THE MAKE-BELIEVE SPACE

Affective Geography in a Postwar PolityBy Yael Navaro-Yashin

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5193-1

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………….xxiIntroduction: The Make-Believe Space……………………………….11. The Materiality of Sovereignty………………………………….372. Repopulating a Territory……………………………………….513. The Affects of Spatial Confinement………………………………624. Administration and Affect………………………………………815. The Affective Life of Documents…………………………………976. Abjected Spaces, Debris of War………………………………….1297. Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects……………………………1618. Home, Law, and the Uncanny……………………………………..1769. Collectibles of War and the Tangibility of Affect…………………202Epilogue………………………………………………………..215Notes…………………………………………………………..223Works Cited……………………………………………………..247Index…………………………………………………………..261

Chapter One

The Materiality of Sovereignty

I SIT IN THE SMALL OFFICE of the Maps Department of the TRNC, in Lefkosa, the neighborhood of Yenisehir quite close to the local police station. The Maps Department, linked directly to the Turkish armed forces in northern Cyprus, is considered one of the most important units of the TRNC administration. Civil servants who work in the department conduct regular cartographic surveys of the territory of northern Cyprus; the maps they produce are used officially not just by the army, but also by the Office of Title Deeds for property allocation, by schools for geography lessons, by town and city councils for local administration, by the police for criminal investigation, and by the Office of Identity Cards and Passports for registration and verification purposes. In this chapter, I begin my account not through the maps (as the products of representational abstraction), but through the work (the practices) that went into their making.

An officer working for the Maps Department, Kemal Bey, a Turkish-Cypriot originally from a village in southern Cyprus, described elements of this work:

In villages, there were land maps (arazi haritalari) held by the elected heads of villages (muhtars). We started with these maps, as well as others that we found in the villages, here and there. We produced new maps for the villages left behind by the Greek-Cypriots. For example, it was us who produced a map from scratch for the village of Demirhan. Then, suddenly, a villager appeared and said that he had found the old map for the village. We compared the old map with the new one we had produced. In the new map, we had parceled land up in a different way.

Kemal Bey opened a drawer and took out an example of an old village map to illustrate what he was describing:

Look, for example, this is the old map for the village of Yenagra. This map was originally produced in 1911 by the [British] Department of Land Surveys and was copied in 1970. On the map, you can see that parcels of land and portions for title deeds have been enumerated. These numbers have been the same since earlier than 1911, and they are still used in title deeds of the TRNC. Now, in this old map, you find the previous name of the field (arazi) in the middle of this village. We adapted this old name to Turkish and changed it.

Kemal Bey opened another drawer and took out a map of Cyprus, which he said the Maps Department had produced in 1987. “There are some small mistakes in this map,” he said:

For example, there is no reference to Güzelyurt [Omorfo for Turkish-Cypriots; Morphou for Greek-Cypriots] on it; you see, that space is blank. This is because Güzelyurt was not registered as a separate district in the period when we were conducting the name-changing project; it was connected to Lefkosa. Only afterward did Güzelyurt acquire a distinct administrative identity. Similarly, we had united the three villages where there were martyrs [people killed by Greek-Cypriots]: Murataga, Sandallar, and Atlilar, and renamed them Sehitler [Martyrs] as a single administrative unit. On this map, there is only a reference to Sehitler; the other village names do not appear. Now, this map can be considered old by today’s standards, but you may have a look at it.

Kemal Bey gave me a copy of the map from 1987 as a present. He then continued to recount the work that went into the project to change place names in northern Cyprus:

We had founded a committee to change the names of villages. But it was primarily me and Halil Bey [the head of the Maps Department] who worked on this. This work took twenty-two years. We created charts, matching old village names with the new ones we had assigned, and against each such pairing we provided a description of the rationale for the change. In some instances, we used to put a question mark for a specific village or location. We would send an officer to that village and have him interview the local muhtar or the elderly men of the village to ask what they used to call a specific parcel of land, a field, or a hill. We would then, if appropriate, name this place accordingly.

I asked Kemal Bey, “What if the villagers there were refugees from the south or migrants from Turkey and they didn’t know the old names for these places?” “Well,” he replied, “if they had been living in that specific location for some time, then we would ask them ‘What name do you give to this field?’ Or, we would ask, ‘Is there any martyr from your village?’ and if there was, we would name that field after the martyr. Or we would give a name that recalled, for the villagers, the village they left behind in the south” (see map 1). A genre of fieldwork, then, was part of the work of the Maps Department, akin to (and referencing) what were called “survey methods” in the cartographic practices of the British. What is significant in the account of Kemal Bey—the senior officer of the Maps Department and an agent in the territorial reconstitution of northern Cyprus—was the extent to which mapmaking and the renaming of places, in this instance, was done by encouraging a degree of collaboration on the part of Turkish-Cypriots who inhabited these spaces to achieve some degree of agreement or acquiescence.

