States of Dispossession offers an ethnography of political violence that takes place in the everyday life of Mardin, a city branded as the beacon of multiculturalism in southeastern Turkey. The anthropology of war and conflict has commonly traced the ethnic, gendered, racial, and embodied effects of violence and, more recently, the destruction of nonhuman environments. Biner’s ethnography also explores the formations of violence, yet the formations that she unearths are sedimented over more than a century, and the violence is not one that is readily visible through bodily loss but through dispossession. Biner reads the matters of death and survival through the cycles of destruction and de/re/possession of materialities like ruined villages, historic stone houses (and imagined treasures under these houses), pistachio fields, monastery walls, vineyards, and others. What she compellingly argues is that cycles of dispossession have made possession the quintessential definition of a “good life,” and people’s struggles and aspirations to possess and “live well” shape their political subjectivities in this wartorn region. States of Dispossession allows us to think of the nexus of hope, violence, complicity, and possession with the depth of 15 years of fieldwork and a rich set of theoretical concepts. Even though it is centered in a small city in Turkey, its methodological and ethnographic interventions would be illuminative for other contexts of political violence and slow death. The ethnography takes place in the fragile peace period between 2001 and 2015, which is when the conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) had slowed down and the state of emergencies had been lifted. The ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, then eager for European Union membership, had initiated a series of “regional development,” “postconflict reconstruction,” and “democratization” projects enabling the revitalization of social, cultural, and economic life in the region. The star of this process was Mardin; it was branded as a city of multicultural heritage waiting to be “discovered” and “experienced.” Several tourists from the west of Turkey traveled to the conflictfree Mardin for a taste of multiculturalism—sipping the Syriac wine, buying silver jewelry crafted by the Syriac masters or their apprentices, eating the most famous examples of “the Arabic cuisine” in historic stone buildings, or walking by the characteristic narrow streets with imaginations of stepping into a “mystical” atmosphere (Öncü 2011). Between 2011 and 2015, while doingmyfieldwork inDiyarbakir, a politicized andKurdishmajority city 90 km away, I would hear Mardin being referred to variably as an authentic, quiet, boring, stagnant, depoliticized, Arabified, Islamized, and privileged city. The pouring of European Union and state resources into the heritage projects in Mardin as well as the increased domestic tourism seemed to elevate Mardin outside conflict geography, to the bitterness of Diyarbakir’s political residents. Biner’s ethnography carves another image ofMardin. It shows that beneath the surface of this quiet and peaceful city lie layers of dispossession and ruination and a volatile sociality. Chapter 1 summarizes these layers through a unique historiography of dispossession in Mardin centered on the stone and the concrete. Biner gives a moving account of how the Muslimand Christian-owned stone buildings from the nineteenth century were gradually destroyed from the 1915 Armenian genocide onward, well into the conflict in the 1990s. In themeantime, the concrete infiltrated. Maybe the most iconic image of this layered dispossession would be that a Kurdish occupier-resident family whose village was evacuated by the Turkish military in the conflict moved into a room of an Armenian-made stone house and built a concrete wall to separate “their” section of the yard and an extra room for more space. The concretization of the stone buildings came to a halt in the postemergency period with the AKP’s heritage projects. Biner reveals that such a reclaiming of heritage was far from acknowledging the violent past or non-Turkish and non-Muslim indigenousness. It was more about creating a zone of exception and amnesia (40) and not the least about a palatable sense of a multicultural past within a neo-Ottomanist rhetoric of imperialism that we have recently seen reemerging in the Islamization of Hagia Sophia. The concrete that is removed from the historical stone buildings came to be the material of the neoliberal urban transformation projects in the area called “NewMardin,” promising wealth and security. States of Dispossession makes the powerful argument that the peace and reconstruction projects of the postconflict period did not end these episodes of violence and dispossession; instead, they reactivated the minefield of intracommunal violence in Mardin. In chapter 2, Biner explains how that precarious coexistence shuttered with the sudden increase in the market value of the historic stone buildings in old townMardin.

