How does a protest last? Rituals of visibility, disappearances under custody, and the Saturday Mothers in Turkey

Abstract

Organizing weekly silent sit-in protests since the mid-1990s, the families of the disappeared created Turkey's longest-lasting civil disobedience movement, known as the Saturday Mothers. Ritualizing their resistance, the group maintained the feeling of solidarity among its participants, attracted spectators, and ensured public visibility. Yet, as this protest form became popular, the participants felt uncomfortable with how they were represented in the wider public, especially how they were reduced to the spectacle of suffering in official and popular discourses. Thus, they often found themselves grappling with the tension between their desire to become visible and their refusal to be represented as a public spectacle of mothers' suffering. Rather than solely focusing on material and spiritual resources of the movement, activists' meaningmaking processes, or the state's tactics to end the movement, this article introduces the analytics of ritual and spectacle to highlight the ongoing negotiations between protestors' subjectivity, collective action, popular representations of the protest, and state violence. The productive tension between ritualized protest and its spectacularized lives suggests a need to revise anthropological theories about progressive social movements that juxtapose the hidden versus public, the individual versus collective, and the institutionalized versus spontaneous forms of resistance.

Disappearances, dissident memory and magic: Sandya Ekneligoda’s struggle for justice

“…There is a long tradition of women family members of the disappeared utilising prominent public spaces to make visible their disappeared loved ones, whether it is the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (Bouvard, 1994), Pratap Park in Kashmir (Zia, 2018) or Galatasaray Square in Turkey (Can, 2022). Sandya's protest in front of the Presidential Secretariat in 2019 reminded me of Hernan Vidal's photograph of two Chilean women who chained themselves to the railings of the Chilean Congress on 18th April 1979, reproduced in Michael Taussig's (1990) 'Violence and Resistance in the Americas'.…”

“…This reality inevitably shapes the modes, forms and visual aesthetics of protests and activism around disappearances, which tend to be remarkably similar. Almost without exception, public protests in contexts of mass disappearances are dominated by silent or weeping and wailing women carrying images of their disappeared children or husbands (Bouvard, 1994;Can, 2022;Zia, 2018). Thus, motherhood, mourning and victimhood are the dominant tropes and idioms that are time and again mobilised in these struggles for memory-truth-justice.…”