named the National Unity and Fraternity Project.11 Known popularly as Democratic Opening, the initiatives consisted of a series of workshops with nongovernmental actors and representatives of

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historically disenfranchised groups such as the Kurds, Alevis, and nonMuslim minorities.12 It was in the so-called Alevi workshops that the coalition of associations representing this faith group found the opportunity to raise fve key demands, one being Madımak’s state-sponsored transformation into a memorial museum. At this stage, there were still virtually no design proposals regarding what the memorial museum could look and feel like, except a textual description covering both sides of an A4 page. The “Alevi workshops” culminated in a ministerial visit to the hotel that aimed to demonstrate the authorities’ commitment to engaging with the museum campaign. This was followed by a secretive process in which the hotel’s architectural transformation was begun, albeit with no information regarding its intended outcome. Finally, in June 2011, the site was re-inaugurated as the SCC, an educational facility serving pupils between the ages of six and fourteen, which contains a memorial wall dedicated to the arson attack.13

Impartiality and Openness Although Madımak’s transformation did involve a commemorative facet and was carried out by the state, it has failed to appease a considerable section of the public. Reasons for this are manifold. First, the transformation did not yield a museum proper. Furthermore, contrary to the impression the fvestory building’s fully refurbished façade now exudes, only a fraction of the interior has been transformed, and a still smaller section—half of the ground floor—has been dedicated to commemorative purposes, while the bulk of the building—the remaining half of the ground floor and the mezzanine above— hosts an educational facility. But one feature of the building’s commemorative section has especially infuriated the campaigners: the names listed on its memorial wall and the order of those names. The list comprises thirtyseven names, and therefore includes not only the thirty-three participants of the culture festival and the two hotel workers who died in the blaze but also two individuals believed to have been among those who participated in the arson attack. One of the latter indeed tops the list, as his name starts with A and the list is in frst-name alphabetical order. Alongside the name list, two statements are displayed on the memorial wall. One of these is attributed to the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This is indicated by his iconic signature and a golden

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mask portraying his face, which accompany the statement. The statement reads, “Whatever be the different ideas, different beliefs in society, there is no task that cannot be fulflled, no obstacle that cannot be overcome for a nation which knows how to act in national unity and togetherness.”14 The second statement is a synopsis of the speech that Minister of State Faruk Çelik delivered when he became in 2010 the frst government representative to visit the site: “In the deplorable incident that took place on July 2, 1993, our thirtyseven people have lost their lives. With the wish that such pains are not lived through again. . . .”15 State authorities in charge of executing the SCC project have proclaimed to have adopted a “human-centric” approach in that they “do not distinguish between those who died in the incident.”16 Such was the rhetoric of impartiality I encountered during my conversations in summer 2011 with the deputy governor and the state-employed engineer who both had prominent roles in the project. According to them, impartiality was the primary reason why the name list is inclusive of the two alleged assailants and is in frst-name alphabetical order, why the statements on the memorial wall say what they say (e.g., “our thirty-seven people,” “unity,” “togetherness”), and why the institution’s name just reads “SCC,” rather than referencing historical events or people, as per common practice at Turkey’s state-owned buildings serving educational and/or cultural purposes. During my research inside the building in late 2011, I observed that certain physical aspects of the SCC were mobilized to reinforce this rhetoric of impartiality. These included the memorial wall’s appropriation of the socalled Atatürk corner, an interior architectural element inseparably associated with bureaucracy and formality, as various versions of it are omnipresent across Turkey’s state buildings.17 But, much less evidently than the latter, they also included the idle four floors that constitute the bulk of the building, which were cited by staff members whenever they faced visitors’ criticism. In such instances, employees resorted to suggesting that the SCC may well be just an interim arrangement, that the process was still open-ended, and that the authorities were impartially taking on board the feedback provided from across the sociopolitical spectrum. When a couple in their mid-thirties slated the memorial wall for its inclusion of “assailants’ names,” the staff member showing them around admitted to the “imperfection” of the overall SCC project. But he quickly stressed that this was just a well-intentioned start; in fact, the bulk of the building comprising the upper four floors was being kept “as is,” and feed-

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back of the sort the couple provided could well influence what might later become of it. Similarly, when a father visiting the building with his teenage son complained about how it had been turned into a SCC as opposed to the memorial museum that campaigners have long demanded, the staff member tending them pointed yet again to the upper three floors. He assumed that the father and son were of the Alevi faith, as per the affiliation of the organizations that have most ardently campaigned for an on-site memorial museum, and claimed that there was a possibility that the upper levels could be handed over to an Alevi association, which could use the space as they see ft: “Turn it into a museum, or perhaps even into a cemevi” (place of Alevi worship; lit.: house of gathering). Importantly, the idle upper floors proved instrumental to the ways in which employees coped with not only the visitors with a pro-museum stance but also those who criticized the building’s refurbishment from an antimuseum viewpoint and saw the building’s hosting a memorial wall as too big a concession to give to those wanting to see it become a full-fledged site of commemoration. To such visitors, the staff member responded by highlighting that the building had, after all, been expropriated; it now belonged to the state, which, “if necessary, might turn it into a post office or a bank,” the upper three floors being evidence that defnitive plans in this respect were still in the making and that the authorities were keeping an open mind. The rhetoric of impartiality and continual openness therefore mobilized various parts of the site of the arson attack to indicate that all citizens—past and present, and perpetrator, bystander, and victim alike—were witnesses whose testimony deserved to be heard on a level playing feld. In forever postponing the task of taking sides and offering conclusions, this rhetoric made both the building and the visitors into objectifed witnesses through which a virtually infnite number of future scenarios could be rendered achievable, if only asymptotically.

Testimony, Remembrance, Martyrdom Features of the SCC that have attracted criticism during individual visits on ordinary days have been challenged all the more ardently during annual onsite commemorations held by members of Alevi associations and left-leaning organizations. Consider the 2011 commemoration, which took place just days after the hotel’s re-inauguration as the SCC. I traveled to Sivas for it together

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with a bus full of mostly young Alevi activists, departing from the capital Ankara. Since the early 2000s, when hundreds started flocking into the city for the occasion, these commemorative gatherings had proceeded unobstructed along a two-kilometer route stretching from Alibaba—the reputed “Alevi neighborhood” of central Sivas—down to the former hotel to culminate in the laying of flowers.18 But the gathering held in 2011 was fundamentally different. First, the procession came to a halt minutes after its departure from Alibaba, in response to news that a group of memory activists traveling from Istanbul had been held up by the police on Sivas’ outskirts. The reason was that this group had on board a sign that read “Madımak Museum of Shame” which they intended to temporarily place atop the SCC’s entrance during the commemoration. The police’s refusal to allow this sign into the city was met with a sit-in by commemoration participants. After about fortyfve minutes, negotiations between the organizers of the commemoration and the authorities concluded with both the sign and the group carrying it being allowed entry into Sivas, and the procession resumed. But soon another issue came up; the police had set up barricades 100 feet from the former Madımak Hotel, blocking entry into the street where it is located for everyone except only a handful of victims’ relatives. According to activists whom I accompanied, this unexpected measure was prompted by the authorities’ unfounded belief that the SCC was at risk of vandalism by pro-museum campaigners.19 Ironically, something of a convention had developed over the years regarding commemoration participants’ performance of their objection to the SCC, and its manner was quite the opposite of vandalism. Each year, they walked up to the hotel’s doorstep but refused to enter inside, declaring they would continue to so refuse until a memorial museum is set up at the site. In 2011 this gesture was not only re-animated by the SCC and its memorial wall’s inclusion of thirty-seven names, but also diversifed thanks to the symbolic museum sign the commemoration participants wanted to temporarily place at the building’s entrance alongside the flowers and victims’ photographs that they have laid every year. While at frst glance the police barricades seemed to function merely as a practical obstruction, they soon turned out to also play a symbolically expressive role. Consider my conversations with some of the commemoration participants as they encountered the obstruction. The barricades, for them, were reminiscent of the absence of such a measure eighteen years ago at that very site. The link became all the more evident when a number of commemoration participants tried to toss the “Madımak Museum of Shame” sign

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over the barricade, and the police responded by using tear gas. Chaos ensued. As the cloud of gas began to fade, prominent Alevi association representatives addressing the commemoration from atop a mobile platform strove to prevent a backlash from the crowd. One after the other, each speaker preached peace and nonviolence, values they said are integral to Alevism and evident in the various historic events and personas signifcant to the faith. When the commotion f nally quieted down, concluding speeches spoke of the law enforcement’s attitude as “a continuation of previous massacres and the centuries-long tyranny of hegemonic powers that slew our martyrs.”20 The notion of martyrdom (şehadet) that themed these speeches has been conceptualized by the Alevism scholar Reinhard Hess as “passive” or “nonviolent martyrdom” (2007, 281).21 Central to the Alevi faith, according to Hess, is a martyrology—a lineage of sanctity whose links consist not of birth but of tragic death during acts of nonviolent dissidence against a perceived oppressor. A most prominent Alevi martyr is the sixteenth-century minstrel Pir Sultan Abdal, reputedly hanged by Sivas’ governor for not submitting to Ottoman rule. The 1993 culture festival whose guests were targeted by the arsonists was named after Pir Sultan Abdal. According to the youths with whom I attended the commemoration, “Pir Sultan Abdal himself was martyred in central Sivas, only a few hundred feet from where they gassed us today.” Many Alevis refer to each of the arson attack victims also as such a martyr, regardless of whether they were of the Alevi faith or not.22 Şehadet, the Turkish-language concept invoked in these references, is a loanword from Arabic and denotes both the status of a martyr (şehit) and that of a witness (şahit). This recalls Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the historico-etymological linkage between the concepts of witnessing, martyrdom, and remembering (1999, 26–36). While martyrs are, empirically speaking, the only true and complete witnesses, their recognition as such depends on those who remember by testifying to the impossibility of bearing witness. The events that unfolded during the 2011 commemoration not only confrmed this linkage but also introduced a new facet to it, due to how martyrdom was shaped by events as well as shaping them. Memory activists may have come to Sivas primarily to remember the 1993 arson attack and therefore to testify to the martyrs being the only true and complete witnesses. But the fact that the empirical foundation of the notion of martyrdom at work here—martyrdom as nonviolent dissidence in the face of violent persecution—is much more expansive than just the arson unsettles the

