Guns and Guitars: Simulating Sovereignty in a State of Siege (with Mete Hatay)
2011; Wiley; Volume: 38; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-1425
Autores Tópico(s)Balkans: History, Politics, Society
ResumoWe present an ethnographic examination of the Agambenian approach to sovereignty through the example of a particular “state of exception,” namely, the militarized Turkish Cypriot enclaves of the 1963–74 period and their transformation into an unrecognized state structure. We argue that both the enclave administration and its subsequent variations have operated under a simulacrum of sovereignty, a claim to sovereignty that is both overproduced and incomplete. We examine the emergence of this simulacrum, which we claim allowed Turkish Cypriots to play with another form of existence, one at the interstices of exceptionality. This interstitial life, we argue, is characterized by a particular form of “abandonment,” one that may allow one to “enjoy one’s exception.” [Cyprus, Turkey, sovereignty, state of exception, Agamben] R ecently, in north Cyprus, a group of aging rock musicians took the stage before a packed auditorium to play songs from their new album, a rerecording of favorites from their glory years. Now gray and balding, group members were mobbed by adoring young fans, who know their music by heart, considering it a part of Turkish Cypriot cultural heritage. And, indeed, the group, which formed during the Turkish Cypriot enclave years of the 1960s and 1970s, had used the few Cypriot folk songs members could find, along with folk poetry that they collected in the villages, to develop a distinctive style, a type of modern folk inspired by the Anatolian folk rock music then sweeping Turkey as well as by U.S. groups such as Peter, Paul, and Mary. Their songs are now taught to children, sung at picnics, and played as background whenever one wishes to evoke an “authentically” Cypriot music. Before developing their own style, the group of teenagers had been the first band to rock the Nicosia ghetto, the largest of the enclaves to which Turkish Cypriots had retreated when intercommunal violence began at the end of 1963. At the beginning, they would play Anatolian rock and British and U.S. pop to excited crowds in the fighters’ clubs, the only spaces for entertainment in the context of a military siege. “We felt like we were the Beatles,” said one of the group, describing what it was like when, as a 16-yearold boy, he took the stage in the Turkish Cypriot enclaves before crowds of more than a thousand. When they played for the girls’ high school, their audience let out screams. When they went on a tour of the enclaves, the leading men of the towns welcomed them. “There was nothing, absolutely nothing, at the time. Imagine, the Greek Cypriots wouldn’t let anything into the enclaves—not a nail, not clothes, not food. We were living on rations from the Red Crescent—dried beans and dried chickpeas. We were pressed in, crowded into this tiny space, and people had no way to let off steam. That’s why we were important.” We use the biography of a rock band to understand Turkish Cypriot social life and constructions of both resistance and sovereignty during a four-year siege and ten-year period of enclavement. As we discuss below, the Turkish Cypriot community had been a partner with the Greek community in the 1960 Republic of Cyprus, and the breakdown of AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 631–649, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01327.x American Ethnologist Volume 38 Number 4 November 2011 constitutional order and ensuing intercommunal violence caused a withdrawal of Turkish Cypriots from the civil service and from political life. They barricaded themselves in their own neighborhoods and villages, which were put first under a military and then under an economic siege. The civil servants and political leaders who had withdrawn from the republic reorganized social life in the enclaves as a statewithin-a-state, a replica of the state from which they had withdrawn. The Republic of Cyprus government, by then entirely in Greek Cypriot hands, declared Turkish Cypriots to be “rebels,” stripping away many of the rights and privileges given to them by the 1960 constitution. The suspension of constitutional order created a state of exception that continues to this day. Like those in the ghettos of eastern Europe during the Nazi occupation (Gringauz 1950; Horwitz 2008; Lewin 2002; Trunk 2006), the Japanese internment camps in the United States during the same period (Houston 2006; Uchida 1982), or the sieges of Leningrad and Sarajevo (Andreas 2008; Macek 2009; Sontag 1994) or Gaza today (Hess 1999), Turkish Cypriots attempted to find order in disorder. The moment of their confinement was an “unstable state,” what Carol Greenhouse refers to as a zone “where