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Imagining ‘the South’: hybridity, heterotopias and Arabesk on the Turkish–Syrian border

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Abstract

This book offers fresh insights into the complex and various ways in which international frontiers influence cultural identities. The ten anthropological case studies collected here describe specific international borders in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, and bring out the importance of boundary politics, and the diverse forms that it may take. The frontier itself may be of great symbolic importance; in other cases the symbolism lies rather in the disappearance of the traditional border. A frontier may be above all a barrier against immigration, or the front line between hostile armies. It may reinforce distinctive identities on each side of it, or the frontier may be disputed because it cuts across national identities. Drawing on anthropological perspectives, the book explores how cultural landscapes intersect with political boundaries, and ways in which state power informs cultural identity.

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... " From this perspective, Hatay can signify the formal designation for the province as an administrative territory of the Turkish nationstate or evoke qualities of Turkishness as a form of ethnoreligious identifi cation (Duman 2016). Antakya, in contrast, is perceived to possess either the qualities of a post-Ottoman cosmopolitan space in which all its autochthonous religious communities-Christians, Alawites, and Sunni Muslims-"coexist peacefully, " or from a diff erent perspective, the qualities of an "Arab borderland" (Stokes 1998) on the periphery of the Turkish nation-state. In this ideological constellation, the contrast between Hatay and Antakya is constructed along three primary axes of diff erentiation (between Turkishness and Arabness, the national and local, and between cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity) and these axes are selectively erased, deployed, or superim-posed onto one another by diff erent social actors to diff erent ideological eff ect. ...
... In the context of larger attempts to rethink Turkish national identity in relation to its "cosmopolitan" Ottoman past-a diff use ideological constellation oft en discussed under the label of Neo-Ottomanism-this contrast has increasingly been complicated by contested claims to Antakya's history and the values that these claims animate. In Turkish Republican ideology, as Martin Stokes (1998) contends, the partition of Hatay from Syria was imagined as a chronotopic realignment that shift ed the province away from an Arab past and toward Turkish modernity as defi ned by the standards of a modern and secular Europe (1998: 268). Th e contrast between an Arab Islamic past and a Turkish secular modernity, however, was complicated by local Republican policies that constructed its secular modernization project onto existing communal boundaries in ways that locally preserved elements of the Ottoman millet system and its emphasis on the peaceful existence between diff erent religious communities (Doğruel 2009(Doğruel , 2013. ...
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This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of mass media to explore how public life is perceived and made by residents in Turkey’s Syrian borderlands. Deploying two case studies from the ethnically and religiously diverse border provinces of Mardin and Hatay, we investigate how people in these borderlands contest and renegotiate terms of solidarity across multiple forms of social difference, considering how this process both responds to and is reflected in larger shift s in Turkey’s politics, economy, and public culture. In addition, we explore how differently positioned actors practice manifold forms of identification and competing forms of political alignment, paying close attention to how “ideological axes of social differentiation” (Gal and Irvine 2019) are deployed in understanding and making relations of solidarity and difference.
... 4 Yusuf's grandparents were among the many of the region's Arabophone populations, who, together with Armenians, felt compelled to leave Hatay for Syria and Lebanon in the years following the annexation due to the Turkish regime's exclusionary attitude toward ethnic and religious minorities (Shields 2011). The Turkish authorities characterized the remaining Arab population in the province as nationally suspect and potentially disloyal (Micallef 2006;Stokes 1998). Such characterization was manifest in the assimilationalist language and education policies that penalized speaking Arabic in public, the taxation and workday regulations that specifically targeted Christian and Jewish merchants, and the systemic resettling of landless Sunni Turks from the Black Sea region in Hatay by government policy to balance the Arab Alawis' demographic dominance (Aswad 1971;Picard 1983;Stokes 1998). ...