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sequentiality that in Agamben characterizes the relationship between martyrdom, testimony, and remembrance. It means that each occasion initially intended to facilitate the solicitation of testimony at this site is always at risk of itself becoming the subject of new testimonies, interweaving the conceptual categories of remembrance and martyrdom. The interweaving in question has materially charged implications for the site of the arson attack. It means that every new material assemblage introduced to the site as part of what seems to be mere remembrance, insofar as it is perceived to perpetuate martyrdom, ends up being assimilated into the body of evidence employed in producing truth about the martyrs. In 2011 this was evident in the transformation of the barricades from just that into an unintentional memorial. The following year it was evident in a lawsuit “the martyrs’ families” brought against the memorial wall’s listing of their relatives’ names alongside the two alleged assailants.23 That the site is not just that of the arson attack but also that of martyrdom therefore brings about a constant risk for defensive walls to serve as memorials, and for memorial walls to serve as evidence.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed the various notions and experiences of witnessing operative around the site of the 1993 Sivas arson attack, a case that encapsulates a larger set of debates that marked the 2000s and the early 2010s in Turkey under the rubric of “facing and reckoning with the past.” The site’s recent state-sponsored transformation has been premised on a rhetoric of impartiality and openness. This rhetoric was evident in the memorial wall and its indiscriminate remembrance of “our thirty-seven people.” It also characterized the staff members’ invocation of the building’s purported incompleteness to forge a position that attempted to balance the highly diverse range of ethical and ideological viewpoints from which visitors inveighed against the site’s transformation. This approach overlooked the impor tant distinctions that separate the various subject positions the concept of witnessing may entail, such as passer-by, spectator, bystander, survivor, and martyr (Fassin 2008, 535). It is these distinctions that resonate most strongly with those who identify with the victims, as evinced by the imprint that the notion of passive and/or nonviolent martyrdom has made on their reactions to incidents during on-site commemorations.

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The differences between these notions and experiences notwithstanding, they together demonstrate the need to reconsider the role architectural objects, spaces, and technologies are taken to play in processes involved in witnessing violence. The need is for exploring this role beyond the confnes of the event thought to singularly constitute the violence being witnessed. Undoubtedly, it is often a par ticular event that prompts testimonial interest in the architectures involved in it. However, neither the sort of violence characterizing the event nor the architectural processes produced by it cease to unfold when that event appears to draw to a close. Material assemblages introduced to a site long after a violent event took place there might continue to be perceived and experienced as intimately linked to the ways it can be witnessed. These assemblages might then beneft the pursuit of truth regarding the violent event, irrespective of their forensic signifcance. Therefore, the relationship between this instrumentality and the possibilities it affords human witnesses for acting on the violence is not necessarily one of inverse proportionality. These possibilities derive from the availability of the necessary sociocultural mechanisms to those seeking to expose and give meaning to violence as a cross-historical phenomenon whose signifcance cannot be confned to its singular, conspicuous, and instantaneous outbursts.

Notes 1. Oktay Ekinci, “Katliamın tanığı olduğu gibi korunmalı,” Cumhuriyet, July 10, 1993, 5. 2. This is a descriptor used most frequently by those upholding the victims’ legacy. For a case in point, see “Tarih 2 Temmuz 1993 . . . Yer Sivas . . . ,” Sosyalizm İçin Kızıl Bayrak 27 (2005): 10, accessed June 28, 2017, http://www.kizilbayrak .org /2005/sikb.05.27/sayfa _10.html. 3. On mediated witnessing, see Frosh and Pinchevski 2009. 4. Thirty-seven assailants were initially sentenced to capital punishment, which was later converted to life imprisonment upon Turkey’s removal of the death penalty in 2002 (DHA, “Sivas’ta 14 yıl sonra Madımak sıcağı,” Radikal, July 3, 2007, https://web.archive.org /web /20071203035246/ http://www.radikal.com.tr/ haber.php?haberno​=​225850). Fourteen others initially received prison sentences of up to ffteen years but were all released due to subsequent decisions of reversal and/or amnesty (Yıldırım Türker, “Madımak!,” Radikal, July 3, 2006, http://www.radikal.com.tr/yazarlar/yildirim-turker/madimak-784969/). 5. İsmail Kaplan, “Neden para ile Madımak Müzesi olmaz?,” Alevilerin Sesi 119 (2008): 52. 6. The 1990s was when the structural changes introduced by the 1980 coup d’état had just recently started to take full force and effect. The junta’s restrictions on social rights rendered the cultural sphere one of the few remaining venues for doing politics, and the economic model it introduced precipitated Turkey’s “globalization,” or the country’s integration into the global neoliberal market system (Zürcher [1993] 2005, 5). These developments are

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believed to have prompted many in society to “retrovert” to the past in search of cultural identity (Gürbilek 1992). 7. A series of articles by Sancar have had a signifcant role in coining this term, culminating in his book Geçmişle Hesaplaşma (2007), which discusses examples of political reconciliation from around the world. Since the millennial turn, the concepts of yüzleşme and hesaplaşma have loomed large in Turkey in academia and beyond, including in newspaper columns, popu lar TV shows, and artworks. An example is the 2013 exhibition entitled Bir Daha Asla! Geçmişle Yüzleşme ve Özür (Never Again! Facing the Past and Apology) and the eponymous book (Günal and Özengi 2013), which compiled cases in point from around the world. 8. There are varied examples of these campaigns. A campaign by pro-Kurdish political organizations to turn into a museum the Diyarbakır Prison, where hundreds of mostly Kurdish political inmates were tortured en masse under the 1980 junta, has been underway since 2005, while the site has continued to serve as a penitentiary (Çaylı 2015). In 2010, the government launched a memorial museum project on Yassıada, the island off Istanbul that witnessed the 1960 junta’s trials of members of the then ruling DP (Democrat Party), to demonstrate that they identify with the latter’s political legacy (Ömer Şahin, “‘Museum of Democracy’ Will Be Opened on Yassıada,’” Today’s Zaman, October 28, 2010, http://www.todayszaman.com/news -225644-100-museum-of-democracy-will-be-opened-on-yassiada.html). In 2006 Ankara’s Ulucanlar Prison, where key members of Turkey’s ’68 leftist student movement were hanged under the military’s influence, became subject to a museum campaign led by local architects and former left-wing political convicts, which resulted in its transformation in 2011 into the Ulucanlar Prison Museum (Çaylı 2011). In 2013, the guerrilla organization PKK, who have been involved in violent conflict with the Turkish armed forces since the mid-1980s in Turkey’s east and southeast, embarked on a project to turn into a museum a house where thirty-three of their members were killed in a 1992 skirmish with the army (Şeyhmus Edis, “PKK, müze inşaatını durdurmadı ara verdi,” Zaman, October  9, 2013, http://www.zaman.com.tr/gundem_pkk -muze-insaatini-durdurmadi-ara-verdi_ 2149288.html). The army’s December  2011 airstrike that killed thirty-four civilians in the village of Roboskî near the Turkey-Iraq border has since become the subject of an architecture competition for a memorial museum (Derya Yılmaz, “Adalet adaletsizliğin olduğu yerden yükselir,” Evrensel, September  26, 2014, https://www .evrensel.net/haber/92695/adalet-adaletsizligin-oldugu-yerden-yukselir). 9. While Turkey did witness majority governments prior to the AKP, these proved shortlived as many were halted by the military, which has led to the latter’s reputation as the “guardians” of the regime (Öktem 2011). The history of this reputation goes back decades. Nearly all of the leaders who founded the republic in 1923 were military men, and their single-party regime reigned until the 1950s. The opposition won the frst multiparty elections, only to be overthrown by a military coup in 1960. Between then and the 2000s, the country saw a coup nearly every decade. In 1960, 1971, and 1980, the military seized direct and complete control over politics, each time staying in power for a few years and then reintroducing electoral democracy. On February  28, 1997, the military released a declaration, initiating a process that has come to be called “the postmodern coup” (Jung and Piccoli 2001, 96–97, 118–122). The declaration implied that the military were to follow with a full-blown intervention if certain requests they had were not fulflled by the government. It also involved