However, if the surveying work itself involved some relationality between the administrators and the villagers, at the end of the project (and of the long-term process) the new place names were formalized through an official procedure. “After assigning new names, we submitted them to the Council of Ministers (Bakanlar Kurulu),” Kemal Bey explained. “The council approved them; they were published in the Official Gazette and went into procedure. We did a lot of work standardizing place names in this way.” In the middle of describing the administrative procedure for toponymic changes, Kemal Bey said, “Most of our maps are kept secret, because they are military.”

Another officer in the Maps Department said he was originally from Sivas, Turkey, but had been living in northern Cyprus for seventeen years. He explained that the Maps Department of the TRNC is linked with the General Commandership for Maps (Harita Genel Komutanligi) in Turkey. “We are a small unit under them,” he said. “This office is also under the Commandership of the Defense Forces (Güvenlik Kuvvetleri Komutanligi; GKK). Even the construction of our building was sponsored by the GKK. The Turkish army gives a lot of importance to this office, but in my opinion, people who work here do not have the character to understand its significance.” The administrator thus was claiming a certain know-how vis-à-vis Turkey and the Turkish army that he thought the Turkish- Cypriot civil servants lacked.

Kemal Bey went on to describe a new and modernized cartographic practice that had been introduced by Turkey to northern Cyprus: “These old systems will be changed. We are bringing a new cartographic system from Turkey. From now on, the surface area on title deeds will be measured not in dönüms but in square meters. We have selected the village of Degirmenlik as the pilot area. The parceling method will be altered.” As Kemal Bey described it, the work of the Maps Department was linked directly not only with the Turkish army, but also with the Office of Title Deeds, which distributed Greek-Cypriot land and property to Turkish-Cypriots on the basis of what was called the “property of equal value system (esdeger puan sistemi).” Kemal Bey described the procedure for obtaining a “title deed” under the trnc: “To obtain a deed (koçan) from the Office of Title Deeds, first one has to get an equal point document from the Settlements Office, which checks out the applicant’s property dossier. This dossier number is then registered on the title deed, as well.” Kemal Bey also described the procedure for measuring and enumerating the proportion and value of landed property. Showing me an example of a title deed for immovable property produced by the Office of Title Deeds bearing the logo of the TRNC, he described how such a document is to be read and interpreted:

You see, first you write the name of the town or village and the neighborhood for the property. Then you inscribe its location (mevki) and its surface area (yüzölçümü). According to the new system we have imported from Turkey, from now on the surface area will be calculated not in dönüms, but in square meters. Some of the villages have been sub-divided into “blocs” since the old days. If the property has a bloc, then this is registered in the deed. The map and section (pafta) number of the property is also put in and the scale (ölçek) is quoted. Underneath that, we define the boundaries (hudud) of the property and provide an exact description for it (whether it be a house or a parcel of land). The old registration number of the property is provided, as well. Below that, we write the name of the person whose name is registered against the property in the title deed volumes, and we define his rights, or portion of rights, over it. If the land or property was acquired through the equal-point system, then we write the number of the dossier for equal points in the Settlements Office. For people who left property behind in the south, the numbers for their title deeds registered in the south are available through the Office of Title Deeds.

Working a Territory

A significant body of anthropological work on space and place has framed its object of analysis as a culturally contextualized and differentiated study of landscape. Against Western as well as geographical reifications of landscape through representational (visual or literary/textual) means, anthropologists have researched non-Western ways to engage with and define land. Following Tim Ingold, Eric Hirsch has proposed a framework for the conceptualization of landscape as a “cultural process,” studying the practices of everyday social life on a landscape in a fashion that is culturally contextualized and differentiated. Studies such as these have developed ethnographic tools and methodologies for exploring variegated and processual engagements with landscape.

At the root of such anthropological re-framings of landscape is a disquiet with human-centered (humanist) Western approaches to space and place that privilege the study of memory, discourse, the imagination, and representations. In the social-constructionist tradition, spatiality has been interpreted as a projection of the human imagination onto the broader physical environment. Accordingly, studies of memory as configured in space have interpreted the workings of landscape within human selves or subjectivities.

