The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity

by Yael Navaro-Yashin

The Make-Believe Space is a book of ethnographic and theoretical meditation on the phantasmatic entanglement of materialities in the aftermath of war, displacement, and expropriation. "Northern Cyprus," carved out as a separate space and defined as a distinct (de facto) polity since its invasion by Turkey in 1974, is the subject of this ethnography about postwar politics and social relations. Turkish-Cypriots' sociality in a reforged geography, rid of its former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants after the partition of Cyprus, forms the centerpiece of Yael Navaro-Yashin's conceptual exploration of subjectivity in the context of "ruination" and "abjection." The unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus unfolds through the analytical devices that she develops as she explores this polity's administration and raison d'être via affect theory. Challenging the boundaries between competing theoretical orientations, Navaro-Yashin crafts a methodology for the study of subjectivity and affect, and materiality and the phantasmatic, in tandem. In the process, she creates a subtle and nuanced ethnography of life in the long-term aftermath of war.

Genres: Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Sociology

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2012

Reviews

[Renin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Çok güzel bir çalışma, gerçekten. Zaten 2012’de Avrupa’nın en iyi antropoloji kitabı ödülünü almış. Bilgilendim, önceden kendi gözlemlediğim bazı şeyleri anlamlandırdım, kafamdaki bazı flu fikirler netleşti, diğer bazı net fikirler ise flulaştı. Bunların yanı sıra hüzünlendim, sinirlendim, hayret ettim. Kısacası iyi bir araştırmanın üzerimde yaratması beklenen tüm etkilenmeleri yaşadım.

Fakat yazarın (ya da belki çevirmenin) dili ve üslubu beni çok bunalttı. İçerik çok sağlam olduğu için inatlaştım da okudum. Birkaç kere fırlatıp atasım geldi kitabı.

Önce dille ilgili sıkıntımı paylaşayım: İçerimlemek, içerimlenmek, alımlamak, dolayımlamak gibi sözcük seçimleri, hele ki bu kitapta kullanıldığı sıklıkta kullanılınca, beni çok sinirlendiriyor. Kendim de hukuk tedrisatından çıkmış biri olduğum için ve sözgelimi, zamanaşımı demeyip müruruzaman demekte ısrar etmenin arkasında yatan duyguyu çok iyi tanıdığım için sinirleniyorum. Madem ki duygu antropolojisi yapıyoruz, dilin buradaki en önemli göstergelerden biri olduğunu unutmamamız gerek. Yazarın dili, kendi duygularıyla ilgili birşeyler söylüyor.

Üslupla ilgili sıkıntılarımdan ilki de bununla bağlantılı: Yazar, birinci tekil şahıs olarak o kadar fazla mevcut ki kitap boyunca! Bir saniyecik bile yazarın ‘ben’i olmaksızın nefes alamıyoruz. Bu elbette yazarın takdiridir, ancak okumayı çok zorlaştırdığını belirtmem gerekiyor. Benim için ikinci bir üslup sıkıntısı da, her bölümün başında yer alan teorik açıklamaların, adeta name dropping’e varan boyutlarda, isimleri üzerimize boca etmesi oldu. Bu, bir grup akademisyenin sıklıkla yaptığı birşey aslında. Akademik değil; aşırı akademik, hatta aşırı akademist bir anlatım tarzı var bazılarında. “Halka inmelisiniz” anlamında asla söylemiyorum, ama insanın doğadan kopuk değerlendirilemeyeceğini söylemek için paragraflarca Spinoza’ya gerçekten gerek yok. Hele ki esas çalışma konusu bu değilse. Konuşamaz hale gelmiş gibiyiz. Sanki üniversitelerde bir makine varmış da, konuyu girince makaleleri o makine yazıyormuş gibi hissetmeye başladım artık. Üstüne de Deleuze, Spinoza, Agamben’den ilgili yerleri makine ekliyor gibi.

Neyse, çok söylendim. Siz yine de kitabı okuyun anacığım, kitap bunlara rağmen güzel. :)

[Lily Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

fkn beautiful!!