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other, more overt demonstrations of power, such as the parade of tanks on the streets of Ankara’s Sincan district the morning after a theater staged play that the military considered a threat to secularism. Finally, in July 2016, an army faction attempted a coup that was thwarted by the AKP government and the president of the Republic, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is also the party’s founding leader. 10. 2010 saw a referendum on constitutional amendments which, according to the governing party, would “bring an end to the coup mentality and expand the space of freedom” (Murat Palavar, “Kaybeden darbeci anlayış oldu,” Yeni Şafak, September 13, 2010, http:// yenisafak.com.tr/politika-haber/kaybeden-darbeci-anlayis-oldu-13.09.2010-278226). The date of the referendum itself was symbolic of this argument—it was scheduled for September 12, the 1980 coup’s anniversary. The referendum’s legacy continued to echo in June 2011 during the governing party’s general election campaign. Members of the party repeatedly argued that the referendum was an important step for leaving “the coup era behind” (Bülent Arınç, “Mandate for a New Turkey,” The Guardian, June 13, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011 /jun/13/mandate-for-a-new-turkey) and that voting for them in the upcoming election would consummate the process. 11. “Darbelerden nemalanmadık,” Sabah, July 23, 2010, http://www.sabah.com.tr/gundem /2010/07/23/ basbakandan _carpici _ aciklamalar. 12. Immediate outcomes of the initiative have included a state-sponsored Kurdish-language television channel, the partial return of properties confscated by the state from non-Muslim communities over the past century, and the then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s symbolic but highly resonant gesture in 2011 of acknowledging and apologizing for the Dersim atrocity of 1938–39, where forces of the army were deployed against civilians in eastern Turkey, purportedly to suppress a rebellion (Ayata and Hakyemez 2013). Furthermore, state prosecutors have opened investigations into the September 12, 1980 coup and the February 28, 1997 military memorandum, albeit with a scope limited to a few highest-ranking generals. 13. That the hotel’s transformation into the SCC was extremely secretive meant there was no formal inauguration. The public found out about it only when a sign that read “SCC” was hung above the revamped building’s entrance in early June 2011. 14. This is my translation from the following original Turkish: “Toplumun içindeki farklı düşünceler, farklı inanışlar ne olursa olsun, milli birlik ve bereberlik içerisinde hareket etmesini bilen bir milletin başaramayacağı iş, aşamayacağı engel yoktur.” 15. This is my translation from the following original Turkish: “2 Temmuz 1993 tarihinde meydana gelen elim olayda 37 insanımız hayatını kaybetmiştir. Böyle acıların bir daha yaşanmaması dileğiyle.” My abridged translation of Faruk Çelik’s original statement, dating from his 2010 visit to the site, is as follows: “July 2, 1993, is one of the painful days of our history. . . . Insidious power groups sought to stage dark scenarios . . . to destroy our fraternity by way of manipulating our differences. . . . The pain that the Madımak Hotel bears is ours altogether; it is the pain of the whole of Turkey. There can be no sides in this incident; to take a side in this incident means to not extinguish the fre. . . . I vehemently condemn those who hatched this event. . . . Nothing was able to ruin our unity and togetherness and will not be able to do so unless we allow it. We will not forget this event which took place seventeen years ago but we will also remember our fraternity, and will embrace each other tighter than ever. The screen

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of fog surrounding this incident has not yet been uncovered. . . . I say that we should take the necessary steps to advance our unity and togetherness in spite of those who are disturbed by our unity, and that I remember with grace and respect our thirty-seven citizens who lost their lives on July 2, 1993.” 16. BİA Haber Merkezi, “Saldıran ve Öldürülen Aynı Yerde,” Bianet, July 1, 2011, http:// bianet.org / biamag / bianet/131188-saldiran-ve-oldurulen-ayni-yerde. This rhetoric of impartiality was in tune with the arson attack’s representations in mainstream politics and media around the time of Madımak’s transformation. Consider the words a member of parliament from the ruling party, who is also a former defense attorney in a major court case on the arson attack, used in a parliamentary session on the 1993 atrocity: “The majority of the people who were put on trial there [as part of the Madımak case] are as innocent as those who were set on fre in [the hotel].” See “130’uncu Birleşim,” Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Tutanak Dergisi (Grand National Assembly of Turkey Journal of Minutes), July 2, 2012, http://www.tbmm .gov.tr/tutanak /donem24/yil2/ham/ b13001h.htm. Another case in point is the way the arson attack was covered in political debates on primetime TV. Accompanied by the ample visual documentation that exists of the day of the attack, the testimonies of a survivor and a former suspect were presented under the same banner of “two witnesses, one from the inside and the other from out” (see the 32. Gün episode broadcast on the popu lar nationwide TV channel Kanal D on March 9, 2012), and experts sought to unpack the vastness of the social trauma resulting from the 1993 atrocity by suggesting that “being set ablaze” and “setting ablaze” each entails a sort of “victimhood” in its own right (see the Tarafsız Bölge episode broadcast on October 30, 2013, on the nationwide news channel CNNTürk). 17. The “Atatürk corner” is nominally dedicated to the cult of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 188–203; Özyürek 2004), who is known as the founder of the Republic of Turkey. 18. Although the neighborhood is officially called Seyrantepe, here I refer to it as Alibaba, since this is historically what it has been called (and colloquially still is) by those who originally hail from Sivas or are familiar with it. 19. See also Rıza Kül, “ ‘İleri demokrasi’nin Sivas katliamı ile imtihanı,” Toplumsal Eşitlik, July 4, 2011, https://www.sosyalistesitlik.org/ileri-demokrasinin-sivas-katliami-ile-imtihani/. 20. On some of these previous massacres, see Korkmaz 1997. 21. On the historical distinction between martyrology and hagiography, especially in Islam, see Ernst 1985. 22. Ali A. Yıldız and Maykel Verkuyten (2011) have called this “inclusive victimhood.” 23. Mesut Hasan Benli, “Danıştay’dan Madımak kararı: Yanan ile yakan aynı yerde olmaz,” Hürriyet, October  18, 2016, https://www.hurriyet .com.tr/gundem /danistaydan -madimak-karari-yanan-ile-yakan-ayni-yerde-olmaz- 40252462. The demand was initially overruled but then appealed successfully at a higher court.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.

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Ayata, Bilgin, and Serra Hakyemez. 2013. “The AKP’s Engagement with Turkey’s Past Crimes: An Analysis of PM Erdoğan’s ‘Dersim Apology.’” Dialectical Anthropology 37 (1): 131–43. Çaylı, Eray. 2011. “Architecture, Politics and Memory Work: Fieldnotes from the Ulucanlar Prison Museum.” In Museums of Ideas: Commitment and Conflict, edited by Graham Farnell, 368–97. Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc. Çaylı, Eray. 2015. “Diyarbakır’s ‘Witness-sites’ and Discourses on the Kurdish Issue in Turkey.” In The Kurdish Issue: A Spatial Perspective, edited by Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden, 63–92. London: Routledge. Ernst, Carl W. 1985. “From Hagiography to Martyrology: Conflicting Testimonies to a Suf Martyr of the Delhi Sultanate.” History of Religions 24:308–27. Fassin, Didier. 2008. “The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectifcation Through Trauma in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (3): 531–58. Frosh, Paul, and Amit Pinchevski. 2009. “Introduction: Why Media Witnessing? Why Now?” In Media Witnessing Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, edited by Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski, 1–19. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Günal, Asena, and Önder Özengi. 2013. Bir Daha Asla! Geçmişle Yüzleşme ve Özür. Istanbul: İletişim. Gürbilek, Nurdan. 1992. Vitrinde Yaşamak: 1980’lerin Kültürel İklimi. Istanbul: Metis Yayınları. Herscher, Andrew. 2011. “From Target to Witness: Architecture, Satellite Surveillance, Human Rights.” In Architecture and Violence: Reception and Reproduction, edited by Bechir Kenzari, 123–44. Barcelona: Actar. Herscher, Andrew. 2014. “Surveillant Witnessing: Satellite Imagery and the Visual Politics of Human Rights.” Public Culture 26 (3): 469–500. Hess, Reinhard. 2007. “Alevi Martyr Figures.” Turcica 39:253–90. Jung, Dietrich, and Wolfango Piccoli. 2001. Turkey at the Crossroads: Ottoman Legacies and a Greater Middle East. London: Zed Books. Kaplan, İsmail. 2009. Alevice: İnancımız ve Direncimiz. Cologne: Almanya Alevi Birlikleri Federasyonu. Kenzari, Bechir, ed. 2011. Architecture and Violence. Barcelona: Actar. Korkmaz, Esat. 1997. Alevilere Saldırılar. Istanbul: Pencere. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Öktem, Kerem. 2011. Angry Nation: Turkey Since 1989. London: Zed Books. Özyürek, Esra. 2004. “Miniaturizing Atatürk: Privatization of State Imagery and Ideology in Turkey.” American Ethnologist 31 (3): 374–91. Sancar, Mithat. 2007. Geçmişle Hesaplaşma: Unutma Kültüründen Hatırlama Kültürüne. Istanbul: İletişim. Schuppli, Susan. 2014. “Entering Evidence: Cross-Examining the Court Records of the ICTY.” In Forensis, edited by Forensic Architecture, 279–316. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Weizman, Eyal. 2010. “Forensic Architecture: Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime.” Radical Philosophy 164 (9): 9–24.

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Weizman, Eyal. 2011. Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums. Ostfldern, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Weizman, Eyal. 2014. “Introduction: Forensis.” In Forensis, edited by Forensic Architecture, 9–32. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yıldız, Ali Aslan, and Maykel Verkuyten. 2011. “Inclusive Victimhood: Social Identity and the Politicization of Collective Trauma Among Turkey’s Alevis in Western Europe.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 17:243–69. Zürcher, Erik. (1993) 2005. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris.

