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Paper short abstract

Focusing on rose scents and their contested meanings in Turkey, this talk examines the potential and limits of docu-poetry to foster shared affective terrains, engaging subjects with conflicting social imaginaries while acknowledging persistent social and structural divides.

Paper long abstract

Following the establishment of the Republic, Turkey underwent a profound cultural and political transformation grounded in the ideology of modernization. This process produced a deeply polarized social and cultural landscape, structured around tensions between so-called Westernizing-modernist ideals and traditional-Islamic values. The effects of this binary were not confined to political discourse; they also extended into everyday cultural practices, aesthetic regimes, and the formation of subjectivities.

This division becomes particularly legible in relation to the scent of rose. For Sunni Muslims, rose scent carries deep affective and religious significance, as it evokes the Prophet Muhammad and Islam more broadly, rendering it a cherished and valued fragrance. For secular subjects, especially those raised under religious pressure within Islamic family structures, the same scent can become intolerable, saturated with embodied memories of discipline, control, and patriarchy.

In my anthropological project, which explores the place of rose scents in everyday life and their socially contradictory meanings in contemporary Turkey, I write docu-poems that engage opposing affective landscapes of rose fragrances. Docu-poetry functions here as both method and form, providing a means of attending to affective dimensions that often exceed conventional ethnographic representation. I ask whether docu-poetry can offer a space in which otherwise disconnected subjects with opposing social imaginaries might engage affectively. Drawing on the “Rose-Scents and Sensory Docu-Poetry Workshop” that I facilitated, this talk discusses both the possibilities and the limitations of docu-poetry in fostering such shared sensory-affective encounters.