Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey

Sacrificial Limbs

Sacrificial Limbs

MASCULINITY, DISABILITY, AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN TURKEY

Salih Can Açıksöz

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 by Salih Can Açıksöz

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Names: Açıksöz, Salih Can, 1976- author.

Title: Sacrificial limbs : masculinity, disability, and political violence in Turkey / Salih Can Açıksöz.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019015012 (print) | LCCN 2019018670 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520973350 (Epub) | ISBN 9780520305298 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520305304 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Disabled veterans—Turkey—Social conditions—20th century. | Disabled veterans—Turkey—Social conditions—21st century. | Political violence—Turkey.

Classification: LCC UB365.T8 (ebook) | LCC UB365.T8 A27 2020 (print) | DDC 362.4086/9709561—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015012

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For Mavi

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface: Entering a Gray Zone

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 • Being-on-the-Mountains

2 • The Two Sovereignties: Masculinity and the State

3 • Of Gazis and Beggars

4 • Communities of Loss

5 • Prosthetic Revenge

6 • Prosthetic Debts

Epilogue: Bodies and Temporalities of Political Violence

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

A conscript resting in the mountains, 1993.

Satellite image showing spatial inscription of sovereign violence in Şemdinli, Hakkari.

Soldiers on a captured hill.

Conscripts marching, 1996.

A symbolic military service ceremony for men with disabilities.

A pro-PKK protest.

CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu visits injured soldiers at the TSK Rehabilitation and Care Center.

2018 Gazis’ Day commemoration at Taksim Square.

A young man begging on the Galata Bridge.

Martyrs’ gallery.

Ramadan charity sacks.

Antigovernment protests at a martyr’s funeral in Manisa.

Edirnekapı Martyrs’ Cemetery.

Milliyet newspaper, June 5, 1999.

The fifth anniversary of Hrant Dink’s murder.

A prosthetic protest during the Öcalan trial, June 29, 1999.

A prosthetics company’s store window display.

Milliyet newspaper, October 20, 2014.

Firefighters praying for the martyrs inside the 15 July Martyrs Memorial.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is often said that a director’s first film is always somewhat autobiographical. The same can be said for ethnographies. This book is a product of being a lifelong witness to political and state violence in Turkey. It is an effort to confront and come to terms with the destructive and generative effects of that violence, which I (along with many others) have encountered repeatedly over the course of my life.

First and foremost, I am grateful to all my interlocutors, who shared their tea, cigarettes, pain, and joy with me. I can only hope that I’ve done justice to their stories.

I embarked on this project during my years as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. I owe thanks to my advisor, Kamran Asdar Ali, and dissertation committee members, Kathleen Stewart, Ann Cvetkovich, Pauline Turner Strong, and John Hartigan, for their mentorship. I am grateful to my cherished friends Hişyar Özsoy, Ruken Şengül, and Halide Velioğlu. This project has been deeply inspired by many stimulating insomniac conversations with them. I also thank fellow graduate school travelers Calvin Jones, Mathangi Krishnamurty, Ken MacLeish, Mariana Mora, Ömer Özcan, Mubbashir Rizvi, Ali Şengül, Ufuk Soyöz, and Raja Swamy for their intellectual and emotional camaraderie. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the memory of the late Özlem Okur, whom I will always remember with a deep sense of love and loss.

I am grateful to many colleagues across various institutions for their friendship and collegial support. Jonathan Glasser, Gül Özyeğin, Sibel Zandi-Sayek, and Ayfer Karakaya-Stump generously welcomed me to the College of William and Mary during my Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship year. I had many wonderful colleagues and students in the departments of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Anthropology, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. I am especially thankful to Sapana Doshi, Jamie Lee, Adela Licona, Tracey Osborne, Brian Silverstein, and Susan Stryker for enriching my life in Tucson as friends and colleagues.