Against the grain of this established (humanist/constructionist) approach to space, scholars such as Kevin Hetherington have urged a move toward a “post-humanist” appreciation of the entanglement of (non-human) materialities and (human) subjectivities in the making of place. Contesting the abstractionism of geometry and the representationalism of hermeneutics in relation to space, and employing Actor-Network Theory (ANT) methodologies, Hetherington proposes that we give due attention to “the materiality of place,” an approach that attends to the agency of objects vis-à-vis human actors. In the “complex topology” he addresses, Hetherington writes:

If we stop thinking of places just in terms of human subjectivity and the way it narrates identities such as the identities of spaces, then we no longer have to look at place as fixed by subjectivity. Place is the effect of similitude, a non-representation that is mobilized through the placing of things in complex relation to one another and the agency-power effects that are performed by those arrangements. Places circulate through material placings, through the folding together of spaces and things and the relations of difference established by those folds. They are brought into being through the significations that emanate from those material arrangements and foldings.

My northern Cypriot material calls on me to develop a theoretical approach that builds on, while differing from, these frameworks. Anthropological studies that have emphasized cultural difference and delineated the force of cultural context on interpretations of landscape (through humanist or post-humanist frameworks) have often shied away from studying what we could call political process. In the northern Cypriot case I have begun to account for, place is a product of political work upon the land. The administrators from the Maps Department, who form the centerpiece of the project to change place names in northern Cyprus in the aftermath of war and partition, openly declared their work as “political.” The remapping of place names was received as a political act, and was therefore assumed or critiqued by both Turkish and Greek-Cypriots as well as by immigrants from Turkey. In this chapter, I therefore analyze the political work (as hands-on practice) that goes into the making (or recrafting) of a territory.

In their studies of the political, theorists of sovereignty such as Giorgio Agamben, have granted agency only or mainly to the “will of the sovereign.” Following Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political as the right of the ruler of a polity to decide on a “state of exception,” Agamben’s famous theory of sovereignty, in my interpretation, reinserts a humanist trajectory into the study of politics in associating agency singularly with human beings (in this case, the one with ultimate power).

In turn, and building on my ethnographic material, I would suggest a theory of politics that would allow for distributed agency between human beings and materialities in a broader terrain. Here, my approach builds on that of Actor-Network theorists, such as Kevin Hetherington, who would study the mutual entanglement of human and non-human agencies. Yet I would differ from ant frameworks that would assign synchronicity—what I would interpret as a nonpolitical symmetry—to the networks of people and things they study. In the transformed territory I have studied in northern Cyprus, human and non-human assemblages are political workings in progress. Another way to put this is to suggest that sovereignty is worked on through a network of people engaged with, and engaged on, through materialities (e.g., tools of cartographic measurement, instruments for aerial military photography, calculation devices for geographical maps, documents of title deed, the office building of a Maps Department, methodologies for assigning value to distinct properties). This practiced network between humans and instruments, then, is what makes sovereignty. Or, sovereignty is only actually realized through an enactment of agency (back and forth) between people and things in and on a given territory. Further than ascribing political agency to the singular authoritarian will of a ruler, then—which in the case we are studying would be the Turkish state and army—in this closer ethnographic reading, sovereignty appears as a field that is worked on through an agency distributed between human beings and material devices. More significantly, my material, emerging until now through the account of the geographical administrator Kemal Bey under the TRNC, suggests that sovereignty is a field of practice (not a momentary declaration of a state of emergency). Sovereignty is worked on in a given territory through time and is a long-term process of negotiation, contestation, and mediation between various actors within a terrain of materialities and physical properties. This is therefore an ethnographic and grounded (rather than top-down) account of sovereignty.

Cataloguing New Place Names

Let us return to “The Catalogue of Geographical Names in the T.R.N.C. Volume—III.” The catalogue was the product, in published and tangible form, of the very cartographic practices that Kemal Bey described to me. Halil Giray, the head of the Maps Department where Kemal Bey worked, wrote a preface to the catalogue (quoted in the introduction) rationalizing the procedure of Turkey-fying place names in northern Cyprus as part of the act of assuming political sovereignty in a given territory. Giray argued that this is what all sovereign states do when they acquire new land, referring especially to the colonial practices of the British in Cyprus. He thus made the political intentions of mapping practices transparent in the preface to the very document that testifies to it.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from THE MAKE-BELIEVE SPACEby Yael Navaro-Yashin Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.