Articles by Erol Saglam
History and Anthropology, 2023
May narratives of treasures be interrelated to remembrances of past societal violence? Attending ... more May narratives of treasures be interrelated to remembrances of past societal violence? Attending to imaginations of and hunts for treasures across seemingly natural interfaces, this article explores these practices not simply as quests for material riches but as occasions through which past societal violence is recounted in the present across human and non-human assemblages. The article engages with two interrelated domains of scholarly debates. The first is the emergent field of scholarly discussions and presumptions about the ways in which past conviviality, displacement, and violence (both by civilian groups and state forces) are remembered by ordinary people who identify as part of the Turkish-Muslim majority in contemporary Turkey. The second, and much wider, scholarly debate the article aims to contribute to focuses on the way non-human entities exert a forceful (psychosocial and political) effect on social relations, which, in turn, invites us to rethink the interrelationship between humans and non-human entities.
Social Research Journal: An International Quarterly, 2022
The transfigurations of conspiracy theories from the late 19th century to today as well as its so... more The transfigurations of conspiracy theories from the late 19th century to today as well as its sociopolitical ramifications in the Turkish context.
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2022
Drawing on an ethnographic research on an archaic Greek variety spoken in Trabzon, in northeast T... more Drawing on an ethnographic research on an archaic Greek variety spoken in Trabzon, in northeast Turkey, this article explores how Greek heritage persists in different modalities among communities identifying as Turkish and professing to Islam in contemporary Turkey and reflects on the afterlives and transfigurations of Greek heritage. The article illustrates how, despite its public invisibility, (fragments and transfigurations of) Greek heritage continues to permeate and affect the social lives of local communities in the Trabzon region. It argues how heritage should not be sought solely across material traces and remnants, how intangible heritages take peculiar shapes in localized contexts in relation to members’ wider socio-economic and political engagements in the present, and how such socio-cultural transfigurations of heritages require researchers to be attuned to discreet, somewhat mythical, non-public, and elusive aspects of local socialities.
International Journal of Law in Context, 2022
Drawing an ethnographic research in Istanbul, Turkey, this article traces the causes and implicat... more Drawing an ethnographic research in Istanbul, Turkey, this article traces the causes and implications of the politicization of bureaucrats in the context of authoritarianization. It argues that politicization of bureaucrats cannot solely be taken as a reflection of the erosion of bureaucratic autonomy and capacity but must be explored further to reveal how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian pressure as well socio-legal destabilisations to preserve their institutional ethos. The article generates insights into the fashionings of political subjectivities and agency by bureaucrats through their labouring in the face of authoritarian interventions, legal disruptions, and the increasing interactions with the citizenry. Doing this, my objective is to shed light into the everyday workings of authoritarian state and to get a better picture of the way the law is ‘made real’ (Latour 2002) across mundane encounters between bureaucrats and the citizenry.
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 2021
Drawing on anthropological research conducted with nationalist communities in northeast Turkey, t... more Drawing on anthropological research conducted with nationalist communities in northeast Turkey, this article reflects on methodological, analytical, and ethical questions arising out of ethnographic engagements with communities that support anti-democratic and authoritarian policies, circulate xenophobic or racist discourses and conspiracy theories, and participate in vigilante violence against minorities and political dissenters. Focusing on how I managed to gain access and establish rapport with my interlocutors, despite our different ethico-political ideals and goals, the article aims to underline how the frank acknowledgement of this irreconcilability allows us to get a better grasp of the violent nationalisms we live by and how they can generate new methodological, theoretical and ethical pathways for future research.
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2021
Études Arméniennes Contemporaines, 2021
Drawing on ethnographic data, this article strives to attend to these questions arising out of th... more Drawing on ethnographic data, this article strives to attend to these questions arising out of the “discreet” preservation of Greek among Turkish-nationalist communities and explores the changing meanings of home/land in relation to this discreet cultural heritage.
