The Turkish Republic was founded simultaneously on the ideal of universal citizenship and on acts... more The Turkish Republic was founded simultaneously on the ideal of universal citizenship and on acts of extraordinary exclusionary violence. Today, nearly a century later, the claims of minority communities and the politics of pluralism continue to ignite explosive debate. The Reckoning of Pluralism centers on the case of Turkey's Alevi community, a sizeable Muslim minority in a Sunni majority state. Alevis have seen their loyalty to the state questioned and experienced sectarian hostility, and yet their community is also championed by state ideologues as bearers of the nation's folkloric heritage.
Kabir Tambar offers a critical appraisal of the tensions of democratic pluralism. Rather than portraying pluralism as a governing ideal that loosens restrictions on minorities, he focuses on the forms of social inequality that it perpetuates and on the political vulnerabilities to which minority communities are thereby exposed. Alevis today are often summoned by political officials to publicly display their religious traditions, but pluralist tolerance extends only so far as these performances will validate rather than disturb historical ideologies of national governance and identity. Focused on the inherent ambivalence of this form of political incorporation, Tambar ultimately explores the intimate coupling of modern political belonging and violence, of political inclusion and domination, contained within the practices of pluralism.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2019
This essay examines “professions of friendship”: efforts by populations who are targeted as enemi... more This essay examines “professions of friendship”: efforts by populations who are targeted as enemies of the state to proclaim their historical fidelity to the state's foundation and preservation. Such declarations often reinscribe a rigid and often violently statist narrative of politics. The essay argues that the retrenchment of this narrative, when reissued in the name of friendship, does not simply close down political options. It seeks to embolden sentiments of moral obligation across instituted lines of enmity. These solicitations of friendship are burdened by a particular historical task: to envision a past and a future of social cohabitation in a present where its possibilities have been violently undermined and morally devalued. The essay centers on two instances that bookend the past century: the first was delivered in Istanbul by an organization speaking on behalf of Armenians living in territories claimed by the Turkish nationalist movement in 1922; the second was issued by a Kurdish Peace Mother in Diyarbakır, as a plea for an end to state violence in late 2015.
In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mournin... more In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mourning the Armenian genocide. This essay examines how the practice of criticizing historical atrocity, central to discourses of human rights, is itself institutionally regimented. Exploring the institutional impetus for critique, the essay offers a theoretical framework for understanding how oppositional groups challenge the parameters that designate the legitimate objects of critique. I focus attention on what I term an uncanny medium of critique, that is, a representational medium that makes the form of its publicity appear at once familiar and unsettling. The medium in question has been developed by the Saturday Mothers—a group that regularly gathers to publicize forcible disappearances that took place largely in Kurdish-majority provinces in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, the organization has begun to publicly commemorate the deportation and killing of Armenians in 1915. The essay analyzes how the vigils evoke even as they unsettle ideological boundaries that are constitutive of social life in the contemporary nation-state—between public and private, the political and the domestic, and the past and the present. The Saturday Mothers mobilize the discourse of kinship and motherhood that has undergirded a militarized nationalism, but they do so for the sake of claiming familial responsibility for Armenians who have been historically defined as an ethnicized enemy. The group’s practices allow us to place at the center of anthropological analysis moments of semiotic opacity, in which the medium that facilitates and undergirds social transactions becomes densely, even disruptively, apparent as a figure within that social field. With the concept of an uncanny medium, I suggest that opacity in mediation can be socially generative and put to political work.
