micro-excursions and comments and alongside the ethnography, I intend a “case-study” of phenomenological anthropology to emerge, an example of what a more phenomenology-inclined anthropology might sound and look like.
In short, Istanbul, City of the Fearless is my describing of activists’ own ethnography of the city. Description—by both the activist and the anthropologist—is a complex activity. In his poem “Description without Place,” Wallace Stevens (1990) draws attention to the constituting or compositional nature of description or of accounts of accounts. As he puts it, description is “a little different from reality: / The difference that we make in what we see.” And not just in what we see. As writer of ethnography, description is the difference we make in what we write. Similarly, as phenomenology, the intellectual tradition that most values its enterprise, has long pointed out, the describing, interpreting, or imagining of anything is intimately connected to the consciousness and perceptions—to the intentions—of the describer, even as the describer’s perception is an act mediated by a range of other processes. These include the describer’s own history and prejudgments, including education in a discipline, and the intersubjective encounter of the interview.
Chapter Outline
To compose my descriptions I have divided the book into eight chapters. Chapter 2 identifies certain central themes of phenomenological philosophy that provide City of the Fearless with a suggestive language for apprehending activists’ engagement with and experience of Istanbul. These include phenomenology’s emphasis on human intentionality and its constituting awareness of events, places, and people, and its insights into how the event and pedagogy of activism involved militants in specific perceptual (phenomenological) modifications.
What is the relevant pre-history to 1970s activism? Chapter 3 recounts the history of the “violence of architecture” in Istanbul from the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 until the mid-1970s, to give readers some idea of the origins of the city’s key features, which a multitude of political activists in the 1970s sought to control or revolutionize. One core historical process included the Turkish Republic’s unrelenting de-Ottomanization of Istanbul, involving both the regularization of Istanbul through modernist planning, and its Turkification policies targeting its non-Muslim residents for expulsion. Another was the tremendous expansion of the city after the 1950s through rural-urban migration, and the burgeoning of the city’s shantytowns (gecekondu), which became key theaters and crucibles of political conflict. According to Setha Low, “An ethnographic approach to the study of urban space includ[es] four areas of spatial/cultural analysis—historical emergence, sociopolitical and economic structuring, patterns of social use, and [its] experiential meanings” (1996: 400). I distribute discussion of these to various parts of the study, and areas one and two to chapter 3 in particular. In short, what was Istanbul like in 1974, and how did it get to be like that?
Chapters 4 and 5 explore activists’ own production of space in Istanbul. To do so I disaggregate from partisans’ narratives four major modes of politico-spatial practice, including their visual politics, their sonic politics, their occupation of space, and their performance of violence. Chapter 4 concludes by analyzing the content and meaning of factions’ obituaries, and of statements from bereaved families for killed activists published in their newspapers or journals. Chapter 5 continues this exploration of activists’ constitution of the city but arrows in on the political and ethical engagements of militant groups in three particular arenas in Istanbul’s urban geography: in squatter settlements; in factories and workplaces; and in municipalities. Ideological activism in shantytowns, labor activism in factories and unions, and urban activism in Councils were core aspects of one single but bitterly factionalized revolutionary movement. This “interconnectedness” of the sprawling revolutionary enterprise is particularly important given junta claims that their intervention was necessitated by the “terrorism” of activists. Most groups did not pursue armed struggle.
Conflicts between militants, factions, ideologies, and ideologists revolved around two inseparable concerns: in order to make a revolution, what is our situation, and how is this to be done? Chapter 6 attends to a single broad theme with at least two dimensions—activists’ perceptions of their factions, and of their factions’ ideologies. The chapter moves back and forth between two foci: description of how partisans (personally and collectively) constituted or applied ideologies, and exploration of how the political/spatial actions, experiences, and decisions of militants were guided by the varied historical narratives, political claims, and economic models of leftist and rightist ideologies.
Coup d’état! Chapter 7 concentrates on three temporally experienced and interrelated themes. The first describes the junta’s immediate spatial and activist politics after the military insurrection, embarked upon to punish militants and to intimidate and pacify the city. The second involves investigation of activists’ responses to this assault on Istanbul’s urban bodies and places. The third section presents the junta’s legal and institutional reconstruction of Turkish society, intended to drastically and permanently reorganize its political practices. Taken together the themes chronicle Istanbul’s shock entry into a reign of fascism and its preparation for a new authoritarian political and neoliberal economic order. Chapter 8 concludes Istanbul, City of the Fearless by describing some of the ways that ex-activists and others in the present continue to reckon with the meaning of those events. In particular, it shows how acts of urban commemoration by leftist political parties, unions, and civil society groups communicate to younger generations both the aims of their struggle and the losses accruing to its participants.
The following chapter more directly addresses the phenomenological approach that orients the book’s spatial analysis of the city. It affirms that at the crux of a phenomenological account of social life lies the matter of individual perception in any or all of its dimensions—corporeal, interactional, cultivated, political, and collective (Bachelard 1994, Casey 1996, Duranti 2009, Ram and Houston 2015). As people’s orientations to the world change—say, by their living through a significant historical event such as the spatial convulsions wrought by urban militancy, or by a diminution of their bodily capacities by torture—so also do different properties of places, situations, emotions and people, once at the margins of noticing, come into focus. A phenomenological perspective illuminates a number of key social processes germane to understanding Istanbul in those years: activism and its modification of place perception; militants’ frictional fashioning of the affordances of the urban environment; the power of inhabited places through their spatial furnishment by others; songs’, bodies’, places’ and things’ holding of militants’ memories; and the contemporary politics impinging upon the forgetting and remembering of 1970s activism. In doing so Istanbul, City of the Fearless presents not only a social history but also a phenomenological study of political memory and commemoration in the present.
1. I have changed the names of activists, but not the political faction they belonged too, nor their gender. The first time I mention the name of a political group or faction I translate it into English. Thereafter I use the Turkish abbreviation. See the list of names of political organizations.
2. I use activist, militant, and partisan interchangeably in this book to refer to the active members of different political factions.
3. According to Zürcher (1995) in the year before the coup up to twenty people a day were slain in urban conflict.
4. There is an issue with the nomenclature used by protagonists to describe combatants in the political struggle in these years. Fascist is the word used by leftist groups to describe the commandos they were confronted by. The rightists called themselves “idealists,” inspired by the ideals (ülküler) or principles of Turkism. Similarly, the Ülkücü labeled all leftist groups “communists,” despite profound differences
