Lecture title:

Knotted Catastrophes: Entangled Histories Between Genocide and Ecocide

by Professor Yael Navaro, University of Cambridge

Abstract:

This lecture traces structural continuities between genocide and ecocide in Turkey. Bringing ethnographic work on the aftermath of the Armenian genocide into relief through fieldwork in Antakya in the aftermath of the earthquake of 2023, I follow the trail of trees and plants that have survived the catastrophes that have surrounded them by talking to the people who now live with or in relation to them. This distinctively environmental approach to the anthropology of the state leads me to cross-reference and co-analyze mass political violence and natural catastrophe as entangled histories. The lecture engages environmental anthropology with political violence studies, and vice versa, engendering critiques of both fields through its ethnographic trails.  

Bio:

Yael Navaro is Professor of Social, Political and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where she has been teaching since 1999. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, she completed her PhD at Princeton University (1998), followed by a period of teaching at the University of Edinburgh. Her first book Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002), based on fieldwork on conflict between secularists and Islamists in Istanbul, established her as a key contributor to 'the anthropology of the state' through research on the production of a state-revering culture in the Turkish public sphere. With her second book, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012), based on long-term fieldwork in Northern Cyprus and its unrecognized administration, she developed new methods for the ethnographic study of postwar environments, actively engaging and recasting materialist and affective approaches. A newer co-edited volume entitled Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is based on a European Research Council (ERC) grant which she led as PI under the title "Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey." Her ethnographic and theoretical/conceptual work has been situated in the anthropology of politics, of history and memory, of affect and the emotions, as well as, more recently, as in today's lecture, in an environmental anthropology.