The Make-Believe Space by Yael Navaro-Yashin

The Make - Believe Space
Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity
Yael Navaro -Yashin

THE MAKE - BELIEVE SPACE
YAEL NAVARO -YASHIN

YAEL NAVARO -YASHIN

Yael Navaro-Yashin
THE MAKE-BELIEVE SPACE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2012

∫ 2012 Duke University Press
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction: The Make-Believe Space 1
PART I. SPATIAL TRANSFORMATION

1. The Materiality of Sovereignty 37
2. Repopulating a Territory 51
3. The Affects of Spatial Confinement 62
PART II. ADMINISTRATION

4. Administration and Affect 81
5. The Affective Life of Documents 97
PART III. OBJECTS AND DWELLINGS

6. Abjected Spaces, Debris of War 129
7. Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects 161
8. Home, Law, and the Uncanny 176
9. Collectibles of War and the Tangibility of Affect 202
Epilogue 215
Notes 223
Works Cited 247
Index 261
Preface
MY FIRST CONNECTION WITH CYPRUS was not through research but

through kinship. It may also have had something to do with kısmet (luck,
destiny). Soon after I met Mehmet Yashin in Istanbul in 1995, he took me
to Cyprus, his homeland, and to the childhood home left to him by his
deceased mother. Little did I know then, on this first trip, that this, one
day, would also be one of my homes.
The Cyprus we were visiting in 1995 was carved in half, with a border of
barbed wire running right through its middle. We were on the ‘‘Turkish
side,’’ but the ‘‘Greek side’’ was visible in the distance. As evening fell over
the Mesarya (Mesaoria in Greek) plain, one could distinguish the electric
lights on the other side from those on ours, as they glittered in a different
color. Crossing to the other side was forbidden. The border was heavily
guarded. On my first visit, I was struck by the bullet holes in the side of a
hotel building in Mağusa (Ammochostos in Greek; Famagusta in English)
and discovered that it had previously belonged to a Greek-Cypriot and
was now empty. Southward along the Mağusa seashore was an entire city
of high-rise apartment blocks and hotel buildings that looked like a ghost
town: broken windows, dangling gates, decrepit stairs, decaying walls. I
was to learn that this city, to which no access was allowed, was Maraş; for
the Greek-Cypriots, Varosha. It was a thriving tourist destination in the
1970s, until the war of 1974 and Turkey’s invasion of the north of the
island, including the town. The Greek-Cypriots of Varosha had escaped
from the invading Turkish army, and the town was blocked off from
habitation after the war. This is where the seashore of Mağusa stopped.
Running across the end of a beach facing Varosha was a barbed-wire fence
and military signs forbidding access and photography.
After Mağusa, we were to visit Lefkoşa (Lefkosia in Greek; Nicosia in
English), which is Mehmet’s home town, both his parents being original
x PREFACE
Nicosians. We first drove through erratically erected low-rise cement