... The Turkish authorities characterized the remaining Arab population in the province as nationally suspect and potentially disloyal (Micallef 2006;Stokes 1998). Such characterization was manifest in the assimilationalist language and education policies that penalized speaking Arabic in public, the taxation and workday regulations that specifically targeted Christian and Jewish merchants, and the systemic resettling of landless Sunni Turks from the Black Sea region in Hatay by government policy to balance the Arab Alawis' demographic dominance (Aswad 1971;Picard 1983;Stokes 1998). These developments, along with shifting labour demands and new economic aspirations, prompted further migration; Christians emigrating to Europe, and Jews to Israel and North America. ...
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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, near the Syrian border, this paper examines the shifts in the positioning of ethnoreligious differences vis-à-vis Turkish nationalism over the past decade. Hatay was annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, 16 years after the foundation of the Turkish nation-state, and did not experience the national homogenization that characterized the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in the post-WWI era. Its ensuing ethnoreligious diversity with a population composed of bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish, Christian, Alawi, and Sunni communities characterized the region’s peripheral border status until the new millennium. In this paper, I focus on two major shifts in Turkish politics which reoriented the ethnoreligious identities of these communities. First, I interrogate the short-lived turn to pluralism in mid-2000s to late-2000s when Hatay’s religious diversity gained prominence as an exemplar of Turkish Muslim tolerance. Built on the nostalgia for Ottoman cosmopolitanism against Turkey’s Republican model of nationalism, this regime celebrated the ethnoreligious difference of Hatay’s residents as long as they were identified as representable elements of the nation. I then turn my attention to the emergent ruptures in this discourse of multireligious nationalism with the outbreak of the Syrian War, Turkey’s foreign policy, and the arrival of Syrian refugees in Hatay. In showing how both polities operated within and through rather than replaced the formerly hegemonic understandings of national unity, this paper reveals the constant reworking of national and ethnoreligious identities at the Middle Eastern borderlands.
... This aside, Hatay has a history of coexistence and blending of not only religious practices such as saint veneration and sacrifice rituals, but also of different styles of music, architecture and wedding ceremonies. This history is also reflected in the forms of visiting patterns, social and economic exchange, and the different types of food and clothing that have blended to form the diverse Arab and Turkish cultures of Hatay (Aswad 1974;Kalaycıoğlu 2011:32-131, 168-192;Şahin 2012;Stokes 1998;Türk 2005Türk , 2010a. This coexistence and blending of different cultures and traditions is, in part, due to the longstanding trading relations by sea and land along the Silk Road and the Cotton Road that cross through Antakya (formerly Antioch), the capital city of Hatay (Liu 2001;Woods 2002:13). ...
... Cultural blending is also reflected in the bilingualism and a distinctive Arabic dialect (Arnold 1998;Cengiz 2010), although some elderly members are only able to speak Arabic. Due to its history and geographic location, Hatay has a unique case of what can be called a Mediterranean cosmopolitism, which blends the various religions and cultures present in that region (Doğruel 2013;Stokes 1998). 7 Despite raised tensions among the different religious groups in Hatay, which have continuously emerged over the last few years due to the civil war in Syria since spring 2011 (Letsch 2013), a genuine, interreligious culture of cohabitation still exists. ...
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Healing, in conjunction with dream and vision requests at sacred sites, is a well-documented phenomenon in Turkey and the Middle East, and plays a major role in local Muslim traditions. This article presents an ethnographic account of dreaming and healing traditions, focusing on the worship of Hızır and Şeyh Yusuf el-Hekim commonly practised at pilgrimage sites in Hatay, Turkey. It demonstrates how Muslims and Christians visit these pilgrimage sites for the purpose of both vows and dream-quests. I argue that visits to local pilgrimage sites – including dreaming and healing as key elements of these visits – lead to a virtual encounter with the saint and a ritual transformation of agency for the worshipper. In reference to the work of Bakhtin, I utilize the concept of the chronotope to analyze oral traditions about Muslim saints and the interrelatedness between temporal and spatial dimensions of visits to these pilgrimage sites. I link this approach with Kapferer’s concept of virtuality so as to account for the personal testimonies of those who visited these sites and experienced virtual encounters with Muslim saints through dreaming and healing. In conclusion, I present details from one of my own experiences at a site and discuss how this changed my relationships with my interlocutors.
