Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a900186
P. Eisenlohr
ABSTRACT:In this essay, I argue that the temporal figure of latency is central for an understanding of the material temporalities of media. Latency as a temporal figure is built into the material functioning of sound reproduction and audiovisual media. The discussion shows how latency underpins technical processes of storing and reproducing sounds and moving images in a broad sense, while analyzing mediatic latency in Twelver Shi'i media practices in Mumbai. The focus on latency as a key temporality of media is also useful for thinking about Twelver Shi'i ritual life and media practices because the temporal figure of latency features very prominently in Shi'i eschatology and ritual life. Mediatic latency and the latency built into Shi'i ritual life and cosmology interact in highly significant and productive ways, reinforcing a complex of piety and ritual commemoration that nowadays is thoroughly integrated with audiovisual media practices. The media practices studied mobilize different affordances of contemporary media, such as creating contemporaneity with the non-contemporaneous and the invocation of linear progress for different religious ends.
{"title":"Latent Cosmologies, Latent Media: The Material Temporality of Twelver Shi'i Media Practices in Mumbai","authors":"P. Eisenlohr","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900186","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this essay, I argue that the temporal figure of latency is central for an understanding of the material temporalities of media. Latency as a temporal figure is built into the material functioning of sound reproduction and audiovisual media. The discussion shows how latency underpins technical processes of storing and reproducing sounds and moving images in a broad sense, while analyzing mediatic latency in Twelver Shi'i media practices in Mumbai. The focus on latency as a key temporality of media is also useful for thinking about Twelver Shi'i ritual life and media practices because the temporal figure of latency features very prominently in Shi'i eschatology and ritual life. Mediatic latency and the latency built into Shi'i ritual life and cosmology interact in highly significant and productive ways, reinforcing a complex of piety and ritual commemoration that nowadays is thoroughly integrated with audiovisual media practices. The media practices studied mobilize different affordances of contemporary media, such as creating contemporaneity with the non-contemporaneous and the invocation of linear progress for different religious ends.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"255 - 277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47361701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a900188
Marlene Schäfers
ABSTRACT:Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs of fallen militants who they respect and celebrate as martyrs. These images hold considerable power: they are able to direct speech, shape bodily comportment, and command the everyday lives of their spectators. This paper asks where this potency stems from and what effects it has. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish communities in Turkey and Europe, it argues that displays of martyrs' photographs project a Kurdish body politic in the making, enrolling both those whom they depict and those who handle them into an alternative project of sovereignty that remains under acute assault. Key to this effect is how the photographs make the dead latent in the present. On the one hand, this makes the images immensely powerful media of political mobilization. Embodying the sacrifice of lifetime made by the fallen, the images become powerful vectors for feelings of indebtedness, commitment, and dedication that make distinct demands on the disposable time of those who contemplate them. On the other hand, photography's capacity to make the absent present and thereby upset linear emplotments of time also makes it a potentially unsettling medium. As a result, photographs of martyrs become crucial sites where political belonging and commitment are fashioned, consolidated, and potentially rebelled against.