Anthropology Today, 2020
This article presents ethnographic insights into everyday lives of conspiratorial narratives thro... more This article presents ethnographic insights into everyday lives of conspiratorial narratives through an ethnographic study with ultra-nationalist men in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on the findings of this research, I suggest pursuing conspiratorial discourses not solely through their (anti-)truth qualities but first trace them as social practices through which masculine subjectivities and socialities are engendered. I then explore how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives forge agency and political subjectivity for the men involved as well issuing forth socio-political effects such as, vigilantism and paramilitary violence. Through their circulation of conspiratorial narratives and everyday engagements with vigilantism and extralegal violence, this article contends, men reconfigure sovereignty and the way the state operates in contemporary Turkey. The findings of this research urges studies not to focus on epistemological shortcomings of conspiratorial narratives or strategies to debunk them, such as fact-checking, which presume that the exposure of ‘the truth’ would lead to the dissolution of ‘untruthful’ conspiracies. I rather suggest researchers to attend to the particular forms conspiracies take in concrete sites, how they mould political subjectivities and social groups, and reconfigure the ways state operates alongside the law in similar other settings.
OpenDemocracy, 2020
Like viruses, conspiracy theories are socially contagious and hard to stop once set in motion. Th... more Like viruses, conspiracy theories are socially contagious and hard to stop once set in motion. Their primary function, however, is not the establishment of an alternative, epistemologically-coherent assertion. Rather their circulation instantiates agency, subjectivity, and social groups while generating socio-political reverberations. We must, hence, understand what they do to us.
Allegra Lab, Afterlives Thematic Thread, 2020
Drawing on an ethnographic research in Trabzon, northeast Turkey, I explore the interrelations be... more Drawing on an ethnographic research in Trabzon, northeast Turkey, I explore the interrelations between the discreet presence of Greek heritage and the enchantments of local topographies. I particularly focus on imaginations of treasures across seemingly "natural" interfaces to discuss how abjected memories "live on" and why we must attend to their afterlives.
Anthropology of the Middle East, 2018
Drawing on an ethnographic research in some rural communities Turkey, this article provides insig... more Drawing on an ethnographic research in some rural communities Turkey, this article provides insights into the diversity of Islamic pieties and their relations to religious norms. An exploration of everyday Islamic practices in the area demonstrates how piety can take peculiar forms within which norms are both publicly and socially upheld and yet also hollowed out. Among Muslim men, piety emerges as an aggregate of reiterative practices exterior to the pious self. Highlighting the aestheticised and ritualised state of these engagements with Islam in the Turkish context contributes to the ongoing discussion of the different modalities and relations among practices of piety, pious subjectivities, and ethics.
Book Chapters by Erol Saglam
The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies, 2023
This chapter explores the critical potential unlocked by the deployment of psychosocial perspecti... more This chapter explores the critical potential unlocked by the deployment of psychosocial perspectives across ethnographic research projects and discusses the pathways for a more ethically sound and reflexive research praxis. The arguments I raised throughout the chapter draw on my research experiences since 2015 across different sites in Turkey and demonstrate how ethnographic praxis benefits from psychosocial theories and outlook both to refashion the analytics and the methodological tools we utilize.
Politics of Culture, 2021
This article explores the practices and discourses that configure the contours of public culture ... more This article explores the practices and discourses that configure the contours of public culture in contemporary Turkey. I argue that, through discretion of certain socio-cultural differences, Turkish masculine subjects navigate across limitations of the public sphere and appropriate Turkish identity in different forms without necessarily renouncing these distinctions altogether.
The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality, 2020
This chapter by Erol Saglam builds off of ethnographic field research in Turkey and explores the... more This chapter by Erol Saglam builds off of ethnographic field research in Turkey and explores the linguistic, spatial, and corporeal methods and forms that masculinity and manhood undergirding heteronormativity. It attends to the rather minute details of the everyday and how seemingly trivial movements, presences, exposures, encounters, and utterances play a constitutive role in the formation of heteronormative masculinities in public settings. Moving from this, the chapter shines light on the ways that this impacts (and is impacted by) the sociopolitical situation in Turkey, providing nuanced insight into the everyday examples of these realities and practices.
New Voices in Psychosocial Studies, 2019
Ethnographic research has long been associated with the analysis of social structures and abstain... more Ethnographic research has long been associated with the analysis of social structures and abstained from paying due attention to more psychic dynamics, such as fantasies, dreams, hauntings, and other unconscious forces, which have conventionally been associated with individual(ised) processes. Drawing on an ethnographic research I conducted in Turkey, this chapter explores the potential unlocked through the incorporation of such individual elements into social analyses. The essay argues that bridging the social and the psychic presents a more comprehensive outlook and helps us understand how the interplay between the social and the individual unfolds as well as how subjectivities are forged through this interplay. It also allows us to forge new methodologies and a new language to trace socio-cultural experiences that were largely left unaccounted for. This chapter pursues the case of haunted treasures and hunts they seem to induce as an example through which psychosocial imaginaries are proven useful in ethnographic research—both methodologically and theoretically.