... The cross-border movement of people also generates its own hidden economies of paperwork, legal regulation and counterfeiting, in which rights and profits seem to be gained or lost in arbitrary ways. It is not surprising that borderlanders are often 'very much absorbed by the question of the ways in which movement (imaginary and otherwise) is constrained and permitted' (Stokes, 1998), or that witchcraft may be an apt way of expressing the ambiguities attached to migration (Sanders, 2001). ...
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African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation. Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.
... Even as the Turkish-Syrian border divided communities and isolated many from their extended kin, Antakyans continued to establish familial relationships with people from Syria. 52 Indeed, cross-border marriages between people of the same faith were strongly desired by the city's diminishing communities of Jews and Christians. It was easier for members of these communities to find an acceptable match of the same faith in Syria than in the rest of Turkey, especially when they could not find one in Hatay. ...
Article
This article examines the figure of the misafir (guest) as it personifies the combined domains of everyday and institutional hospitality in Hatay, a contested border province annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, and home today to over 400,000 displaced Syrians. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Hatay's administrative capital, Antakya, I focus on the perspectives of the region's bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish and Christian populations about the official misafir status of the first Syrian arrivals. I argue that the sudden transformation of Syrians from familial misafir s to governmental misafir s in the early days of the Syrian conflict ruptured the hierarchical domains of reciprocity that have historically shaped the cross-border relations between these communities. In this process, Antakya's religious minorities recognized and negotiated the limits of their own residence, difference, and citizenship in Turkey, and invoked the lived practices of hospitality that exist beside but also transcend ethnoreligious and national identities. By examining how historical articulations of religious and national difference along the Turkish–Syrian border are entwined with the figure of the misafir at the interpersonal level, this article contributes to debates on hospitality in scholarship on the Middle East and in migration literature.
... Diferentemente do sucedido com a circulação de bens, o trânsito de pessoas através da fronteira por motivos de saúde, de visita a familiares e em festas, era objeto de alguma transigência policial. Mas a permeabilidade relativa das fronteiras supostamente impermeáveis é uma constante antropológica registada à escala mundial -por exemplo, veja-se, no caso luso-espanhol,Brito (1996) e Uriarte (1994; no caso franco-espanhol,Sahlins (1989;; no caso hispano-marroquino,Driessen (1992;; sobre o muro de Berlim,Borneman (1992;; sobre a fronteira entre o México e os Estados Unidos da América,Alvarez (1995) eKearney (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Malásia e a Tailândia,Carsten (1998); sobre as fronteiras do Zimbabué com Moçambique, África do Sul, Zâmbia e Botswana,Cheater (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Turquia e a Síria,Stokes (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Turquia e a Geórgia,Hann e Béller-Hann (1998); sobre a fronteira entre a Hungria e a Sérvia, bem como sobre a fronteira entre o Uruguai e o Brasil,Gay (1995); sobre a fronteira greco-turca, o filme de Theo Angelopoulos, O Passo Suspenso daCegonha (1991). ...
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Este livro aborda as modalidades de construção da identidade nacional em duas localidades situadas em lados opostos da fronteira luso-espanhola no rio Guadiana. O principal objetivo é contribuir para o estudo da identidade portuguesa. Os objetos mais precisos da investigação etnográfica em que se baseia o trabalho apresentado são as festas, incluindo as taurinas, a alimentação e os estereótipos nacionais. As semelhanças e dissemelhanças de facto entre as populações em estudo também são objeto de descrição e análise, mas a atenção centra-se no ponto de vista dos habitantes, nos seus discursos.
... It is in borderlands, places most symbolic of the achievements of nationhood because that is where the nation is most subject to cartographic anxiety (Krishna 1994), that the persistence and/or efflorescence of cultural variety are subject to the most systematic assault from centralized power (Anzaldua 1987;Brady 2000). Such regions also acquire a mythic dimension insofar as they evoke hybridity and the possibilities of the chaos that could engulf the nation as a whole if such complex identities spread elsewhere (Stokes 1998). ...