AF TERWORD

Reverberations of Political Violence Penelope Harvey

How does the affective force of political violence register in bodies, in places, and in things and endow them with the capacity to act back on human lives in other times and places? How does such capacity endure? How long does it persist and in what form? How does it disperse? The chapters in this volume engage these questions ethnographically, drawing attention to the reverberations of the structural and symbolic violence of state systems—genocide, apartheid, displacement, dispossession, and forced nationalist integration. The authors focus on the importance of the small things that pass un-noticed in grand narratives of social theory, revealing in the process that there is more to structural violence than “structure,” and more to symbolic violence than “symbol.” Theoretically and analytically the chapters build on a rich seam of research on non-human “things” that act back on human worlds, that have sensuous presence and the capacity to affect human potential, and that mediate the connections between individual and collective understandings of self and other.1 What they bring to these discussions is an insistence on the importance of attending to the relationship between the affective materialities of things, places, bodies and sensibilities, and histories of political violence. “Reverberation” is the concept that they draw on to probe this relationship. As an acoustic phenomenon, reverberation refers to the prolongation of sound, the way in which sound persists beyond the moment when it is produced. This prolongation is a relational effect, the result of the encounter between sound waves and the material surfaces that reflect the sound. Sound will disperse in an open space. Reverberation occurs in a confned environment. The more surfaces the sound wave encounters, the greater the

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reverberation. In specifc contexts, sound engineers work to control the effect, making choices of how best to balance resonance with distortion to produce a desired sonic outcome. The material architecture of the space through which the sound wave travels is of utmost importance. Recording studios and top-quality concert halls seek to minimize the interference between source and receiver. Others might seek to produce and amplify distortion as a specifc quality of sound in a deliberate attempt to extend sonic repertoires and to challenge established expectations of what it means to make music. In acoustic science it is the perception of continuity that distinguishes reverberation from echo. An echo occurs when a pulse of sound is heard twice, perceived by the brain as a separate rather than as an extended event. Reverberation is the pattern created by the superposition of echoes— the overlapping of multiple echoes—such that perception is of distorted prolongation rather than a clear repetition. The analogy is highly suggestive when applied to the aftermath of political violence. In particular, it opens analytical awareness to the distorted forms in which violence persists, and invites the recognition of connections that might otherwise be denied and/or erased. Unlike the echo (the sharp awareness of repetition), reverberation is a more diffuse effect, less clearly connected to its source, its continuity mediated by the many “surfaces” encountered, and by the particular architectures of “confnement” which prevent dispersion over time and space. The reverberation concept thus highlights complex intersections of space, time, and material form. It opens a compelling and imaginative way to think about how political violence is registered in people’s bodies, thoughts, and dispositions, and in the material worlds that surround them.

Memory, Embodiment, and Distortion All the chapters in this volume describe conflicted borderlands, violent margins produced by material architectures of separation: walls, checkpoints and frontier posts, occupying forces, infrastructures that generate and distribute vulnerability, and categorical distinctions of race, religion, or ethnicity deployed to name and embed the separations through which suspicion, blame, and fear can take shape, circulate, and persist. Yael Navaro’s account of the structural violence of sectarian blame that shapes the everyday landscape of the town of Samandağ, on the Turkish/Syrian border, exemplifes the ways in which “reverberation” directs attention

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to phenomena that are neither echo nor memory. The Arab Alawi inhabitants of this region are aware of the trail of massacres and genocidal events produced by the insistent categorical distinction of victims and aggressors that underpin and provide justifcation for state violence toward its own citizens as a mode of governance. However, this awareness is not founded on the clarity of a specifc memory, but exists as an existential sense of anxiety or uncertainty, manifest in dreams and visions and in the extraordinary and miraculous power of Khidr, a mystical fgure at once religious and political. Khidr is the reverberation, integral to the communal identity of the Arab Alawi of Samandağ, an identity forged in spaces of political violence. Connie Cagliardi and Valentina Napolitano also explore the reverberations of political and religious partition, manifest in the protective and transformative power of two Christian icons. For Palestinian Christians, the violence of the mass dispossession of those living on land annexed by the state of Israel in 1948 reverberates through the Marian fgure of Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls. The continuous, unblemished presence of her image on the wall in Bethlehem that separates Palestinian from Israeli territory testifes to her miraculous power to support the enduring presence of the Christian minority in Palestine. Divine protection for a minority population moving through segregated political and religious territories is also fundamental to the followers of Toribio Romo, the saint of illegal crossings venerated by Mexican Christians now living in Chicago. In both cases, the miraculous power of these fgures is founded in the political and religious violence of regimes of partition and exclusion. The animate force of the possessions and treasures left behind in the wake of killings, expulsions, and forced migration is another key theme of this volume. The promise of hidden gold is at the heart of Alice von Bieberstein’s analysis of the treasure hunters who search through the material remains of the Armenian genocide. The very notion of buried treasure connects the tragic original speculation on the possibility of survival (the burials suggesting a store of wealth for some future return) to the contemporary speculation and investments of those who seek to transform histories of untold violence into future economic prosperity. These connections are recognized but take form only vaguely. Out of focus, there is no sense of a need for restoration, or direct appraisal of how and why the gold might be there for the taking. This sense of blurred histories is also present in Rosalind Morris’s vivid description of the zama-zama, South Africa’s piratical miners who live in a world where corpses retain a deadly vitality, and where gold grows back

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in mines abandoned by their owners, inviting the poor to make their fortunes in dangerous spaces. The lure of gold and its capacity to reproduce the persistent presence of deadly conflicts and fatal accidents is the legacy, the reverberation, of a state founded on the violence of racialized capital. The violent expropriation of property from previous Armenian owners is also not forgotten, but persists as a nagging sensibility that disturbs the lives of the contemporary occupants of previously abandoned spaces in Mardin in southeast Turkey. Zerrin Özlem Biner’s account of people who dig out their homes in search of buried treasure suggests that past histories of violence are confused and elusive. The searching and the secrecy reveal a sense of connection to past atrocities and suffering, but a sense mediated by all that is not known and not understood. Here the fgure of the jinn encapsulates the sense of uncertainty and danger. The jinn are the original residents of the city with whom the new house owners have to cohabit. Possession by these spirits is experienced as a loss of self, a mode of dispossession through which the previous dispossessions of property reverberate. The dispossession of self might or might not offer a path to knowledge and riches. It might even offer a new ethical accommodation to the violent expropriations of the past. There is a sense of complicity here, a theme also discussed by Erdem Evren in his account of the pending land expropriations in the Çoruh Valley in northeast Turkey, where a series of mega-dams are to be built for the generation of hydro-electric power. The projected ecological devastation is dramatic, involving not only the obliteration of the land, but the destruction of seventeen villages and the displacement of twenty thousand people. The situation has given rise to a new economy of “things that are about to disappear.” Evren’s ethnography describes the speculative attempts by existing residents to acquire property in places where compensation might be paid for expropriation at a later date. The calculations involve a deep complicity in the forthcoming dispossession, undermining the actions of those who try to stand up against the dam. But it also awakens in some a sensibility to the lingering histories of expropriation in the region, where the properties on which calculations of future compensation are made are the very same that were expropriated from the previous Armenian owners, who had no recourse to such measures. Speculative orientation to the future rests on sensibilities that render the past both present and inaccessible. A disturbing sense of complicity also infuses the sense of place in Seda Altuğ’s description of the loss experienced in the Batman region of southeast Turkey where the discovery of oil in the mid-twentieth century led to rapid development and exponential popula-

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tion growth. The “development” was marked by sectarian violence, embedded in specifc regimes of power and authority, endorsed through the courts, and consolidated in the contemporary Turkish state. Ongoing acts of aggression, illegal taxation, and violent extraction reverberate in the production of a sense of a place that appears to be uniquely susceptible to ruin and abandonment. This sense that the place itself invites ruination within a zone of development promise is an important reminder of the uneven distribution of such resonance in time and space, as the unfolding continuity of violence marks some lives with devastating consequences while leaving others untouched. Hanna Baumann’s ethnography also elaborates on this theme. She writes about infrastructures that create, maintain, and disrupt “borderlands” in the city of Jerusalem—specifcally the Wall and the light rail transport system. Her focus is on the specifc ways that these bordering architectures prolong the violence of segregation, in the ways that they direct flows of traffic, water, and sewage, dividing the city and creating spaces of abjection and forced incorporation. The chapter picks up on the theme of ambiguous and dangerous promises. The light rail lays the ground for rendering the Palestinian territories both navigable and legible to the occupying population. Protest and the violent destruction of the infrastructure produce vulnerabilities for the otherwise-empowered, as the otherwise-excluded refuse incorporation. At the same time, the infrastructures of exclusion (such as the Wall, and now the disrupted rail link) create zones of pollution and fear that not only constrain, but also threaten to leak—the violence rebounding through and around the urban infrastructures where connectivity is never limited to that which it is designed to categorize. The politics of memory and the capacity of things and places to provoke, curtail, or other wise shape historical awareness is the subject of Munira Khayyat’s analysis of memory and landscape in the borderland between Lebanon and Israel. Approaching trees as ethnographic portals, she contrasts the memorializing effects of two trees, each of which have endured and witnessed the violence of war. One of them stands as the centerpiece of Hizbollah’s official commemoration site. This tree that refused to be uprooted by the bulldozers now supports Hizbollah’s narrative of resistance, demonstrating the connection between the sacred earth of South Lebanon and their political and existential project. The other tree that Khayyat describes is not connected to official heritage or to any specifc ideological project. It holds diverse personal memories of loss and survival, but these

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are not gathered together as a narratable singularity. Here “afterworlds” of violence entwine with nature and everyday life. Memorialization is also at the heart of Eray Çaylı’s discussion of the politics of memory in relation to an arson attack on a hotel in the Turkish city of Sivas—where two employees and thirty-three guests died. The reverberation of this act of violence is registered in the fabric of the building that bears witness to the fre, but also to the knowledge that the city authorities looked on but failed to react to save the victims. The violent suppression of peaceful protesters who campaigned for the hotel building to remain as a memorial to the dead fueled the sense of injustice and betrayal. The state authorities chose to actively repress the protesters but had stood by when the hotel was burning, and had subsequently failed to prosecute or otherwise condemn the actions of the perpetrators.

