Spaced-Out States

Abstract

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.

Decolonizing Middle East anthropology

“…They document, too, the work of care in situations of state violence and repudiation (Arıcan, 2021;Wick, 2023;Zengin, 2019). At the same time, political practice and expression-especially by women-can take forms that do not fit as easily into liberal models of resistance or expression (Ihmoud, 2019;Li, 2019;Yıldırım, 2021).…”

“…They document, too, the work of care in situations of state violence and repudiation (Arıcan, 2021; Wick, 2023; Zengin, 2019). At the same time, political practice and expression—especially by women—can take forms that do not fit as easily into liberal models of resistance or expression (Ihmoud, 2019; Li, 2019; Yıldırım, 2021). Important for the next century will be understanding how capitalism, racism, and climate crisis intersect (Hage, 2017), how people experience environmental crisis and organize for healthier communities and futures (Farmer, 2023; Meneley, 2021), and how they scrape by in ecologies defined by war (Khayyat, 2022).…”

Resistant ecologies

“…Recent ethnographic work in the region has shown how war is present and lived beyond the violent event. In Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, war is encountered, experienced, expressed, and inhabited in urban (infra)structures (Bou Akar, 2018; Nucho, 2016), (military) waste (Al‐Mohammad, 2007; Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2020; Touhouliotis, 2018), politics and time (Hermez, 2017), embodiment (Açıksöz, 2020), and affect (Navaro, 2017; Yıldırım, 2021). Writing about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Aretxaga (1997, p. 4) observes, “Peace and war are not so much two opposed states of being as they are multi‐faceted, ambiguous, mutually imbricated areas of struggle.” And as Mbembe (2002, p. 267) provocatively puts it, “Getting beyond a consideration of its empirical aspects … the state of war … should in fact be conceived of as a general cultural experience that shapes identities, just as the family, the school, and other social institutions do.”…”