I’ve just posted this message to the Media Anthropology Network mailing list:
Dear All
Jay Ruby raised a very important question for discussion about a month ago re:
media anthropology in the US v Europe (see his message below), followed up by
Philipp Budka’s reference to national traditions of anthropological research.................
Continue reading ""Media anthropology in Europe and the US..." »
* That's a quote from the Wanted.
Wanted offers more than everything I want from an action movie. Two good movies in two days and I am back to life. Both Di and Hans' suggestions were super but not doable at the moment. Hence the movies for consolation. I and Özgür decided to try the movie and we had not felt any regrets. I am energized. The movie has a super soundtrack and several innovative features for an action movie. It combines several action features, car chase, shooting, fighting, high tech gadgets, secret society etc without delving into romance at all.
What else? Well I am in Otto in santralistanbul waiting for my highschool buddies. We are having a small scale reunion event. Nobody showed up yet and i suspect some are having great difficulties to find the place:) -already incoming messages, excuses for not coming. Typical turkish organization:)
if that's really the value. I will sell it immediately! :)
79,830
How much money is your blog worth?
Continue reading "Sunday morning post- What have you done for your life lately?*" »
In discussing the role of anthropologists in the battlefield I’ve argued that what is needed isn’t so much anthropology as common sense. I find it hard to see how the expert opinion of anthropologists will be taken seriously in an organization which fires Arab experts simply because they are gay. If an organization doesn’t take local knowledge seriously, how much help can an anthropologist provide? This short video by Guardian journalist John D McHugh makes clear what I mean.
Continue reading "Mostly old anthro articles from UC Californi Digital Library..." »
Elitists, isolated in their ivory towers, serving out life terms in self-imposed exile. It’s a great image, if you are writing a comedic novel, or perhaps aiming to produce a take on Great Expectations applied to an academic setting, or likewise some rendition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. One can indeed think of how many of these great novels were produced in solitary conditions, but note, by individuals with a great deal of “noise” in their heads, a great many voices struggling to be heard, in conversation or argument with one another, the author caught somewhere in between the (not so) fictional, allegedly “imaginary” voices.
Çarşı puts an end to its 25-year-long story
Stuart Hall's reflections on a life analyzing culture and society
An interview with Stuart Hall, December 2007
COLIN MacCABE
It seems that these are the times for evaluating what happened in the last decades. I have been reading many evaluative inteviews or articles. Here are from wtihin anthropology:
The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology's Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition
George Marcus
EDITORS' OVERVIEW
Anthropology has been vital to recent interdisciplinary endeavors such as feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and science studies, but its own disciplinary core remains “in suspension,” awaiting an infusion of fresh theories and methods, argues George Marcus in an interview published in the February 2008 issue of Cultural Anthropology.
Turkey's government unveiled a £6bn investment package yesterday for the country's south-eastern provinces, taking a tentative step to counter separatist sentiment...
As the gay and transgender community demands recognition, Turkey's conservative society is reacting with hostility, says the BBC's Sarah Rainsford.
Edited by:
Nurhan Yentürk - Yörük Kurtaran - Gülesin Nemutlu
It is in Turkish but for those who can read, one should have a look.
Check out the publisher's site.
Results of the United Nations Development Program 2008 “Youth in Turkey” Report:
From an interview with one of the authors:
Only about 4 percent [of Turkish youth participate in civil society activities], and most of these are university students.Despite the perception of young people in Turkey as dynamic, middle-class students, the reality is quite different. Only 30 percent of young people are students. The remaining 30 percent are working and 40 percent are idle — they neither study, nor work. So 40 percent of the young population does not participate in work life, school life and, of course, in social life. One can call these people the “invisible youth.”…
"Esprit" focuses on "the other '68"; "Merkur" looks back at '68 in amusement; "New Humanist" outstares blind faith; "Blätter" warns of climate wars and market crashes; "The New Presence" takes a dim view of Czech neo-Nazism; "Ord&Bild" works through Nordic colonialism; "Mittelweg 36" debates the terminology of inequality; "dérive" can't see freedom without power; and "Wespennest" writes back from post-crisis Argentina.
found in Sex rule: Use a condom: "For several years the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (BAG) makes remarkable Aids prevention campaigns. Typical European with a visual language that is not suitable for all countires in the world.
This years focus is on possible kamasutra situations like holidays and night life. Wherever you go, don’t go without a condom.....
After revising a little bit, i submitted the paper to the Network and it will be subject to intense criticism/ discussion in the following two weeks. This network is one of the best productive online academic groups I have seen so far.
