State violence and the ethics of the minority question in Turkey

Lecture

Kabir Tambar (Stanford University) analyses how the category of 'minority' has been constitutive of 'the people' in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. 'Minority', in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition.It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds ethical community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain outside of the framework of collective obligation and responsibility.

Kabir Tambar examines comments delivered by a pro-Kurdish political party and a largely Kurdish mothers-of-the-disappeared group during the Gezi Park protests of 2013. These moments of public address participated in the broader spirit of state critique on display during those protests. They were noteworthy, however, for recasting the Gezi events as a late moment in a longer history of state violence, prefigured by a century of dispossession experienced by those who have been classed as minorities or threatened with that designation.

The commentaries interrogated what we might call the negative historicity of the minority. They were not primarily aimed at repudiating that historical judgment as discriminatory or contrary to law, but instead sought to delocalize the judgment vested in the category of minority, to see in that judgment an increasingly generalized economy of political abjection, and in effect to view it as prefiguring an ethical community to come. 

About the lecturer

Kabir Tambar is a sociocultural anthropologist, working at the intersections of political anthropology and the anthropology of religion. He is broadly interested in the politics of history, the affective forms of public criticism, and varieties of Islamic practice in Turkey. 

Published by  AISSR