The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling... more The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond the framework of collective obligation and responsibility. This essay examines comments delivered by a pro-Kurdish political party and a largely Kurdish mothers-of-the-disappeared group during Turkey’s Gezi Park protests of 2013. These moments of public address participated in the broader spirit of state critique on display during those demonstrations. They were noteworthy, however, for recasting the Gezi events as a late occurrence in a longer history of state violence, prefigured by a century of dispossession experienced by those who have been classed as minorities or threatened with that designation. The essay asks how these invocations of history enabled interventions into imagined futures. The commentaries were not primarily aimed at repudiating the historical judgment of minority as discriminatory or contrary to law, but instead sought to delocalize the judgment vested in the category of minority, to see in that judgment an increasingly generalized economy of state violence, and to view it as prefiguring a political community to come. [futures; politics of history; ethics; protest; minorities]
This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interro... more This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interrogating the social, affective, and material mediation of its expression. I focus on Turkey's Alevi community, for whom the encounter with modern reflexive media has proved deeply ambivalent. If available genres of public reflexive discourse enable Alevi participation in national public debate, such discursive media also sustain a disciplinary impetus, in which certain genres of argument and forms of subjectivity are valued as critical in contrast to others that are deemed to be insufficiently detached or excessively impassioned. The boundary between the critical and the uncritical, I argue, represents an ideological partition, a condition of social intelligibility, and an institutionally enforced limit to viable subjectivity. Interrogating this partitioning, I thematize a particular understanding of the politics of reflexive discourse, in which existing institutional architectures motivate the production of certain kinds of reflexive subjects at the expense of others, by disciplining affective potentials, moral sensibilities, and modes of historical consciousness.
A Conversation with Jeanette Jouili, Mucahit Bilici, Esra Özyürek, and Kabir Tambar about Islam a... more A Conversation with Jeanette Jouili, Mucahit Bilici, Esra Özyürek, and Kabir Tambar about Islam and the Culture/Religion Binary
The Turkish Republic was founded simultaneously on the ideal of universal citizenship and on acts... more The Turkish Republic was founded simultaneously on the ideal of universal citizenship and on acts of extraordinary exclusionary violence. Today, nearly a century later, the claims of minority communities and the politics of pluralism continue to ignite explosive debate. The Reckoning of Pluralism centers on the case of Turkey's Alevi community, a sizeable Muslim minority in a Sunni majority state. Alevis have seen their loyalty to the state questioned and experienced sectarian hostility, and yet their community is also championed by state ideologues as bearers of the nation's folkloric heritage.
Kabir Tambar offers a critical appraisal of the tensions of democratic pluralism. Rather than portraying pluralism as a governing ideal that loosens restrictions on minorities, he focuses on the forms of social inequality that it perpetuates and on the political vulnerabilities to which minority communities are thereby exposed. Alevis today are often summoned by political officials to publicly display their religious traditions, but pluralist tolerance extends only so far as these performances will validate rather than disturb historical ideologies of national governance and identity. Focused on the inherent ambivalence of this form of political incorporation, Tambar ultimately explores the intimate coupling of modern political belonging and violence, of political inclusion and domination, contained within the practices of pluralism.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2019
This essay examines “professions of friendship”: efforts by populations who are targeted as enemi... more This essay examines “professions of friendship”: efforts by populations who are targeted as enemies of the state to proclaim their historical fidelity to the state's foundation and preservation. Such declarations often reinscribe a rigid and often violently statist narrative of politics. The essay argues that the retrenchment of this narrative, when reissued in the name of friendship, does not simply close down political options. It seeks to embolden sentiments of moral obligation across instituted lines of enmity. These solicitations of friendship are burdened by a particular historical task: to envision a past and a future of social cohabitation in a present where its possibilities have been violently undermined and morally devalued. The essay centers on two instances that bookend the past century: the first was delivered in Istanbul by an organization speaking on behalf of Armenians living in territories claimed by the Turkish nationalist movement in 1922; the second was issued by a Kurdish Peace Mother in Diyarbakır, as a plea for an end to state violence in late 2015.