UCLA is the most stimulating and supportive academic environment that I have ever known. I am indebted to all my colleagues and friends in the Department of Anthropology and beyond for the various ways they have supported and intellectually nourished me over the past three years. I would especially like to acknowledge a couple of beloved friends. Jason Throop has been a source of great advice and holds responsibility for introducing me to Kate Marshall, the editor of this book. Laurie Hart and Philippe Bourgois have provided a sense of home in Los Angeles; not only that, they also graciously read an earlier draft of this book and shared their insightful feedback. Aomar Boum and Norma Mendoza-Denton have generously opened their home to my partner and me during our difficult arrival in Los Angeles. I am very fortunate to have Aslı Bali, Jessica Cattelino, Erin Debenport, Alessandro Duranti, Laura Gomez, Akhil Gupta, Sondra Hale, Purnima Mankekar, Elinor Ochs, Sherry Ortner, Jemima Pierre, Sherene Razack, Michael Rothberg, Susan Slyomovics, Shannon Speed, Tim Taylor, Yasemin Yıldız, and Noah Zatz as friends and colleagues. Finally, I thank all the participants of the interdisciplinary Mind, Medicine, and Culture discussion group for enriching my thinking on several of the issues that I tackle in this book.

Various institutions funded the research and writing of this project: the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I am thankful to all of them.

Earlier versions of portions of this book appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethnologie Française, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Journal of Turkish and Ottoman Studies, and the edited volume Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures. Chapter 6 was originally written for the Wenner-Gren Disability Worlds symposium, and a later, expanded version of it is included in the forthcoming special issue of Current Anthropology. I would like to thank the editors, guest editors, and anonymous reviewers of these publications for their feedback. In particular, many thanks to Faye Ginsburg, Banu Gökarıksel, Seth Messinger, Gül Özyeğin, Rayna Rapp, and Kent Schull. The following people also merit special thanks for reading and commenting on earlier versions of parts of this book: Hannah Appel, Sherine Hamdy, Emma Varley, and Scott Webel.

Parts of this book were presented at panels, symposia, and workshops at various institutions. I am especially grateful for the invitations from the Wenner-Gren Disability Worlds symposium, the Military Bodies workshop at the University of Michigan, the State of Democracy in Turkey conference at the London School of Economics, and the Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches in the Field of Turkish Studies conference jointly organized by Northwestern University and the Institute of Turkish Studies. I would like to extend my thanks to the members of the Reproductive Health Working Group (RHWG) who attended the annual meetings in Istanbul, Beirut, Aleppo, Muscat, and Tunis where I presented rough drafts of parts of this book.

I would like to thank my editor, Kate Marshall, for being supportive of this project from the very start and Enrique Ochoa-Kaup at UC Press for answering my endless questions. My gratitude goes to my amazing reviewers Esra Özyürek, Chris Dole, and Elif Babül. This book greatly benefited from their constructive criticism and insightful suggestions. I owe thanks to Theresa Truax-Gisch, who meticulously edited the entire manuscript and made substantive suggestions to improve the flow of the text. I thank Sinan Bilgenoğlu for capturing several key images with his professional photographic eye and the artist Hakan Topal for allowing me to use an image from his Sceneries exhibition. I am grateful to the artist İsmet Doğan for granting me permission to use his impactful work as a cover image.

I want to thank a number of people who shaped my thinking long before I started this project. Belgin Tekçe, who introduced me to medical anthropology and the Reproductive Health Working Group, deserves my deep gratitude as a lifelong interlocutor. I also extend my appreciation to the late Dicle Koğacıoğlu and the late Ferhunde Özbay and to Nükhet Sirman, Nazan Üstündağ, Çağlar Keyder, Ayşe Öncü, Meltem Ahıska, Suna Ertuğrul, and Ferda Keskin.

During my fieldwork, I found fun and solace in my old friends in Istanbul: Nafiz Akşehirlioğlu, Berk and Elif Balçık, Can Belge, Özgür Ergüney, and Elif Özkılıç. Thank you for being such wonderful friends through thick and thin. In Los Angeles, I thank Sinan Olcayto for long conversations about anything and everything that made writing breaks much more enjoyable.

I couldn’t have written this book without my family’s support. Thank you to my parents, Ayla and Selim Ant, for their unflagging love and backing. Also thanks to my family members Fatma Budak and Güneş Cansız for their loving presence. My deepest gratitude goes to Zeynep Kurtuluş Korkman, who has been my partner, confidante, comrade, coauthor, feminist moral compass, and endless source of inspiration over the past twenty years. I dedicate this book to our child, Mavi Açıksöz-Korkman, who, even before he was born, started to teach me new lessons about the body and masculinity and made procrastination disappear from my life. I hope that by the time he grows up there will be justice and peace.

