This article critically engages with recent theoretical writings on affect and non‐human agency by way of studying the emotive energies discharged by properties and objects appropriated during war from members of the so‐called ‘enemy’ community. The ethnographic material comes from long‐term fieldwork in Northern Cyprus, focusing on how it feels to live with the objects and within the ruins left behind by the other, now displaced, community. I study Turkish‐Cypriots’ relations to houses, land, and objects that they appropriated from the Greek‐Cypriots during the war of 1974 and the subsequent partition of Cyprus. My ethnographic material leads me to reflect critically on the object‐centred philosophy of Actor Network Theory and on the affective turn in the human sciences after the work of Gilles Deleuze. With the metaphor of ‘ruination’, I study what goes amiss in scholarly declarations of theoretical turns or shifts. Instead, proposing an anthropologically engaged theory of affect through an ethnographic reflection on spatial and material melancholia, I argue that ethnography, in its most productive moments, is trans‐paradigmatic. Retaining what has been ruined as still needful of consideration, I suggest an approach which merges theories of affect and subjectivity as well as of language and materiality. Résumé L'article examine sous un angle critique les écrits théoriques récents sur l'affect et l'agency non humaine pour étudier les énergies émotives libérées par les biens et objets confisqués lors d'un conflit armé aux membres de la communauté dite «ennemie». Le matériel ethnographique provient d'un travail de terrain de longue durée dans le Nord de Chypre, qui portait sur le ressenti de ceux qui vivent avec ces objets, dans les ruines laissées par l'autre communauté désormais déplacée. L'auteure étudie les relations des Chypriotes turcs avec les maisons, les terres et les objets qu'ils se sont appropriés sur les Chypriotes grecs lors de la guerre de 1974 et de la partition de Chypre. Le matériel ethnographique la conduit à une réflexion critique sur la philosophie centrée sur les objets de la théorie de l'acteur‐réseau et sur le tournant affectif des sciences humaines à la suite des travaux de Gilles Deleuze. Par la métaphore de la «ruine», l'auteur sonde ce qui ne va pas dans les proclamations académiques de tournants théoriques et de changements paradigmatiques. En lieu et place, elle propose une théorie de l'affect engagée dans l'anthropologie, par une réflexion ethnographique sur la mélancolie spatiale et matérielle, et affirme que l'ethnographie, dans ses moments les plus productifs, est trans‐paradigmatique. En gardant ce qui est «ruiné» comme digne encore de considération, l'auteure suggère une approche qui concilie les théories de l'affect et de la subjectivité et du langage et de la matérialité.

This article studies the affects retained, carried, and effected by documents, as they are produced, exchanged, transformed, and transacted among their users. I study the interactions which Turkish-Cypriots (in Britain and on either side of the border in Cyprus) forge with documents, especially those used for identity verification and travel. For those who juggle documents manufactured by several complexes of law and statecraft (including the 'illegal' Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), documents generate differential and politically charged affectivities. Bringing anthropological literature on law, policy, and bureaucracy, as well as Actor Network Theory, into dialogue with psychoanalytic work on affect, this article charts a new terrain for the study of affect (in the domain of documents as objects) and explores emotive dimensions previously unattended by scholars of bureaucracy.

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Preface MY FIRST CONNECTION WITH CYPRUS was not through research but through kinship. It may also have had something to do with kısmet (luck, destiny). Soon after I met Mehmet Yashin in Istanbul in 1995, he took me to Cyprus, his homeland, and to the childhood home left to him by his deceased mother. Little did I know then, on this first trip, that this, one day, would also be one of my homes. The Cyprus we were visiting in 1995 was carved in half, with a border of barbed wire running right through its middle. We were on the ''Turkish side,'' but the ''Greek side'' was visible in the distance. As evening fell over the Mesarya (Mesaoria in Greek) plain, one could distinguish the electric lights on the other side from those on ours, as they glittered in a different color. Crossing to the other side was forbidden. The border was heavily guarded. On my first visit, I was struck by the bullet holes in the side of a hotel building in Magusa (Ammochostos in Greek; Famagusta in English) and discovered that it had previously belonged to a Greek-Cypriot and was now empty. Southward along the Magusa seashore was an entire city of high-rise apartment blocks and hotel buildings that looked like a ghost town: broken windows, dangling gates, decrepit stairs, decaying walls. I was to learn that this city, to which no access was allowed, was Maraş; for the Greek-Cypriots, Varosha. It was a thriving tourist destination in the 1970s, until the war of 1974 and Turkey's invasion of the north of the island, including the town. The Greek-Cypriots of Varosha had escaped from the invading Turkish army, and the town was blocked off from habitation after the war. This is where the seashore of Magusa stopped. Running across the end of a beach facing Varosha was a barbed-wire fence and military signs forbidding access and photography. After Magusa, we were to visit Lefkoşa (Lefkosia in Greek; Nicosia in English), which is Mehmet's home town, both his parents being original

The categories of “state” and “civil society” have too often been used as oppositional terms in the social sciences and in public discourse. This article aims to problematize the concepts of “state” and “civil society” when perceived as separate and distinct entities in the discourses of social scientists as well as of members of contemporary social movements in Turkey. Rather than readily using state and society as analytical categories referring to essential domains of sociality, the purpose is to transform these very categories into objects of ethnographic study. There has been a proliferation of discourse on “the state” and “the civil society” in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. This article emerges out of an observation of the peculiar coalescence of social scientific and public usages of these terms in this period. It aims to radically relativize and to historically contextualize these terms through a close ethnographic study of the various political domains in which they have been discursively employed.

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