Article
Macedonia's centrality to the making of Greece over the past century provides the empirical grounding for an exploration of how cultural-symbolic borrowing rather than cross-border othering has been crucial for border making in Modern Greece and, by extension, everywhere in the world. There has been a recent revival in studies of borders between states and what they mean in relation to both the history of state formation and the effects of globalization on state power. Typically, however, the borders between modern “nation-states” are seen as originating in cross-pressures between pairs of neighboring states just the same in Africa today as, say, in nineteenth-century France. The wider contemporary geographical context may be invoked in terms of the “sides” taken in particular border disputes by other nearby states or by the Great Powers. Rarely, however, is the wider historical-geopolitical context invoked as the primary source of the practices, simultaneously material and symbolic, that produce the desire for precise borders in the first place. With increased globalization, however, the making of Greece in Macedonia may become increasingly problematic because the political logic of all national border-making is increasingly in question.
... 'Border studies' are more and more interested in the 'everyday' aspect of the borders, investigating cross-border contacts, shopping, outing, leisure activities, migration, smuggling and the like: activities which to an extent make the border disappear ( Blank, 2004;Kearney, 1998;Rabinowitz, 1994;Stokes, 1998). A recent study, however, stresses a dialectic between the two aspects of the border -the public, belonging to the nation state and the private, belonging to the private lives, within or outside the limits of the law This content downloaded from 134.220.1.139 ...
Article
This article aims to show the varying constructions of the Polish–German border in the Polish border town of Zgorzelec. We are interested in how informants from three generations discursively position the frontier itself and the two towns on its either side: Polish Zgorzelec and German Görlitz. The data comes from a Europe-wide ethnographic project studying communities living on the borders between the European Union (EU) and its ascendant nations, funded by the European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme. We suggest that the inhabitants of Zgorzelec construct the border on two planes: public and private. In the public sphere, the border is constructed as a means of identifying ‘us Poles’ against all those living on the other side. In those nationalized terms, the border is also constructed as protecting Poland and Zgorzelec's (Polish) community. On the other hand, in the private sphere, the border is represented as virtually invisible allowing the individual to cross it for shopping or entertainment. The border becomes a gateway in which the individual becomes a customer, a shopper with his or her national identity pushed to the background. We also show that the two spheres intersect, creating spaces in which the two orders of discourse are made to co-exist and the discursive mechanisms of separation run next to the mechanisms of inclusion. We explore our informants’ discourses as mediated by the historical context of common experience (eviction, displacement, communism) pertaining mostly to the older generation and by the cultural-economic context (shopping, entertainment) largely in the case of our younger informants.
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There is a plethora of research on border disputes, border dispute resolution, unsettled borders, and artificially drawn borders. Yet, no study has so far been conducted on the comparative analysis of borders settled with mandatory powers and between nation-states. This article fills this research lacuna and makes a novel contribution to border scholarship by exploring the linkages between border settlement dynamics and the border status quo. In analysing and comparing Turkey's borders drawn between the 1920s and the 1930s, it is shown that Turkey's Iraqi and Syrian borders settled with mandatory powers (Britain and France respectively) have resulted in the emergence of alternative border imaginations by one of the neighbouring states, albeit without reaching the level of an official demand to change the status quo. Since its independence, Syria has produced an alternative border imagination with respect to its Turkish border by showing Turkey's Hatay province within its borders in its official maps and documents. Since the cession of Mosul to Iraq, Turkey's alternative border imagination has taken the form of state actors' contemplations about resettling the border. In sharp contrast, the Turkish-Iranian border, settled after long consultations between two independent nation-states, effectively resolved boundary-related problems, resulting in the mutual endorsement of the border status-quo. This article concludes that border settlement processes create path-dependent effects that are carried over to subsequent generations of state actors.