PREFACE

ENTERING A GRAY ZONE

True journey is return.¹ Ursula K. Le Guin’s words from The Dispossessed echoed in my mind as my plane landed in June 2005 in my beloved hometown of Istanbul. For the coming twenty-nine months, I was to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict in Istanbul and Ankara. Given that my aim was to trace the multiple physical, mediatized, and virtual spaces in which disabled veterans were embodied, represented, and governed in contemporary Turkey, my field site was a dynamic and ever-shifting one. The tangible spatial foci of my research were two support and advocacy associations in Istanbul—one official and the other popular²—that brought together disabled veterans and martyrs’ families.³ I spent my days attending these organizations, meeting dozens of disabled veterans whom I would follow to hospitals, state institutions, coffeehouses, weddings, picnics, nationalist commemorations, political demonstrations, and martyrs’ cemeteries. I collected life histories from disabled veterans and carried out interviews with retired military physicians and officers, disability activists, social workers, and journalists. I conducted extensive archival research so as to understand the broader sociohistorical forces that impinged on disabled veterans’ bodies and subjectivities.

While this smooth linear narrative of my fieldwork conforms to a customary academic convention, it is one that erases all the ambiguities, vacillations, fears, and enjoyments of ethnography in exchange for an illusionary sense of mastery. Such linear narratives are indeed rarely possible while conducting fieldwork under fire. ⁴ When I arrived in Istanbul in 2005, I was ecstatic to be back home, yet clueless and nervous about where and how to begin my study. People grimaced when I explained the topic to them. You’ve chosen a sensitive topic, they grumbled, pointing out the possible risks of conducting research on such a politically volatile issue. But I had known that before choosing my topic. As a child raised in a leftist family broken in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, one of my first lessons in life was that things related to the state were sensitive in Turkey. For my generation, the spectral persecutory power of the state was an intimate force.⁵ Even if you are able to conduct the research, how are you going to publish it? my reproachful family and concerned friends asked. Because I wasn’t sure, I grew more and more edgy.

Weeks passed. Tarrying daily at the Atatürk Library in Taksim set against the magnificent view of the Bosphorus, I put off my entry into the field. Autumn came. As Istanbul’s colors turned to red, I called the official association from the number I found on the Internet. Approaching it as a perfect stranger, I was allowed entry first as a student doing homework, then as a welcomed guest, and later as the adopted son of the organization’s head. It was through this organization that I met my first disabled veteran friends, who introduced me in a snowballing effect to others until I learned of the popular association on the other side of Istanbul. As I found myself immersed in these organizations’ daily rhythms, I realized that they were at once hubs of mourning, healing, redistribution, and activism, knitting disabled veterans and martyrs’ families together in politicized communities of loss.⁶ Participant observation in these spaces allowed me to learn about the places, objects, and practices where disabled veteran activism set anchor and helped me decipher the relevant processes of collective identity formation.⁷

Becoming a regular at the associations provided a unique opportunity for dispelling the aura of suspicion that surrounded my middle-class, able body and my waist-long hair, signaling an undue Westernized masculinity. Disabled vets I met in the privacy of these secluded spaces mostly welcomed, or at worst kindly refused, my interview requests. With those I met outside, I was not always so lucky. I first had to pass some tests, I was often told. Disabled veterans were used to the prying gaze of journalists, but I was not from the press. Was I a terrorist?

As I observed them, my interlocutors gazed back at me. In attempts to make out my ethnic and thereby my political background, I was asked repeatedly about my paternal hometown. My car’s license plate number was noted down. People told me that they had me checked out and that I came out clean. Despite all these intrusions, I remember feeling uncomfortable only twice. The first was when a veteran I was visiting at his apartment told me only half-jokingly that he had placed his gun within hand’s reach, in case I had something bad up my sleeve. The second incident occurred when I was waiting in the garden of a veteran’s workplace in Ankara. Because I had only ever talked to him on the phone, I assumed that the suspicious stranger staring at me from a distance must be him. When I approached, the man began to interrogate me hostilely, asking to see my ID, making me think he was an undercover intelligence officer. To my surprise, he turned out to be my original interviewee’s coworker, a disabled veteran himself. In the course of my fieldwork, I would come to understand how these performances of vigilance and statehood and the associated feelings of vulnerability and sovereignty permeated disabled veterans’ experience of publicness in ethnically mixed urban spaces.