buildings on the road leading to (north) Lefkoşa and then turned inward
towards the walled city. The home where Mehmet was born was in a
neighborhood called Yenişehir (Neapolis in Greek and English), just out-
side the walled city. It was built in the 1930s, when Cyprus was under
British rule. The land, which used to be Turkish-owned, had been bought
by an Armenian real-estate agent who developed it into a complex of
suburban houses with gardens in the colonial British architectural style of
the period. When Mehmet was born in 1958, Cyprus was still under
British sovereignty, and this neighborhood was cosmopolitan. On the
same street lived Mehmet’s mother and his two aunts, who had bought
separate homes there as young women by working as primary-school
teachers. They were Turkish-Cypriots, but the neighbors in the houses
with gardens on either side were Greek-Cypriots who often came for
home visits, while those across the street were Armenian-Cypriots and
other Turkish-Cypriots. At one end of the street was a Greek Orthodox
church, which was now being used as a mosque. Mehmet told me that the
house across from the church belonged to the priest and that the one
next to it used to be inhabited by a Maronite-Cypriot family.
I heard many stories about the house and read Mehmet’s poems and
novels about it. In 1963, three years into independence and the foundation
of the Republic of Cyprus as a bi-communal state, the house was set on fire
by the Greek-Cypriot neighbors, whose son had become a member of the
Greek-Cypriot fighter force eoka (National Organization of Cypriot Fight-
ers), which favored enosis (union with Greece). At the time, an eoka team
under the leadership of Nikos Sampson had begun to attack Turkish-
Cypriots who lived in the nearby neighborhood of Küçük Kaymaklı
(Kuchuk Kaimakli in Greek).∞ The entire neighborhood of Yenişehir/
Neapolis was also being claimed by eoka, and the Turkish-Cypriots who
lived there had to flee for their lives to enclaves that had been designated
for them. Mehmet, his mother, and his aunt were among the victims of
these attacks and the displacement that ensued. They had to live away
from their home between 1963 and 1974 as refugees in the Turkish-Cypriot
enclave of Lefke (Lefka in Greek and English). In the same period, Meh-
met’s aunt and grandmother were held as ‘‘prisoners of war’’ in the Kykkos
Monastery. Close relatives were killed or made to ‘‘disappear.’’≤
In 1974, after Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, Yenişehir/Neapolis
remained on the northern side of the border. Mehmet, his mother, and
PREFACE xi
his aunt could then return to their original property, but they could not
live in it immediately, as it was in a burned and decrepit state. The repair
work took more than two years. When they eventually moved back in,
their neighbors were different. With Turkey’s claim over northern Cy-
prus, the Greek-, Armenian-, and Maronite-Cypriots of this neighbor-
hood had escaped to the south. Their homes had been allocated for the
inhabitation of Turkish-Cypriots who had arrived in the north as refu-
gees from the south. To this day, most of our neighbors on the street are
Turkish-Cypriots originally from villages of the Baf (Paphos in Greek and
English) region of Cyprus, people who lost their own houses and belong-
ings in the south. Some homes in the neighborhood have since been
rented by the Turkish-Cypriots to settler families from Turkey.
I first arrived in Cyprus not only as an anthropologist but also as a
relative. I was an Istanbuli of Jewish origin who was Mehmet Yashin’s
partner, Mehmet being a very well-known poet and author who was in the
public eye in Cyprus. So I was recognized as well as accepted. In time,
people came to know me for who I was, where I came from, how I spoke my
thoughts and politics, how I related, and what I did professionally and to
incorporate me in that way. For many of our Turkish-Cypriot friends, my
‘‘minority’’ status in Turkey helped them converse and speak more freely
and comfortably. It was through the positionality developed by these
Turkish-Cypriot friends—their critical reflections on the actions of the
Turkish army in its invasion of northern Cyprus, their mention of the
bodies of Greek-Cypriots they remembered seeing on the shores of Girne
(Kyrenia in Greek and English), the crosses on the road sides they remem-
bered being removed, their remarks on the administration in northern
Cyprus as a state of loot (ganimet) built on the expropriation of Greek-
Cypriot property, and their actions geared toward the opening of the
border with the Greek side—that I developed my understanding of Cyprus.
It was precisely this ground of friendship, kinship, and intimacy that
allowed me a closer understanding of and access to discussions among
Turkish-Cypriots that no unrelated anthropologist could have had.
We were to settle down not in Cyprus but in England after getting
married in 1996. From 1998 onward, as we visited Cyprus from England
on short as well as longer trips, I started conducting fieldwork in north-
ern Cyprus. I was to find my relationality vis-à-vis Cyprus and my subjec-
tivity, as well as my background as perceived by Turkish-Cypriots, to be
resources rather than hindrances to research. Being ‘‘related’’ meant
xii PREFACE
being affectively attuned to the environments and history that Cypriots

(both Turkish and Greek) had experienced, if only vicariously. Being a
non-Cypriot who had married in allowed a good inside-outside position,
an ability to ‘‘relate’’ as well as to ‘‘reflect.’’ Being a minority also meant
being positioned both inside and outside, a way to perceive and look from
more than one angle at any one time. Being an anthropologist (who
thought through comparative analytical and theoretical frameworks) en-
tailed a methodological distancing, as well, which any healthy research
would require.
The anthropologist’s imagination is never simply a product of her or
his professional training. Nor is the ability to relate in the field. Against a
colonial conceptualization of research in which students of anthropology
assume that the world is a laboratory from which they can pick and
choose sites for fieldwork, I would argue that only certain spaces and
themes make themselves available and accessible for study by certain
people. The people whom we call our ‘‘informants’’ always study us back,
allowing certain engagements and blocking others. A positivist imaginary
of research, which still survives in certain areas of anthropology, would
only conceive of our informants as ‘‘objects of analysis,’’ rather than relate
with them as subjects of their lives and of narratives about their lives.
Here I take a different route, suggesting that anthropology is fruitful only
insofar as the anthropologist is able to establish a relationality with the
people whom she or he is studying. This is not possible just anywhere, for
any one person or with any other person. The world does not wait for us
out there to be the object of our science.
Northern Cyprus triggered my imagination as it resonated with experi-
ences in my own personal history. Little had I realized at first that the
story of my birthplace, Istanbul, where I grew up in a Jewish family in the
1970s and 1980s, was so intrinsically tied to events in Cyprus. In my
childhood, I heard stories from my father about the events of 6–7 Sep-
tember 1955, when Turkish nationalist youth rampaged through neigh-
borhoods of Istanbul inhabited by the ‘‘non-Muslim minorities,’’ espe-
cially the Greeks, breaking shop and home windows, attacking members
of the minority communities, and looting.≥ My father’s family had es-
caped being a victim of these attacks by putting a Turkish flag on the
street window of their home, as did many other minority families, in
order for the nationalist youth to pass them by. The 6–7 September
events, which only in the last decade have been marked by Istanbul’s
PREFACE xiii
intellectuals as a major event in the city’s declining cosmopolitanism,