{"title":"Projecting a Body Politic: Photographs, Time, and Immortality in the Kurdish Movement","authors":"Marlene Schäfers","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900188","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs of fallen militants who they respect and celebrate as martyrs. These images hold considerable power: they are able to direct speech, shape bodily comportment, and command the everyday lives of their spectators. This paper asks where this potency stems from and what effects it has. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish communities in Turkey and Europe, it argues that displays of martyrs' photographs project a Kurdish body politic in the making, enrolling both those whom they depict and those who handle them into an alternative project of sovereignty that remains under acute assault. Key to this effect is how the photographs make the dead latent in the present. On the one hand, this makes the images immensely powerful media of political mobilization. Embodying the sacrifice of lifetime made by the fallen, the images become powerful vectors for feelings of indebtedness, commitment, and dedication that make distinct demands on the disposable time of those who contemplate them. On the other hand, photography's capacity to make the absent present and thereby upset linear emplotments of time also makes it a potentially unsettling medium. As a result, photographs of martyrs become crucial sites where political belonging and commitment are fashioned, consolidated, and potentially rebelled against.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"307 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47079285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a900189
Anoush Tamar Suni
ABSTRACT:This article attends to the material legacies of past violence through a focus on the contemporary search for buried gold in the Kurdish-majority region of Van in southeastern Turkey—gold believed to have been left behind by Armenians fleeing the 1915 Genocide. Grounded in an exploration of local narratives and practices of treasure hunting, it demonstrates how the search for buried gold illuminates the multiple, contradictory, and ambiguous ways that the violent history of the Genocide continues to animate and enchant everyday life in the region. Through a focus on the semi-illicit digging for buried gold in a post-genocide geography, this article highlights how past and present cycles of violence are sedimented into the material landscape and how memory, temporality, and the reverberations of historic crimes coalesce in the enchanted objects hidden beneath its surface. By approaching treasure hunting as an embodied interaction with the past, it argues that the search and digging for mythical buried gold is a material recognition and unearthing of the taboo and officially denied history of the destruction of the Armenian community. Furthermore, it argues that treasure hunters translate an understanding of the violent past of the Genocide into buried gold in the present—what I term "historical alchemy." The process of historical alchemy, which involves the transformation of a history of genocide into gold, demonstrates the fundamentally material quality of how the past is imbricated in the present and sedimented in the landscape. It is this material temporality—echoes of past genocide emerging from the earth as buried objects and remnants of a silenced history made physical in the present—that highlights the intrinsic links between 1915 and 2015, between the Armenian and Kurdish communities, and between ongoing cycles of violence, ruination, and dispossession.
{"title":"Historical Alchemy: Buried Gold, Buried Pasts","authors":"Anoush Tamar Suni","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900189","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article attends to the material legacies of past violence through a focus on the contemporary search for buried gold in the Kurdish-majority region of Van in southeastern Turkey—gold believed to have been left behind by Armenians fleeing the 1915 Genocide. Grounded in an exploration of local narratives and practices of treasure hunting, it demonstrates how the search for buried gold illuminates the multiple, contradictory, and ambiguous ways that the violent history of the Genocide continues to animate and enchant everyday life in the region. Through a focus on the semi-illicit digging for buried gold in a post-genocide geography, this article highlights how past and present cycles of violence are sedimented into the material landscape and how memory, temporality, and the reverberations of historic crimes coalesce in the enchanted objects hidden beneath its surface. By approaching treasure hunting as an embodied interaction with the past, it argues that the search and digging for mythical buried gold is a material recognition and unearthing of the taboo and officially denied history of the destruction of the Armenian community. Furthermore, it argues that treasure hunters translate an understanding of the violent past of the Genocide into buried gold in the present—what I term \"historical alchemy.\" The process of historical alchemy, which involves the transformation of a history of genocide into gold, demonstrates the fundamentally material quality of how the past is imbricated in the present and sedimented in the landscape. It is this material temporality—echoes of past genocide emerging from the earth as buried objects and remnants of a silenced history made physical in the present—that highlights the intrinsic links between 1915 and 2015, between the Armenian and Kurdish communities, and between ongoing cycles of violence, ruination, and dispossession.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"335 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48945421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/anq.2023.a900185
Sasha Newell
ABSTRACT:Clutter fragments the temporality of the home and storage space offers a technology of containment with which to keep these portals to the past and future open, but not openly visible. Storage space is not a spatial but a temporal solution, secreting objects that do not belong to this time until such time as they might be more appropriate. Possessors of such objects speak of being transported to specific moments of their past, or in Benjaminian fashion, of historical objects that provide a sensorial window into worlds otherwise unlived. Other future-oriented things provide access to dormant or merely imagined selves projected into Borgesian forking futures, alternate paths that owners refuse to relinquish even when their possibility is lost. Clutter, by definition out of place, is thus also extra-temporal, and untold acreage is occupied in wait for a near future when "there will be more time" to sort the debris. Storage, thus, offers a haven for "anti-kairos"—things of an inappropriate time. Indeed, the accumulation of clutter is itself an image of time, a means of understanding Bergson's durée as an unfolding expansion of heterogenous unity that envelops us. Finally, the paper considers the relationship between these spatiotemporal trajectories of objects and the expanded spacetime of households as a kind of social value in itself, but one that must be kept balanced with the more kula-like value of circulation.