In Istanbul and Ankara, I collected life histories from disabled veterans from very different backgrounds. I was not in a position to be picky, but I ended up succeeding in incorporating differently structured experiences segmented across age, class, ethnicity, sect, military branch, rank, and type of injury. Interviews often took place in my interlocutors’ homes, which were mostly located in working- or lower-class neighborhoods that I had never been to despite being a native of Istanbul. These home visits allowed me to observe their neighborhoods, houses, and families and to record their life histories without being frequently interrupted. Sometimes interviews took up to seven hours to complete, leaving piles of cigarette butts, hoarse voices, puffy eyes, and exhausted bodies in their wake. The interviews I carried out at my interlocutors’ workplaces often produced shorter, disrupted, and poor-quality recordings and less intimate conversations. Even so, these work-embedded interviews offered an unanticipated but welcome opportunity to get a sense of the working conditions and power dynamics within the state institutions where most of my interlocutors were employed as blue-collar workers. These dynamics would later help me to conceptualize the sacrificial crisis that I describe in chapter 3.

Life histories were portals to the subjective worlds of my interlocutors.⁸ They provided me with a deeper understanding of how my interlocutors performatively renegotiated the boundaries of their selves as they narrated and made sense of their experiences of warfare, injury, and disability. Such performative narrativization notwithstanding, reconstructing their testimonial life stories was not an easy task for disabled veterans. The flow of their narratives was often disrupted by long pauses, silences, inarticulate expressions, and emotional outbursts while they recounted their experiences of military clashes, injury, dismemberment, amputation, and the social isolation caused by disability. Sometimes we had to take breaks or smoke a few more cigarettes before resuming the interview. Sometimes we wandered, entered blind alleys, or took long detours in our conversation. All these moments were, to say the least, as important as the biographical and semantic content of my interlocutors’ stories as they carved out an affective space for understanding the pain of the other.⁹

Pain and trauma stand at the threshold of our understanding, presenting epistemological challenges to our ability to know and to represent.¹⁰ Because of this precarious placement, traumatic experiences cannot be easily assimilated into language and symbolism, and even when they are they often produce fractured and erratic narrative structures that will not sustain integrated notions of self, society, culture, or world.¹¹ What makes testimonial narratives valuable is not only their recording of an often silenced past, but also their ability to bear witness even when words do not work. Bearing witness in testimony, some scholars assert, is only possible through the breakdown of representation at the moment of traumatic reenactment.¹² This is the only way, they argue, to learn from one’s history. History itself is a symptom that cannot be cured, but merely transmitted through the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.¹³ I would not go as far, but I have to admit that the vicarious effects of witnessing on my own body and psyche were more useful than any other source data in understanding the process of subject formation.

Through their life histories, disabled veterans introduced me to a narrativized gray zone in which the categories of perpetrator and victim became increasingly blurred.¹⁴ In this ethically ambiguous zone, which I call being-on-the-mountains, they were both perpetrators and victims of sovereign violence as involuntarily conscripted soldiers. Before entering the field, I had prepared myself for the ethical dilemmas of this gray zone of life history gathering. But the gray zone that I witnessed through participant observation was something I was not expecting and for which I was wholly unprepared.

During my fieldwork, my disabled veteran associates joined an ultranationalist witch hunt against public intellectuals, including some of my favorite writers and journalists, who had questioned official nationalist paradigms about minorities in Turkey. These protests constituted the limits to my participant observation and placed me along multiple lines of ethnographic seduction¹⁵ and ethnographic betrayal.¹⁶ I had ample political, ethical, and practical reasons not to attend these highly mediatized ultranationalist demonstrations. Nevertheless, I increasingly began to feel that the space for ethnographic witnessing was getting thinner. One day, I encountered one of the intellectuals being protested against at a pricey breakfast café overlooking the Bosphorus and found myself dealing with strong feelings of complicity. But complicity with whom? The answer was disturbingly unclear. On one hand, I felt the urge to express solidarity with her and apologetically explain why my interlocutors’ rage was directed at her. On the other hand, being aware of the class base of my interlocutors’ political resentment, I was ashamed to have shared in that upper-class breakfast.

The murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, a key target of my veteran acquaintances’ protests, by an ultranationalist hitman in 2007 was a threshold event that slowly but gradually alienated me from disabled veteran activist circles. However, leaving the field was not easy, I found, when the field would not leave you. As clashes with Kurdish guerrillas escalated, nationalist demonstrations became after-dinner entertainments even in middle-class residential neighborhoods, including mine. Gigantic flags enshrouded the city. Disabled veterans were constantly on TV. Before soccer games, cheerleaders announced the names of the latest martyrs, making the whole stadium chant Present! in newly invented ghostly performances. Soccer players made a soldier’s salute after each goal. The militarization of public life became more suffocating than ever. On top of it all, I now had conspiracy theories to explain it all. Leaving the field is not easy when the field does not leave you.

Gray zone has, of late, become a commonplace term in anthropology for describing the ethical dilemmas of conducting ethnography among perpetrator-victims of violence. Yet it is often seen as something that belongs to the interlocutors’ world rather than the anthropologist’s, even if it does temporarily seep into the anthropologist’s life in the context of the ethnographic encounter. Once the anthropologist gets out of the field, such gray zones are supposed to be sublimated into narrative, activism, and advocacy, even when the gray zone continues to haunt the anthropologist. In that sense, it is ironic that it was after I left the field that I was further sucked into the gray zone through my own becomings and encounters with the state.

In 2011, I was conscripted into the military, something that most young men from my background dreaded. I too dreaded it. A few years earlier, I had been petrified to read on a yellowed piece of paper that I was listed as a draft evader. Although I knew that it was a bureaucratic mistake, I lived in apprehension until the day I was ultimately tried and acquitted in the military court of an armored brigade. Evading the draft would end my academic prospects in Turkey. I was not courageous enough to declare conscientious objection, an act of political resistance and a de facto civil death decree. Medical exemption was a real possibility since, according to military medical regulations, I was rotten (unfit for military service) because of my high myopia, and I thought that might be a way out of conscription. Yet the so-called medical examination at the draft office consisted of a military doctor collectively asking us—hundreds of half-naked young men standing against a wall in the office’s garden—if anyone had a medical problem, only to dismiss any issues mentioned with insults and threats. When I mentioned medical exemption to my maternal uncle, who had served in the Kurdish region before the rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, or PKK) and whose son had recently been enlisted as a commando stationed in a hotbed of guerrilla activity, he reacted intensely. We do not have rotten [people] in our family! It took me a couple of seconds to process his reaction. Rotten report, the popular term for the certificate of ineligibility for military service, was assigned not only to people with disabilities, but also to openly gay and transgender men, who were classified as having psychosexual disorders in the military’s psychiatric episteme. My uncle was teaching me a lesson I already knew: regimes of (dis)ability are always intimately co-constituted with gender and sexuality, especially under conditions of militarization and political violence.¹⁷

Another lesson from the field was that class privilege and resentment always lurked in the background of nationalist spaces like military service. Through my teaching assistantship at the University of Texas, Austin, I had access to a paid exemption option, always available for Turkish citizens working in foreign countries. By paying the state $7,000 (US) in cash, I was able to buy myself out of service but not out of the three-week basic military training set in a hot and dry interior Mediterranean town. The town’s economy was almost wholly dependent on military service exempts, most of whom were the children of emigrants living in Europe. Here come the new Mehmet Beys, soldiers greeted us at the entrance of the barracks. Mehmet Bey (Mr. Mehmet) was a wordplay on Mehmetçik (literally, Little Mehmet), the archetypical and affectionate name for the common Turkish soldier. Replacing the diminutive -çik ending with Bey, a courtesy title with upper-class implications, it disdainfully distanced the paid exempts from common people. I had first heard that phrase from disabled veterans, who teasingly used it to underline the classed and gendered lines between us. Now, hearing it again, I felt a strange mixture of guilt and relief.

A disabled veteran had once baffled me by asking if I was more afraid or more willing to serve after listening to their stories. At that point I realized that despite my deep apprehension, the anthropologist in me craved military service as an autoethnographic experiment. And it was. During basic training I would realize that many fellow soldiers refused to eat military food, believing that potassium alum was added to it as a way of curtailing their sex drives, and instead ate snacks they bought from the canteen. Castration anxieties produced by submission to the military authority of the state were also reflected in the man-high pyramids of Viagra boxes displayed in surrounding pharmacies’ shop windows. Theatrically staged military souvenir photos also served as prostheses of masculinity. The barracks housed professional photographers whose bread and butter was to produce fake, Rambo-like counterguerrilla war photo souvenirs, using sandbags, heavy weaponry, and even commando makeup as décor. As an anthropologist working on the gendered and sexualized predicaments of military masculinity all these ethnographic moments fascinated me.