Reverberation, Political Violence, and a Sense of Place There are striking parallels between the ethnographic accounts collected here and the cultural forms and practices that I encountered in the southern Peruvian Andes, where I have worked since the 1980s. I am particularly struck and engaged by the “jinneaologies” offered by Zerrim Özlem’s analysis of the guardians of buried treasures in Mardin. One of the very frst things that I was taught by the family who had taken on the task of hosting the anthropologist was how to respect the Awkis. The Awkis are beings from a former age of existence. They dwell underground. These powerful beings fled the surface of the Earth in the abrupt transition from the Age of Darkness to the Age of the Sun. The mythic narratives that frame understandings of the Awkis are drawn from early Christian apocalyptic teachings that specify the presence of human life on Earth as the Age of God the Son, a time between the Age of God the Father, and the Age of God the Holy Ghost, when human beings will be liberated from earthly concerns and live as birds.2 The time of the Awkis is thus a pre-human time, a time when the creative potential for life on Earth was fostered and sedimented in the land, the mountains, and the rivers. In Andean mythic repertoires there is also a conflation between the pre-human world and the pre-colonial world. The arrival of the Sun brought about the drying out or desiccation of the Awki life force, but not its destruction. Rituals of rehydration were hugely signifcant in the Inka period, when royal (divine) beings were mummifed, their life force sus-

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pended but not erased. These understandings of the relationship between dehydration and rehydration remain important today in many agricultural communities, as a means of storing potatoes for example, and as a fundamental principle underpinning the communicative channels to the Awkis and other Earth beings.3 Libations are poured onto the earth (or indeed on the floor of a house or a shop, into a pile of cash, or onto a new piece of technology) to enlist the power of these beings, to bring rain, to bring fertility, to bring reproductive force, to bring life. Andean mythic narratives on the three Ages of Life articulate a fundamental connection to the Conquest of 1492 and the arrival of Christianity as the moment of apocalyptic transition from one age of being to another. The Age of the God the Father is not only pre-human, it is pre-colonial. The formulation does not imply that pre-colonial Andeans were not human. On the contrary, it implies that the huge powers of an originary/pre-colonial indigenous world were not lost. The Awkis went underground and took their treasure with them. Crucially, they did not die. They were displaced but remained as vital forces animating the land, a life force that human beings ignore at their peril. Similarly, the knowledge and the creative force of an indigenous world can also be brought forth, and in Andean millenarian mythic narratives, will also return.4 The transitions were and will be violent, destructive, truly apocalyptic. In this respect, just as with the jinn described by Özlem, the presence of the Awkis is a reverberation from a moment of brutal transformation when the world of previous residents was utterly transformed. People in the small Andean town in which I was based generally assumed that the Awkis had buried their treasure, often hastily, when their world came to an end. Stone structures, or chullpas, which archaeologists identify as pre-Hispanic burial sites, have long since been mined in the search for riches. However, the search for gold in these borderlands of life and death is extremely dangerous, the precious metals themselves protected by forces that require sacrifcial returns for their extraction, often in the form of human life. The fascination with gold in the region extended well beyond the buried treasures of the Awkis. In the 1980s many people were abandoning precarious agricultural livelihoods to work in the growing artisanal gold-mining enterprises of the Amazonian region of Puerto Maldonado. Human life held little value in these frontier spaces of competitive exploration and extraction. Many suffered and died from sicknesses. Sexual exploitation, rape, violence, and murder were commonplace. The price of gold sustained the lure and the promise of the transformational powers of this precious metal, despite

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the dangers. Some people did make good money and found ways to build businesses either in the Amazon or other urban centers. Many found gold but did not escape the obsessive determination to keep looking, often spending what they found on drink and sex, tied into a desperate search by the expectation that more would be forthcoming. The power of gold connects abject spaces of extraction (in both the formal and informal sectors) to the foundational violence of empire that stretches far back in human history. The concept of “reverberation” invites us to consider the allure of gold as a historically constituted patterning of affective force. But how does such patterning endure over time? For over fve centuries Andean peoples have been subjected to the fluctuations of global trade, to the rise and fall of the fortunes of different imperial powers and religious empires, to the struggles for independence and the subsequent demarcations of national territories, to the impacts of “development” and “infrastructural” interventions as transport systems and educational and health regimes are imposed in ways that transform the material architectures of life through which the pulses of political violence reverberates. Might these energetic pulses not also disperse? I have never forgotten a conversation that I had with a friend when I returned to the village after a nine-year absence. The seismic violence of the war between the armed forces of the Peruvian state and those fghting for the revolutionary ideals of the Shining Path had led to mass killings, widespread fear, random accusations and acts of torture, and a corrosive sense of insecurity and uncertainty. It is estimated that some seventy thousand people were killed in the two decades from 1980 to 2000. I had left the village in 1988, and in the 1990s I returned to Peru but did not go to the village, out of fear for both my own safety and that of those who would be seen to have sheltered an outsider. I was aware of how the war had frmly re-inscribed racialized borderlands and architectures of separation that generated huge anxieties in all those who had no choice but to travel—and thus to pass through the deadly roadblocks and checkpoints set up by state officials, guerrilla forces, and highway thieves alike. There was no safe transport. So when asked by a friend where I had been and why I had not visited, I told her that it was because of the war. “Oh no!” she responded. “Has there been a war in your country?” As I think about the reverberations of political violence in Peru, I am struck by this surprising suggestion that even in these most terrible times, for some, at least, there was no war, or if there was a war, it was elsewhere. But these same people who saw themselves as unaffected by the dramatic

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political violence that was shaking the country would always make offering to the Earth, to the Awkis, to the forces of the sentient landscape. The tangible prolongation of colonial violence in the animate landscape exists on a different experiential plane, such that contemporary political violence does not appear to reverberate in the same way. These complex temporalities of reverberation raised questions for my current ethnographic research on nuclear power. The affective force of nuclear power took shape as the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This force was prolonged by the orchestrated sense of threat produced by the Cold War, and it reverberated in the social and political aftermath of the accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Today the challenges of what to do with high-level radioactive waste, and the question of whether nuclear power should or should not be included as an energy source for a lowcarbon future, are inextricably entangled with histories of devastating political violence. The experiential plane of this reverberation extends across time and space, and what was once an exciting scientifc and technological breakthrough now also heralds apocalyptic destruction.5 However, in West Somerset, where I am doing ethnographic research in and around the Hinkley Point nuclear complex, nuclear power has become familiar and mundane, and the reverberations are not felt as keenly as in other times and other places. The dreadful affective force of nuclear fssion is dispersed by the presence of regulatory institutions, information systems oriented to the detection of both leaks and intrusions, physical barriers that contain irradiated matter, and secure, well-paid employment opportunities that facilitate a generally peaceful co-existence. This capacity to live peacefully in this place despite the potential reverberations extends well beyond the case of nuclear power. There are numerous castles built in the Middle Ages as defensive architectures of survival in landscapes where warfare and the accumulation of landed power went hand in hand. The Glastonbury Tor, another celebrated and highly visible landmark, is famed as the place where Alfred, the Saxon king of Wessex took refuge from his battles with the Danes. The rich and powerful Glastonbury Abbey was destroyed in the sixteenth century as Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church and turned his sights on the huge wealth of the monasteries. The abbot was hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor on Glastonbury Tor in 1539. A century later the English Civil War (1642–1651) became particularly signifcant to the people of Bridgwater, the nearest town to Hinkley Point. Bridgwater was a thriving port and a Protestant stronghold in the

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struggle between the monarchy and Parliament for political supremacy. As Royalists in the civil war, the people of West Somerset were on the losing side. The reverberations of that loss, and the devastation suffered and registered in the destruction of much of the fabric of the town, were rekindled just a few decades later in the bloody confrontation of the Monmouth Rebellion. The Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, and a Protestant, was asserting his right to the crown over the Roman Catholic King James II. Protestant sympathies were strong in Somerset, and Monmouth gathered an army of non-conformists, artisans, and farm workers to support his cause. They were defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685, just outside Bridgwater. The notorious Judge Jeffreys oversaw the retribution. Many of the rebels were executed in public hangings. Many more were taken into slavery and dispatched to the West Indies. The reverberations of these enslavements remain in a local sense of pride in their history of non-conformity, particularly a pride in Bridgwater’s very early commitment to the abolition of slavery. These Somerset histories unfolded against a backdrop of expropriation, accumulation, and religious conflict that is resonant of accounts in this volume of contemporary conflicts in the Middle East. They also raise questions about the temporality of reverberation. The continuity of colonial violence is clearer in Peru, nearer to the surface of people’s memories and direct experience than in Somerset. Had the changing surfaces of rural England curtailed the potency of the violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Many of the histories of political violence in Somerset are memorialized in museum exhibits. Here images, documents and tableaux (some animated by the voices of actors) invite the visitor to identify with the victims of a distant time of state repression. You can listen to a mother’s plea to spare her son from deportation, or identify with the anger and desperation provoked by the overbearing and merciless meting out of “justice” to those who might have done nothing more than feed a soldier, or were merely suspected of collaboration. The room where Judge Jeffreys condemned the rebels to death and deportation houses these exhibits. The idea that the room itself was witness to these cruelties has a certain affective force, but the stories are not told as narratives of political identifcation, and in that sense the connections made do not equate in a direct way to those I encountered in Peru, or those otherwise described in this volume. These representations of violent histories that are commemorated but not experienced in the present as a prolongation of the past raise questions about the ways in which political violence may or may not reverberate across time

