Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State

Navaro-Yashin, Yael

doi:10.1515/9781400826698.103

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The Mesarya plain is bisected, right through the middle, with a military border which has been in place since 1974. My informants who live in (appropriated or inherited) villages on this plain have spoken of feeling confined, entrapped, and suffocated in this slice of territory, especially in the period when I did fieldwork, before the opening of checkpoints on the green line between the north and south of Cyprus in 2003 (also see Navaro‐Yashin 2005). Deleuze and Guattari associate the ‘plateau’ with free roaming, movement, multiplicity, and potential, rhizome‐style.…”

Section: Affective Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge*

Navaro-Yashin¹

2009

Royal Anthropological Inst

535

195

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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.

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Section: Affective Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The words ‘How Happy is the One Who Calls himself a Turk’ are written in giant characters on hills overlooking the plain. Entire areas cut off from access or circulation with barrels and barbed wire (also see Navaro‐Yashin 2003; 2005). Rhizomes?…”

Section: Affective Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge*

Navaro-Yashin¹

2009

Royal Anthropological Inst

535

195

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“…2004; Pegg 1998). As perhaps the most ‘state‐like’ of these ‘less‐than‐state’ entities de facto states such as Somaliland (Kaplan 2008; Srebrnik 2004), Abkhazia (Walker 2007) and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (Navaro‐Yashin 2005) are also the unintended byproducts of changing international norms concerning the legitimacy of states. Whilst in ‘traditional international law, recognition was acquired only after successfully demonstrating the capacity to govern’ (Pegg 1998, 3), following 1945 ‘rulers can acquire independence solely by virtue of being successors of colonial governments’ (Jackson 1990, 34).…”

Section: Contextualising Geopolitical ‘Anomalies’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Governments‐in‐Exile: Statehood, Statelessness and the Reconfiguration of Territory and Sovereignty

McConnell

2009

Geography Compass

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Governments‐in‐exile are conventionally viewed as discrepant forms of political practice and geopolitical exceptions to the rules of sovereign statehood. However, despite significant limitations, polities such as the Tibetan Government‐in‐Exile enact state‐like functions and are actively forging new political spaces and modalities of sovereignty. Contextualising governments‐in‐exile with regards to a range of twentieth‐century geopolitical anomalies, this study argues that such polities raise key questions for political geographers regarding the relationship between sovereignty and territory, the nature of statehood and the role of ‘the exception’ in geopolitical discourses. In light of contemporary critical reappraisals of sovereignty, territory and statehood, this study calls for political geography – and critical geopolitics in particular – to expand its gaze and engage with issues raised by governments‐in‐exile. In turn, an empirical and theoretical focus on such non‐state entities highlights the utility of ethnographic methodologies within critical geopolitics, enables a critical fusion of literatures of the state and of statelessness, problematises taken‐for‐granted political geography categories and facilitates critical inquiry into alternative political arrangements.

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“…For TMT killings of Turkish Cypriots, see Yennaris, 2003, pp. 121–7, 140–2, 161–74; Navaro‐Yashin, 2004.…”

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confidence: 99%

From psychosocial equilibrium to catastrophic breakdown: Cyprus 1955–1974

Galatariotou¹

2008

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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The recent history of Cyprus presents an example of a society in which a centuries-long peaceful coexistence of diverse populations gave way to violence and murderous hate, with devastating end results. This paper tries to understand and describe the process by which Cypriot society slid from a position of psychosocial equilibrium and integration towards one of disintegration, fragmentation and catastrophic breakdown. This paper draws from work by social anthropologists, sociologists, historians and others, and from my own personal experience. To these I applied insights afforded by psychoanalysis to identify and explore the psychic processes and states of mind that characterized a psychosocial disintegrative process. I came to see external political events and internal psychological processes as inseparably intertwined and dynamically interdependent, each emanating from and catalysing the other. The factual details of the process described are of course unique in their local specificity, but the psychic phenomena that characterized it are not: at both the individual and group levels they are replicated in other societies undergoing similar processes of self-destruction.

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Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge*

Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge*

Governments‐in‐Exile: Statehood, Statelessness and the Reconfiguration of Territory and Sovereignty

From psychosocial equilibrium to catastrophic breakdown: Cyprus 1955–1974

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