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Il file allegato contiene i contributi dell'autrice: Introduzione, Geografie di un territorio poliedrico, L’evoluzione amministrativa, Dinamiche demografiche, La presenza immigrata
Chapter
The Syrian civil war has become an important arena of regional struggle with its human tragedies and geopolitical implications for neighboring countries. The sectarian dimensions of the war added another complication to the current political framework and violence not only in Syria but also in the Turkish-Syrian borderlands, particularly in Antakya (Hatay). At the southernmost border with Syria, the city was annexed by Turkey in 1939 as a result of colonial treachery and contains the largest proportion of Arab citizens of Turkey. The Turkish state’s open support for opposition forces in Syria including jihadist groups, the influx of the Syrian refugees and a significant Sunni Turkish population in favor of the Turkish regime amplified sectarian tensions and the political opposition, after March 2011. Drawing on micro-historical approaches and ethnographic analysis of societal responses at the Turkish-Syrian border region to the interstate conflict of the Syrian civil war, this paper attempts to answer two questions: How has the political and cultural landscape shifted and what are the spatial consequences of it? What are the ways in which ethnic and religious identifications in the city have been re-negotiated with regard to sectarian polarizations and the Syrian civil war?
Article
This article examines the politics of minority representation focusing on the Civilizations Choir of Antakya, a multireligious ensemble formed in the mid-2000s against the backdrop of Turkey’s democratization process and involvement in globally funded programs of intercultural dialogue. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the choir’s hometown, Antakya, near Turkey’s border with Syria, I compare the experiences of Arabic-speaking religious groups who simultaneously represent and are represented in the choir. These experiences, I argue, manifest different historical positions and political tensions that defy the choir’s categorization of minority religions as equally representable constituents of a tolerant nation. Together, they expose the uncertainties of ethno-religiously defined citizenship and the representational work such uncertainties demand for constructing nationhood. By analyzing this process, the article foregrounds representational politics as one key site for the anthropological study of religious diversity, and for addressing broader problems of minority recognition inherent in liberal regimes of tolerance. Özet Bu makale, 2000’li yılların ortalarında Türkiye’nin demokratikleşme süreci ve küresel olarak finanse edilen kültürlerarası diyalog programlarına katılımı zemininde kurulmuş çok dinli bir topluluk olan Antakya Medeniyetler Korosu özelinde azınlık temsili politikalarını incelemektedir. Koronun kurulduğu, Türkiye’nin Suriye sınırı yakınında bulunan Antakya şehrinde yapılan etnografik saha çalışmasından yola çıkarak hem koroyu temsil eden hem de koroca temsil edilen Arap kökenli dini grupların deneyimleri karşılaştırıyorum. Savım, bu deneyimlerin, koronun azınlık dinlerini hoşgörülü bir ulusun eşit temsil edilebilir bileşenleri olarak sınıflandırmasına ters düşen farklı tarihi konumları ve siyasi gerilimleri ortaya koyduğu. Bu konum ve gerilimler, etnik ve dini köken temelinde tanımlanan vatandaşlık kavramının belirsizliklerini ve bu tür belirsizliklerin milliyet inşası için gerektirdiği temsili çabayı gözler önüne sermektedir. Makale, temsil politikalarını kilit bir çalışma alanı olarak ön plana almak suretiyle, hem dini çeşitliliğin antropolojik olarak incelendiği klasik çalışmalara, hem de liberal hoşgörü rejimlerinde esas olan azınlıkların tanınmasına dair daha geniş çaplı sorunların analizine katkı sağlamaktadır.
Book
The Turkish-Syrian borderlands host almost half of the Syrian refugees, with an estimated 1.5 million people arriving in the area following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. This book investigates the ongoing negotiations of ethnicity, religion and state at the border, as refugees struggle to settle and to navigate their encounters with the Turkish state and with different sectarian groups. In particular, the book explores the situation in Antakya, the site of the ancient city of Antioch, the "cradle of civilizations", and now populated by diverse populations of Arab Alawites, Christians and Sunni-Turks. The book demonstrates that urban refugee encounters at the margins of the state reveal larger concerns that encompass state practices and regional politics. Overall, the book shows how and why displacement in the Middle East is intertwined with negotiations of identity, politics and state. Faced with an environment of everyday oppression, refugees negotiate their own urban space and "refugee" status, challenging, resisting and sometimes confirming sectarian boundaries. This book’s detailed analysis will be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, historians, and Middle Eastern studies scholars who are working on questions of displacement, cultural boundaries and the politics of civil war in border regions.
