No abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2005 to February 2007, and March and August 2008) in Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey, this article explores the conceptual intersection of recent anthropological literature on space, neoliberalism and resistance to study the affective life of politics in the context of the war between the Partiye Karkêren Kurdistan and the Turkish State in the 1990s. Offering a contribution to regional studies on the neoliberal restructuring of the urban space and to the anthropology of resistance, this article seeks to make ‘the political’ into a conceptual thread. The article deploys this approach to think through dissonant affects at a site where uncountable deaths are woven into the neoliberal restructuring of space, yet denied through the form that such governance takes.

Against anthropological notions of "illness narratives" and "social suffering" as the responsible reception of trauma, this article formulates possible directions in which to expand trauma's conceptual framework so as to respond ethnographically to affective ways of understanding memory, critical agency, and political belonging. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with militarily displaced Kurdish communities in Diyarbakır, in Kurdistan, in Turkey, this article addresses the psychological and political states of spatiotemporal displacement. Taking the encounter of two bereaved Kurdish mothers with antidepressants and antipsychotics as its object of inquiry, the article analyzes the affective state of feeling gej ("spaced-out," in Kurdish), making the case that in this colonial setting of necropolitical destruction and displacement, feeling spaced-out is an assertion of political critique. Such fugitive manifestations of colonial wounding reveal not only the constitution of a medical space of informal economic traffic and diagnostic intervention but also transient states through which bereaved Kurdish mothers actively undertake their own constitution and engage with decolonial imaginaries to sustain mental health. These noncathartic states need not be organized, collective, or even resistant in any standard sense to be considered as a form of outrage at colonial oppression and as expressions of dissent.

How can the Armenian genocide be considered in terms of its ecological roots and remnants? Umut Yıldırım explores the more-than-human flora and fauna indigenous to the banks of the Tigris river in Upper Mesopotamia — in particular, centenarian mulberry trees — as resistant roots that register the evidentiary ecologies of the Armenian genocide through the Turkish state’s denialist present and its ongoing war against the Kurds.

Umut Yıldırım’s introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.