19 May - 2 June 2008. Erkan Saka (Rice University, USA): Blogging as a research tool for ethnographic fieldwork. (PDF, 280 KB)
Abstract
Comments: Mary Stevens (University College London)
In the mean time, just finished:
The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey by Sam Kaplan
In terms of ethnographic merits this book may not meet expectations. However, it is a good review of developments in Turkish education after the 1980 coup, has a good list of references and its content/discourse analyses of the text books maybe very relevant for the interested parties...
Continue reading "EASA Media Anthropology Network discusses Erkan's paper...." »
George Marcus and Erkan
I had a great and productive talk with George. It was real nice to see him here and it was such a good exchange of ideas. George seems to be quite impressed with my blogging activity. (In fact, i have learnt that some other people know already about this blog) I will probably meet George again before I leave US.
Guess, who met me in the train station: Metin of Talkturkey. Bloggers meet again. He is based in Irvine and man, he is fun and funny. I am overwhelmed with his hospitality here. We will have some going outs today and tomorrow. Well, he had already had to meet my humble fantasies such as having pancakes constantly (!)
As a reading report:
In my 4 hour train trip from Santa Barbara to Irvine I have read an article from Brian Silverstein. "Disciplines of Presence in Modern Turkey. Discourse, Companionship, and Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice" (In Cultural Anthropology Journal)
It is a good sound article. Mass Mediation part is open ended, future work recommended, but the initial parts are good to work for those who are interested in these topics. The book form could be a follow up on Brinkley Messick's Caligraphic State...
My reading pack for this exhaustingly long flight to LA includes:
FOUR GENEALOGIES FOR A RECOMBINANT ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY -
MMJ FISCHER - Cultural Anthropology, 2007
THE END (S) OF ETHNOGRAPHY: Social/Cultural Anthropology's Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in …
GE MARCUS - Cultural Anthropology, 2008 - Blackwell Synergy
A chapter from Featherstone's Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,
Rumor, Gossip and Urban Legends
N DiFonzo, P Bordia - Diogenes, 2007
hmm two more articles...
and some Americana stuff:
Oh boy, The Kite Runner is such a good novel! I have just started reading and already past 50 pages and i am so glad to discover another good novel. I don't feel like it is an apologetic work and it just flows from the author's mouth. (I had always found Kandahar movie's style too apologetic and i was expecting this would have a similar taste. But no, at least so far:)
This is a good Saturday and i am warming up for my US- LA trip that will start on Wednesday. Goin' out now with Nurdan to do some reading in a cafe and a little shopping and i will probably end up in my office to do more work. Well, good way to spend a good Saturday:)
Early minutes of the blog party. Çetin (far right) and I as usual
Istanbul's weather got crazy today. It was a literally spring day. That refreshed my mind and soul and after an early room supervisor work in Kuştepe campus, I moved back to my office in SantralIstanbul and with an iron will I shut myself in, did not check my bloglines account and worked on my dissertation until this time- of course I had several breaks:)))
Dissertation writing has several levels. Today I basically focused on integrating my reading notes to the draft. As you might remember I got a reading craze recently and there are several articles and books on my table, in my bags and car waiting to be integrated to writing. Well, I did some integration today. However, integration work entails finding new readings. You know, those cited works. So I did lots of printing. More articles to read than I have integrated today.
And let me announce that:
Later in the party
Now I am tired. I might do some reading later tonight. However, there are several sources of distraction: my dear friend Adviye and her husband are in town. I will meet them. I just got the call that Malta is crowded with people. there might be late night card playing. I have another movie to watch.
In the mean time, i have finished Joyce Carole Oates' Rape: A Love Story. The most riveting novel I have read recently. Ms. Oates never disappoints me. Now I will start a novel by Ian McEwan who is another favorite.
christian club / stereotypes
An expert in Ottoman-Russian relations Ortaylı quotes an old drawing of European stereotypes (14-7) in which Ottomans and Greeks are used interchangeably. This 18th century drawing that is found in the Ethnography Museum of Vieanna is a good example of historical constructedness of ethnical identities. Ortaylı states that Orthodoxy was always excluded in western European politican and cultural alliances. (11) "Christian club" metaphor is wrong in both angles then. (9)
Continue reading ""Reading İlber Ortaylı's 'Avrupa ve Biz'" »
Writer Doris Lessing, 86, sits in her home in a quiet block of north London April 17, 2006. Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." (AP Photo/Martin Cleaver)
By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER
I am with my parents somewhere close to Yalova for the weekend. A nice place and one of the rare good moves of my father in terms of leisure activities. It is good for them and for twins, I suppose. Hakan knows his ways of entertainment and this is one more place for him while as my flatmate Nurdan is less lucky so this is even better for her.
