Courses

This course aims to investigate the contemporary outlines of political anthropology, as well as its potentialities, through the lenses of the studies on Turkey. Since its original formulation in Aristotle, the political has been conceived at the nexus of life, goodness, and craft, each one continuously implicating the others, waving the webs of meaning in human communities to create a good life. Pushing this insight forward, we will combine ethnographic and theoretical works on political questions with a variety of fieldworks on Turkey, paying specific attention to meanings, signs, imaginaries, and practices as enacted in the daily lives of ordinary people. We will study specificities of political discourses, state practices and social movements in order to complicate and expand our understanding of ideology, hegemony, class, and power. We will be asking questions such as: How do specific histories emerge in people’s political imaginaries? What are the social and political practices that sustain such histories while erasing others? Is the state an entity that people encounter in their daily lives or an imaginary assemblage that is being used to make sense of power relations in modern societies? How do the power relations that circulate within bureaucratic institutions interact with people’s sexual practices? Can we observe the ideologies and workings of world markets in local settings? Are there any intersection points where ordinary people relate questions of wealth to questions of political order? Focusing on ethnographic works on Turkey, this course asks these and other questions as part of a broader effort to understand the origins, developments, and possibilities of the modern political world.