Politics, Ethics, and Complicity in Turkey's Kurdistan: Anxieties of an Era
Creators: name: Korkmaz, Ozge
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: political anthropology
subject: anthropology of the Middle East
subject: ethics and morality
subject: linguistic anthropology
subject: Anthropology and Archaeology
subject: Social Sciences

description: How do we live with the consequences of our actions? And why do consequences matter? While Western morality and much of classical theory have long pointed out the significance of intentionality to social life, underscoring the intensity with which humans evaluate one another, as well as themselves, based on the perceived intentions of social actions, this dissertation centers its analysis on the question of consequences, most significantly, unintended consequences. It explores the ethical and pragmatic life of the consequentiality of social action in Turkey’s Kurdistan, where Kurds commonly ethically problematize “complicity in systemic injustices” as an ongoingly reproduced consequence of their everyday accommodations to politics. With close attention to these problematizations, I argue that an anthropological narrative that draws from an attention to consequences brings new and valuable insights into how broader theoretical categories of politics, agency, and morality are lived on the ground. In Turkey’s Kurdistan, since the mid-19th century, and increasingly so since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, local Kurdish communities have tended to conceptualize their political condition as not-normal, and unlike any other part of the country, due to historical circumstances of colonial indirect rule and state authoritarianism. Likewise, contemporary Kurdish political movement, from the early days of its inception in the 1970s, has centered its political critique of Turkish rule around the same problem, that it differently, unjustly, and unequally treats Kurdistan and the Kurdish populace. At stake in this framework is a cultural logic that sees Kurds’ everyday accommodations to the demands of politics as pragmatically and historically consequential to their own political subjugation, even though Kurds do not intend that. Using materials from twenty-three months of ethnographic research, which followed three summers of preliminary work in the predominantly Kurdish populated southwest and east regions of Turkey, I examine the variety of reflexive forms and habits that come to shape and govern social relations, and ways in which Kurds imagine and scale their own historical journey in Turkey. Although I touch on a broad range of ethical and evaluative practices that shape the Kurdish everyday life, the empirical focus of this dissertation are the problems, sensibilities, and anxieties that seem to derive their everyday force from being recognized as circumstantial and somewhat given, yet deeply rooted in and constitutive of face-to-face interactions and the dynamics of communication. Most significantly, I reflect on the social lives of a list of key ethical categories such as luck, misfortune, collaboration, and betrayal, as well as categories construed as the opposite of the first group, such as autonomy and solidarity, theorized in this dissertation as functions of a life where consequences are made to matter. The dissertation ultimately demonstrates a wide range of consequences that unintended consequences create for our notions of politics, ethics, and agency, with which they coexist.