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and space. With these thoughts in mind I visited a popular National Trust property at Dunster on the North Somerset coast, a monument to both violent histories and periods of privileged domesticity. I encountered a layered history. A castle was frst built on this site in the eleventh century as a defensive structure in the wars between Normans and Saxons. By the thirteenth century it was further fortifed and rebuilt in stone, but by the seventeenth it had become a lavish Jacobean mansion. The building survived the English Civil War less through the strength of its walls, and more thanks to the capacity of the owners to change sides at crucial moments. Handed to the National Trust in 1976, both the grounds and the house are in an ongoing process of restoration and refurbishment. As a visitor today you can wander freely around these spaces. There are panel boards that give brief narrative accounts of who lived there, and the visitor is invited to imagine the changing fortunes of the building and the lives of its inhabitants. These layered histories are revealed as historical strata. There is a medieval dungeon, or oubliette, a dark underground chamber where political and religious foes were left to die, thrown in and forgotten. Today, this technology of vengeful death is but a few paces away from the elegant rooms of the later Jacobean mansion, and the innovative underground reservoir installed in Victorian times, a celebrated example of engineered improvement for domestic comfort. There is a restored mill where flour is ground and sold, gardens that are tended, and the gift shop. The display of the architectures and furnishings of landed prosperity and consumer tourism thus sits cheek by jowl with the material remains of sites of overwhelming violence, when the castle walls marked the borderlands of life and death, where the siege was the instrument of slow and patient destruction, and where those who fell out of favor were condemned to a dark space of oblivion where death was enacted as the ultimate denial of existence. There are stories of ghosts but the castle itself does not appear to carry the political violence of its history into the present in any very clear way. An immersive ethnography of those who live in and around the castle might reveal other accounts, and it is certainly the case that there is a sensibility to a charged mythic landscape in this region, although that charge has come and gone in repeated waves of revival and disappearance. These fluctuations are brought into clearer focus when considering a different form of cultural heritage, one that calls for a far stronger mode of participation than the average museum visit calls forth. The Bridgwater Carnival is an event of passionate local engagement and pride. Carnival clubs compete to produce the most spectacular illuminated

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carts, which are driven through the streets of the town on Bonfre Night. This English festival marks the suppression of the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1605, an attempt to assassinate King James I and re-establish Catholic rule. One of the rebels, Guy Fawkes, was discovered guarding the explosives in a vault below the Houses of Parliament. People were encouraged to celebrate the foiling of the plot by building bonfres and burning effigies of Guy Fawkes. The largely Protestant population of Bridgwater enthusiastically joined the swell of antiCatholic sentiment that swept the country. Assuming that it would be futile to try to stop the raucous celebrations that threatened both life and property, the mayor of Bridgwater announced a parade in which common people and dignitaries alike would participate, with the promise of “purse prizes” for the most spectacular participants. This founding Carnival parade culminated on the main bridge of the town with a display of handmade and handheld freworks. The squibs, as these freworks are still known, were lit and then thrown into the river—apparently thus rendering the town safe from fre! Today the parades are staged sequentially in seven Somerset towns, but the most keenly felt competition is between the many Bridgwater Carnival clubs, each associated with a specifc pub. Members meet on a weekly basis throughout the year to plan, with great secrecy, the collaborative efforts to raise money and to create a spectacular display. These collaborations span generations and are played out in an annual cycle of fundraising, design, construction, rehearsal, and performance. In this process of intense sociality, the Carnival clubs create and navigate an intimacy born of common experience and mobilized in bawdy jokes and fond memories of drunken adventures. On Carnival night the spectacular carts are driven through the main streets of the town and thousands gather to watch and cheer. At this stage the competition is paramount, but mediated by a charitable ethos as people register their appreciation by throwing money, which the clubs collect for onward donation. Finally, the competitive event resolves in a textbook enactment of “communitas”6 that channels the affective force of the event in an explosive act of squibbing. Some 150 participants drawn from all the competing clubs come together to line the main street and simultaneously light the squibs as the crowd presses in from all sides in what becomes a celebration of the explosive qualities of gunpowder. Might there be a latent connection between these contemporary moments of ritual engagement and the sectarian political violence of the seventeenth century? Of all the rebels, the fgure of Guy Fawkes endures as an ambiguous fgure in the public imagination. Over the centuries there have been con-

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texts in which anti-Catholic sentiment has been encouraged and made explicit on Bonfre Night. At other times these sentiments have been deliberately downplayed. Bonfre Night has also been an occasion to mark defance of political authority, with Guy Fawkes celebrated as a fgure of political defance, his effigy replaced by those of despised contemporary politicians who take his place on the bonfres. At other times, in true Carnival spirit, the festival simply offers “an excuse to get horribly drunk and misbehave”!7

Reverberation—Protracted and Fluctuating Temporalities The chapters collected in this volume draw attention to the protracted temporalities of political violence and stress the importance of attending not only to histories of memorialization and/or forgetting but also to the half-lives of events that are neither remembered nor forgotten but which persist in the specifc ways in which things, places, and bodily sentiments assume the power to act on human lives. The contributors have demonstrated how political violence is prolonged in the agency of things and places, in histories that are not necessarily carried forward in conscious awareness but which nevertheless persist in what Raymond Williams famously described as “structures of feeling” (Williams 1961), in forms that can be ambiguous, vague, and often unacknowledged in dominant cultural narratives. This capacity of things to hold the vitality of memories other wise suspended or forgotten can clearly be seen in the response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. The images of the police officer standing on the neck of his victim, casually ignoring both Floyd’s repeated protestations that he could not breathe and the fact that the bystanders were witnessing and recording what was happening, has led to waves of furious protest at the sense of impunity that the officers assumed in the face of what appears to be an incontrovertible public act of racist murder. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” challenges the voices of those whose sense of “freedom” rests on the genocide of Native American peoples, the systematic dispossession of colonial and imperial economies, and the regime of enslavement on which the wealth and political influence of the United States and all the other capitalist economies of the so-called free world were built. The toppling of statues, erected in celebration of the lives of those who deployed the wealth of slave economies for the “public good” in the sponsoring nations, speaks directly to the ways in which things carry dormant or un-acknowledged

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connections to long histories of political violence. For centuries the provocation intrinsic to these objects has passed un-noticed by the vast majority. Now the provocation has become abruptly visible, contingent on the capacity of digital media to both witness and connect. The concept of reverberation helps us to conceptualize these historical fluctuations. I return in conclusion to the notion that a sound reverberates in relation to the material surfaces it encounters. The value of the reverberation concept is that it keeps open the possibility of continuities founded not only in political violence but also in its refusal. In this sense “reverberation” is replete with the refracted power of political violence but takes it elsewhere.8 In the present day the question of which objects, materials, bodies, and landscapes carry forward past histories, and for whom, is not straightforward. Ethnographic work that attends to how such connections are made in a world of shifting populations is deeply thought-provoking and offers an approach that promises to enrich research on the entanglements of human and other-than-human forces by bringing the fluctuating affective histories of these entanglements into view. Notes 1. The introduction and the chapters of this volume offer a rich bibliography on these questions and a critical engagement with literatures that ignore the ways in which histories of political violence animate the other-than-human forces that shape human worlds. Three collaborative projects have been very impor tant to my own approach to these issues, and are published in Harvey et al. 2014; Harvey, Jensen, and Morita 2017; and Harvey, Krohn-Hansen, and Nustad 2019. Rather than directly revisit these ideas on politics, affect, and materiality, I have chosen to follow the very suggestive concept of “reverberation” to revisit and connect my early work in the Peruvian Andes to my current research in the west of England. 2. Harris 1995. 3. Gose 1994; Harris 1982. 4. Gow and Condori 1982; Ossio 1973; Wachtel 1977. 5. See Masco 2006 for discussion of the “nuclear sublime.” 6. Turner 1969. 7. See Barb Drummond, “The Evolution of Bonfre Night,” Texthistory (blog), 2 October 2013, https://texthistory.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/the-evolution-of-bonfre-night/. 8. See Gordillo 2014; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017; Navaro-Yashin 2009, 2012; Stoler 2013; Taussig 1987.

Works Cited Gordillo, Gaston. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Gose, Peter. 1994. Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gow, Rosalind, and Bernabé Condori. 1982. Kay Pacha. Cusco: Bartolomé de las Casas. Harris, Olivia. 1982. “The Dead and the Dev ils Among the Bolivian Laymi.” In Death and the Regeneration of Life, edited by M. Bloch and J. Parry, 45–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Olivia. 1995. “ ‘The Coming of the White People’: Reflections on the Mythologisation of History in Latin America.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 14 (1): 9–24. Harvey, Penny, Eleanor Casella, Gillian Evans, Hannah Knox, Christine McLean, Elizabeth Silva, Nicholas Thoburn, and Kath Woodward, eds. 2014. Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion. London: Routledge. Harvey, Penny, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita, eds. 2017. Infrastructure and Social Complexity: A Routledge Companion. London: Routledge. Harvey, Penny, Christian Krohn-Hansen, and Knut Nustad, eds. 2019. Anthropos and the Material: Anthropological Reflections on Emerging Political Formations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Laszczkowski, Mateusz, and Madeleine Reeves, eds. 2017. Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions. Oxford: Berghahn Books Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post– Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces and Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ossio, Juan. 1973. Ideología mesiánica del mundo andino. Lima: Ignacio Prado Pastor. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wachtel, Nathan. 1977. The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru Through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570. Hassocks, UK: Harvester Press. Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus.

CONTRIBUTORS

Seda Altuğ Assistant professor in history, Ataturk Institute, Bogazici University, Turkey. Hanna Baumann Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Institute for Global Prosperity, The Bartlett, University College London, UK. Alice von Bieberstein Assistant professor, Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Zerrin Özlem Biner Lecturer in anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. Eray Çaylı Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Shannon Lee Dawdy Professor of anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, US. Erdem Evren Independent researcher based in Berlin; from 2012 to 2019, at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany. Connie Gagliardi PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada. Penelope Harvey Professor of social anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK.

