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Contribution short abstract:

Drawing upon ethnographic and archival research, this paper examines the video records of the violence and violations of the 1990s in Turkey, in terms of their archival potentials to testify to historical injustices and communicate the hope and resilience for justice to come.

Contribution long abstract:

Following the coup d’état in 1980, the 1990s in Turkey witnessed both the visualization of public culture thanks to the rise of television and video technologies and massive human rights violations resulting from the counterinsurgency measures of the state. While television channels communicated public reality predominantly within the official frames of the state, video as technology and collective practice became the primary relay for producing and archiving the unofficial visual documents that depict rights violations, protests, fact-finding missions, trials, testimonies, alternative public gatherings, etc. of the decade. These video records mostly reside in a dispersed and uncatalogued manner in the depositories of institutions or personal collections, in the lack of a nongovernmental archival institution.

This paper considers the video records of the 1990s, that I collected during my PhD research, as counter-archival materials and ethnographically examines their spatial and temporal transmission from their contested fields of production to our contemporary digital present. Interrogating the political dynamics, media-technological forces, and everyday practices involved in the archival preservation and erasure of video records, it emphasizes their double articulation: alongside what they portray in their contents, the conditions of production and archiving of video records also inform their political, testimonial, historical, and epistemological potentials. Therefore, I question how bringing ethnographic and archival work together can address not only the remnants of unavenged historical injustices but also the hope for a future justice to come and the collective resilience materialized into these video records.

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Contribution short abstract:

Ethnographic study on feminist community archives in Israel (the Feminist Peace Archives and the Rape Crisis Centers). We examined the motivations, perceptions and practical engagements of non-state actors’ with an emphasis on testimonials of inter-personal and conflict-related violence.

Contribution long abstract:

In this paper we would like to share our ethnographic work on studying feminist community archives that contain historical information about peace activism and sexual violence. The presentation summarizes a three-year ethnographic study (2019-2021) on archiving-as-activism in Israel. Using a comparative analysis of two feminist archives in Israel (the Feminist Peace Archives and the Rape Crisis Centers registry) we examined the motivations, perceptions and practical engagements with non-state actors’ history and politics with an emphasis on testimonials of inter-personal and conflict-related violence.

We found that while the storage conditions of these community archives vary, many of them are endangered. Scarce financial resources, lack of physical space, uneven method of archiving, and conflicts over ownership appear as major obstacles for their preservation. To understand these challenges we followed NGO workers and feminist activists, many of them are elderly women who were politically active in the Israeli feminist and peace movement in the 1970s-1990s. Through the ethnographic process, we observed different attitudes and practices relating to the archival collections and objects. We found that objects become not just a source of memories but they evoke live emotions of rage, disappointments, hope, alienations, death and reveal activists’ roles of historical gatekeepers. Some of the interviewees were deeply concerned with various aspects of preservation, while others chose to disposed of personal items, through shredding, hiding, erasing and cleaning. The act of disposition was sometimes intentional and served as a way to expressed frustrations or as protecting the privacy of victims and activists.

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Contribution short abstract:

The paper discusses methodological challenges of doing historical research about Cold War anthropology of Turkey. It focuses on (i) the process of assembling an archive of experiences from various venues and (ii) the ways in which unspoken anxieties are reached through individual life stories.

Contribution long abstract:

In this paper, I talk about two different methodological challenges I faced during my research about individual life stories of international ethnographers who worked in Turkey in the 1960s and 70s. First, the project inevitably requires a creative process of archive-making since the available archives hardly permit one to go beyond the institutional logic of the collections. The usual archival research must be combined with detective work to reach family members, field informants, personal letters, and photo albums. The new body of material defies the noble look and consistent harmony of an official archive as this montage would likely put side-by-side a juicy and nostalgic Facebook post with a secret report to the Secretary of State. Second, the creative process is not limited only to collecting different types of traces (like memories) related to the past. Conceptually more challenging is to resist the seduction of flashy events and to crack the window of historical ethnography open to possibilities, failures, and hope. The dominant narratives of the long 1968 and its repercussions in American academy tend to picture black-and-white characters who are either collaborators or resisters, either conservatives or liberals. In this paper, I would like to discuss the methodological challenges of dealing with people in the middle, who could not easily give up their Cold War sensibilities even though they embraced the critical look of the ‘60s. The resulting anxiety dodges even the unofficial sources, let alone the usual archives.

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Contribution short abstract:

This paper addresses the importance of cultural archives of resistance and oppression in understanding the conditions of the possibility of fearless and hopeful struggle and the radical refusal to be docile and complicit despite the likelihood of heavy punishments.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper addresses the importance of cultural archives of resistance and oppression in understanding the conditions of the possibility of fearlessness and the radical refusal to be docile and complicit despite the likelihood of heavy punishments. Drawing on the experiences of the racialized Kurdish and Turkish Alevi working classes in Turkey, I propose that state violence does not always manage to push resistance off the stage into Scottian forms of covert resistance. To understand how certain individuals and/or populations continue to act out against punitive security states and hope to transform oppressive social structures despite the potentially grave consequences, I suggest we take into consideration the invigorating power of the past resistance as well as oppression. While anthropological studies on hauntings mainly focus on histories of violence and injustice, the history of the oppressed is not only marked by oppression but also resistance. I suggest by taking into account what I call inspirational hauntings-- the hauntings of past resistance and rebellious and defiant subjects who seep into the present and serve as encouraging and emboldening political and ethical resources-- along with hauntings of oppression can we understand how the questions related to ethics and justice that are raised by hauntings are translated into active, undisguised, subaltern resistance.