Out of this concern, psychosocial studies emerges to produce a body of knowledge that aims to account for the critical issue of subjectivity through going beyond conventional conceptualisations of the subject and the social.
Then, it can be claimed that “psychosocial studies [is] a critical approach interested in articulating a place of ‘suture’ between elements whose contribution to the production of the human subject is normally theorised separately.”159 It brings these analytic categories together as co-constitutive conceptions that are thoroughly imbricated into one another. Through this specific articulation of the relationality between the self and the social, it traces
“a type of subject which is both social and psychological, which is constituted in and through its social formations, yet is still granted agency and internality.”160 One needs to explore all these registers to account for the complexity posed by intricacies of selves. Especially relevant with regards to how human subjects are formed and amended with regards to a multitude of factors, I believe, psychosocial perspectives, as critical engagements with both streams to give rise to an embedded sociality within the subject and vice versa, might be potentially productive through its ability to move across registers and to be able to accommodate what is missed out of these theories that focus on the structure.
II. Tension and Ambiguity: “Moving Back and Forth”
Subjectivity, hence, emerges as a concept that is implicated in the constitutive tension between the individual and the social. As explored above, in addition to being “formed not within a single ideological line,”161 subjectivities present a complicated interplay. Structural elements of socio-cultural life (political discourses, state policies, customs, kinship structures, geographies, collective memories, economy, and law) undoubtedly play a crucial part in the way people come to assume certain subject positions as they circumscribe a space of (im)possibilities. Yet, the meanings of being man, woman, citizen, Muslim,
159 Frosh and Baraitser, “Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies,” p. 348.
160 Frosh and Baraitser, “Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies,” p. 349.
161 Simon, Caged in on the Outside, p. 186.
Turkish, Trabzonlu (Trabzonian), or Kadahorlu (of Kadahor) would still take particular forms and appeals within this general configuration. How these positions are approximated and the way they are occupied and comprehended depend on subjects’ histories, their socio-cultural background, corporealities, genealogies, socialities, affective investments, desires, feelings, vulnerabilities, strengths, perceptions, and aspirations that incessantly amend and distort these structural constructions and messages.
Subjectivity, then, is generated out of constitutive tensions and interrelatedness, involving “how we put the diverse parts of our personal being together into some kind of whole”162 in contingent, heterogeneous, fragmented, and various ways. 163 Subjectivities are fragmentally and transiently constituted as
“consequences of actions, behaviour, or ‘performativity’ [rather] than as their source,” highlighting their non-essential composition.164 As subjectivity cannot be reduced to its biological determinants,165 which Butler demonstrates in the case of gender and sex, it is an imperative to emphasise multiple, unfinished,166 social, and evolving composition of subjectivities. Far from demonstrating coherent and unitary entities, they should be conceptualised as constellations of fractured, mobile, porous, and multiple aspects that are structurally prone to contradiction.167 Especially relevant in the case of everyday experiences—as I trace through this dissertation—how this tension is implicated in the formation of subjectivities requires one to be attentive to socio-cultural structuring and how norms are internalised, accommodated, resisted, and amended by individuals and socialities. Rather than trying to dissolve this tension, though, it might be much more productive to pursue how actors are constituted and move
162 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p. 17.
163 Arthur Kleinman and Erin Fitz-Henry, “The Experiential Basis of Subjectivity: How Individuals Change in the Context of Social Transformation,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 2007, p. 53.
164 Evelyn Fox Keller, “Whole Bodies, Whole Persons? Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, and Biology,” p. 353 – 354.
Read, “The Production of Subjectivity,” p. 114.
165 Arthur Kleinman and Erin Fitz-Henry, “The Experiential Basis of Subjectivity: How Individuals Change in the Context of Social Transformation,” p. 53.
166 Henrietta L. Moore, The Subject of Anthropology: Gender Symbolism and Psychoanalysis, Polity:
Cambridge and Malden, 2007, p. 40 – 41.
167 Evelyn Fox Keller, “Whole Bodies, Whole Persons? Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, and Biology,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 2007, p. 353 -354.
across these registers in response to both their psychosocial backgrounds and the socio-cultural contexts they are embedded in.
Similarly, in her discussion of subjectivity within social theory, Sherry B. Ortner highlights how subjectivity cannot simply be reduced to either of these aspects, but needs to be accounted through their co-existential and ever-changing implications. She uses subjectivity to refer to both “the ensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, […] fear that animate acting subjects” and
“the cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke these modes of affect, thought, and so on.”168 Consequently, she “move[s] back and forth between the examination of such cultural formations and the inner states of acting subjects”169 to account for the complexity of processes of subject formation in various forms. My discussion of Romeika-speaking communities of Trabzon can be read as an illustration of this complexity where the subjects are always in excess of the prescribed subject positions, ranging from national(ist) affiliations to religious identities. Hence, throughout my analysis, I also “move back and forth” between these registers to capture the implications of both domains in order to avoid reducing subjectivation processes to a single domain.
Thus, as an agency that is embedded within a given symbolic structure, subjectivity should be conceived to emerge in correspondence to a number of structuring discourses through which its alignments and manoeuvres take form.170 This embeddedness, though, should always be thought alongside the dynamism and fractured composition of subjectivities, as open-ended processes, through which different subject positions are produced and approximated. Such diversity and fragmentation with regards to subject positions, I argue, constitute another significant aspect of subjectivities: ambiguity. Devoid of essential coherence and unity, as I have touched upon more explicitly through psychoanalytic trajectories, it is not surprising to witness ambiguous
168 Sherry B. Ortner, “Subjectivity and Cultural Critique,” in Anthropology and Social Theory:
Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject, Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2006, p. 107.
