Promotional Information

This is an anthropological look at the Turkish territory of Northern Cyprus, a self-defined state, which is actually imaginary (because it is only recognized by Turkey). Where Greek and Turkish Cypriots once lived historically side by side, now only the Turks remain. Navaro-Yashin surveys the affective landscape, examining the sense of haunted property and objects lost and gained in the partition, along with people's relation to the fictive remapping of places and history by this new state. The author is a highly regarded theorist, and her innovative joining of a biopolitics of the state and affect theory should make this an influential work of anthropology.

Table of Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction: The Make-Believe Space 1
Part I. Spatial Transformation
1. The Materiality of Sovereignty 37
2. Repopulating a Territory 51
3. The Affects of Spatial Confinement 62
Part II. Administration
4. Administration and Affect 81
5. The Affective Life of Documents 97
Part III. Objects and Dwellings
6. Abjected Spaces, Debris of War 129
7. Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects 161
8. Home, Law and the Uncanny 176
9. Collectibles of War and the Tangibility of Affect 202
Epilogue 215
Notes 223
Works Cited 247
Index 261

About the Author

Yael Navaro-Yashin is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. She is the author of Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey.

Reviews

"An unforgettable ethnography of a nation-state whose special status sharpens our eyes to the make-believe quality of every state. Yael Navaro-Yashin's evocative writing brings to life the scarred landscapes of Northern Cyprus and the affective worlds of Turkish-Cypriots who inhabit them - uncomfortable with 'looted' and abandoned objects, melancholic about the ruins of war and the ghostly Greek presence, and cynical about the banal apparatus of the state, whether its documents, laws, or occupations. Intimate conversations with philosophers and theorists weave in and out of profound ruminations on the details of people's interactions with their pregnant material worlds in this unique study that reveals anthropology's incisive beauty." Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University "Can the experience of citizenship in an illegitimate state reveal something about state-making more generally? In her insightful account of Northern Cyprus as 'make believe' space, Yael Navaro-Yashin traces the diverse practices - imaginative, material, and affective - that craft this de facto polity, both as fantasy, and as tangible truth. In the process, she offers profound insight into what it is that makes nation-states believable everywhere." Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago "Navaro-Yashin's sustained study of the effects of war, displacement, political authoritarianism, and the existential gap between officially sanctioned and actually lived sentiments is not only convincing in its theoretical acuity, breadth, and originality, but it also plays the role of an intervention in its own right through its meticulous witnessing of the suffering of her informants and of their human dignity in the aftermath of terror and in the midst of adversity. Navaro-Yashin makes bold claims for the significance of this work, over and above the Northern Cyprus question, for anthropological theory more broadly, but she has not been bold enough: this is a book that goes beyond the confines of anthropology to shed light upon the human condition in the era of the nation-state." - Nicolas Argenti, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 405-441 2013