In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mournin... more In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mourning the Armenian genocide. This essay examines how the practice of criticizing historical atrocity, central to discourses of human rights, is itself institutionally regimented. Exploring the institutional impetus for critique, the essay offers a theoretical framework for understanding how oppositional groups challenge the parameters that designate the legitimate objects of critique. I focus attention on what I term an uncanny medium of critique, that is, a representational medium that makes the form of its publicity appear at once familiar and unsettling. The medium in question has been developed by the Saturday Mothers—a group that regularly gathers to publicize forcible disappearances that took place largely in Kurdish-majority provinces in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, the organization has begun to publicly commemorate the deportation and killing of Armenians in 1915. The essay analyzes how the vigils evoke even as they unsettle ideological boundaries that are constitutive of social life in the contemporary nation-state—between public and private, the political and the domestic, and the past and the present. The Saturday Mothers mobilize the discourse of kinship and motherhood that has undergirded a militarized nationalism, but they do so for the sake of claiming familial responsibility for Armenians who have been historically defined as an ethnicized enemy. The group’s practices allow us to place at the center of anthropological analysis moments of semiotic opacity, in which the medium that facilitates and undergirds social transactions becomes densely, even disruptively, apparent as a figure within that social field. With the concept of an uncanny medium, I suggest that opacity in mediation can be socially generative and put to political work.
The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling... more The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond the framework of collective obligation and responsibility. This essay examines comments delivered by a pro-Kurdish political party and a largely Kurdish mothers-of-the-disappeared group during Turkey’s Gezi Park protests of 2013. These moments of public address participated in the broader spirit of state critique on display during those demonstrations. They were noteworthy, however, for recasting the Gezi events as a late occurrence in a longer history of state violence, prefigured by a century of dispossession experienced by those who have been classed as minorities or threatened with that designation. The essay asks how these invocations of history enabled interventions into imagined futures. The commentaries were not primarily aimed at repudiating the historical judgment of minority as discriminatory or contrary to law, but instead sought to delocalize the judgment vested in the category of minority, to see in that judgment an increasingly generalized economy of state violence, and to view it as prefiguring a political community to come. [futures; politics of history; ethics; protest; minorities]
This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interro... more This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interrogating the social, affective, and material mediation of its expression. I focus on Turkey's Alevi community, for whom the encounter with modern reflexive media has proved deeply ambivalent. If available genres of public reflexive discourse enable Alevi participation in national public debate, such discursive media also sustain a disciplinary impetus, in which certain genres of argument and forms of subjectivity are valued as critical in contrast to others that are deemed to be insufficiently detached or excessively impassioned. The boundary between the critical and the uncritical, I argue, represents an ideological partition, a condition of social intelligibility, and an institutionally enforced limit to viable subjectivity. Interrogating this partitioning, I thematize a particular understanding of the politics of reflexive discourse, in which existing institutional architectures motivate the production of certain kinds of reflexive subjects at the expense of others, by disciplining affective potentials, moral sensibilities, and modes of historical consciousness.
A Conversation with Jeanette Jouili, Mucahit Bilici, Esra Özyürek, and Kabir Tambar about Islam a... more A Conversation with Jeanette Jouili, Mucahit Bilici, Esra Özyürek, and Kabir Tambar about Islam and the Culture/Religion Binary
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Books by Kabir Tambar
Kabir Tambar offers a critical appraisal of the tensions of democratic pluralism. Rather than portraying pluralism as a governing ideal that loosens restrictions on minorities, he focuses on the forms of social inequality that it perpetuates and on the political vulnerabilities to which minority communities are thereby exposed. Alevis today are often summoned by political officials to publicly display their religious traditions, but pluralist tolerance extends only so far as these performances will validate rather than disturb historical ideologies of national governance and identity. Focused on the inherent ambivalence of this form of political incorporation, Tambar ultimately explores the intimate coupling of modern political belonging and violence, of political inclusion and domination, contained within the practices of pluralism.
Papers by Kabir Tambar
Book Reviews by Kabir Tambar
Talks by Kabir Tambar
Kabir Tambar offers a critical appraisal of the tensions of democratic pluralism. Rather than portraying pluralism as a governing ideal that loosens restrictions on minorities, he focuses on the forms of social inequality that it perpetuates and on the political vulnerabilities to which minority communities are thereby exposed. Alevis today are often summoned by political officials to publicly display their religious traditions, but pluralist tolerance extends only so far as these performances will validate rather than disturb historical ideologies of national governance and identity. Focused on the inherent ambivalence of this form of political incorporation, Tambar ultimately explores the intimate coupling of modern political belonging and violence, of political inclusion and domination, contained within the practices of pluralism.