Books
University of California Press, 2024
What is the value—religious, political, economic, or altogether social—of getting on a bus in Teh... more What is the value—religious, political, economic, or altogether social—of getting on a bus in Tehran to embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey across two international borders to the Sayyida Zainab shrine outside Damascus? Under what material conditions can such values be established, reassessed, or transgressed, and by whom? Zainab’s Traffic provides answers to these questions alongside the socially embedded—and spatially generative—encounters of ritual, mobility, desire, genealogy, and patronage along the route. Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrims women’s desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors’ experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab—emerging out of a self-described “poverty of mobility”—demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of ritual. Rather than thinking of ritual as a scripturally canonized manual for pious self-cultivation, Zainab’s Traffic approaches ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria.
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Peer-reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2024
Every year, 80,000 tons of kaçak (contraband) tea, primarily of Sri Lankan and Iranian origin, ma... more Every year, 80,000 tons of kaçak (contraband) tea, primarily of Sri Lankan and Iranian origin, makes its way to the markets of Turkey-itself the fifthlargest producer of tea in the world. While most kaçak commodities in Turkey face derision because they are understood as low-quality approximations of their formal counterparts, of dubious origins and lacking any guarantees of quality, many consumers of kaçak tea valorize it as an emblem of superior taste. Rather than being a target of derision, kaçak tea takes shape in its consumers 'thin-waisted' glasses as a sign of distinction. In this inverted hierarchy of values, the domestic produce is the commodity that is mocked for its weak flavor and inflated price, while the informal contraband commodity is prized. By tracing the cultural biography of kaçak tea, this essay advances a historically and geographically networked understanding of commoditization across the formal/informal divide. Studying 'guaranteed contraband' tea across Turkey and Iran proves productive for understanding how people negotiate and build dynamic hierarchies of taste, while transforming the confines of the formal national economy into new thresholds of conversion that draw upon formalization of informality as well as informalization of formality in market formation.
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Journal of Cultural Economy, 2024
Electricity and petroleum stolen from grids of distribution. Livestock, tea, and tobacco traded a... more Electricity and petroleum stolen from grids of distribution. Livestock, tea, and tobacco traded as contraband goods across national borders. An apartment building built without permits. A defendant who refuses to show up to his trial. What unites these seemingly disparate situations in Turkey, Kurdistan and Iran is that they are all described with the qualifier kaçak. Although conventionally translated into English as the equivalent of 'smuggled good,' the semantic domain of kaçak in Turkish (loaned into Kurdish and Persian) is more capacious than 'smuggled' signifies: Derived from the Turkish verb kaçmak-to run away, flee, or be a fugitive-kaçak helps us recover the act of breaching the obligations of a social or legal contract as a constitutive field of politics, framed by the socio-cultural constructions of modern bureaucracy and economy. Each participant tracks kaçak as a good, as a tapped resource or a legally sanctioned person, and shows the many forms kaçak takes in the hands of concrete social actors under historically specific material conditions. Further, kaçak provides a historically and geographically more expansive windows into the politically instituted process that is the making of states and economies in cross-regional and crossdisciplinary ways.
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2023
Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian pilgrims have engaged in saint visitation (ziyarat) to sites i... more Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian pilgrims have engaged in saint visitation (ziyarat) to sites in Syria. By travelling via Turkey on buses, and venerating Sayyida Zainab at their destination, these pilgrims disrupt conventional conceptions of not only Islamic ritual, but also Iranian mobility under sanctions. Their experiences venerating Sayyida Zainab – emerging out of a self-described ‘poverty of mobility’ – demonstrate the utility of a more expansive conceptualization of ritual in anthropology. Instead of taking ritual for a scripturally canonized ‘manual for’ pious self-cultivation, here I approach ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria. This approach produces a dynamic and spatial conception of ziyarat as a ritual of mobility. Ethnographic attention to these pilgrims’ politically conditioned and regionally networked spatial practices reveals that their movements are irreducible to ethical projects of cultivating piety alone. What is at stake in Iranian pilgrims’ movements is nothing short of the extra-religious conditions of religion – those of the economy and the polity. These stakes illuminate how religious practices interarticulate with political and social institutions – including bazaars, borders, and shrines – that remain understudied in recent anthropological scholarship on Islamic piety.
