Prosthetic Debts

Economies of War Disability in Neoliberal Turkey

Bibliographic Data

ID2227148
AuthorsC Aciksoz (0009-0007-5637-3374, corresponding author), Salih Can Açıksöz
Year2020
Volume61
IssueS21
PagesS76-S86
Publication date2020-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/705654
OpenAlexW2971338322
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited50

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey's Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans' embodied performances. The public debates surrounding "prosthesis repossession" cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation

Capitalism · Debt · Economics · Nationalism · Neoliberalism (international relations · Nexus (standard · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Disability Rights and Representation · Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality · Law · Turkey's Politics and Society

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