Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey: Governing Through Smoke

Description

Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey critically analyses the travel of neoliberal ideas, policies, experts and institutions from the West to Turkey. Through an ethnographic investigation of the newly established tobacco market, Ebru Kayaalp considers how they are being adopted and transformed in their new settings. The February 2001 crisis, the most severe economic downturn in the history of Turkey, generated an emergency situation in which a series of sweeping neoliberal policies were implemented to prop up the collapsed economy. To receive the necessary loans from the international financial institutions, the Turkish government hastily enacted a number of neoliberal laws, including the notorious tobacco law. Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey not only explores the repercussions of the new tobacco law, such as the establishment of a new regulatory institution, the emergence of contract farming and the privatization of the tobacco monopoly, thereby making a liberalized market, but also the smoking ban governing the bodies and spaces of Muslim citizens. Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey provides an innovative contribution to Middle Eastern studies, filling the gap for anthropological research in Muslim countries on local economic relations and their connections with the global economy. FC Half Title Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The visible hands Commodity Belatedness Outline Part I. Politics 1. Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions Technocrat as a superman (Re)making the law Good governance, bad governance Framing the economy Emerging institutions 2. Opening the Black Box of Law The Tobacco Law A gift to the IMF A meeting in the Turkish Assembly 3. Policy in the Making Regulating under uncertainty Conflict I: Machines and reports Conflict II: Tax and blends Assessment Part II. Markets 4. Remaking the Tobacco Market Counting tobacco bales as votes The representation of the oversupply Framing tobacco 200 kilograms of tobacco Dispossessed citizens 5. Borders of the Market Complicit state Outside the market Western tobacco market Eastern tobacco market Part III. Citizens 6. Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Resistance Privatization of TEKEL Providing “hizmet” Different citizenships Workers and the “people” 7. Making Healthy Good Citizens Oriental tobacco cigarettes New public health Purification of bodies Healthy non-smoking Muslims 8. Smoking Tobacco, Speaking Nationalism Régie Germans Jews Americans Communists Conclusion Ethnographic questions Notes Bibliography Index