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Munira Khayyat Assistant professor in anthropology, Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology, American University in Cairo, Egypt. Rosalind C. Morris Professor of anthropology, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, US. Valentina Napolitano Professor of anthropology and Connaught scholar, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada. Yael Navaro Reader in social anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK.

INDE X

actor network theory, 2, 279; science and technology studies, 4 affective force, 147, 279, 302, 304, 306; of nuclear power, 303; of political violence, 295 Agamben, Giorgio, 54, 55, 56, 287–88 agency, human and non-human, 1, 2, 4, 7, 13, 121; human exceptionalism and, 7; infrastructure and, 226–27; new materialist turn and, 16, 164; study of violence and, 3 Ahmed, Sara, 147, 212, 213 Altuğ, Seda, 15, 16, 298 Anand, Nikhil, 222 Anders, Günther, 10 Anthropocene, 1, 14 anthropocentrism, 3, 12, 17, 207, 278 architecture: architectural turn in testimony, 278–81; remains of nonMuslim communities in Turkey and, 63; renovation after disaster, 268; of separation, 296, 302; as witness to violence, 21, 289, 304 archives, 3, 16, 247 Armenian genocide, 8, 18, 20, 22n4, 169, 297; abductions, 8, 63, 80n1, 167; annihilation of Armenians/Christians, 88, 94, 103, 249; architectural remains and, 63, 158; centenary of (2015), 65, 159; confscation of assets during, 77; denial of, 10, 159, 248–49; deportations, 77, 88, 247, 249; in Kurdish region of Turkey, 85; nationmaking processes in Turkey and, 16; property regimes and, 93, 247–48 Armenian genocide, survivors of, 63, 65, 80n1 Armenians: dispossession of, 91–92, 99; embodied remnants of, 9; Islamicized, 84–85, 88–89, 248; land formerly owned by, 83

Asad, Talal, 121 assemblage, 164, 187, 210, 264, 288; Deleuzian assemblage theory, 4; human–object, 264, 265; polyphonic, 200; re-assemblage, 7, 162 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 122, 123, 125, 135, 283–84, 292n17 Athanasiou, Athena, 161, 162, 180 Azoulay, Ariella, 214 Barkat, Nir, 215, 222 Bataille, Georges, 78 Baumann, Hanna, 19, 20, 299 Benjamin, Walter, 262 Bennett, Jane, 5, 7, 72, 164 Bieberstein, Alice von, 15, 297 Biehl, João, 258 Biersack, Aletta, 73 Biner, Zerrin Özlem, 17, 18, 298, 300 biopolitics, 14, 38, 41, 64, 74, 78 borderlands, 18, 156; in city of Jerusalem, 299; Israel–Lebanon, 186, 187, 188, 299; of life and death, 301, 305; political theologies of, 147; racialized, 302; U.S.–Mexican border, 149, 155 Bourdieu, Pierre, 12 Braidotti, Rosi, 5–6, 7, 71–72 built environments, 12, 13, 164, 170, 237; commodifcation and destruction of, 236; infrastructural incorporation and, 216; life and death of, 233 Butler, Judith, 161, 162, 180 Cagliardi, Connie, 297 capitalism, 1, 19, 162, 164, 193; “bulldozer capitalism” (construction/destruction), 233, 236, 237, 240, 251n1; destructive effects of, 165; enslavement and, 307;

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Index

capitalism (continued) neoliberal, 180; racial, 59, 90, 298; ruination and, 238; trea sure hunting and, 70 Carrithers, Michael, 6 Çaylı, Eray, 21, 300 Clastres, Pierre, 60n6 Comaroff, Jean and John, 59n2, 70 Constantinou, Costas, 139n10 Courcoucli, Maria, 200 Coward, Martin, 207 criminality, 39, 44, 45, 59n2; cycles of violence and, 55; ethno-national identity and, 47, 49–50; infrastructural lack associated with, 213; police as thieves, 46, 57–58; statism as solution to problem of, 51–52 cyborg city, 20, 207, 208, 209, 227; Jerusalem as, 20; technological extensions of human bodily selves in, 211 Dawdy, Shannon, 21 death, 7, 41, 162, 218, 250, 260; biopolitics and, 64, 74, 78; “bulldozer capitalism” and, 233; death penalty in Turkey, 289n4; disappearance from posthumanist writings, 78; ecological, 250; as process of becoming, 71–72; rendered invisible, 8; spaces of, 13–16; suspension of, 70–72; technologies of vengeful death, 305; temporality and, 64; treasure hunters’ speculating on, 74–77 debt/indebtedness: of Armenian peasants, 85, 87, 91, 101–2; of treasure hunters, 75, 78, 79 Deleuze, Gilles, 60n6 Derrida, Jacques, 54, 182n2 disasters, 21, 257, 260, 266; differential responses to, 258, 265, 269; landscape management as response to, 258; post-disaster landscape, 267, 270; scarred landscape and, 256; taphonomy and, 257. See also memory/memorialization: of Hurricane Katrina displacement, 8, 9, 20, 233; dams and, 235–36; reverberations of violence and, 249, 295 dispossession, 14, 15, 85, 152; border disputes as an excuse for, 103; confscation of Armenian property, 92; defned, 161,

165–66; discontinuities in cultures of, 104; indebtedness and, 101; jinn and, 163; private property and, 95, 104, 105, 108n48; property regimes and, 90, 93, 98; subject formation and, 162; survival strategies in face of, 233; treasure hunting and, 64, 298 Dressler, Markus, 135 ecology, 7, 233, 250, 271; ecological studies, 4; environmental turn, 1 Elden, Stuart, 128–29 Evren, Erdem, 20, 298 Farmer, Paul, 11–12 Fassin, Didier, 264 Foucault, Michel, 4, 54, 57, 60n6, 128, 216 Fowles, Severin, 21n1 Freud, Sigmund, 262–63, 272 Gagliardi, Connie, 18 genocide, 3, 15, 121, 122, 295, 307. See also Armenian genocide geographies, 89, 103, 186, 189, 247; affective, 188; political, 123, 129; spatial and material, 12; strategic/military, 192 Girard, René, 53–54, 55 Gordillo, Gastón, 200 Gordon, Avery, 182n2, 182n5 governmentality, 39, 42, 54, 58 Graeber, David, 6 Guattari, Félix, 60n6 Guyer, Jane, 243 Haraway, Donna, 6, 22n2, 208, 227 Harb, Mona, 201 haunting, 11, 12, 16, 18, 182n2, 237; defnition of, 182n5; jinn and, 158, 167 Hayles, N. Katherine, 72 Herscher, Andrew, 280 historical materialisms, 22n6 Holocaust, 11, 22n4 humanism: Christian, 54; colonization of the human by, 59; philosophies and sociologies, 2, 3 infrastructural violence, 13, 19–21, 207, 224–27; exclusion as urban injustice, 209–15, 224–25; infrastructural incorporation, 209, 215–21, 224

Index infrastructure, 3, 8, 13; of cyborg cities, 208, 223; as link or nexus, 19–20 Ingold, Tim, 7, 271–72 jinn (cinler), 16, 18, 158, 160–61, 164, 179, 300; as guardians of buried treasure, 160, 176; jinn experts, 172; possession by, 161, 165–68, 178, 180–81, 298; property and, 163–65 Khayyat, Munira, 17, 18–19, 299 landscapes, 8, 104, 187, 256, 308; changing property regimes and, 93, 104; of disaster and rebuilding, 259–62; human–thing connection and, 272–73; knowledge of, 103; as stories, 271–72; temporalities of, 262; trauma and, 257, 263; of war, 188, 197 Latour, Bruno, 7, 59, 122, 164 Lefebvre, Henri, 128, 129, 227 linguistic turn, 4, 5, 7, 8 Lock, Margaret, 258 materiality, 4, 161, 162, 208; as active feld, 164; community and, 86; effects of violence on, 12; materialist turn, 163–65; process of becoming and, 5–6, 71; and violence, 90–93; trauma and, 21 memory/memorialization, 19, 21, 263, 264, 273, 307; architectural witnessing and, 282, 290n8; of Armenian genocide, 65; forgetting and, 263, 269–70, 307; of Hurricane Katrina, 268, 269, 274n4; involuntary memorials, 267, 268, 273; jinn and, 165, 168; landscape and, 258, 299; politics of, 299, 300; of traumatic events, 258, 262–63 mind/matter dualism, 5, 6 modernity, 76, 125, 218; capitalist, 38, 162; embodied sense of, 219; infrastructural violence and, 225; nature/culture dualism, 5; politics/religion distinction, 121, 122 monism, philosophical, 5, 6 more-than-human/other-than-human, 1, 3, 8, 10, 308; supra-human entities, 10 Morris, Rosalind, 14–15, 74, 244, 297 Nakba, Palestinian, 10, 13, 215 Napolitano, Valentina, 17, 18, 297