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differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2022
Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of lgbt+ and queer Iranians have sought asylum throug... more Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of lgbt+ and queer Iranians have sought asylum through the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Turkey. As recent queer and feminist scholarship has demonstrated, a “gay enough” litmus test often determines whether asylum seekers will be recognized as having a credible fear of persecution. To unhcr officers conducting asylum interviews, a claimant’s gender nonconformity functions as a proxy for credibility. Self-identified bears, with their masculine gender expression, cannot pass this litmus test and thus are expected to confess an indifference to religion, or areligiosity. Arguing that expectations of gender nonconformity and areligiosity make the application process an asylum of translation for self-identified bear claimants from Iran, this article examines the discursive labyrinth asylum seekers must navigate to become legible and advances a novel conception of the twinned process of confession and translocation that asylum-seeking has become in countries of transit like Turkey.
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International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2021
Since the 2012 sanctions that dis-embedded the Iranian economy from global markets, contraband co... more Since the 2012 sanctions that dis-embedded the Iranian economy from global markets, contraband commerce has become an explosive issue in Iran. Increasingly Iranians came to regard sanctions as enforced by both international powers and their own state officials, who criminalized certain kinds of cross-border trade, but not others. Although Iranian state actors distinguish between the trader-praised for contributing to the economy-and the traitor-denounced for undermining its integrity-what both unites and blurs the line between them is their shared struggle with a devaluing currency that some Iranians call nuclear. This article examines the "nuclear rial" by extending insights from anthropological scholarship on money to the study of sanctions to advance a dynamic understanding of currency. Studying Iranian trade in gold proves productive for understanding how people negotiate the effects of sanctions in an unevenly financialized world. At stake in the negotiations is a conditional articulation of monetary value that relies on contingent conversions between commodities and currencies and among currencies.
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Cultural Anthropology, 2020
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Toplum & Bilim, 2014
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in (Ed. Umut Ozkirimli) The Making of a Protest Movement, 2014
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Jadaliyya, 2014
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Edited Volumes
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Commentary and Short-Form Writings
Counterpunch, 2020
On April 7, the U.S. President Donald Trump took the stage for the White House Coronavirus Task F... more On April 7, the U.S. President Donald Trump took the stage for the White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing. In his speech, he targeted the World Health Organization (WHO) for mismanaging the Coronavirus pandemic. Trump criticized the organization for focusing too much on China, and accused its leadership of not being proactive enough in confronting the virus that led to its spread across the globe, culminating in a planetary pandemic that has so far (April 17) infected approximately 2 million people and claimed more than 125,000 lives globally. Defending his earlier steps to limit some travel to China that the WHO had criticized, President Trump, in essence, vilified the premier international health organization for the very failures that public health experts have identified in Trump's response to the virus. The same experts have repeatedly criticized the President for his public denials of the dangers of the virus and his prioritization of the health of the U.S. economy over that of its people. Having exonerated himself of the guilt of having slowed the American response to the pandemic, including the scarcity of testing kits and protective gear, which turned the United States to the pandemic's latest epicenter, Trump threatened with putting a hold on all U.S. funding to the WHO-the largest single source of money for the organization. In the midst of what a member of the White House Task Force, Adm. Brett Giroir, called the "peak death week," Trump-the nation's self-declared cheerleader-went back to his favorite topic, the economy, and cheered the U.S. public on: We're getting all of the investment wanting to come into the dollar. The dollar is the strength. The dollar is the whole ball game. And we have a strong dollar. Other currencies are going down, way, way down in some cases. You look at other countries, I won't mention them, but other countries are going down 22%, 25%, 28%. and it's very hard for them. That makes it much more difficult. With us, our currency is relatively now [sic] stronger than it ever was or it was over the last few years relative to other countries. It's always relative to other countries, but our currency is very strong. So, therefore, people want to invest. If we do a bond issue to do infrastructure, everybody wants a piece of that issue, even at zero interest. Trump's threat to the WHO, issued at the height of the pandemic in the U.S., in order to absolve himself from any blame for the spread of the COVID-19 virus and score some points in domestic politics is simply despicable, yet predictable. What Trump's words, and his celebration of the U.S dollar as the currency in the age of corona reveal is less the culprits behind the global pandemic, and more the very inequality on which our global economy is built. More directly, what Trump's cheering reveals is the weaponization of the U.S. dollar that blatantly and literally cashes in on that inequality that is amplified in the era of corona: That inequality is the premise of our international monetary system and the condition of possibility for Trump's celebration.