{"title":"The Time of Clutter: Anti-Kairos and Storage Space in North American Domestic Life","authors":"Sasha Newell","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.a900185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.a900185","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Clutter fragments the temporality of the home and storage space offers a technology of containment with which to keep these portals to the past and future open, but not openly visible. Storage space is not a spatial but a temporal solution, secreting objects that do not belong to this time until such time as they might be more appropriate. Possessors of such objects speak of being transported to specific moments of their past, or in Benjaminian fashion, of historical objects that provide a sensorial window into worlds otherwise unlived. Other future-oriented things provide access to dormant or merely imagined selves projected into Borgesian forking futures, alternate paths that owners refuse to relinquish even when their possibility is lost. Clutter, by definition out of place, is thus also extra-temporal, and untold acreage is occupied in wait for a near future when \"there will be more time\" to sort the debris. Storage, thus, offers a haven for \"anti-kairos\"—things of an inappropriate time. Indeed, the accumulation of clutter is itself an image of time, a means of understanding Bergson's durée as an unfolding expansion of heterogenous unity that envelops us. Finally, the paper considers the relationship between these spatiotemporal trajectories of objects and the expanded spacetime of households as a kind of social value in itself, but one that must be kept balanced with the more kula-like value of circulation.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"229 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48443124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M Celebrity is an ethnography of the celebrity media industry based in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the precarious work of paparazzi and celebrity reporters working with magazines such as People and Us weekly. The book contributes to the existing literature on precarious labour in the American media industries as well as the broader field of media anthropology. It is divided into three main parts covering the labour of Latino paparazzi, the labour of white female celebrity reporters, and the content of celebrity magazines. Chapter 1 is an engaging ethnography of the everyday work of Latino paparazzi in Los Angeles, while Chapter 2 delves into the overall political economy of paparazzi images. With a focus on the death of Chris Guerra, a Latino paparazzo, after a police altercation on the job, Chapter 3 reflects on the disposability of racialized bodies in contemporary America. Chapters 4 and 5 provide, respectively, an ethnographic study of red-carpet routines and a strong analysis of the precarity of white celebrity reporters. Finally, Chapter 6 delves into the work of “body teams” in celebrity magazines, which are tasked with covering and manufacturing celebrity bodies on a daily basis, while Chapter 7 explores the power of blended couple names à la “Brangelina.” The book’s core strength lies in its detailed ethnographic attention to the racialized and gendered work of the celebrity media industry, a wellestablished theme in existing scholarship on American film and television production more broadly. Chapter 1, for instance, details how paparazzi
{"title":"Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz (review)","authors":"Chihab El Khachab","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"M Celebrity is an ethnography of the celebrity media industry based in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the precarious work of paparazzi and celebrity reporters working with magazines such as People and Us weekly. The book contributes to the existing literature on precarious labour in the American media industries as well as the broader field of media anthropology. It is divided into three main parts covering the labour of Latino paparazzi, the labour of white female celebrity reporters, and the content of celebrity magazines. Chapter 1 is an engaging ethnography of the everyday work of Latino paparazzi in Los Angeles, while Chapter 2 delves into the overall political economy of paparazzi images. With a focus on the death of Chris Guerra, a Latino paparazzo, after a police altercation on the job, Chapter 3 reflects on the disposability of racialized bodies in contemporary America. Chapters 4 and 5 provide, respectively, an ethnographic study of red-carpet routines and a strong analysis of the precarity of white celebrity reporters. Finally, Chapter 6 delves into the work of “body teams” in celebrity magazines, which are tasked with covering and manufacturing celebrity bodies on a daily basis, while Chapter 7 explores the power of blended couple names à la “Brangelina.” The book’s core strength lies in its detailed ethnographic attention to the racialized and gendered work of the celebrity media industry, a wellestablished theme in existing scholarship on American film and television production more broadly. Chapter 1, for instance, details how paparazzi","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"197 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41584779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article investigates nostalgia and mourning among former Turkish revolutionary militants, the main victims of state violence in the wake of the Turkish 1980 military coup. It understands these emotions as ethically imbued moods that are both conscious and unconscious and