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Temptations in Ruin w/ Alice von Bieberstein

Temptations in Ruin w/ Alice von Bieberstein

Talk On — Debates in Anthropology vor 2 Monaten

Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey

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36:39

In this episode, Xenia Cherkaev speaks with Alice von Bieberstein
about her book ‘Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and
the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey’. The book develops the
concept of sovereign accumulation to analyse the
political-economic afterlife of the Armenian genocide under
conditions of 21st-century neoliberal extractivism and ongoing
counterinsurgency warfare against the Kurdish freedom movement.
It does so ethnographically through the story of an urban
regeneration scheme in the historically Armenian quarters of the
city of Muş in what is today far-eastern Turkey, but which is
also part of Northern Kurdistan and was once part of the
heartland of Western Armenia. Following the quarter’s demolition,
residents moved on to dig the foundations of their homes in
search of what is locally known as ‘Armenian’ treasures or gold.
Some individuals and groups also developed ideas and concrete
projects of heritagization. The book thus looks at how Armenian
material remains are targeted in different modalities of
value-extraction, stewardship, and care in ways that re-animate
the 1915 genocide against Armenians in its specificity as a
moment of primitive accumulation that brought into being a
racialized property regime that continues to reflect in different
positionalities today. Cherkaev and von Bieberstein discuss how
the history of sovereign violence continues to shape relations
between state, capital, and citizens in this predominantly
Kurdish region of Turkey; how this history becomes recursive and
itself a kind of necro-economic frontier; and how these broader
analytical insights point beyond Turkey to illiberal
undercurrents structuring logics of accumulation in the 20th and
21st centuries.