Kyle T. Evered

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGIES OF THE OPIUM POPPY AND ORAL HISTORY IN RURAL TURKEY

Cultivated in the Eastern Mediterranean region for millennia, the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) was profoundly significant in the economies, ecologies, cultures, and diets of the peoples of many towns and villages of rural Anatolia. When the United States compelled Turkey to eradicate cultivation of the plant in the early 1970s in order to diminish the flow of heroin into America, farmers were obliged to deal with not only changes in their incomes but also profound changes in their relationships with the land and the state. Although Turkish officials later allowed production to resume in a highly controlled manner for pharmaceutical purposes, significant socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of Turkeys poppy‐growing communities were forever changed. Interviewing now‐retired poppy farmers, I employ oral history as my primary source of historical evidence to reconstruct these past ecologies and associated social relationships and to give voice to the informants.

Sex and the Capital City: The Political Framing of Syphilis and Prostitution in Early Republican Ankara

In its initial years, the nascent Turkish republic established the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance in order to promote public health. Beyond simply facilitating its modernizing agenda for the emergent nation-state as it sought to define itself against an Ottoman past, this institution was also geared toward remedying a self-defined population crisis by prioritizing and confronting particular diseases and health conditions. One of the maladies of utmost concern was syphilis. Based upon an analysis of official primary sources, this article engages with how the developing republic distinguished and consequently politically constructed—or framed—the syphilis problem from the vantage of its new forward capital, Ankara. Integral to this project of confronting this sexually transmitted disease, public health officials projected upon both this ailment and their understanding of the suitable means for its treatment their own views of what constituted appropriate sexual practices and relations. In doing so, certain subgroups of the population, especially prostitutes, were particularized as targets for surveillance and policing through regimes of licensing and compulsory medical examinations. Stemming from the states framing of the disease—and its definition of appropriate sexual practices—this article also examines the subsequent legislative and public health education projects that followed.

REGIONALISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE CASE OF TURKEY

Abstract. Turkey is a republic that borders on, regularly interacts with, and actively seeks to define itself as a part of neighboring regions. As such, it provides a significant example of how Middle East nation‐states are not only affected by globalization but also deeply involved in contributing to the related processes of regionalization and regional (re)definition. Far from a unique phenomenon, regionalism involving Turkey is flexible and multifaceted, profoundly dynamic, and inextricably linked to virtually all aspects of the nations foreign and domestic affairs. Regionalism in Turkey demonstrates clearly how processes of globalization are not simply economic but also directly implicated in contemporary shifts in national identity and even in the very nature of the nation‐state itself. This study surveys and analyzes the constructs and dynamics of regionalism that are shaping the Turkish nation and state, contributing to varieties of transnationalism, and reconstituting the scales at which Turkey is located, both in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.

From rakı to ayran: regulating the place and practice of drinking in Turkey

Despite religious proscriptions and practices, currents of alcohol never wholly ceased in Ottoman or Republican Turkey. Rather, Anatolian history overflows with examples of regulated consumption – and futile schemes for prohibition. Recently, prohibitionist discourse returned amid regulatory initiatives and in ways reifying secular-Islamist divides. Integral to permutations in policy implementation, even schemes of socio-spatial control arose that entail regimes of zoning and separation for trade and consumption. Accounting for narratives of regulationism and prohibitionism from a vantage acknowledging the republic’s past, we map today’s dynamic and ongoing shifts in Turkey’s regulatory and discursive engagements with the place and practice of drinking.

‘Protecting the national body’: regulating the practice and the place of prostitution in early republican Turkey

In the formative years of the Turkish Republic, the regulation of prostitution was geared toward biopolitical ends: safeguarding public health and eliminating syphilis. Viewing sexually transmitted diseases as a threat to the nations population and economy, the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance played a crucial role in the identification and definition of prostitution as a public health risk. Out of this medicalized framing of the disease and of prostitution, the republic adopted legislative remedies for both. Prostitution was legislatively regulated to achieve comprehensive surveillance and policing – sometimes amid debate between state interests promoting regulation and those concerned with matters of morality. A modernist nation-state, otherwise characterized as progressive with regard to the status of women, instituted a regulatory regime to define appropriate sexual practices and places and mandate the licensing and medical examination of some of its most marginalized female citizens.