中文翻译：

---

挖掘暴力区

剥夺国家提供了发生在马尔丁日常生活中的政治暴力的民族志，马尔丁是土耳其东南部多元文化的灯塔。战争和冲突的人类学通常追踪暴力的种族、性别、种族和具体影响，以及最近对非人类环境的破坏。比纳的民族志也探讨了暴力的形成，但她发掘的形成是一个多世纪以来的沉淀，而暴力不是通过身体的丧失而显而易见的，而是通过剥夺而显而易见的。比纳通过破坏和去/重新/拥有物质的循环来解读死亡和生存的问题，比如被毁坏的村庄、历史悠久的石屋（以及这些房子下的想象中的宝藏）、开心果地、修道院的墙壁、葡萄园等。她令人信服地认为，剥夺的循环使占有成为“美好生活”的典型定义，人们在这个饱受战争蹂躏的地区，为占有和“过上好生活”而奋斗和渴望塑造了他们的政治主体。剥夺状态使我们能够通过 15 年的田野工作的深度和丰富的理论概念来思考希望、暴力、共谋和占有之间的联系。即使它以土耳其的一个小城市为中心，它的方法论和人种学干预对于政治暴力和缓慢死亡的其他背景也具有启发意义。民族志发生在 2001 年至 2015 年之间脆弱的和平时期，那时土耳其国家与库尔德工人党（PKK）之间的冲突已经放缓，紧急状态已经解除。当时渴望加入欧盟的执政的伊斯兰正义与发展党 (AKP) 政府发起了一系列“区域发展”、“冲突后重建”和“民主化”项目，以振兴社会、文化和经济生活在该区域。这个过程的明星是马尔丁；它被打上了一个等待被“发现”和“体验”的多元文化遗产城市的烙印。几位来自土耳其西部的游客前往没有冲突的马尔丁体验多元文化——啜饮叙利亚葡萄酒，购买叙利亚大师或其学徒制作的银饰，在历史悠久的石头建筑中品尝最著名的“阿拉伯美食”，或者走在特色狭窄的街道上，想象步入“神秘”氛围（Öncü 2011）。2011 年至 2015 年间，我在 90 公里外的一个政治化且库尔德人占多数的城市迪亚巴克尔 (Diyarbakir) 进行田野调查时，听到有人称马尔丁为真实、安静、无聊、停滞、非政治化、阿拉伯化、伊斯兰化和享有特权的城市。欧盟和国家资源倾注到马尔丁的遗产项目以及国内旅游业的增加似乎将马尔丁提升到冲突地理之外，让迪亚巴克尔的政治居民感到痛苦。比纳的民族志塑造了马尔丁的另一个形象。它表明，在这座宁静祥和的城市表面之下，隐藏着层层剥夺和破坏以及动荡的社会。第 1 章通过以石头和混凝土为中心的独特的马尔丁剥夺史来总结这些层次。比纳生动地描述了 19 世纪穆斯林和基督教徒拥有的石头建筑是如何从 1915 年亚美尼亚种族灭绝开始逐渐被摧毁的，一直到 1990 年代的冲突。与此同时，混凝土渗入。也许这种分层剥夺最具标志性的形象是，一个在冲突中被土耳其军队疏散的库尔德占领者家庭搬进了亚美尼亚建造的石屋的房间，并建造了一堵混凝土墙将“他们的”隔开。院子的一部分和更多空间的额外空间。随着 AKP 的遗产项目，石头建筑的具体化在后紧急时期停止了。比纳透露，这种对遗产的回收远非承认暴力的过去或非土耳其和非穆斯林的土著。它更多是关于创造一个例外和健忘症的区域（40），而不是在我们最近在圣索非亚大教堂的伊斯兰化中看到重新出现的新奥斯曼帝国主义言论中的多元文化过去的令人愉悦的感觉。从历史悠久的石头建筑中拆除的混凝土成为“NewMardin”地区新自由主义城市改造项目的材料，有望带来财富和安全。剥夺国家提出了强有力的论点，即冲突后时期的和平与重建项目并没有结束这些暴力和剥夺事件；相反，他们重新激活了马尔丁社区内暴力的雷区。在第 2 章中，Biner 解释了这种不稳定的共存是如何随着马尔丁老城区历史悠久的石头建筑的市场价值突然上涨而结束的。