permeate both public discourses and the innermost spheres of former fighters. These moods pervade the everydayness of former revolutionaries, their discourses on the past and the present as well as ritualized occasions, such as anniversaries, gatherings, and commemorations. Based on fieldwork research conducted in Istanbul, this article conceptualizes these moods as inter-subjective emotional practices with a certain degree of agency that work as political and moral modes of engaging with the world. Although former revolutionaries intend these moods as practices of resistance against the ongoing state repression, this article argues that their active perpetuation does not lie in their political success in the public battle for memory and recognition, but in their ability to shape former militants’ subjectivity, invigorate their generational bond, keep alive the moral economy of revolutionary fighter, and create a community of loss. Likewise, this contribution demonstrates how revolutionary feelings of nostalgia and mourning shape a social poetics that reduces possibilities for acting in new ways on history and contributes to the creation of a community as cohesive as isolated from the rest of society. Notwithstanding the endurance of state oppression over time, this contribution warns against restraining our analysis to an unmasking of asymmetrical violence and unequal power relationships in the public sphere. It instead argues that, even in repressive contexts, it is important to investigate the symbolic codes and the political feelings that shape social actors’ subjectivities, their moral horizon and their possibilities of actions.
{"title":"“Making the wound bleed”: Nostalgia, Mourning, and Morality among Turkish Revolutionaries in Istanbul","authors":"Lorenzo d’Orsi","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0009","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article investigates nostalgia and mourning among former Turkish revolutionary militants, the main victims of state violence in the wake of the Turkish 1980 military coup. It understands these emotions as ethically imbued moods that are both conscious and unconscious and permeate both public discourses and the innermost spheres of former fighters. These moods pervade the everydayness of former revolutionaries, their discourses on the past and the present as well as ritualized occasions, such as anniversaries, gatherings, and commemorations. Based on fieldwork research conducted in Istanbul, this article conceptualizes these moods as inter-subjective emotional practices with a certain degree of agency that work as political and moral modes of engaging with the world. Although former revolutionaries intend these moods as practices of resistance against the ongoing state repression, this article argues that their active perpetuation does not lie in their political success in the public battle for memory and recognition, but in their ability to shape former militants’ subjectivity, invigorate their generational bond, keep alive the moral economy of revolutionary fighter, and create a community of loss. Likewise, this contribution demonstrates how revolutionary feelings of nostalgia and mourning shape a social poetics that reduces possibilities for acting in new ways on history and contributes to the creation of a community as cohesive as isolated from the rest of society. Notwithstanding the endurance of state oppression over time, this contribution warns against restraining our analysis to an unmasking of asymmetrical violence and unequal power relationships in the public sphere. It instead argues that, even in repressive contexts, it is important to investigate the symbolic codes and the political feelings that shape social actors’ subjectivities, their moral horizon and their possibilities of actions.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"37 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42953274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Based on ethnographic field research, this article examines the “affectional community” of Internet-based gay sports groups in Seoul, South Korea. Referring to “networks of support that do not depend on the bonds of blood or the license of the state, but that are freely chosen and nurtured” (D’Emilio 1980), such affectional communities have been vital for the emotional survival of non-normative populations such as LGBTQ people. However, with the growing number of single people as part of the process of detraditionalization (Giddens 1992), they have also become important for all individuals living in late-modernity to meet social, emotional, and financial needs that had once been met by the heterosexual family. Still, this paper argues that Korean gay men face particular challenges in creating an affectional community in a country, where they have historically been permitted only sexual (and not social) relations. They must not only overcome a primarily sex- and consumer-oriented gay culture, they must also reject romantic entanglements within the sports groups that threaten the group relationality of an affectional community based on friendship. In examining the affectional community of Koreans sports groups, this article contributes to the ongoing theorization of queer globalization (Cruz-Malave and Manalansan 2002, Povinelli and Chauncey 1999) in the non-liberal and communitarian context of East Asia. It also speaks out against the rigid separation of affect from feeling and emotion, evident in the so-called “affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007) within the humanities and social sciences, arguing that all are embodied forms of cognition.
