Papers by Osman Balkan
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2022
How do European Muslims navigate death and burial in countries where they face systematic barrier... more How do European Muslims navigate death and burial in countries where they face systematic barriers to political inclusion? The authors of this article investigate the complex negotiations surrounding end-of-life decisions for Muslim communities in France and Germany. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research among Algerian and Turkish diasporas in Marseilles and Berlin, they illustrate how burial decisions reflect divergent ideas about citizenship, belonging, and identity. While some Muslims are interred in local cemeteries, many more are repatriated out of Europe to be laid in ancestral soils in countries of origin. Through interviews with Muslim death-care workers and community members the authors analyze the significance and symbolic value that such posthumous journeys carry in postmigratory settings. They argue that the Muslim corpse embodies a range of overlapping desires, experiences, and expectations connected to histories of migration, settlement, and return, as well as attitudes toward death and beliefs about the afterlife. Consequently, the corpse offers a compelling window into the transnational afterlives of migration and empire.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Immanent Frame, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Theory & Event, 2019
Review of James Martel's "Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead" (Amh... more Review of James Martel's "Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead" (Amherst University Press, 2019)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance , 2019
This chapter examines the aftermath of the 2016 failed military coup in Turkey through the politi... more This chapter examines the aftermath of the 2016 failed military coup in Turkey through the political afterlives of its victims and perpetrators. Focusing on the so-called "Cemetery of Traitors" (established to inter the remains of dead coup plotters) as well as the funeral ceremonies of soldiers and civilians who died during the coup attempt, I illustrate how corpses become politicized sites of struggle and resistance and argue that the treatment and commemoration of the dead is a critical means through which states and other actors demarcate the contours of national, religious, and political communities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss , 2019
This chapter considers the relationship between dead bodies and the politics of mourning by exami... more This chapter considers the relationship between dead bodies and the politics of mourning by examining the public controversies prompted by the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It traces the travels of his corpse, from the Chief Medical Examiner's Office in downtown Boston, to a series of funeral homes across the Greater Boston area, to its final resting place in a privately owned Islamic cemetery in rural Virginia. At each step of its itinerant journey, Tsarnaev's remains generated a flurry of political backlash and activity. By mapping and analyzing the perspectives of a range of actors with a shared interest in the fate of Tsarnaev's body, I show how the treatment and memorialization of the exceptional dead is an important means through which different groups express, enact, and contest the boundaries of national, political, and moral communities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Project on Middle East Political Science- Islam in Europe and North America, 2018
This essay examines the patterns of memorialization and representation of ethnic, religious, and ... more This essay examines the patterns of memorialization and representation of ethnic, religious, and national identities on the tombstones of Muslim graves in Berlin's Islamic burial grounds. As places where the physical landscape is symbolically (re)inscribed and (re)signified, Germany's Islamic cemeteries offer insight into the changing contours of political membership, belonging, and identity in an increasingly multicultural society.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Contemporary French Civilization , Jul 2016
This article explores the different forms of mourning that structured the
public and political me... more This article explores the different forms of mourning that structured the
public and political memorialization of the victims and perpetrators of the
Paris attacks by analyzing the discourses, ceremonies, and negotiations
accompanying their funerals. It argues that political actors employed
three distinct strategies of mourning to produce a hierarchy of French
subjects organized around a spectrum of grievability. The first strategy,
“mourning as erasure,” was characteristic of the funerals of the three
terrorists and evinced an active effort by the French state to efface any
trace of their memory. The second, “mourning as exclusionary-inclusion,”
was exemplified in the ceremonies held in honor of Ahmed Merabet,
a police officer mourned as a loyal guardian of the French Republic in
terms that maintained his subordinate status as a religious outsider. The
third strategy, “mourning as appropriation,” was most pronounced at the
funerals of the four victims of the attack on the kosher supermarket Hyper
Cacher. Held in Israel, these ceremonies offered an emotional platform for
both French and Israeli leaders to claim the Jewish victims as their own.