were directly linked with events in Cyprus. At the same time that Istan-
bul’s Greeks and other minorities who lived in nearby neighborhoods
were being attacked, Turkish nationalist youth were chanting slogans in
favor of the ‘‘partition (taksim)’’ of Cyprus. Slogans such as ‘‘Cyprus Is
Turkish (Kıbrıs Türktür)’’ and ‘‘Partition or Death (Ya Taksim Ya Ölüm)’’
were being chanted by thousands on the streets of Istanbul in the 1950s.
Therefore, what is called the ‘‘Cyprus case (Kıbrıs davası)’’ in Turkish
nationalist discourse is a political imagination intrinsically linked with
the last attempts in the twentieth century to empty Turkey of its non-
Muslim minorities.
In 1964, as the Greek-Cypriot eoka (as well as the National Guard of
the Republic of Cyprus) continued its attacks against Turkish-Cypriot
civilians in Cyprus, the Republic of Turkey announced that all citizens of
Greece would be officially deported from Turkey.∂ This deportation de-
cree, which targeted the Greek community of Istanbul, was intended as a
reprisal against the eoka’s attacks on the Turkish-Cypriots. In other
words, events in Cyprus that were perceived as being linked with one of
Turkey’s so-called ethnic minorities received a response from the Turkish
state in the form of threats against this minority community in Turkey.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was originally from the town of
Didimoticho (Dimetoka) in northern Greece.∑ Having migrated to Istan-
bul in the early 1930s, he escaped the Nazi occupation of Greece. He was a
Jewish citizen of Greece, and although he married my Istanbuli grand-
mother, with whom he conversed in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), he never
became a citizen of Turkey. When the deportation decree was announced
in 1964, my grandfather, being a Greek citizen, was targeted. My mother
remembers this as one of the most traumatic events in her family history.
My grandfather was in fact able to remain in Turkey through the help of a
Turkish judge who classified him as a ‘‘Jew,’’ not a ‘‘Greek.’’
The wave of the war of 1974 in Cyprus was to hit the shores of the
Bosphorus and the Marmara Sea in Istanbul. This is a time I remember
from my childhood, when we spent summers on the island of Büyükada
(Prinkipo in Greek). Our neighbors at the time were Istanbuli Greeks. As
threats against the Greeks of Istanbul mounted once again during and in
the aftermath of the Cyprus conflict, we watched one family after an-
other pack to leave Istanbul permanently and move to Athens.∏ Though
each classified minority in Turkey had its own configuration of fate, the
xiv PREFACE
non-Muslims always experienced each other’s discrimination by the

Turkish state, as they were similarly categorized as ‘‘non-Turkish’’ or
‘‘foreigners’’ in popular discourses.
So events in Cyprus were intricately linked with every wave of migration
out of Istanbul by the city’s last remaining non-Muslims. Each displace-
ment of the Turkish-Cypriot minority in Cyprus by the Greek-Cypriot
majority would receive a revanche in Turkey through the displacement of
Turkey’s own Greek (and other non-Muslim) minorities.π Therefore,
growing up in Turkey I learned to perceive the spaces and environments
around me from the point of view of ‘‘a minority.’’∫ Büyükada was full of
houses left behind by the Greeks, whose numbers had dwindled through
several currents of out-migration. My mother’s childhood neighborhood
D
of Sişhane-Galata was likewise full of flats and buildings evacuated by their
Jewish, Greek, and Levantine owners in the course of the twentieth cen-
tury. Yet although we experienced our surroundings through the lens of a
minority, we were Turkish, as well, giving us another outlook at the same
time.Ω Living and growing up in Turkey gave one the ability to experience
the world and view it through Turkish eyes, too.
Entering Cyprus as a relative, as well as an anthropologist, I was there-
fore able to engage with both the Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot
experiences at the same time. Though opposed in intercommunal conflict
and war, the Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot experiences coincide in
shared spaces and materialities. The objects dispersed over the landscape
of Cyprus in the aftermath of war and displacement bear the fingerprints
of members of both communities, containing both viewpoints at any one
time. This ability to co-view or co-experience, to see from both inside and
outside or experience any given situation in a double, triple, or multiple
manner, came to Cyprus along with me. Although it was fed by my anthro-
pological education, where one is trained to perceive radically ‘‘other’’
points of view, it did not singularly emerge from it.
From 1995, when I first visited, until 2005, or two years after the opening
of checkpoints to the Greek side for access, northern Cyprus was admin-
istered under the leadership of Rauf Denktaş, the nationalist president of
the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (trnc) recognized as the
long-term leader of the Turkish-Cypriot community. This was a distinct
period to be conducting research in Cyprus, one marked by excessive
repression on the part of the regime, as well as by antigovernment pro-
tests on the part of the Turkish-Cypriots.
PREFACE xv
In 1996, the journalist Kutlu Adalı was assassinated in front of his

