Hirokazu Miyazaki

Insistence and Response: On Ethnographic Replication

This essay is one of three responses to Casper Bruun Jensen’s article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science,” published in the Spring 2014 issue of Common Knowledge . Jensen suggested that the postcritical mode of knowledge production should focus on a continuous and persistent analytical effort to resist despair by “insisting properly.” This commentary, by one of three authors on whom the original article focused, contrasts Jensen’s emphasis on insistence with the idea of ethnography as response . The reconceptualization of ethnographic work as response can have various and divergent consequences, some of which are explored here with reference to the author’s own ethnographic research on indigenous Fijian gift-giving and Japanese financial trading. While his immediate interest here is to expose differences in the kinds of openness that insistence and response afford, he concludes that willingness to respond is more basic to anthropology than the ethnographer’s cultivation of the internal strength required to keep anthropology going as an enterprise.

Bringing People Back In: The Case of the Anthropology of Finance

glorified by journalists seeking living embodiments of nostalgic images of Ataturk’s times. Yet these Kemalists also felt tensions between the nostalgia that caused the private media to glorify them and the neoliberalizing political economy that increasingly excluded elders who still identified themselves so closely with the nation-state. These tensions were also reflected in divergences between the globalized, neoliberal content of museum exhibits for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic (Three Generations of the Republic, produced by the History Foundation, and To Create a Citizen: Introduction to Warfare for Creating a Modern Civilization, produced by Yapi Kredi, a private bank) and how more nostalgic and nationalistic guides and visitors reacted to them. Organizers of these exhibits wanted them to convey a vision of Turkish modernity in which people of different religions, ethnicities, and genders voluntarily embraced each other and a shared vision of homogenized, neoliberal, secular citizenship (from which signs of Islam were notably absent) that could prepare them to move beyond the nation-state into the European Union and the globalization and secularization it represents. Although these exhibits did not display Ataturk himself, guides and visitors often interpreted them in the context of their own nostalgia for and loyalty to Ataturk, and guides even told Ozyurek how much they hated the “Economic Awakening” section of the Three Generations of the Republic exhibit because it glorified selfinterested neoliberal businessmen, whom they perceived as damaging to the Republican emphasis on the importance of the nation-state. Ozyurek has produced a wide-ranging and multifaceted yet intimate and detailed ethnography that serves as a brilliant reminder of how politics are played out not only in discourses produced by elites but also in the discourses, images, and everyday activities of nonelite citizens. Nostalgia for the Modern is a fascinating, original book that sheds new light on often ironic tensions, contradictions, and interdependencies among citizens, the state, nationalism, neoliberalism, and nostalgia, through a seamless integration of rich ethnography and sophisticated theoretical insights. It should be of interest not only to those interested in Turkey but also to anyone interested in the study of nationalism, citizenship, neoliberalism, and the uses of history and memory.