{"title":"“Good Sweat, Bad Sweat”: The Affectional Community of Gay Sports Groups in Seoul, South Korea","authors":"J. Cho","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0008","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Based on ethnographic field research, this article examines the “affectional community” of Internet-based gay sports groups in Seoul, South Korea. Referring to “networks of support that do not depend on the bonds of blood or the license of the state, but that are freely chosen and nurtured” (D’Emilio 1980), such affectional communities have been vital for the emotional survival of non-normative populations such as LGBTQ people. However, with the growing number of single people as part of the process of detraditionalization (Giddens 1992), they have also become important for all individuals living in late-modernity to meet social, emotional, and financial needs that had once been met by the heterosexual family. Still, this paper argues that Korean gay men face particular challenges in creating an affectional community in a country, where they have historically been permitted only sexual (and not social) relations. They must not only overcome a primarily sex- and consumer-oriented gay culture, they must also reject romantic entanglements within the sports groups that threaten the group relationality of an affectional community based on friendship. In examining the affectional community of Koreans sports groups, this article contributes to the ongoing theorization of queer globalization (Cruz-Malave and Manalansan 2002, Povinelli and Chauncey 1999) in the non-liberal and communitarian context of East Asia. It also speaks out against the rigid separation of affect from feeling and emotion, evident in the so-called “affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007) within the humanities and social sciences, arguing that all are embodied forms of cognition.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"36 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47321598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This paper focuses on a particular moral category, “betrayal,” that has gained significant purchase on Kurdish public culture in Turkey. It examines the ways Kurds reconfigure the relationship between political conditions and personal guilt by using betrayal as an orienting framework expressive of this relationship. In this sense, this paper frames “betrayal” not as a label or an abstract idea, but a register of political engagement that allows Kurds to recognize the conditions as well as the ethics of their shared membership in a public. It argues that examining Kurds’ reflexive interactions about betrayal—how they debate, define, and describe it—reveals a great deal about the formative significance of moral categories to the work of negotiating group-life, a specific kind of intellectual work thus rendered salient. The goal of the paper is to point to some productive directions in the anthropological study of moral categories by foregrounding the co-indexical relations between these categories and the semiotic operations in which they gain public and ethical recognition.
{"title":"The Traitor at the Court: A Tale of Moral Categories from the House of Kurds","authors":"Özgen Korkmaz","doi":"10.1353/anq.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper focuses on a particular moral category, “betrayal,” that has gained significant purchase on Kurdish public culture in Turkey. It examines the ways Kurds reconfigure the relationship between political conditions and personal guilt by using betrayal as an orienting framework expressive of this relationship. In this sense, this paper frames “betrayal” not as a label or an abstract idea, but a register of political engagement that allows Kurds to recognize the conditions as well as the ethics of their shared membership in a public. It argues that examining Kurds’ reflexive interactions about betrayal—how they debate, define, and describe it—reveals a great deal about the formative significance of moral categories to the work of negotiating group-life, a specific kind of intellectual work thus rendered salient. The goal of the paper is to point to some productive directions in the anthropological study of moral categories by foregrounding the co-indexical relations between these categories and the semiotic operations in which they gain public and ethical recognition.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"96 1","pages":"120 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47504736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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