[Frances Currie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I became quickly convinced of the environmental haunting described by Yael Navaro Yashin in “The Make-Believe Space.” In conceptualizing hauntings as being manifested through the environment and in arguing that ghosts can be material rather than apparitional representations of humans, Navaro Yashin makes a really fascinating case for how we should represent afterlives in ethnographic inquiry. I’ve heard the term “afterlives” thrown around a lot in anthropological works, but, in Navaro Yashin’s book, things left behind and their afterlives become phantasmatic, highlighting the uncanniness of the places written about. While reading this book, I became particularly struck by how those living in Lefkoşa had almost foreclosed on this uncanniness. While Navaro Yashin feels that the disturbing nature of the scene around here is inescapable, one Turkish-Cypriot man told her he no longer notices them. Her response, “How could this debris not hurt?... How could they seem normal? To me the wrecks of the buildings, the walls, and the piles of rubbish seemed so alive, as if they silently spoke their secret memories,” forces the reader to confront what the residents of the space have become so used to (132). The idea of foreclosure came up for me again when Navaro Yashin speaks about how the ruined spaces of northern Cyprus “had been left to die by the Turkish-Cypriots or were pushed to the backroom of consciousness” (145). In my Conspiracy and Media class (we read a lot of Lacan) we would often talk about the brain as a house. Foreclosure could then be understood as the boarding up of a room or the closing of a room’s door. Just because the room has been forgotten about doesn’t mean it isn’t still a part of the house. Therefore, the next line of the book really jumped out at me: “At times, this was the facade of the house, the secret front walls, or a secret back room, with the belongings of the former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants locked away” (145). However, it is important to note that the foreclosure of the room within a house that we discussed in my Conspiracy and Media Class (that is, the foreclosure theroized by Lacan) takes place within the unconscious, whereas this foreclosure (if I’m right in calling it that) of space manifests in the physical realm. This brings me back to the introduction, where Navaro Yashin brings up the French Lacanian tradition wherein psychoanalysis “prioritizes the human self or subjectivity as the primary locus for affective charge or energy” (22). She also questions why, following psychoanalytic tradition, we assume there is a separation between interiority and exteriority (23). “Why conceive of human beings as distant from the environments, spaces, and objects with which they coexist, correlate, or cohabitate?” (23). Or, going even further, why assume the supremacy of the interiority (23)? In breaking down these preconceived notions, Navaro Yashin pays more attention to the “outside,” resulting in her detailed examination of physical items, not human apparitions, as being ghosts. Overall, I found this to be a really interesting way to ethnographically explore the ways in which humans interact with the world around them, and I want to keep her attentiveness in mind while writing my ethnographic vignette for the final portfolio.

[Araz Kojayan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeal Navaro-Yashins second book enters into the, in her words, "phantasmic" and "so-called" space of TRNC, where one exists de facto but not de jure. The rich historic research present mainly in the introduction and scattered in the nine chapters and epilogue is not only that you find in textbooks or internet, but also involves a rich emic perspective where her active narrative, anxious and worried voice is heard once talking about the atrocities of this “Make-Believe Land.” This makes her the talkative dominant narrator of the ethnography, sometimes directly addressing the readers, making him/her involved but at the same time lost in her ethnographic text. Navaro-Yashin struggles hard to make herself heard, as if trying to start a revolution in the minds of the readers. You can hear her intense and demanding voice even in the fieldnotes. You can see her getting in administrative offices, talking to civil servants, walking in the ruins, interviewing informants and so on in order to read her multidisciplinary work of ethnography.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two sides to every story and when it comes to Cyprus, there are even more. Navaro-Yashin covers one of them in her book; the story of Nothern Cyprus, which differs a lot from the version you hear in the South. I really enjoyed her explanation of effects it has to live in an "illegal country", a "make-believe" state. The Cyprus problem is still unsolved and after hearing my class mates talking about it, I am pretty sure it will stay like this for a very long time. Perhaps this book should be compulsory at university.
However, it should be noted that Navaro-Yashin focuses on the late 1990s and early 2000s and although she says the administrative as well as material structures have remained the same since the borders opened in 2003, I think there has been some changes due to the opening of the vorders and the Greek-Cypriots voting no at the referendum.