The anthropologist in me would eventually get more of the field than he had asked for when the commander of our troop of Mehmet Beys was dispatched to this small, peaceful city after being injured while fighting guerrillas. It was for a change of air, the rumor went. Whenever someone complained about wearing winter uniforms despite the 100°F-plus heat, not being allowed to take showers, eating decomposed or expired food, or medication being confiscated rather than given to the sick, the commander would line us up and start berating us. I won’t take crap from you worthless scum! My Mehmetçik died on my lap so that you can sit comfortably on your ass! I was already well versed in this sacrificial military discourse, as the entire country had become increasingly steeped in it. Immediately after I left the field in 2008, a group of high school students became national celebrities after painting a large Turkish flag with their own blood and presenting it to the head of the military staff along with a petition to be conscripted as soldiers in the war against the PKK.¹⁸ What I was not well versed in was how to become an intimate subject of such militarized discourse, within which sacrificial death was the only index of the value of life.

My becoming-soldier process moved ethnographic knowledge to a more visceral level. I was immersed in the intense military sociality that affectively bound disabled veterans to their buddies and, through them, to the military and the state; I learned how to load, fire, disassemble, and reassemble the HK G3 assault rifle, which I knew well, like a bad friend of a friend, from my interlocutors’ firearm malfunction stories; I came to know the noise of rifle and the smell of gunpowder. Now I was acquainted with many of the spaces, objects, practices, and sensations in their narratives, but not with the war, the enemy, the fear, the rushing adrenaline, the act of killing, the witnessing of dying, the encounter with mortality, the destruction of flesh and bone, the pain, the loss, and what follows.

While the becoming-soldier process made me complicit with the production of sovereign violence, my critique of that very violence gave way to a process of my becoming-terrorist.¹⁹ Responding to the eruption of violence after the failed peace negotiations in 2016, over one thousand academics from Turkey, including me, signed a petition criticizing human rights violations and asking the government to resume peace negotiations. In return, the government launched a witch hunt that would spiral into one of the biggest academic purges in history. Labeled as traitors, zombie slaves, and terrorists with pens by President Erdoğan, the signatories were faced with job terminations, house raids, detentions, and criminal prosecutions. Their names and photographs were published in the pro-government media, their campus offices doors were marked with red crosses, and they were threatened by ultranationalist crime leaders, who swore an oath in public meetings to spill and take a shower in signatories’ blood. Under such dire circumstances, hundreds of academics for peace have lost their civil freedoms and livelihoods, and many have had to leave the country under conditions of exile. As a US-based academic, I was among the relatively privileged, but there was a specific loss awaiting me. Criticizing the state’s counterinsurgency practices meant my banishment from the field. My fieldwork friends were no longer friends.

How does an ethnographer become the enemy of his own informants, about whom he deeply cares? This is a question that has preoccupied me as a peace petition signatory, especially as I’ve learned that the prosecutor’s indictment included the accusation of terrorist propagandizing as well as charges under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, or Turkish government institutions. Public intellectuals, including the assassinated Hrant Dink, had become targets of ultranationalist protests as a direct result of being tried under this law. Now I—the ethnographer-cum-terrorist—was also turning into a scapegoated object of disabled veterans’ hatred for having spoken out against the cycle of militarized violence that had originally injured them, but which they clung to as its fallen heroes. It chilled me to the bone when I read that the head of an association of disabled veterans and martyrs’ families told the media, The [missing] arms and legs of disabled veterans will call traitor academics to account.²⁰ Disabled veterans’ sacrificial limbs were now turned against me.

Against this backdrop, my ethnographic scrutiny of the connections between the somatic and the political is motivated by a burning question of our times: How do right-wing nationalist movements manage to affectively mobilize whole groups of people, especially those most harmed by their policies? As the global electoral victories of the populist Right push conspiratorial ultranationalist ideas from the fringes to the political center, increasing numbers within the discipline of anthropology voice concern about the lack of ethnographic attention to Far Right movements and the scarcity of fieldwork with people we tend not to like.²¹ Yet an anthropological awareness of the ethical and political complexities of working within Far Right worlds is often missing. In worlds like the one I depict here, there is rarely such a thing as a neutral ethnographic position; one is either a part of