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The global refugee crisis gives new urgency to questions of gender and religion in contexts of displacement. This article adopts and contributes to an intersectional feminist reading of gendered displacement by examining the daily lives of a diverse group of displaced Syrian women at the southern borderlands of Turkey, a country hosting the world’s largest population of refugees today. I argue that the vernaculars of hospitality and border crossings surrounding these women’s lives assemble gendered practices and religious discourses in ways that rework and transcend their citizenship and identity-based differences. These assemblages, moreover, derive significant insight from women’s labour and everyday networks at the local level, which often go unnoticed in public debates. Research that shifts focus from institutional governance to women’s everyday sociality allows intersectional feminists to capture the nuances of displaced women’s agency and the contingencies of their dwelling and mobility in the Middle East against the de-historicized representations of victimized refugee women.
Chapter
Employing the resistance story of Aeham Ahmad, a Palestinian-Syrian musician and activist who has gained most of his fame by playing a portable piano in the ruins of Yarmouk refugee camp under siege, this chapter investigates implications of arts to resist conflict in urban areas. Analyzing the lyrics of ten songs Aeham performed publicly at Yarmouk refugee camp when it was under siege, and incorporating a number of Aeham’s interviews with global media, this chapter highlights the possibilities of arts in the context of urbicide: the violence induced by war and expanded into cities. Civil resistance, like the music of Aeham Ahmad, can empower citizens to reclaim their rights to urban spaces. As a local act of resistance, Aeham’s music represents the everyday suffering and lived experiences of those trapped in Yarmouk. However, Aeham’s music also offers an alternative urbanity, beyond the representation of daily suffering, for change, hope, and solidarity for reconstructing and reordering urban spaces, post conflict.
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en The Syrian Civil War has displaced millions of Syrian citizens since March 2011 and has drastically changed the lives of those in the Turkish–Syrian borderlands. Antakya (Hatay), which was annexed by the Republic of Turkey from Syria under the French Mandate in 1939, is a border province that hosts tens of thousands of Syrian refugees today. Although the province has long been renowned for its ethnic and religious diversity, the influx of Syrian refugees and Turkey's Syria policy have created new ethno‐religious conflicts and have shifted the dynamics of everyday life in Antakya. Drawing on micro‐historical approaches towards boundary‐making and state formation, this ethnographic study focuses first on how the Syrian Civil War has transformed urban everyday life in this border city and has redefined ethno‐religious boundaries and locals’ relationships to the state since 2011. Second, this article investigates the ways in which ‘sectarianism’ is implicated in the Turkish regime's approach to the Syrian Civil War and how sectarian discourses have shifted the political landscape in Antakya. This project suggests that in international conflicts between neighbouring states, the spatial, political and social divisions in border cities will increase as ethnic and religious identities become more politicised. La guerre civile syrienne, sectarisme et changement politique à la frontière turco‐syrienne fr La guerre civile en Syrie a déplacé des millions de citoyens syriens depuis mars 2011 et transformé de manière radicale la vie de ceux vivant près de la frontière turco‐syrienne. Annexée par la Turquie sous le mandat français en 1939, Hatay est une province de frontière accueillant en ce moment des dizaines de milliers de réfugiés syriens. Connue depuis longtemps pour sa diversité ethnique et religieuse, l'afflux de réfugiés syriens et la politique turque envers la Syrie ont créé de nouveaux conflits ethno‐religieux et changé la dynamique de la vie quotidienne à Antioche. S'appuyant sur des approches micro‐historiques analysant la formation des frontières et de l'État, cette étude ethnographique met d'abord l'accent sur la façon dont la guerre civile syrienne a transformé la vie quotidienne urbaine dans cette ville frontalière. Elle explore également les relations des populations locales avec l'État depuis 2011 et s’interroge sur le rôle de la guerre à redéfinir les frontières ethno‐religieuses entre les populations locales et les réfugiés syriens. L'article étudie aussi les façons dont le « sectarisme » est impliqué dans l'approche du régime turc à la guerre civile syrienne et comment les discours sectaires ont transformé le paysage politique à Antioche. Ce projet laisse penser que dans les conflits internationaux entre pays voisins, les divisions politiques, ethno‐religieuses et sociales dans les villes frontalières augmentent à mesure que les identités ethniques et religieuses deviennent plus politisées.
