This talk will discuss Cold War entanglements in the discipline of anthropology through a case study of University of Chicago anthropologists working on Turkey in the 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and manuscripts in the university archives and on oral history interviews, it brings to light the life and work of Professor Lloyd A. Fallers (1925–1974) and his graduate students Michael E. Meeker, Peter Benedict and Alan Duben. This Chicago group constituted the kernel of an exceptional moment in the history of anthropology of Turkey in the late 1960s, when a Turkey focus in Euro-American anthropology was commenced by the social scientific interest in successfully modernizing non-Western countries during the Cold War. It faded away, however, when the theoretical postulates of the Cold War anthropology were challenged within the discipline in the late 1960s and when the 1968 movements in Turkey —both the anti-imperialist Left and the nationalist Right— turned foreign ethnographers into unwanted guests. This talk is derived from the question how the anthropologists whose worldview was shaped during the Cold War experienced the revolutionary 1960s on personal and conceptual levels. Or, in a nutshell, how did the Cold War anthropology meet the challenge of the 1968?
Ali Sipahi holds a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and currently works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. He co-edited The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century (I.B. Tauris, 2016) and published articles in academic journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, History and Anthropology, and Middle Eastern Studies. Funded by research fellowships by the Gerda Henkel and the Alexander von Humboldt foundations, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien working on a manuscript about anthropologist Lloyd A. Fallers’ research on Turkey in the 1960s.
Çiçek İlengiz works at the intersection of memory studies, politics of emotions and critical heritage studies. In 2019, she completed her PhD at the Research Center for History of Emotions, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Before joining the research project BEYONDREST, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Empires of Memory Research Group, hosted by the Max Planck Research Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. Her recent publications have engaged with the conceptual discussions on inheritance, temporality and mourning in the fields of memory and heritage. She is currently revising her book manuscript for publication, tentatively titled The Healing-Injury: Revolutionary Mourning in Post Genocidal Turkey. Combining ethnographic research with oral histories and archival documentation the book offers a critical assessment of the logics of rational politics, the framework of which has been drawn by military, racial, and secular regimes of power.
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