Browsing by Author "Sipahi, Ali"

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Anthropologist Lloyd A. Fallers’ Research in Turkey during the 1960s
(Cyprus International University, 2023) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
Due to the influence of the modernization paradigm, as the main axis of the American social sciences during the Cold War, and since the 1950s, the field of anthropology has shown interest in the developing nation-states in addition to primitive societies. Within this context, Turkey was one of the ‘new nations’ to become a potential object of analysis for Western anthropologists as Turkey was already praised as an exemplary democracy in the political science literature. As a result, for the first time in the history of American anthropology, a series of ethnographies pertaining to Turkey were generated in the 1960s. This article brings to light the academic portrait of the anthropology professor Lloyd A. Fallers at Chicago University and his studies on Turkey. Fallers worked on Turkey for more than ten years, did long-term fieldwork during his residences in Turkey for a total of two years, and supervised dissertations about Turkey. Fallers’ work, which has mostly remained unpublished due to his early death, is analyzed by relying on the archives deposited in the Chicago University library and on oral history interviews conducted by the author with people who had known Fallers.
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Convict Labor in Turkey, 1936–1953: A Capitalist Corporation in the State?
(Cambridge University Press, 2016) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
The article proposes the institutional analysis of convict labor as an alternative to both (profit-oriented) economic and (discipline-oriented) political explanations. The specialized labor-based prisons in Turkey from 1936 to 1953 are brought to light by archival research and are presented here as a rich case to discuss the experiential/subjective conditions of unfree labor regimes and the structural effects of institutions on the convicts’ experiences. I argue that the state department responsible for prison labor in Turkey was transformed into a capitalist corporation with bureaucratic management, and the target of convict labor system was neither profit nor discipline, but the creation of the corporate bureaucracy itself. As a consequence, both for prisoners and for the prison staff, labor-based prisons appeared as privileged places. Hence, unfree labor was volunteered.
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Deception and violence in the ottoman empire: the people's theory of crowd behavior during the hamidian massacres of 1895
(Cambridge University Press, 2020-10) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
This article is an historical ethnography of the popular conceptualizations of crowd behavior during the pogroms against the Armenians in the Ottoman East in 1895-1896. It draws on contemporary sources like official telegrams, governmental reports, letters of American missionaries, and Armenian periodicals to show that observers with otherwise highly conflicting views described the structure of the event in the exact same way: as an outcome of sinister deception. Without exception, all parties told some story of deception to explain the violent attacks of the Kurdish semi-nomadic crowds on the Armenian neighborhoods of the city of Harput. The article analyzes these cases of disguise, deluding, and inculcation to reveal how contemporary observers theorized crowd behavior in general and the atrocities they witnessed in particular. They did not perceive violence as an index of social distance or deep societal divisions. On the contrary, they described a world in which Armenians and Muslims lived a shared life, and where one attacked the other only when deceived. Methodologically, the article lifts barriers between intellectual history and social history on behalf of an historical ethnography of people's theories about their own society.
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Ethnographic authority and public culture in Turkey in the 1950s
(Taylor & Francis, 2020-06) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
The article is a historical study of ethnographic practices in non-academic fields of culture. It examines the practices and artefacts of cultural production in post-war Turkey and reveals that in the long 1950s popular as well as elite culture lived through an 'ethnographic moment' in which ethnographic authority was elevated to be the dominant criterion for the evaluation of good work. During this ethnographic moment, artists, writers and journalists turned their professional practices into ethnographic fieldwork, forged distinction based on their ethnographic methodology, and excluded armchair practitioners as amateurs. By focusing on four main fields - folklore, painting, cinema, and photojournalism - in post-war Turkey, this study disentangles the history of ethnographic practices from the narrower scope of the history of anthropology/sociology and situates it in an overarching account of cultural encounters with the others. In this period, any form of representation of the others was expected to be based on intersubjective intimacy, first-hand experience, and local knowledge. Modern ethnographic methodology was the zeitgeist of public culture.
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Hotels and highways: The construction of modernization theory in cold war Turkey.
(Cambridge University Press, 2019-05) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
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How to be a good guest: American ethnographers in Turkey in the long 1968
(Wiley, 2024-03) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
The article uncovers a forgotten chapter in the history of anthropology by revealing the experiences of American ethnographers in Turkey between 1967 and 1969. Using original archival documents and oral history interviews, it focuses on the trials of Professor Lloyd A. Fallers as well as doctoral students Michael Meeker, Peter Benedict, and June Starr in navigating Turkish bureaucracy and global politics. Conceptually, the article evaluates the case of anthropologists in Cold War Turkey from the perspective of hospitality studies with a particular focus on guest-to-guest relationships. Adopting the guests’ points of view shows us that hospitality assemblages are forged by other-oriented thinking and behaviour, which involves misunderstandings, empathy, and projection. The article conceives the hospitality relationship as an encounter among perceptions of hospitality.
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In pursuit of intellectual discovery: an interview with Michael E. Meeker
(Cambridge University Press, 2021-11) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
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The making of a national city: From Mezre to Elaziğ
(Taylor & Francis, 2021) Sipahi, Ali; Humanities and Social Sciences; SİPAHİ, Ali
This chapter tells the story of an imperial town’s transformation into a national city. It will start with the emergence of Mezre as a government suburb in proximity to Harput in the nineteenth century. With its Armenian majority, Mezre was the product of a unique combination of bourgeois suburbanization with military authority. Then, the nationalization of the town in the early twentieth century is laid out, by visiting key events in the life of the town, like the Armenian deportations, the war of independence, the Sheikh Said Rebellion and Operation Dersim. Last, the chapter uncovers the process of modernizing and ideologizing of the urban space: The symbolic reconstruction of the town centre in the 1930s will be followed by the abandonment in the 1940s, nostalgia for the old town in the 1950s and creative destruction for tourism in the 1960s. Conceptually, the chapter will challenge the top-down perspective in the existing literature and demonstrate the ebb and flow in the process of nationalization and modernization. Extensively using local sources, it will show the mostly reluctant attitude of the local elite and the largely failed attempts of national homogenization.