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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how people of Diyarbakır persist in narrating the Tigris and their own histories through deep temporalities, expansive spatiality, and multiple cosmological registers, against Turkish officials’ symbolic and material efforts to contain the river within the nation-state’s present.

Paper long abstract

Beginning from methodological discomfort with anthropology’s tendency to privilege the present as a site of analysis (Irvine 2020), and uncertainties around the place of the supranatural within secular temporal frameworks (Fernando 2022), this paper reflects on the discipline’s limits through ethnographic encounters with people in Diyarbakır and their relationship with the Tigris. In local narrations, the river enters people’s biographies, nesting everyday life within its longer temporal horizon, wider spatial reach, and varied cosmological orders—crucial for sustaining forms of belonging in Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city and grounded in lived memories and mnemonic traces of a multi-ethnic past preceding the Armenian Genocide. Yet the same river that enables such foldings of time, space, and cosmology is also subject to state efforts to fix it within a singular Turkish-Sunni present through heritage regimes, post-conflict reconstruction, and capitalist development. This paper argues that insisting on a homogeneous ethnographic now risks overlooking how people make sense of the past, inhabit the present, and imagine the future through fragmented narratives—some fractured by violence and irreparable loss, others articulated as political projects that deliberately refuse alignment. Polarisation thus emerges not merely as political antagonism, but as a struggle over which spatio-temporal and cosmological registers are allowed to endure. Attending to the grey zones where such alternatives remain possible, the paper brings together interviews, songs, and literary texts to trace how the river’s deep histories and memories of multi-ethnic coexistence along its shores continue to take shape amid the state’s violent attempts at spatio-temporal and cosmological flattening.