315

nation-state, 91, 93, 104, 214; demise of, 36; originary violence of, 21; reconstitution of, 42 nature, 1, 13, 233, 249; nature/culture dualism, 5, 6, 208; social constructivist theory and, 5; violence against, 5, 13, 19–21 Navaro, Yael, 187, 188–89, 214, 250, 279–80, 296 necropolitics, 14 neoliberalism, 58–59, 108n48, 222 new materialisms, 2, 4, 5; depoliticized objects of analy sis, 12–13; dualisms opposed by, 6; power-blindness of, 22n6 Nixon, Rob, 241 objects (things), reifcation of, 2, 21n1 ontology, 121, 139n4, 161, 238; human–nonhuman relation and, 164, 258; indeterminacy and, 71; ontological turn, 5, 7, 8; psycho-archaeology and, 262–64 Özgül, Ceren, 108n48 Parla, Ayşe, 108n48 Polatel, Mehmet, 77, 92 posthumanism, 2, 16, 59, 278, 279; absenting of political violence and, 4–8; linguistic turn, 4; posthumanist subject, 6; spaces of death and, 19–20; suspension of death and, 70–72, 78; treasure hunting and, 64 race/racialization, 4, 257, 296; racism, 12, 146, 224; re-racialization, 42 Rechtman, Richard, 264 remnants, 4, 21, 237, 243; affective forces and, 279; life insurances as, 77–78; material, 103, 188; material remains, 9; persistence of, 83; spiritual, 166, 200; of violence, 8–10 ruination, 12, 18, 95, 250, 299; capitalist process of, 19; defned, 188–89; heritage and, 161; investment and accommodation to, 238–44; landscapes of, 187; “slow violence” and, 241; strategies of accumulation and, 236, 244, 250 sovereignty, 16, 20, 91; civil war and, 43; empire as fxed form of, 87; ethnicity and, 42; Israeli occupation of Palestinian

316

Index process of becoming, 64; ruination and, 236–38, 250; trauma and, 262, 264, 273. See also space and time topography, 14, 15, 16, 85, 86, 93; mystical, 126, 127, 129 trauma: archive of the body and, 37; avoidance behav ior of victims, 257, 266, 269–70; mass trauma, 256, 258, 263, 273n2; materiality and, 21; psychoanalytic theory and, 11 Tsing, Anna, 67

sovereignty (continued) lands, 222, 225; materiality of, 12; per formance of, 214; redefnition of, 86; right of sacrilege and, 52–57; territory and, 129, 130 space and time, 1–3, 13, 187; acoustic reverberation and, 296; disaster and, 273; infrastructural projects and, 236; post-conflict cities and, 93; reverberations of violence across, 304–5; ruination and, 12; spiritual “other world” and, 128; state sovereignty and, 129; urban space, 3, 207–8, 227. See also time/temporality speculation, 20, 261; biopolitical governance and, 15, 64; as capitalist process, 19; death and, 74–77, 78, 79; generation of value and, 64; speculative realism, 71; treasure hunting and, 67–70, 181, 297 spirituality, 17, 161, 179, 198; Khidr cosmography and, 128, 135, 137, 138; materiality and, 179; religion in relation to, 137; supernatural beings, 13 Spivak, Gayatri, 48 states of emergency, 144, 170 Stoler, Ann Laura, 87, 241 subjectivity: dispossession and, 162; ethnicity and, 42; fnitude as constitutive of, 7; haunted by ongoing violence, 11; intersubjective perpetrator-victim relation, 13; political, 14, 236; propertied, 163; ruination and, 189 suffering, 7, 20, 21, 180, 298; posthumanist view of, 72; rendered invisible, 8; ruination and, 241; scarred landscape and, 236; social suffering school, 11; temporality and, 237

violence, 2, 3, 11, 138: absenting of violence, 4–8; affective force of, 295, 302; architecture and, 21, 278–79; colonial, 303, 304; of dispossession, 162; embodiment of, 2; endurance of, 3; as “event,” 10; memory of past violence, 88; more-than-human forms/effects of, 1, 3; against nature and the earth, 1, 5, 13; nonhuman actants and, 164; past violence and property regimes, 93–97; persistence and continuity of, 237; property claims and, 87; remnants of, 8–10; sacrifcial, 36, 39, 42, 53–54, 56; sectarian, 103, 154, 306; “slow violence,” 241; structural, 11–12, 209, 224, 295; study of, 1, 2–3, 4; the super natural and, 16–19; symbolic, 12, 22n6; transmogrifcation of, 3, 10, 11; witnessing of, 21, 278–81, 289. See also infrastructural violence vitalism, 4, 7, 73

Taneja, Anand Vivek, 168 Taussig, Michael: on gift economies, 78; on gold, 69–70, 73–74, 76, 78 technology, 2, 6, 158, 233; infrastructure as colonial technology, 216; military, 192; visual, 278, 280; witnessing and, 280, 289 territory, 128–29; re-territorialization, 128, 129; “territory effect,” 129 time/temporality, 19, 303, 307–8; generation of value and, 64; matter and, 71; as

Wacquant, Loïc, 213 war, 3, 12, 52, 237; architectural remains of, 278; inter-ethnic, 51, 55; Khidr veneration and, 131, 132; political violence and, 44, 45, 60n8; seasons of, 19 Weizman, Eyal, 278–79, 280 witnessing, 21, 85, 288, 304; anthropocentrism and, 278; evidence and, 280; false, 103; martyrdom and, 287; trauma and, 273n1

Üngör, Uğur Ümit, 77, 92 “urbicide,” 12

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

The journey of this book began with a European Research Council grant, titled “Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey,” in which the co-editors of this volume collaborated. We therefore thank, foremost, the ERC for funding our research and making our fantastic work together possible, with all the feldwork and research-based conversations that ensued. We co-organized an international conference to bring the conceptual framework and methodologies of this project, based on anthropological and historical work on political violence in Turkey, into conversation with the work of anthropologists working elsewhere, as well as with other analytical tools. The conference that led to this book was held in Istanbul in March 2015, under the title “Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space.” We thank all those who participated in the conference, including those whose contributions are not included in this volume but whose insights were part of the discussion. The works of Eirini Avramopoulou, Andrew Barry, Elizabeth Dunn, Mantas Kvedaravicius, Marc Nichanian, Penelope Papailias, Marlene Schafers, Sarah Wagner, Kath Weston, Umut Yıldırım, and Lisa Yoneyama, in conversation with ours at this conference, may be followed through their publications. The conference was held at the Galata Greek School in Karaköy, Istanbul. This venue was recommended to us by Osman Kavala, who, at the time, attended our reception. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Osman Bey, who has been in prison since November 2017 on concocted charges, and we extend our solidarity with him toward his release. For opening the Galata Greek School as a venue for our conference, we thank the artist Hera Büyüktasçıyan, whose work we continue to admire. Maria Kevkep Yumurta assisted us with the organization of the conference at the school. The artist Emrah Gökdemir curated an exhibition at the school as a component of the conference, which included his own flm What Khidr Says to Moses: Turn Around Me, flms made by Alice von Bieberstein and Gary Hurst, Zerrin Özlem Biner,

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Acknowledgments

Yektanurşin Duyan, Evin Sevgi Baran, and Zeynep Merve Uygun, and photos of Seda Altuğ. We heartily thank Emrah for being part of the journey that resulted in this project and for bringing his creativity and spirit to the conference. His artwork also inspired the cover design of this volume. Candie Furber, who was the administrator of our ERC grant, has also been part of our journey from its inception, and we especially thank her for helping us navigate the obstacles we faced while carry ing out our research in Turkey as the country plunged into further authoritarianism. Finally, we thank the contributors of this volume for participating in the project that led to this volume and especially for staying with us, as it took a while to bring it all together. Special thanks to Peter Agree, who was our editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press when we signed the contract for this book, and to Jerome Singerman and Walter Biggins, who followed in his place. Tobias Kelly, who edits this series for the Press, recognized the potential of this project and supported us all the way to its completion. We are also grateful for the support received from the Senior Members’ Research Fund at Newnham College, Cambridge, for the completion of an index for this book. When we came together to envision our collaborative project in 2010, Turkey was on the verge of what was then called a “peace process”—namely, political negotiations between the state and the Kurdish political movement regarding the settlement of the Kurdish conflict and democratization in Turkey. Numerous civil society organizations and academics were involved in working on taboo subjects that were critical of Turkey’s century-old violence against its minorities. It was possible to plan a period of sustained feldwork in south and southeastern Turkey, as well as to organize academic workshops and conferences in the country. The anti-government Gezi protests of the summer of 2013, in Istanbul and elsewhere, were the culmination of the creative political thinking that had developed in Turkey over the years, even as the protests were violently suppressed. By the summer of 2015, the proKurdish political party, HDP, mainly a coalition between the Turkish left and the Kurds, had won 13  percent of the vote in national elections. However, the social and political empowerment of the pro-Kurdish opposition, as confrmed by the election results, was disagreeable for the Turkish state establishment. This led to the commencement of a localized war in various Kurdish provinces in the southeast, marking the end of the so-called peace process. In January 2016, 1,128 academics signed a peace petition urging the Turkish government to resume its peace negotiations and bring an end to the ongoing violence in the southeastern provinces of the country. These academ-

Acknowledgments

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ics, including some contributors to this volume, have been hounded with court cases opened against them by the state. Since the failed military coup attempt of July 2016, which is claimed to have been organized by a rival Islamist group, the Gülenists, Turkey has become even more intolerant of dissenting and critical voices, making research much more difficult than before by eradicating the academic freedom that is necessary for it. Thousands of elected HDP politicians, journalists, and activists as well as Gülenist civil servants, teachers, and jurists have been arrested and imprisoned since then, strangulating the social and political atmosphere in the whole country. As we turn this volume in for publication by the Press, Boğaziçi University in Istanbul has been protesting to retain its academic autonomy and institutional democracy following the recent state intervention in the administration and academic integrity of the university. The research matter of this volume, political violence in Turkey in conceptual conversation with elsewhere, continues to reverberate, if ever more severely. We dedicate this book to those who speak truth to power, the many students among them, the journalists, the artists, the civil society activists, the lawyers, and academics, in solidarity with them. We hope this book makes certain analytical toolboxes available, also when hopefully translated into Turkish, for those who continue to struggle for justice and democracy.