Projects

Trading Places: Markets and Migrants in Erdoğan’s Istanbul

In the space of less than two generations, Istanbul’s population has grown five-fold from just under 3 million in 1980 ––when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, having graduated from peddling simits as a teenager on the streets of Beyoğlu, was beginning his political career as a grassroots organiser in those same streets–– to over 15 million in 2023, as Erdoğan’s AK Party reached the culmination of over two decades of national rule to celebrate the centenary of the Turkish Republic. This demographic change is, most proximately, the result of intense rural-to-urban migration: as agriculture has shrunk from almost 30% of GDP, employing over half the country’s  labour force, to little more than 5% today, and services have ballooned to well over 50% of GDP now to employ more than half the labour force, a reasonably young population, little more than one generation removed from the land, finds itself struggling to make a living amid the sprawling marketplaces of Istanbul’s urban service sector. What is this generation of migrants discovering about the place of markets in their lives – what markets can do and what they can’t, what they should do and what they shouldn’t?
    This book project draws together fieldwork I have conducted over the last twenty years of AK Party rule with migrant artisans and traders in three historic Istanbul marketplaces – the Grand Bazaar, Beyoğlu’s İstiklal Street, and the Port of Galata. During a period of economic transformation in Turkey when competing figurations of “the market” were critical to interconnected projects of “market reform” ––indeed, when Turkey itself was frequently styled as an “emerging market”–– what exactly are these migrant traders and their children discovering has become of commerce in a fifteenth-century bazaar, or a nineteenth-century boulevard and its arcades, or an early twentieth-century port? While these markets have changed dramatically in the space of a generation, my book argues that a key part of discovering how to trade today in Istanbul is learning how commerce in each of these marketplaces has become significantly different from one another. Indeed, as I discovered with my interlocutors, navigating life in an “emerging market” is less like finding oneself in the midst of some epochal dis-embedding or re-embedding out of the central pages of Polanyi’s Great Transformation and rather more like finding oneself in the opening chapters of Braudel’s Wheels of Commerce – amid a bewildering variety of marketplaces, each animated by markedly different forms of commerce, and facilitating seemingly quite diverse possibilities of state-society relation.
    Beginning to theorise how “market forces” partly galvanise these migrants’ lives calls (in part) for an intellectual revitalization of qualitative market research, and building on Husserl’s notion of ‘trading places’, my project seeks germinally to contribute to a renewal of economic anthropology that attends more faithfully to the phenomenology of economic life. Phenomenology has tended to have a bad-wrap among those interested in political economy –not seeing the wood for the trees, fetishizing the micro and blind to the macro, etc. In Trading Places, however, I hope empirically to demonstrate that any big-picture economic account of Erdoğan’s Turkey over the last twenty years needs to address, at least in part, how many of its ups-and-downs have come curiously to hinge on the idiosyncrasies of state-society relations in particular markets; among other things, an intriguingly bazaar-like Grand Bazaar in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis (helping to intermediate gold-for-oil swaps with Iran), a brutal politics of moral order in the nightlife market around İstiklal Street (that exploded with the Gezi Park protests of 2013), and the shifting geopolitical significance of traffic through the Bosphorus (not least since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine).

Ottoman Culture at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair

“World fairs,” Walter Benjamin quipped, were in the late nineteenth-century “the site of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish”. Working with art historian Mary Roberts, I am currently publishing a two-volume, critical edition of the major scholarly texts prepared by the Ottoman delegation to the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair – the Usul-i mimari-î Osmanî [Ottoman Architecture] and Elbise-i Osmaniyye [Ottoman Costume]. Among the earliest Ottoman monographs explicitly styled as “ethnology”, this translation makes available for the first time in English two pioneering works on Ottoman culture and economy; indigenously-produced scholarship that has tended to be overlooked in intellectual histories of anthropological thought about Europe and the Middle East. Drawing on archival-, collection-, and object-based research, my own contribution to this collaborative project has been to reconstruct an “historical ethnography” of the production of the books in Constantinople in 1872, their circulation amidst the lively exchanges on Vienna’s Prater in 1873, and some of their routes around the world after 1873, particularly their consumption in collections, libraries, and museums across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Resonant with our department’s research focus on global knowledge repositioning, the scholarly apparatus I have helped to prepare at once situates these works in the historical development of Ottoman thinking about culture and economy and also maps the global exchanges involved in their production, circulation, and consumption, especially with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats in Khedival Egypt, Meiji Japan, and the British Raj.  

Clifford Geertz and Post-WWII US Anthropology

Comparable to the empirical re-evaluation of the work of Franz Boas and his students by George Stocking and interlocutors during the 1980s and 1990s, over the next twenty years the discipline will be enriched by the first wave of archivally-grounded histories of anthropology in the last half of the twentieth century. My own focus, in the first instance, is the work of Clifford Geertz, whose archive is now accessible, as are the papers of all his teachers, many of his colleagues, and one major student. Over the next few summers, pending funding, I shall undertake archival research in the US, initially in Chicago, and conduct interviews necessary to write an intellectual biography of Geertz. Partly following Stocking’s example, I intend to publish much of this research initially in essay form as I go along (‘Geertz and the market’, ‘Why did Geertz write four cultural system essays? And why those four?!’, ‘On late Geertz’), together with expository essays on unpublished texts by Geertz (‘Geertz’s Berlin Diary’, ‘Geertz’s China Notebook’), plus a number of theoretical essays on the comparative significance of markets in the social thought of some of his near contemporaries, beginning with ‘Bourdieu and the market’ (timed to benefit from the presence at MPI of noted Bourdieu scholar, Ghassan Hage).