“Not just eliminating the mosquito but draining the swamp”: A critical geopolitics of Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Turkey's approach to illicit drugs

In the 1970s, Turkey ceased to be a significant producer state of illicit drugs, but it continued to serve as a key route for the trade of drugs between East and West. Over the past decade, however, authorities identified two concerns beyond its continued transit state status. These reported problems entail both new modes of production and a rising incidence of drug abuse within the nation-state - particularly among its youth. Amid these developments, new law enforcement institutions emerged and acquired European sponsorship, leading to the establishment of TUBİM (the Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction). Coordinating with and reporting to the European Union agency EMCDDA (the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction), TUBİMs primary assigned duties entail the collection and analysis of data on drug abuse, trafficking, and prevention, the geographic identification of sites of concern (e.g. consumption, drug-related crimes, and peoples undergoing treatment), and the production of annual national reports. In this article, we examine the geopolitical origins of TUBİM as Turkeys central apparatus for confronting drug problems and its role as a vehicle for policy development, interpretation, and enforcement. In doing so, we emphasize the political and spatial dimensions inherent to the countrys institutional and policy-driven approaches to contend with drug-related problems, and we assess how this line of attack reveals particular ambiguities in mission when evaluated from scales at world regional, national, and local levels. In sum, we assess how Turkeys new institutional and legislative landscapes condition the states engagements with drug use, matters of users health, and policy implementation at local scales and amid ongoing political developments.

Draining an Anatolian desert: overcoming water, wetlands, and malaria in early republican Ankara

Past scholarship on the origins of Turkey’s forward capital has contributed both to insightful critical analysis of modernity, nationalism, and urbanization in the republic but also to a tradition of work that is too often quite narrow in conceptualization and shallow in historical depth. In this article, I address the promise and the shortcomings of this tradition by incorporating both views of nature and novel primary documents from the city’s early republican pasts. Focusing on problems within 1920s Ankara as depicted in both foreign and nationalist narratives, on the one hand, and perspectives from public health and other state officials, on the other hand, I engage with water as a key problem not only in its scarcity but also in its excess. This research shows that not only planning but also the attainment of public health objectives (as framed in terms of place and nature) were established unambiguously as preconditions to the project of urban – and hence national – development. Additionally, as a study on the early republican capital that utilizes unique sources, this article identifies and analyzes alternative voices, thus expanding our views of the place and period in ways that elucidate the complex dynamics of both place-making and political ecology in this still contested context.

“Where nothing was before”: (re)producing population and place in Ghana's Volta River Project

Significant infrastructural projects, and especially large hydroelectric dams, were envisioned and deployed by postcolonial governments to promote particular visions of industrialization, agriculture, democracy, and modernity. Newly independent states sought to annihilate formerly so-called backward and primitive landscapes and populations alike, promising to re-create both places and people as rational, economically productive entities. In this article, we re-examine such narratives as they related to Ghanas Volta River Project (VRP). Relying on archival and media sources between the 1950s and 1960s, we interrogate the Ghanaian states pursuit of the VRP from a perspective rooted firmly in cultural geography and pay careful attention to the issues of population displacement/resettlement and landscape reconfiguration that permeated all dimensions of the project. We analyze the ways in which Ghanaian leaders used the VRP to translate a particular suite of cultural, economic, and political values into material reality, utilizing the techniques of displacement and population resettlement in efforts to enroll Ghana into a modern, global, industrial economic system. As such, this article augments the body of literature examining the modernist and state-building aspects of the VRP as well as studies critiquing the various processes of development that have unfolded in West Africa since the mid-twentieth century.

Therapeutic landscapes and nationalism: Turkey and the curative waters of Kemalism

ABSTRACT Hypothesised as a promising research concern for medical geographers, the therapeutic landscape concept promised to bridge divides between methods and approaches in humanistic, structural, and critical geographies. Despite early reference to ideology and the topic’s potential, engagements with political ideas and identity politics remain underdeveloped. Analysing a range of historical sources, this article examines the therapeutic landscapes of early republican Turkey from the vantage of its guiding philosophy and identity construct, Kemalism. In doing so, it reveals the politicised and ideological nature of many therapeutic landscapes and their place in one of the major projects of the modern era: nation-building.