people are entangled, abandoned, engaged, and altered by the reconfiguration of states” (2002:4). But as Greenhouse stresses, such a moment is not one of chaos (also Lubkemann 2008); instead, it is a moment of reordering. For Turkish Cypriots, enclaving was a moment when new forms of politics and sociality were being constructed. In this article, then, we describe how they made sense of their own “unstable state,” which was directly tied to the collapse of the political state. We argue that their ways of making sense of their state during that period directly shaped the state of sovereignty on the island today. A rock band may seem a peculiar place to begin a search to understand constructions of sovereignty, but the fate of a group that has enjoyed several decades of popularity reveals much about the ways that social life and political life in the Turkish Cypriot community were reconfigured around their own exceptionality. Initially, all the young men in the group were mucahits, or fighters, and all but one of them went to high school during the day and took up guard duty at night. The original name of the group, Flag Quartet (Bayrak Kuartet), expressed something of the militarized nationalist mobilization that pervaded the community during the first years of siege, when most Turkish Cypriots expected Turkey’s military intervention and willingly adopted forms of nationalism coming from Turkey, including the Turkish flag. The name that band members chose only five years later, Sila 4, uses the word sιla, or “return to one’s homeland,” to express a more local sense of Cyprus as a homeland, a new “Cypriotism” that found form in their music. As we discuss below, this change also reflected a more general localization of nationalism during the period, a growing distance from Turkey and attachment to the island. But even as their music developed to give expression to changing cultural values, our musicians themselves never became professionals and so had experiences and careers typical of many men in similar positions at the time. The band began not long after Turkish Cypriots’ entry into the enclaves and flourished during the 1963–74 period. In 1974, a Greek-sponsored coup against President Makarios provoked Turkey’s military intervention and the ultimate division of the island. Turkish Cypriots who had lived for a decade in enclaves claimed more than a third of Cyprus’s north as their new territory, establishing a new administration there that they would, in 1983, declare as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a state that remains unrecognized by any country besides Turkey. The political culture and administrative structure of the enclaves were transferred to the new state, which continued to be defined by exception. The “rebels” of the 1963–74 enclave period had become the bandit founders of a “pirate state.” After division of the island and the establishment of a de facto state in the island’s north, our rock group disbanded as its members took up positions as civil servants and politicians in Turkish Cypriots’ new, unrecognized entity. The recent retirement of some of the band members from those positions has given them time to record again, but the revival and rerecording of their music also parallels other social changes, such as a revolution at the turn of the millennium against an older nationalist regime and the subsequent 2003 opening of the checkpoints that divided the island. We argue elsewhere that the past several years have seen a new nostalgia for the solidarity of the enclave period (Hatay and Bryant 2008), a nostalgia with parallels in other cases of sudden “openings” in which neoliberal intrusion and accompanying rapid social change appear to erode social values (e.g., Berdahl 1999; Boyer 2006; Boym 2001). This has been expressed, for instance, in nostalgia for the walled city of Nicosia, the space into which Turkish Cypriots were crowded during the enclave years and which they subsequently abandoned, and it is reflected in the revival of Sila 4’s music. A local rock band, then, may be an especially pertinent point of entry to an ethnography of ghetto life and constructions of sovereignty in a state-within-a-state. The past decade has seen a proliferation of literature on sovereignty, especially following the English-language publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998) and its seeming applicability to the post–9/11 “state of exception” in the United States.1 More recent work has begun to examine the limitations of the Agambenian framework, especially its potential as a basis for alternate political futures. For instance, in a trenchant critique of Agamben’s work, Ernesto Laclau takes issue with the essential Agambenian notion of the “ban,” or the exclusion from the law that nevertheless
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