169 Ortner, “Subjectivity and Cultural Critique,” p. 107.
170 Moore, The Subject of Anthropology, p. 8 and 55.
subjectivities as they are “based on a series of subject positions, some conflicting or mutually contradictory, that are offered by different discourses.”171
Within the scope of this thesis, then, my objective is to decipher these different registers through which men of this small Valley community go through subjectivation processes in a number of ways, ranging from movements across the Valley to gatherings in coffeehouses to discuss national matters, from state enactment to engaging with the collective memory in a peculiar manner, or from moving across languages and accents to conspiratorial enunciations. In Chapter VII for instance, I illustrate that local engagements with the landscapes they dwell in give rise to a specific modality of subjectivity through which memory is corporeally articulated and situated in ways that could be accommodated only through a semi-illegal practice, that is, definecilik (treasure hunts). In parallel, through my discussion of masculine circulation of conspiracies and mundane enactments of the state in Chapter IX, I argue that local men produce a sovereign subjectivity that is characterised by potency and unwoundedness in tandem with the general tone of nationalist history. Although they are simply fragments of a much richer and more diverse range of subject positions, my aim remains to underline how these different registers operate to produce particular aspects of local communities.
As, such processes require one to attend to both social factors and how they are implicated in the self, throughout this dissertation I utilise premises from post-Marxist analyses, performativity, and psychoanalysis to account for the peculiar forms that subjectivities take in different aspects of everyday life. Foucauldian theory, for instance, is utilised to underline the changing regimes of truth by which modalities of being and belonging are rearticulated. Emergence of the national(ist) identity, I argue, constitutes an illustration of such transmutations through which Romeika can no longer be articulated in public. Relying on psychoanalysis, too, I discuss how this muted status in public might be related to the prevalence of treasure hunts as a haunting of places by unaccounted memories.
171 Moore, A Passion for Difference, p. 4.
Similarly, following Foucauldian articulations of power, I trace how modern governmental techniques and materialities generate a public sphere and citizenship out of which masculine subjectivities are constructed. In close connection, following an Althusserian path, I trace how men are hailed by a nationalist-modernist ideology to assume their positions as citizens in the public sphere. I explore, both in Chapter VIII and IX, how such interpellations promise equality, coherence, and potency to local men. Simultaneously, though, I also account for how gender is strictly related to a set of reiterations, in the footsteps of Butler, through my analysis of local men and how particular corporealities, spatialities, enunciations, and presences generate gender. My analysis of local religiosities, too, in Chapter X, follows a similar logic and explores how a convergence of productive technologies of power and local distinctions produce a particular religious reiteration that constructs local subjectivities.
In line with these theoretical articulations, subjectivity should be conceptualised as “both an empirical reality and an analytic category: the agonistic and practical activity of engaging identity and fate, patterned and felt in historically contingent settings and mediated by institutional processes and cultural forms.”172 Their formation displays immense diversity and requires the analysis to be attentive to both its ongoing transformation and the way they are affected by their socio-cultural surroundings. Throughout this dissertation, they are represented in fragments that are always situational, incoherent, malfunctioning, ever changing, embedded in their psychosocial environment, and affected by a multiplicity of factors implicitly or explicitly.
172 Biehl et al., “Introduction,” p. 5.
CHAPTER IV
SITE, CONTEXT, AND HISTORY
I. Brief History: Trabzon and the Valley
Constricted in the narrow littoral, Trabzon has always been a significant place in the socio-political imaginary of Turkey. Although relatively small in size and economy, Trabzon still emerges as a hotspot, not only because of the recent incidents that profoundly shook and changed the Turkish political landscape, but also as a city where a rich history is still partially alive in the nationalist and conservative present.
Founded in antiquity, the city has since found itself a spot in succeeding imperial structures, gaining regional capital positions in Byzantine, Hellenic, and Ottoman bureaucracies. When Latin crusaders ransacked the Byzantine capital in the early 13th century, Byzantine royals fled to Trabzon to establish a Hellenic empire in the region, Trabzon Rum İmparatorluğu (Greek Empire of Trabzon).173 Throughout this period, until its acquisition by Ottoman forces in the mid 15th century, the area had been under the Hellenic influence that affected socio-cultural, economic, and religious domains of subjects of the Empire, which stretched along the narrow littoral from Samsun in the west to Georgia in the east.174 In time, numerous churches and monasteries were founded across the coast and along the valleys, spreading and consolidating Hellenic culture further.175
In the mid 15th century, Ottoman imperial forces consolidated their rule over the Western plains of Anatolia and the Balkans and gradually incorporated Trabzon.
When Ottomans captured the city in 1461, a date that is still vividly in circulation as illustrated by the recent establishment of a new football team, 1461 Trabzon
173 For further information about the province in antiquity and the Greek Empire of Trabzon, please see: William Miller, Trebizond: The Last Greek Empire, Adolf M. Hakkert: Amsterdam, 1968.
174 Miller, Trebizond, p. 11.
175 Miller, Trebizond, p. 6.
Rustem Shukurov, “Foreigners in the Empire of Trebizond (The Case of Orientals and Latins),” in At the Crossroad of Empires: 14th and 15th Century Eastern Anatolia, Deniz Beyazıt (ed.), Paris, 2012, p. 71. Proceedings of the International Symposium, İstanbul May 4-6, 2007.