house by an unidentified gunman. Adalı had been publishing columns in
the newspaper Yeni Düzen criticizing the Denktaş regime and Turkey,
which supported it, and favoring the unification of northern and south-
ern Cyprus.∞≠ Turkish-Cypriots were alarmed by the killing of Adalı. Hun-
dreds walked in protest on the streets of Lefkoşa demanding that the
murderer be identified. The assassination of Adalı resonated for Turkish-
Cypriots with the repression they felt they were experiencing, at the
time, under the Denktaş regime in northern Cyprus. It therefore became
a turning point in the resistance against it. Trade unions, which pre-
viously had struggled independently against aspects of the regime, uni-
fied, calling themselves the Trade Unionists’ Struggle Platform (Sendikal
Mücadele Platformu).∞∞
In the years to follow, the repressive political atmosphere in northern
Cyprus continued. In the summer of 2000, SenerD Levent and other jour-
nalists who worked for the newspaper Avrupa, which was critical of the
regime, were arrested. The offices of the newspaper were sabotaged more
than once. When a high fine was levied on the newspaper’s publisher,
Avrupa was shut down, and a new paper under the name Afrika began to
be printed in its place, signifying the repressive measures of the admin-
istration, which resembled, according to the journalists, that of ‘‘third
world countries.’’∞≤ Meanwhile, the headquarters of the Republican Turk-
ish Party (ctp), which was in opposition in the northern Cypriot Parlia-
ment at the time, was sabotaged. Members of the ctp gave accounts of
hand grenades being thrown over their garden gates. Repression was
similarly experienced by members and supporters of other opposition
groups, including the People’s Liberation Party (tkp) and the New Cy-
prus Party (ykp). Villagers as well as town dwellers spoke of being able to
speak their minds only in their back gardens (avlu) out of fear of surveil-
lance. Many suspected that their phones were being tapped. Critics of the
regime checked under their cars for any suspect item before they got in.
Columnists in nationalist papers and magazines, such as Volkan and
Kıbrıslı, who were spokespeople of the Denktaş government and Turkey,
published articles full of slurs and slogans against anyone they identified
as a critic of the regime. People feared being on the assassination list of
Turkey’s ‘‘deep state.’’∞≥ More mundanely, supporters of opposition
groups or parties experienced grave difficulties getting jobs in the civil
service or getting promoted in it. Only supporters of Denktaş’s ruling
government, under the Democratic Party (dp) and its partner (and rival),
xvi PREFACE
the National Union Party (ubp), appeared to have peace and prospects.
They were informally criticized by members of the opposition for collab-
orating with the regime.
When I arrived in northern Cyprus for a year and a half of fieldwork in
2000–2001, discontent with the administration (and with Turkey’s sover-
eignty over it) was mounting and widespread. The Avrupa/Afrika news-
paper, which published articles exposing the corruption of the administra-
tion, was being sold and read in the thousands. In almost every home I
visited, people spoke of their unhappiness. Many described their experi-
ence as ‘‘a sense of suffocation,’’ attributing this to their prolonged living
in a bordered territory in divided Cyprus, with identity papers that were
not recognized internationally. A common phrase used by Turkish-
Cypriots in this period to describe their experience of living in northern
Cyprus was ‘‘an open-air prison (açık hava hapishanesi).’’ Numerous such
metaphors described the affects of living in northern Cyprus in that pe-
riod. Turkish-Cypriots spoke of being ‘‘enclosed inside this place (bunun
‘çinde kapalı olmak),’’ of feeling as if they were ‘‘being strangled by our
throats (boğazımızdan sıkılıyormuş gibi hissetmek).’’ And many spoke of
experiencing ‘‘maraz,’’ a state of deep melancholy or depression. In every-
day conversations, Turkish-Cypriots gave political interpretations for the
maraz they said they were feeling, attributing it to their repression and
discontent under the northern Cypriot administration. Some put mean-
ing into their serious illnesses, linking it with their maraz.
So profound was the discontent with life under the governing admin-
istration in northern Cyprus then that criticism had been turned mainly
toward the Turkish-Cypriots’ own polity (the trnc) and toward Turkey
more than toward the Republic of Cyprus (effectively on the ‘‘other side’’),
which had been de facto taken over by the Greek-Cypriots. At the time, I
remember being astonished by the critical self-reflections of Turkish-
Cypriots: about their administration, about northern Cyprus, about Tur-
key, about the settlement of immigrants from Turkey in northern Cyprus,
about their own collaboration in the system of looting and expropriation,
about those who had benefited and acquired wealth from it by exploiting
patronage networks. In reflecting on the homes they lived in, many of
those who inhabited Greek-Cypriot property obtained after the war spoke
almost with a sense of warmth about the Greek-Cypriots who had owned
it, expressing some sort of feeling of empathy with them for having lost
their homes, if not a sense of guilt for having acquired them.
PREFACE xvii
In referring to the ‘‘Greek side (Rum tarafı),’’ Turkish-Cypriots spoke

