Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Tez Türü: Doktora
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences , Anthropology, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri
Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. Errol Daniel Valentine
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2010
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Desteklendiği Program: Diğer
Özet:
In this dissertation, I examine the question of politicized ethnicity in a transnational context where nationalism is instrumentalized as a redemptive ideology to heal personal and collective wounds of historical traumas and marginalization. I try to understand how ethno-nationalism is organized as a process of identification and as a discursive regime dictating certain moral imperatives generative of a collective political subjectivity. The key figures of my ethnographic research are Iraqi Turkmen immigrants in Turkey, a Turkic-speaking community sustaining resilient and politicized attachment to its hometown Kirkuk, the oil-rich ancient city of northern Iraq.
I conceptualize ethno-nationalism as a melancholic process, marked by the subject’s refusal to abandon its (lost) object of desire, which is, in this case, home (the city of Kirkuk) as well as ethnic identity (Turkness). I understand the melancholic tendencies of the ethnicized subject in terms of one’s resistance against normalizing discourses (in the case of Iraq, Arabization and Kurdification). With a retrospective approach, I study the survival strategies that the Turkmen community has developed against the assimilation policies of Iraqi state. I explore the constitutive role of state and inter-communal violence in the formation of Turkmen ethnicity.
I also study the diasporic perspective on contemporary Turkmen politics in Iraq. I argue that the diasporic elite seeks to incorporate ethnic sentiments and (be)longings into a kind of civic nationalism and to justify the Turkmen claims of ethnic particularity based on universal principles of human rights. I maintain that this new identity discourse, which foregrounds the civic bonds of the Turkmen to Iraq, has developed mainly in response to a Kurdish ethnocracy emerged in the post-2003 period.