I don't enjoy here at all. My only reason being here is to be with my parents whom I have been neglecting recently. It does not suit my vacation fantasies. There is the sea and sun basically and lots of nouveau rich, middle class or upper middle class family organisms around. Dad decieved me by saying there is woods behing the settlement but there are only young trees and bushes as far as I understand or as you can see in the picture. Still hoping to go to Black Sea this summer.
We arrived towards noon. I had a long nap in the afternoon and I have been reading in all breaks and now they are out for swimming and I am in an internet cafe in the mall of this vacation site. I guess I have done well so far, but something i read in the mails depressed me and now i am going down.
I have read the recent online discussion posts in Media Anthro Network, I have read a few chapters from Gökmen Karadağ's "AB'nin Medyası, Medyanın AB'si [EU's Media and Media's EU]" and i have been obsessively reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.
After dinner, i guess, i will be reading the latter until i exhaust myself. William Gibson is great. I feel fantasies of being a cyberpunk or a keen observant of the complex postmodern times as I read his novels. Anyway, time to leave the cafe as the spoilt kids around challenging my already weakend nerves...
A little after the first one, that is "Assemblage" in Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 101-106 (2006) co-authored with George Marcus, there comes another one that makes me happy a lot: I and my officemate, Aylin Dağsalgüler co-authored an article in Turkish that is just published in this book: Medya Okumaları. "Media Readings" is edited by Özgür Yılmazkol and published by Nobel Yayın Dağıtım. Our article is entitled something like "New Communication Technologies and Rethinking Habermas' Public Sphere". We first wrote in English for other purposes, then we did not have time to translate and Emrah Akbaş from Hacettepe University did it for us and here we are...
Speaking of books and all I have just started reading DBC Pierre's second novel, Ludmila's Broken English
after finishing John Banville's The Sea. I cannot verify this but it looks like there is a positive correlational situation between what I read and my psyche. The Sea has such a beatiful language- and a vocabulary challenge I haven't met since I took GRE Vocabulary exam- 
and such a soothing prose but at the same time it gives the reader such intense feelings of nostalgia that i have difficulties to breath. Now here comes DBC Pierre, a Salingerasque prose with full of action and I feel more energetic.
Speaking of books, I (belatedly) announce that a great novelist Kurt Vonnegut passed away. Amardeep Singh offers us a brief quote from him:
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. (from Cat's Cradle)
Britannica Blog cites a NYT obit in addition to its own tribute to this great author.
 |
| Jill Krementz |
and finally Rex from Savage Minds asks Kurt Vonnegut passes — have we lost an anthropologist?
As I was watching The Lives of Others, I was thrilled with Ulrich Mühe's performance. The film deserves the Oscar it got and much can be said about it but I will focus on something else. Mr. Mühe's brillant acting made me think about those lonely ascetic men and made me immediately connect him to another filmic character in Takva. Especially in the first part of the film, Muharrem (played by Erkan Can), had a structurally similar life with the Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler. A self-subsistent, self-disciplined man who lives a life of an ascetin within a modern society. I don't know towards the end of the film, my eyes are teary. I felt great pity for Wiesler. But at the same time, I know that the character has set up a life-world in which he can live to the end.
Wiesler and Muharrem
You can pity him and he lives on the edge of being a loser but he is not exactly a loser. He is connected to the world outside of himself and he has an authority around himself to exert his existence.Why my eyes were teary towards the end of the first film I mentioned. Not only because he was exposed to an unfair treatment but because I thought I could become like him in some sense. Under normal conditions, I can imagine the old Erkan who has lots of grandsons and granddaughters around but one never knows and I know I have the potential to move towards a more ascetic life.
Anyway, it is certainly difficult to homologize but Hugh Grant in About a Boy provides a more happier sample of this manhood (I had jealously admired Will in the film). Of course, some of Nick Hornby's writings offers more for this kind of man, I believe. I can even think of Fever Pitch's narrator in this sense too...
All this triggers for a longer essay I am thinking of writing for Milli İstirahat. And I should think about Yusuf Atılgan's Aylak Adam and some of Oğuz Atay's literary characters. But the latter's writings should be handled with care. They might not conform to what I think. His characters are not good examples of autopoiesis in Luhmannian sense. I could think of Salinger. But something misses there. More thinking later...
