Editor’s Letter

This issue presents a collection of essays that illustrate infrastructures, politics, affects, and structures of feeling that produce social life through the often-intertwined effects that pull people together while simultaneously pushing them apart.In our Forum essay, Noah Arjomand begins the issue with a series of photos that follow a young Turkish man in the days before shipping out to fulfill his duty as a conscripted soldier. Complicated attitudes toward the military pervade this young man’s community in the shadow of Turkey’s most recent attempted coup, against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a conflict that pitted many civilians and civil servants against insurgents from the armed forces, often in very public displays of humiliation after the coup was put down. But, as Arjomand writes, for the community being depicted here, obligatory military service endures as a noble deed and is felt to create unity across many otherwise distinct social groups, producing Turkish citizens as well as nationalistic subjects. This is demonstrated to be the case largely because of the promise of martyrdom, which persists whether “in uniform or not,” as “an egalitarian provider of virtue.” So strong are this ideal and its power to outshine politics that as the young revelers move through the city on the eve of departure, women open windows from apartments above to shout the essay’s titular phrase, “Every Turk is born a soldier.”The issue’s first research article shifts focus to Taiwan and from war to love, as Sara L. Friedman demonstrates how citizenship is produced through a very different type of civic commitment: the bond of marriage. Friedman examines how marriage is challenged in Taiwan by two different phenomena: growing cross-border migration and increasing demands for the recognition of nonheteronormative relationships and gender identities. The article demonstrates how this most intimate of bureaucratic institutions is tightly knotted to the cornerstone of society and citizenship and how this binding simultaneously produces an exclusion of nonnormative types of intimate relations. Friedman calls this “stranger anxiety” and interprets it as symptomatic of broader concerns across the nation about the status of the heterosexual family and its position as central to the organization of social life. She writes that for those rendered intimate strangers, the consequences can be banishment from recognition and from “the nation’s embrace.” The essay offers hope, however, in the form of potential coalition building across multiple meanings of “trans,” identifying potential for common cause among those seeking both transnational union and transgender marriage.Kimberly A. Arkin takes up questions of inclusion and exclusion in a very different way, with an analysis of the relationship between the fight against anti-Semitism and national identity in pluralist France. Grounded in a case where a Jewish student union was forced to retract an ad campaign promoting tolerance because it contained controversial religious imagery, this article develops deep insight into how other religious groups might achieve assimilation or exclusion in European nations at a time of ascendant ethnonationalism.Building on questions about the tensions between intimate relations and the strangeness of the other, Harel Shapira’s interview with Arlie Hochschild about her ethnographic work with political conservatives touches on the challenges of finding common ground and respectful, empathic encounters with those occupying staunchly opposed ideologies. Hochschild shares stories from her travels in the southern and midwestern United States, in which she has managed to establish honest and disarming dialogue around issues that might otherwise only produce defensive disagreement.Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s article also focuses on examples of religion and visual culture, but in a vastly different register than Arkin’s. O’Neill’s account builds on evidence gathered in Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers in Guatemala City, where digital photographs are used to discern whether an addict has achieved salvation, through a “hermeneutics of life” that proceeds by “reading the body for signs of the soul.” O’Neill traces a history of the mug shot and early criminology, narrating how these practices arrived in Guatemala in the nineteenth century and how they now function as a new form of social surveillance, where capturing images of the drug users’ visage serves an integral role in capturing their body.Continuing with questions around citizenship criteria and processes of inclusion and exclusion, Georgina Ramsay introduces a new approach to these issues by emphasizing how these dynamics unfold in time. This essay considers the cases of refugees who have been resettled in Australia but whose crisis situations have not been “settled” in spite of the resolution to the problem of their physical displacement. The case of a mother from the Democratic Republic of the Congo illustrates the bureaucratic temporalities imposed on refugees, as she attempts to navigate the complex processes of procuring welfare payments for which she has already qualified. Ramsay writes that liminality, the status of being betwixt that is so often seen as characteristic of the refugee experience, implies a linear process of resolution and a kind of equivalence between the past and the future. By contrast, the cases that Ramsay follows are subject to an incommensurability of the present, determined by processes of control that render any sense of sovereignty into a status perpetually deferred.It is a consideration of very different processes of inconclusiveness that takes us into the final article of this issue, in which Dorien Zandbergen shares findings from an ethnography conducted among participants in the Air Quality Egg project: an open-source smart city effort to develop a small digital device with air toxicity sensors and a corresponding online platform to visualize the data it generates. Zandbergen follows these actors through gatherings organized with the website Meetup.com, meetings that are attended by hobbyists, activists, and community organizers, as well as representatives of large technology corporations. At these gatherings, participants come together as much to build and tinker with the device itself as to debate and discuss the broader goals and meaning of the project. It is these contested goals that lead Zandbergen to consider the liminal status of the Air Quality Egg project, owing to its co-optation and commodification by corporate interests, as well as its inability to deliver on the group’s scientific ambitions. But rather than theorize the project as a failure, Zandbergen focuses on “the liminal imaginary of transformation as an ongoing, never-ending process,” which is precisely what allows the project to be sustained as a site of active, engaged, and mobilized social action.Taken together these contributions reveal the complexity of forces at play in the social and material infrastructures that allow publics to cohere. Drawing people together, they nonetheless also sustain a productive tension that creates spaces in which often conflicting dynamics create a fecund basis for ongoing social action

Political science · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · History · Turkey's Politics and Society