Book Reviews by Erol Saglam
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2023
Sertaç Sehlikoglu's Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul is an ethnograp... more Sertaç Sehlikoglu's Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul is an ethnographically rich and multilayered contribution to contemporary anthropological debates on subject formation. The book generates insights into the gendered (re)production of normative orders and the cultivation of agency at the intersection of piety and everyday politics. Sehlikoglu's exploration of women's engagements extends these debates through its attention to the ordinary and yet often overlooked modalities of subjectivity formation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, conducted in 2008 and 2011–2012 across multiple sites in contemporary Istanbul, Working Out Desire focusses explicitly on the ways in which women engage with sport not solely as a process of reshaping their bodies but also as a way of constituting themselves as capable and willful subjects in a changing socio-economic landscape. The ethnography skilfully moves between experiences of wider political magnitudes (such as the rise of political Islam and the consolidation of neoliberal logic where cost-benefit calculation reigns supreme and subjects are posited first and foremost as consumers) and an examination of how nascent social forces are renegotiated and acted upon by individuals and smaller groups. The reader is presented with an account of ‘women's self imaginations, with what women imagine themselves doing, and with how those aspirations are formed and collectively articulated toward triggering the creation of a new market’ (p. 9).
NORMA International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 2018
Fatherhood in transition: masculinity, identity and everyday life, by Thomas Johansson and Jesper... more Fatherhood in transition: masculinity, identity and everyday life, by Thomas Johansson and Jesper Andreasson, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 238 pp., $108 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-137-58952-1.
Calls for Papers by Erol Saglam
This panel seeks to explore these potentialities by focusing on how the topographies and material... more This panel seeks to explore these potentialities by focusing on how the topographies and materialities in which one dwells affects the remembering or forgetting of the past and the forgings of identity. It explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting as indicated not only by the unearthly practices of magic, curse and haunting, but also by daily and mundane-earthly-engagements such as farming and burial. The panel draws on ethnographically grounded accounts that highlight how the practice of unearthing-in both senses of rendering unearthly and digging up from the earth-might offer a way into the analysis of publicly unacknowledged histories of political violence, abjection, displacement, and destruction as well as individual or collective struggles to assimilate them.
Panel convened as part of the RAI2020 conference themed "Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Pa... more Panel convened as part of the RAI2020 conference themed "Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future" (4-7 June 2020, London)
Short abstract:
This panel explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting through both earthly (e.g., farming, ruination, burial) and unearthly (e.g., magic, curse, haunting) engagements with land, focusing on how they acknowledge past political violence that otherwise seems unacknowledged.
Long abstract:
Postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and feminist theorists have highlighted the divergences between nationalist historiographies and other ways of remembering or forgetting. Challenging universalist and homogenous approaches to time and narrative, these theorists have attended to the localized, incoherent, and fragmented ways in which individual and/or collective memories operate, citing as examples trauma victims or subaltern communities whose relations to the past are severely curtailed through colonial-modernist framings. This postcolonial, psychoanalytic and feminist attention has been characteristically charged with material and spatial import; place, geography, topography, objects and the body have been explored as the media of the localizations, incoherences and fragmentations in question. Despite this interest in materiality and space, the conventions of narrative-based remembering or forgetting have yet to be deprived of their hegemonic status, as affective potentialities unassimilable within the contours of memories qua narratives remain underexplored. This panel seeks to explore these potentialities by focusing on how the land in which one dwells affects the remembering or forgetting of the past and the forgings of identity. It explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting as indicated not only by the unearthly practices of magic, curse and haunting, but also daily and mundane—earthly—engagements such as farming and burial. The panel comprises ethnographically grounded accounts that highlight how the practice of unearthing—in both senses of rendering unearthly and digging up from the earth—might offer a way into the analysis of publicly unacknowledged histories of political violence and individual or collective struggles to assimilate them.
Discussant: Dr Yael Navaro (Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Further details and information on how to submit a paper: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2020/p/8359
Call For Papers by Erol Saglam
This half-day in-person workshop brings two researchers, Dr Erol Saglam (BGSMCS, Germany) and Dr ... more This half-day in-person workshop brings two researchers, Dr Erol Saglam (BGSMCS, Germany) and Dr Deniz Yonucu (Newcastle University, UK) together with ten doctoral students to explore the reverberations of ethnographic research in contexts that are plagued by suspicion, surveillance, and violence. It directly tackles how such engagements force researchers to rethink the anthropological conventions around ethics as well as theoretical articulations around statecraft, agency, and subjectivity.