with longing, saying they ‘‘would not die before seeing the south again
(güneye bir daha gitmeden ölmeyiz).’’ Trying to imagine what life for the
Greek-Cypriots might be like at the time, many asked me if I had visited
the Greek side. Aware of adults’ curiosity about the south, children would
ask questions, wondering whether the sky looked the same to children in
the south or whether they wore similar kinds of T-shirts.
There was a widespread wish for a solution to the Cyprus problem in this
period. Many expressed their desire for reconciliation with the Greek-
Cypriots in saying, ‘‘If they [the leaders of the two sides] could only put
down a signature! (Bir imzacik atsalar!).’’ Turkish-Cypriots spoke of the
border with the south through metaphors of ‘‘closure’’ and of their wish
for its ‘‘opening.’’ Those who had received permission to cross to the
‘‘Greek side’’ were questioned by curious friends and relatives about what
it was like. Refugees from the south who now lived in the north watched
the lights twinkling on the Trodos (Troodos) Mountains or in villages
across the Mesarya (Mesaoria) Plain, saying they longed to revisit their
ancestral homes on the ‘‘other side.’’ As brt, the state television of north-
ern Cyprus, broadcast programs that tried to remind the Turkish-Cypriots
of their suffering at the hands of the Greek-Cypriot fighters of eoka
between 1963 and 1974, and as Denktaş appeared on television every
evening giving speeches about the rationale for a divided Cyprus and a
separate state, Turkish-Cypriots mostly listened with nonchalance and
cynicism. Such television programs, as well as newspapers and other tools
of state propaganda, were received by most Turkish-Cypriots, at the time,
with irony and critical distance. In spite of the domineering and pervasive
aspect of such propaganda, Turkish-Cypriots expressed a widespread de-
sire for a solution to the Cyprus problem that would have northern Cyprus
unify with the south.
The various repressive events, including the arrest of Avrupa’s colum-
nists in the year 2000, led to the formation of a joint movement on the
part of forty-one organizations and trade unions under the name ‘‘Bu
Memleket Bizim Platformu’’ (This Country Is Ours Platform). The move-
ment started to organize significant protests against the Denktaş regime,
calling for an end to the division of Cyprus and the unification of the
island under one governmental roof. The first took place on 18 July 2000,
when 15,000 workers and civil servants took to the streets demanding
that the Avrupa journalists be freed.∞∂ Around the same time, and due to
xviii PREFACE
an economic crisis in Turkey, numerous banks in northern Cyprus went