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Conferences
The primary aim of the conference is to engage with the global debate taking place on intersectio... more The primary aim of the conference is to engage with the global debate taking place on intersectionality. More specifically, we are interested in analyzing the role of gender identity and dynamics in facilitating the reproduction of power structures, and in the mobilization of historically marginalized groups seeking to expose, challenge, and ultimately dismantle those structures. By examining emergent forms of these justice-seeking struggles, the conference this year will direct the scholarly gaze on shifting relationships and opportunities for political action in a deeply polarized Turkey.
Feminist scholars of modernity have repeatedly revealed the gendered assumptions that underwrite the abstract citizen as the building block of society. By “sexing” the supposedly unmarked subjects and unmasking their socio-political conditions, we can productively interrogate the normative assumptions of other individuating axes of difference such as race, ethnicity, class and geography. By historicizing patriarchal heteronormativity, we can start to undermine its dominance in our readings of the past and shape current narratives of power.
Some of the questions we seek to answer are: What are the conditions facing queer, feminist and other sexed subjects in contemporary Turkey? How did Turkey get to its current state after the Gezi protests that showed arguably the most intersectional politics in action in the country’s recent history? How could attending to these queer conditions help us approach the study of Turkey anew? At a time of profound transformation, framed by graduated authoritarianism and shrinking freedoms in the country, how could sexing the study of Turkey enrich our understanding of its history and its present?
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Please join the Colloquium for Global Iran Studies for an event in which the critically acclaimed... more Please join the Colloquium for Global Iran Studies for an event in which the critically acclaimed novelist and writer Bahiyyih Nakhjavani will be reading from her latest work Us&Them and will explore the satire of survival in the Iranian diaspora. A Q&A moderated by Emrah Yildiz will follow the reading.
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Electricity and petroleum stolen from state laid grids of distribution. Livestock, tea and tobacc... more Electricity and petroleum stolen from state laid grids of distribution. Livestock, tea and tobacco traded as contraband goods across national borders. An apartment building built without permits. What unites these seemingly disparate situations in Turkey is that they are all described with the qualifier kaçak. Although conventionally translated into English as the equivalent of “smuggled good,” the semantic domain of kaçak in Turkish (loaned into Kurdish and Persian) is more capacious than ‘smuggled’ signifies: Derived from the Turkish verb kaçmak—to run away, flee, seek refuge—kaçak helps us recover the act of breaching the obligations of a social or legal contract as a constitutive vector of informality and its politico-legal and socio-cultural construction. Each panelist tracks a single commodity, and shows the many forms kaçak takes in the hands of concrete social actors under historically specific material conditions. The symposium’s focus on the forms commodities and their informalities take invites a radical rethinking of truth-claims made about economic informality as a relatively recent and primarily urban effect of neoliberal capitalism. The six studies of kaçak instead provide historically and geographically far more expansive windows into the politically instituted process that is the making of modern Turkey.