Something is missing in this semester, i seem to be not getting along with my students as good as i did before. i seem to be more and easily annoyed. Today in the beginning of a class i had to lecture about the philosophy of university and the need to read. You know i am quite a tolerant instructor but when a seemingly concerned students tells:
you see we have other courses, too. This 35 pages of reading stuff a week (in average) is difficult and you don't tell everything written in the book. Particularly there are many quotations. Do we have to read and to know all that stuff?
In the end it turned out to be that she basically wanted to know what kind of questions we would ask in the midterm but the manner she formulated her complaint was now unbearable for me....
In another course, a group of students with high grades claimed that "Kurds are also Turks". Even the deep state recognizes the "reality of Kurds" and there are some concepts like citizenship or ethnic identy which have not reached to the minds of these students. In the latter case, i wasn't angered, i was disappointed.
Anyway, that is all for now.
There is an interview with Özer Kiziltan, Director of "Takva" in Crisis of Faith in Modern Turkey. "The film "Takva" – the first by Özer Kiziltan – deals with a controversial issue. But it still became a commercial and critical success. Amin Farzanefar spoke to the director about Dervish orders and other Muslim topics in Turkish cinema
"Takva" is originally an Arabic word. It means "A man's fear of God" which is also the subtitle of the film in English.
I have finally watched Sis ve Gece.
Sis ve Gece/Fog and Night (Official Site)
It wasn't the best movie I watched recently but it is still a notable one. I already like Ahmet Ümit's novels and this adaptation works well. Contentwise it both touches the existence of para-legal security practices and the extraordinary powers attached to them through conspiracy theories... for a substantive review, click here...
Have a look at Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: A Book Review Essay by Patricia Kushlis:
Istanbul in black and white . . .
My first visit to Istanbul was a short one in late January 1979 en route back to Moscow after visiting friends in Nairobi. Istanbul was then cold, rainy, and polluted. Turkey was in the thralls of an unstable left-wing government which did not know how to govern. Coffee was non-existent, gasoline rationed, the Turkish lira was depreciating rapidly and besides, the lira was a non-convertible currency so anyone who could, kept money in a hard currency account in Switzerland........
In the mean time,
Finally, Kiki "punches" Foucault here. I am not sure about agreeing with the allegation of empirical weakness in the foundations of F's theoretical claims. As far as I know Foucault was quite a punctual and diligent scholar to find out and read whatever he found in his field of study. Every attempt of theoretical deduction inevitably ignores some empirical data and I suppose Foucault might have decided to leave some stuff behind. Maybe the problem is not that he did not look for empirical substance but what he decided to theorize. And (but) this is a different area of discussion....
This evening's game between Besiktas and Fenerbahce was the attraction of the week for me. I am into various escapisms nowadays. Besiktas won the game though this did not make me happy. My favourite team's players are so aggressive. They play dirty and in the end they accuse the referees. I felt dizzy all the day and I could not work on my proposal for SSRC. I could only read a little bit from Faulkner's The Sound and the fury. So I am also not happy with my reading performance today.
forgive me god but i am not happy with Ramazan, too. rituals are collectively felt and when someone like me is out of touch with those collectivities, rituals are hard to keep up with. My closest friends are fasting, too. But we all feel in the same way. Cetin and I had several iftars in a coffeehouse during last week. This is an unlikely situation for many. People prefer to have iftars with their families or groups. we don't feel to be involved in these 'warm', homey environments....
IN THE NEWS:
HURRIYET (LIBERAL)
ERDOGAN IN ROME TO SIGN EU CONSTITUTION
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister & Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Gul will attend the signing ceremony for EU Constitution in Italian capital Rome later today. Turkey, together with the two other candidate states Bulgaria and Romania, will sign the final part of the Constitution. While in Rome, Erdogan and Gul are expected to hold a series of bilateral talks with EU heads of state and government to discuss Turkey-EU relations prior to December 17th when the EU would make a decision whether to open entry talks with Turkey.
I have sent my grant application to ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey). I am grateful to Ebru who told me to apply. I had thought this was for only American citizens.
Now i am working on SSRC-IDRF application. I should send it soon.
I have a feeling that the result of Wenner-Gren application is not that positive. So be it.
I am too busy with these applications, my teaching load and AAA fiasco. I had worked on a complex flight plan and as I had finally found a good deal, i got the news that the meetings would be relocated. Fine. I feel bad for my travel agent. But i guess i should tell him about the latest decision. He helped me a lot to find a good deal and now it must be gone.
Prof. Ugur seems to warming up to call Mr. Ozkok.