bankrupt, swallowing the accounts of about 50,000 Turkish-Cypriots.∞∑
This great economic blow drew a huge number of those struck by the
bankruptcy (mudiler) to storm Parliament on 24 July in protests against
the Denktaş administration. In the year to follow (2001), every month
was marked by demonstrations and other protest events on the streets of
Lefkoşa and other towns of northern Cyprus, attended by two thousand
to three thousand people in each instance.∞∏ People in the streets called
for an end to Denktaş’s rule. They chanted in favor of the opening of the
border for access to the Greek side. Organizing around the This Country
Is Ours Platform, Turkish-Cypriots were saying that they wanted to rule
themselves rather than be governed through orders from Turkey.∞π In
demonstrations, which I participated in as well as observed, Turkish-
Cypriots cried for peace and called for the unification of the island. In
many such events and in nighttime demonstrations, those attending
marched toward the border, with candles in hand, chanting for it to be
opened. Between November 2002 and February 2003, ‘‘four major rallies
took place in Northern Nicosia the last of which was attended by an
estimated 70,000 people, an extraordinary number, given that the ‘offi-
cial’ population of Northern Cyprus is around 250,000.’’∞∫
The public protests in northern Cyprus were likened to a ‘‘social revolu-
tion,’’ a complete grassroots formation.∞Ω So effective were the protests
that, in the round of municipal elections that coincided with this period,
the ruling nationalist parties were toppled, for the first time giving the
ctp, which until then had always been in opposition, major gains.≤≠ The
three main towns of northern Cyprus (Lefkoşa, Mağusa, and Girne) were
to be administered by ctp municipalities. This was the movement’s first
round of success, to be followed by gains in parliament and in the cabinet
of ministers under the prime ministry. The rallies that followed the ctp’s
electoral victories were bombastic, with people celebrating the first-time
wins of the opposition in the northern Cypriot administration. One of
the common slogans chanted on such occasions was ‘‘Peace in Cyprus
cannot be prevented! (Kıbrıs’ta barış engellenemez!).’’≤∞
In April 2003, Denktaş, who was still president, announced that check-
points along the border with the Greek side would be opened for crossing.
This declaration, and the opening of checkpoints for crossing to the
‘‘other side,’’ caught Turkish-Cypriots (as well as Greek-Cypriots) com-
pletely by surprise. It was as if the dream of the grassroots movement
PREFACE xix
amongst the Turkish-Cypriots had been realized. On the day after this
announcement, thousands of Turkish and Greek-Cypriots lined up on
both sides of the Green Line (the border) to cross to the other side.≤≤ The
Green Line had been opened for access for the first time since 1974.
The research for this book was conducted in northern Cyprus between
1998 and 2003, while it was still shut. In the chapters that follow, I give an
ethnographic account of aspects of Turkish-Cypriots’ lives and experi-
ences in and beyond northern Cyprus and derive from it conceptual
terms. I do not study the period that followed the opening of the border,
except for a brief commentary in the epilogue. But the analyses, frame-
works, and concepts produced through this ethnographic study of a his-
toric period have a bearing much beyond it.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN a long time in the making. When I began the field-
work for this project, I was a starting-level lecturer at the University of
Edinburgh. I first thank colleagues in the Anthropology Department in
Edinburgh who encouraged me in the very first stages of this project,
especially Jeanne Cannizzo, Janet Carsten, Anthony Cohen, Anthony
Good, Iris Jean-Klein, and Jonathan Spencer. The University of Edin-
burgh also provided the first fieldwork expense grants for the research,
for which I remain grateful. They included the Faculty of Social Sciences
Initiatives Fund, the Hayter Travel and Field Research Grant, the Munro
Research Grant in Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Muray Endow-
ment Fund (all received in 1998 and 1999).
This project followed me along to Cambridge and determined the re-
search I was to conduct through more than a decade of teaching there.
There are people in life who take a role of mentorship and support at a
crucial early stage of one’s career. I express my deep gratitude in this
regard to three key people: Caroline Humphrey, Deniz Kandiyoti, and
Marilyn Strathern. They will each know and remember turning points
when they stood by my side. In Cambridge, I thank the late Sue Benson,
Barbara Bodenhorn, Harri Englund, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Sian Lazar,
Perveez Mody, David Sneath, and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov for their friend-
ship and collegiality. The most enjoyable and rewarding part of being in
Cambridge has been my work with PhD students. Eirini Avramopoulou,
Zerrin Özlem Biner, Matthew Carey, Georgia Galati, Mantas Kvedaravi-
cius, Juliana Ochs, Ross Porter, Marlene Schafers, Alice von Bieberstein,
Fiona Wright, Hadas Yaron, and Umut Yıldırım have each traveled with
me in the various stages of the intellectual journeys this book led me
through. Undergraduate and masters students have heard me deliver
lectures and run seminars on the theoretical and ethnographic themes
xxii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
that make up this book. I thank them all for the immense joy that work-
ing with them has brought me.
I owe very special thanks to Jane Cowan, Ruth Mandel, and Valentina
Napolitano, who have been there as friends, colleagues, and interlocutors
throughout. They, as well as other friends and colleagues, have provided
valuable comments on draft chapters of this book. Here, I mention Alev
Adil, Athena Athanasiou, Andrew Barry, Georgina Born, Thomas Blom
Hansen, Rebecca Empson, Catia Galatariotou, Sarah Green, Peter Loizos,
Yiannis Papadakis, Geeta Patel, Maja Petrovic-Steger, Amiria Salmond,
Charles Stewart, and Kath Weston.
Earlier versions of chapters of this book were presented as seminars at
several universities, including Manchester, University College London,
Sussex, Cambridge, London School of Economics and Political Science,
the School of Oriental and African Studies, Edinburgh, King’s College,
Birkbeck College, Oxford, Boğaziçi, Sabancı, Yale, Chicago, Oslo, and
Trinity College. I presented the key theoretical arguments of this book as
the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics in
2007. Four of the book’s chapters were presented as seminars to a small
group of scholars at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales,
Paris, during a visiting professorship I held there in 2009. Chapters were
also presented as papers over the years in conferences at St. Peter’s Col-
lege (Oxford); the National Research Centre of Greece (Ermoupolis, Sy-
ros); the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin); the Centre for Research in
the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (Cambridge); the Pembroke
Center (Brown University); the University of Amsterdam; the University
of Cyprus; the Artos Foundation (Cyprus); the University of Nicosia; the
University of Sussex; Birkbeck College; and the University of Exeter, as
well as at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association
(Chicago), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (Vienna,
Bristol, Ljubljana), and the Association of Social Anthropologists of the
United Kingdom (Brighton). Comments I received during these seminars
and conferences shaped my work in progress.
Two long periods of research and writing were supported by grants I
received toward the project that made this book. I acknowledge the sup-
port of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (United
States), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom),
and the Fortes Fund (Cambridge).
I feel lucky to publish this book with Duke University Press. I felt very
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxiii
privileged to work with Ken Wissoker through the editorial process. I

thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript whose suggestions for
revision turned this into a better book. Thanks, as well, to Toby Macklin,
Tim Elfenbein, and Mark Mastromarino for their editorial work on the
manuscript.
For their friendship and support through the years in Cyprus, I very
warmly thank Fatma and Bekir Azgın, Olga Demetriou and Murat Erdal
Ilıcan, Soulla Georgiou, Maria Hadjipavlou, Ruth Keshishian, Niyazi and
Sylvaine Kızılyürek, Elli Mozora, Amber Onar and Johan Pillai, Saziye D
D
Barış Yaşın, Zeki and Özcan Yaşın, and Sengül and Hakkı Yücel.
In the spirit of this book, which conceptually focuses on the affects
discharged by spaces and materialities, I feel that I owe a big thank you to
Cyprus as a space, as well as to its people. Being and living in Cyprus, as
well as researching and writing there, has inspired me as has no other
place to date. I also owe heartfelt thanks to our home in Cyprus and the
spirits of my mother-in-law, Ayşe Süleyman İpçizade, and her sister, our
great-aunt Süreyya Yaşın, who protect it. Though deceased, they have
lived with us through the house and objects they left behind.
My parents, Leyla and Daniel Navaro, have always been there with
boundless love and support. I embrace them with gratitude in return. My
sister, Ilana Navaro, read an earlier version of the preface and gave me
crucial comments and suggestions.
More than anything, it is the inspiration that came from being with
Mehmet Yashin that led me to engage with the issues that make up this
book. Here I thank him enormously, deeply, and very dearly. The most
wonderful event of our life, our daughter Ayshe-Mira, was born in the
period of writing this book, bringing us tremendous joy, light, and love of
life. I dedicate this book to her and to her future.
A brief section of the introduction and most of chapter 1 were previously

published as ‘‘The Materiality of Sovereignty: Geographical Expertise and
Changing Place Names in Northern Cyprus,’’ Spatial Conceptions of the
Nation: Modernizing Geographies in Greece and Turkey, ed. P. Nikiforos
Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, and Çaḡlar Keyder (London: I. B. Tauris,
2010), 127–43.
An earlier version of chapter 2 was previously published as ‘‘De-Ethniciz-
ing the Ethnography of Cyprus: Political and Social Conflict Between
Turkish-Cypriots and Settlers from Turkey,’’ Divided Cyprus: Modernity and
xxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
an Island in Conflict, ed. Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela

Welz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 84–99.
An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously published as ‘‘Confine-
ment and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-
State,’’ Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial
World, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 2005), 103–19.
An earlier version of chapter 4 was previously published as ‘‘Affect in
the Civil Service: A Study of a Modern State -System,’’ Postcolonial Studies
9, no. 3 (2006), 281–94.
Earlier versions of sections of chapter 5 were published as ‘‘Make-
Believe Papers, Legal Forms, and the Counterfeit: Affective Interactions
between Documents and People in Britain and Cyprus,’’ Anthropological
Theory 7, no. 1 (2007), 79–96, and as ‘‘Legal/Illegal Counterpoints: Sub-
jecthood and Subjectivity in an Unrecognized State,’’ Human Rights in
Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitle-
ments, ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Jon P. Mitchell (London: Routledge,
2003), 71–92.
An earlier version of chapter 7 was previously published as ‘‘Affective
Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropo-
logical Knowledge,’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 1
(2009), 1–18.
Introduction: The Make-Believe Space
I HOLD IN MY HANDS an object that is the product of a distinct admin-