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This article reassesses themes in the present literature on borders in political geography by using the case study of Israel's border with Lebanon. This securitized landscape invites a definition of the border predicated on a neat dichotomy between one's own identity and a foreign and dangerous “Other.” However even this border is a complex and contradictory boundary, in which residents’ attitudes, beliefs and practices are ambivalent and defy neat categorization. This study provides a more nuanced account of geographical imagination at this border by treating the borderland as a heterotopic space, rather than perceiving the border as a fixed line, and by examining the everyday “micro-political” operations and materialities that inhabitants of the border region perform and experience. While there is clearly a relationship between security and identity at this border, the outcome of this research indicates that this relationship is non-linear and more complex than can be allowed for by a hostile cultural imagination solely based on a self/Other dyad.
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https://books.google.pl/books?hl=pl&lr=&id=PqMwBwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA57&dq=related:fTbyxF2f8ukJ:scholar.google.com/&ots=Lv0Xj6oXNY&sig=HX5779sRPm_x9fJD-CVANl7c-sc&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
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Since its independence in 1946, Syria has fielded a team for every summer Olympic competition except 1956, yet has won only three Olympic medals. In contrast with its smaller, higher-powered neighbour Lebanon, its participation at the Olympics has been consistent but limited, with the country making little impact internationally. Yet the history of Syria's involvement with the Olympics reflects key elements of its political and social history: its ambitious but short-lived partnership with Egypt, the Baathist-supported promotion of women as athletes and head of the National Olympic Committee and its commitment to participation in the vexed but ideologically important Pan-Arab Games. This article uses official International Olympic Committee publications and related press coverage to examine the history of Syria's involvement with the Olympic Games, the Mediterranean Games and the Pan-Arab Games. It argues that Syria's participation was initially important not for its medal count but for the 'sign of statehood' that membership in the Olympic community conferred, and that its participation in regional games supported Syria's political positions as a Baathist, Arab republic. It concludes by contending that these political commitments have renewed salience as the conflict in Syria that began in March 2011 continues, and the country's participation in Olympic and regional games becomes increasingly politicised.
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This article explores how internal borders can become naturalized political instruments that are heavily implicated in the extension of state control over rural populations and rural landscapes. It shows how seemingly innocuous instruments such as national parks and hunting and sport fishing regulations can be utilized to create essentialist ecological arguments for the extension of class and urban-based centers of power. Specific examples of these forms of control are illustrated with material from island Newfoundland to show how neo-liberal agendas have been implemented in the name of ecological conservation. These processes create serious disruptions in the historic political ecology of rural areas and obfuscate the anti-ecological practices of contemporary capitalism and neo-liberal forms of government.
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In this article, I explore the complex opportunities afforded by high-intensity performative events for the instantiation of diverse forms of sociality and masculinity in the mountainous Chitral region of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. I focus ethnographically on two types of all-male musical gatherings that are regularly attended by Chitrali Muslims: the istók and the mahfil. The “permissibility” of these types of entertainment, according to Islamic authoritative teachings, is a source of considerable debate in the region: Many Chitrali “men of piety,” who are mostly trained in Pakistani madrassas and are often affiliated with so-called Islamist political parties, deliver mosque addresses during which they pronounce such gatherings “impermissible” within Islam. Analysis of the role played by these all-male sonic gatherings in the instantiation of locally contested forms of masculinity furnishes unique insights into the much-debated issue of how Muslims handle and respond to pressures to Islamize. More broadly, I aim to contribute to wider anthropological debates concerning the constitution and significance to everyday life of local theories of aesthetics, emotion, and ethical action.
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