Turkish Politics, Research and the Last Two Years (aka Ping Pong for Dummies)

I have been wanting to come back to this space and enrich it by sharing more of where my work has taken me in the ethnographic field, particularly in the realm of traditional medicines. If only the situation were so simple and the macro and micro worlds we all swim in could really be separated.

About two and a half years ago I received a very helpful package of funding in order to carry out a project on traditional healers in modern Turkey (of various kinds, fitting various descriptions of this basically anthropological term, imposed somewhat from outside). I travelled all over Anatolia meeting all sorts of interesting characters in Aegean villages and medium sized towns with huge statues of Atatürk fit for a capital. I have a collection of fascinating field notes.

But what about the 'real life' mentioned in the subtitle of this blog? Ah well, yes that... Without devolving into too much biography, this has been a very destabilizing time for me in which I started off on a year of research leave that ran into problems in terms of funding and other practical issues. After that, the frightening and misguided attempted military coup in Turkey, in July 2016, lead to a shutdown of my main affiliation and resources. Over the course of a weekend I saw fear, violence, militarism and death plant the seeds for months and years of blowback. I lost everything I had had in Turkey, in just a matter of days.

Now, I find myself vaguely in the US academy, after moving back home. Wow. It is indeed in as big of a mess as it looked like from the outside. I get a number of emails with job listings. In a week, I probably get links to almost a hundred potential jobs and  only around 20 or 30 are long term or tenure track possiblities. Very few are even full time.

This is no joke and is far too powerful a macro force for me to deny its micro manifestation in my own work, something I am only slowly coming to full terms with, or, perhaps, only now fully integrating into my scheme of reality.

But as the Turks say 'Her şerde bir hayır var'/ There is something auspicious in every misfortune. A lot has come from all of this. For one thing, a flickering interest in indigenous studies that was picking up speed while doing research on Chicana traditional healers, has fanned into flames. I am now working with Native American young people from local tribes and beyond studying the social sicences and humanities from an entirely new perspective, growing in my ability to learn from my students. I have become more informed and influenced by the group of indigenous scholars I introduce these young people to. I find myself, like them, holding to the  insistence that cosmology, personhood and knowledge cannot be separated. 

But finding my feet, my orientation, in the wake of the domino effect that was the ghostly turn of events in the summer has not been easy. Besides being without a job and having my bank account closed after the violence of the Friday coup and its weekend denoument, I was just generally deeply troubled by all of the fear for what might happen to friends. After this explosion, I had to, of course, immediately look for new jobs and that landed me in the lap of the post-economic crisis US academy that I had been shielded from while teaching abroad.

Of course, Turkey had been protecting me from that reality, until it could no longer protect itself. But by then we had already fallen in love. What had begun as an area studies interest and a tentative job, had become a type of religious devotion to Turkology. But that is for another post.

So, here I am back on Turtle Island in these unusual circumstances and, besides the stress, what has emerged? At core, two things: coherence and authenticity. That may seem like a strange result, but this time spent on the margins of the academy has forced me into just such a place. I would find myself, in this period, swinging back and forth, some days believing that I would just have to buckle under and do exactly whatever else was doing in order to find work here, and at other times wanting to rebel entirely. In any case, there have been no magic solutions in the end. What emerged was a play of dialogical and dialectical moments that, not suprisingly, move towards a kind of synthesis. I began to see how, in my writing, a lot of the editorial criticism of my research seemed to suggest a kind of lack of authenticity. American reviewers were looking for a kind of personal voice to emerge at some point, others in less individualistic frames of mind were looking for a stronger argument. I have really come to appreciate well thought out editorial critique, something I used to hate.

But beyond that officialdom, I suppose what I most want to express here is that, in all of this, what I have learned is that, however much there is a place for institutional and research-community influence and critique, these last two years have forced me to be my own scholar. I cannot really produce anything that is fundamentally not what I think. I can no longer produce work that is, at its core, an acquiescence to a mandatory discussion that I am expected to be part of, one that seems to not really allow me any authentic scholarly agency. Instead, the process often expects that I will, with painstaking footnotes, affirm one of a ew different possible reactions to the thoughts of scholars who are my seniors. Dialogue is absolutely key; This sort of ping pong is not.

I am very clear, for example, that I want to be immersed in engaged theory. Does this mean that I hold the ant-intellectual position that only practical things matter or deserve funding? Of course not. That is a short-sighted view that ignores all the discourse built into the world we live in. It is an important observation that none of the major terror attacks carried out over the last decades have been by social scientists or people educated in the humanities. Most had studied engineering.

In any case, this is a bit of where I am at the moment. I don't hold to the view that knowledge can be mastered or seen apart from the human being and so, although it may be partial, here is the story of a human being.