These disparate strategies of mourning highlight the different ways that
the dead help demarcate the boundaries of political communities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Review of Middle East Studies, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Apr 10, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2016
This article explores the intercultural negotiations around the death and burial of Muslims in Ge... more This article explores the intercultural negotiations around the death and burial of Muslims in Germany. In particular, it examines the mediating role that Muslim undertakers play between immigrant families and the German state. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Turkish funeral homes and the Islamic funeral industry in Berlin, it argues that undertakers' ability to navigate the regulatory structures of the German bureaucracy and the cultural expectations of their customers is a defining feature of their occupational identity and a principal source of their professional authority. As intermediaries between civil society and the state, undertakers guide families through the cultural, religious, political, and legal landscapes that structure the transitions from life to death. In burying the dead and tending to the living, they must reconcile competing sets of administrative and cultural norms surrounding death and interment. In doing so, the Muslim undertakers of Berlin preside not only over end-of-life decisions and their theological implications, but also over pedagogical moments in processes of political and cultural integration in contemporary Germany.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 2015
This article explores the role that funerary practices and burial decisions play in the construct... more This article explores the role that funerary practices and burial decisions play in the construction of national and political identities amongst muslim immigrants in Germany. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with Islamic undertakers, migrant families, and religious leaders in Berlin it argues that the act of burial serves as a powerful means to assert belonging in migratory settings. While local burial laws impact the feasibility of Islamic funerary rites, this article suggests that family ties, ideas about the soil, and feelings of social exclusion play a larger role in shaping burial outcomes than the laws of the dead. By conferring a sense of fixity or permanence to identities that are more fluid or ambivalent in life, determining where a dead body belongs helps demarcate social and communal boundaries.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Muslims in the UK and Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2015: 19-28)
This article analyzes the transnational funerary rituals of the Turkish community in Germany. It ... more This article analyzes the transnational funerary rituals of the Turkish community in Germany. It focuses on the operations of two funeral funds administered by the longest-standing Turkish associations in Europe, Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği (DITIB) and Islamisch Gemeinschaft Milli Görüş (IGMG). These funds were established to help facilitate and subsidize the provision of Islamic funerals in Germany. Drawing on contracts, membership forms, informational literature, and interviews with fund representatives, I argue that the funeral funds encourage a form of necropatriotism by providing material incentives for the repatriation of their members to Turkey for burial. In highlighting the ways that institutions, economic incentives, and legal constraints help determine burial choices, I suggest that end-of-life decisions are never entirely shaped by sentimental reasons.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Conference Presentations by Osman Balkan
Montpollier, 2021
Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Osman Balkan
public and political memorialization of the victims and perpetrators of the
Paris attacks by analyzing the discourses, ceremonies, and negotiations
accompanying their funerals. It argues that political actors employed
three distinct strategies of mourning to produce a hierarchy of French
subjects organized around a spectrum of grievability. The first strategy,
“mourning as erasure,” was characteristic of the funerals of the three
terrorists and evinced an active effort by the French state to efface any
trace of their memory. The second, “mourning as exclusionary-inclusion,”
was exemplified in the ceremonies held in honor of Ahmed Merabet,
a police officer mourned as a loyal guardian of the French Republic in
terms that maintained his subordinate status as a religious outsider. The
third strategy, “mourning as appropriation,” was most pronounced at the
funerals of the four victims of the attack on the kosher supermarket Hyper
Cacher. Held in Israel, these ceremonies offered an emotional platform for
both French and Israeli leaders to claim the Jewish victims as their own.
These disparate strategies of mourning highlight the different ways that
the dead help demarcate the boundaries of political communities.
Conference Presentations by Osman Balkan
public and political memorialization of the victims and perpetrators of the
Paris attacks by analyzing the discourses, ceremonies, and negotiations
accompanying their funerals. It argues that political actors employed
three distinct strategies of mourning to produce a hierarchy of French
subjects organized around a spectrum of grievability. The first strategy,
“mourning as erasure,” was characteristic of the funerals of the three
terrorists and evinced an active effort by the French state to efface any
trace of their memory. The second, “mourning as exclusionary-inclusion,”
was exemplified in the ceremonies held in honor of Ahmed Merabet,
a police officer mourned as a loyal guardian of the French Republic in
terms that maintained his subordinate status as a religious outsider. The
third strategy, “mourning as appropriation,” was most pronounced at the
funerals of the four victims of the attack on the kosher supermarket Hyper
Cacher. Held in Israel, these ceremonies offered an emotional platform for
both French and Israeli leaders to claim the Jewish victims as their own.
These disparate strategies of mourning highlight the different ways that
the dead help demarcate the boundaries of political communities.