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Uploads
Books
Peer-reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
Edited Volumes
Commentary and Short-Form Writings
Conferences
Feminist scholars of modernity have repeatedly revealed the gendered assumptions that underwrite the abstract citizen as the building block of society. By “sexing” the supposedly unmarked subjects and unmasking their socio-political conditions, we can productively interrogate the normative assumptions of other individuating axes of difference such as race, ethnicity, class and geography. By historicizing patriarchal heteronormativity, we can start to undermine its dominance in our readings of the past and shape current narratives of power.
Some of the questions we seek to answer are: What are the conditions facing queer, feminist and other sexed subjects in contemporary Turkey? How did Turkey get to its current state after the Gezi protests that showed arguably the most intersectional politics in action in the country’s recent history? How could attending to these queer conditions help us approach the study of Turkey anew? At a time of profound transformation, framed by graduated authoritarianism and shrinking freedoms in the country, how could sexing the study of Turkey enrich our understanding of its history and its present?
Feminist scholars of modernity have repeatedly revealed the gendered assumptions that underwrite the abstract citizen as the building block of society. By “sexing” the supposedly unmarked subjects and unmasking their socio-political conditions, we can productively interrogate the normative assumptions of other individuating axes of difference such as race, ethnicity, class and geography. By historicizing patriarchal heteronormativity, we can start to undermine its dominance in our readings of the past and shape current narratives of power.
Some of the questions we seek to answer are: What are the conditions facing queer, feminist and other sexed subjects in contemporary Turkey? How did Turkey get to its current state after the Gezi protests that showed arguably the most intersectional politics in action in the country’s recent history? How could attending to these queer conditions help us approach the study of Turkey anew? At a time of profound transformation, framed by graduated authoritarianism and shrinking freedoms in the country, how could sexing the study of Turkey enrich our understanding of its history and its present?
By exploring states and stakes of migrancy as well as economies of mobility in conjunction with state formation and capital accumulation, Migrant States & Mobile Economies aims to rethink the political of both political economy and political theory through the historiography and ethnography of contemporary Turkey.
In recent years, various regions have drawn growing interest in scholarly and popular debates. Clandestine migration overflows national borders along routes that often follow historical connections. Regionalist projects draw on pre-national pasts as they attempt to create supra-national political and economic formations. Infrastructural projects like pipelines, offshore mineral exploitation, highways, and telecommunication cables bind places and articulate stakes in ways that both reimagine the past and reconfigure the future on a vast scale. Yet, most academic analysis of these trends oscillate between local, national, and global scales of analysis. This conference seeks to examine the spaces, scales and routes of such dynamics by promoting a comparative approach to region formation.
What distinguishes the current regionalism from the earlier area studies? What has given the idea of the region new traction, what is it contrasted with, what kinds of projects does it underwrite, and through what processes is a regional space materialized? This interdisciplinary conference will address these questions by examining the region, not as a pre-given scale of social life, but as a product of both “expert” classification and of social practice. We will inquire what analytical purchase the idea of the region has had, what scholars are responding to by elevating the region analytically, and what spatial practices they showcase as constitutive of region formation.
Conveners
Vincent Brown
Charles Warren Professor of American History, Department of History; Professor of African and African American Studies, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.
Ajantha Subramanian
Professor of Anthropology and of South Asian Studies, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
ogy in conversation. In so doing, we also hope to probe the disciplinary lines deriving from the nature of area studies, or subdivisions thereof, that often create a blind spot between Ottoman/Turkish and Persian/Iranian studies. On a theoretical register, we hope to think about (1) the analytical states and political stakes of “gender and sexuality,” and (2) their emplotments as useful categories of and for social science research of the state. And through our “inter-area” focus, the conveners of the panel also aim to generate excit- ing and provocative reflections on the intimacies and genealogies of the empire and the nation-state, as well as liberal interpretations of religion as a part and parcel of the heteroglossia of Islam.