Applicants should send a short bio (200 words max), an abstract (500 words max) of their doctoral research projects as well as a few questions pertaining to the workshop theme by November 1. Accepted participants are to be informed by November 7.
November 15, 2021, 1.30-5-30 pm
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Articles by Erol Saglam
Book Chapters by Erol Saglam
Book Reviews by Erol Saglam
Calls for Papers by Erol Saglam
Short abstract:
This panel explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting through both earthly (e.g., farming, ruination, burial) and unearthly (e.g., magic, curse, haunting) engagements with land, focusing on how they acknowledge past political violence that otherwise seems unacknowledged.
Long abstract:
Postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and feminist theorists have highlighted the divergences between nationalist historiographies and other ways of remembering or forgetting. Challenging universalist and homogenous approaches to time and narrative, these theorists have attended to the localized, incoherent, and fragmented ways in which individual and/or collective memories operate, citing as examples trauma victims or subaltern communities whose relations to the past are severely curtailed through colonial-modernist framings. This postcolonial, psychoanalytic and feminist attention has been characteristically charged with material and spatial import; place, geography, topography, objects and the body have been explored as the media of the localizations, incoherences and fragmentations in question. Despite this interest in materiality and space, the conventions of narrative-based remembering or forgetting have yet to be deprived of their hegemonic status, as affective potentialities unassimilable within the contours of memories qua narratives remain underexplored. This panel seeks to explore these potentialities by focusing on how the land in which one dwells affects the remembering or forgetting of the past and the forgings of identity. It explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting as indicated not only by the unearthly practices of magic, curse and haunting, but also daily and mundane—earthly—engagements such as farming and burial. The panel comprises ethnographically grounded accounts that highlight how the practice of unearthing—in both senses of rendering unearthly and digging up from the earth—might offer a way into the analysis of publicly unacknowledged histories of political violence and individual or collective struggles to assimilate them.
Discussant: Dr Yael Navaro (Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Further details and information on how to submit a paper: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2020/p/8359
Call For Papers by Erol Saglam
Applicants should send a short bio (200 words max), an abstract (500 words max) of their doctoral research projects as well as a few questions pertaining to the workshop theme by November 1. Accepted participants are to be informed by November 7.
November 15, 2021, 1.30-5-30 pm
Short abstract:
This panel explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting through both earthly (e.g., farming, ruination, burial) and unearthly (e.g., magic, curse, haunting) engagements with land, focusing on how they acknowledge past political violence that otherwise seems unacknowledged.
Long abstract:
Postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and feminist theorists have highlighted the divergences between nationalist historiographies and other ways of remembering or forgetting. Challenging universalist and homogenous approaches to time and narrative, these theorists have attended to the localized, incoherent, and fragmented ways in which individual and/or collective memories operate, citing as examples trauma victims or subaltern communities whose relations to the past are severely curtailed through colonial-modernist framings. This postcolonial, psychoanalytic and feminist attention has been characteristically charged with material and spatial import; place, geography, topography, objects and the body have been explored as the media of the localizations, incoherences and fragmentations in question. Despite this interest in materiality and space, the conventions of narrative-based remembering or forgetting have yet to be deprived of their hegemonic status, as affective potentialities unassimilable within the contours of memories qua narratives remain underexplored. This panel seeks to explore these potentialities by focusing on how the land in which one dwells affects the remembering or forgetting of the past and the forgings of identity. It explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting as indicated not only by the unearthly practices of magic, curse and haunting, but also daily and mundane—earthly—engagements such as farming and burial. The panel comprises ethnographically grounded accounts that highlight how the practice of unearthing—in both senses of rendering unearthly and digging up from the earth—might offer a way into the analysis of publicly unacknowledged histories of political violence and individual or collective struggles to assimilate them.
Discussant: Dr Yael Navaro (Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Further details and information on how to submit a paper: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/rai2020/p/8359
Applicants should send a short bio (200 words max), an abstract (500 words max) of their doctoral research projects as well as a few questions pertaining to the workshop theme by November 1. Accepted participants are to be informed by November 7.
November 15, 2021, 1.30-5-30 pm
WORKSHOP ORGANIZED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE EASA NETWORK,
ANTHROPOLOGY OF CRIME & CRIMINALIZATION (ANTHROCRIME)