istrative practice: a booklet produced by the Technical Expertise in Maps
Department of the Ministry of Settlements of the ‘‘Turkish Republic of
Northern Cyprus.’’ The title is K.K.T.C. Coğrafi İsimler Katalogu (Cilt-III)
(The catalogue of geographical names in the T.R.N.C. [volume 3]). The
logo of the trnc is printed on the cover, as is the name of the district,
Girne (Kyrenia), to which the volume in hand pertains.∞ I turn the pages
of the catalogue to find listings of names of districts, villages, neighbor-
hoods, rivers, slopes, hilltops, mountains, and fields. These lists are sub-
divided into distinct classifications. On the left-hand side, I glance down
through what the catalogue calls ‘‘the new names’’ of geographical units,
all in Turkish. I read:
Anıt dere
Armutluk
Atabeyli
Ayhatun
Balıklı köy
Başpınar
Başeğmez deresi
The list continues. Across from each Turkish name, in the second column,
are what the catalogue calls ‘‘the old names.’’ Most of these so-called old
names are in Greek. The old names that correspond to the newly assigned
Turkish names listed are:
Kalamoullin River
Appidhies
Sterakoudhia
Mylonas
2 INTRODUCTION
Ayios Andreas
Kephalovrysos
Mothides River
For these couplings of old with new geographical terms, the catalogue
provides under a third column a rationale for the choice of the new name.
This procedure of name allocation is called ‘‘the form of standardization.’’
Certain geographical names in Turkish are assigned on the basis of ‘‘re-
semblance to the territory,’’ as in the case of the village of Templos, which
was renamed Zeytinlik, signifying ‘‘olive grove’’ in Turkish, because of its
abundant olive trees. Elsewhere, the technical experts from the Maps
Department have assigned a Turkish translation from the Greek. The
third column across from Armutluk and Appidhies, for example, reads
‘‘its Turkish [version].’’ In other instances, administrators of the trnc
have invented completely new (Turkish) names for geographical units,
therefore listing the ‘‘form of standardization’’ as ‘‘a new name.’’ Some-
times, as indicated in the preface to the catalogue, local villagers were
consulted about the name they would prefer for a given territory, field, or
slice of land, and such choices were classified as ‘‘conventionally used
names.’’ If the old names for places were already Turkish, or if they
sounded Turkish enough, they were accepted as the new standard and
listed as ‘‘the same.’’ When administrators were at a loss for new names,
they introduced place names from Turkey to northern Cyprus. Finally,
the administrators employed phonetic resemblance as a method of stan-
dardization, introducing Turkified or Turkish-sounding versions of old
Greek names. For example, ‘‘Kalamoullin’’ was transformed into ‘‘Ak-
mulla.’’ For each name change, a map reference is provided in the fourth
column, reading ‘‘XII.9.D2,’’ for example, for Anıt dere in the village
of Alsancak close to Girne. Finally, in the fifth column, the catalogue
lists the coordinates for each geographical unit; for Anıt dere, this is ‘‘WE
21–11.’’
I turn to the end of the catalogue, where there is a listing of settlement
units in the trnc according to the names formally accepted by, and in
procedure under, the administration. Across from each given name for a
village, neighborhood, or district, the technical experts from the Maps
Department have provided the old names for these places ‘‘according to
Turks’’ and ‘‘according to Greeks.’’ In most instances, the old Greek and
Turkish names of villages and neighborhoods are the same, but the new
name assigned by the administration is completely different. So, for ex-
INTRODUCTION 3
ample, the newly allocated name for a village reads ‘‘Aydınköy,’’ while its
old name, according to Turks, is ‘‘Prastyo,’’ and according to Greeks,
‘‘Prastio.’’ Likewise, the new ‘‘Aşağıtaşkent’’ was called ‘‘Sihari’’ by Turks
and ‘‘Sykhari’’ by Greeks. It is clear that many geographical names were
shared by Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots before the allocation of new
names by the trnc administration in northern Cyprus.≤
Returning to the beginning of the booklet, I read, on the inside cover,
that it was printed by the Defense Forces (the army) in the State Printing
House in 1999. The preface, written by Halil Giray, the technical specialist
in maps for the trnc, reads:
As is well known, every group of humans, whatever level of civilization they

may have attained, defines the borders of its sovereignty in order to claim the
land on which it has chosen to live and, taking due measures to protect this,
gives names to the fields and geographical details which lie within these bor-
ders. It is natural that these names should be in the language spoken and
understood by the group of people inhabiting this territory.
Therefore, different groups and administrations that settled in Cyprus have
instituted procedures along these lines.
Following the island’s passage to Turkish administration in 1571, it would
have been normal and expected for them to have given Turkish names to the
villages and neighborhoods left by the Venetians and settled by Turkish families.
Likewise, Turkish villagers should not be judged for having given Turkish
names to the fields they farmed and the geographical details that surrounded
them. . . .
With the transfer of the island’s administration to the British in 1878, work
along these lines took a different trajectory.
Because the British saw the Turkish presence on the island as an impediment
to their political goals, and in order to weaken the Turkish presence, they
assumed the Sultan’s properties and distributed them to Greek villagers. And in
order to completely destroy Turkish traces in these regions, they replaced the
existing Turkish names and assigned them Greek counterparts for everyday use.
Likewise, with the procedure they instituted, following their takeover of
administration on the island, they [the British] began to prepare a 1/63,360
scale map of Cyprus, to produce maps for title deeds, and to renew the registra-
tion of these deeds. With the assistance they received from the Greek title deed
administrators, they changed thousands of Turkish names on the island, re-
cording them in the Greek language on the maps.
In the 8,000 or so title deed maps which were created by the British for the
4 INTRODUCTION
entire island of Cyprus, of the 61,139 geographical names, only 1,731 of them are
in Turkish, 795 are half in Turkish, half in Greek, and the remaining 58,613
names for places are in Greek.
In an island which was in Turkish hands for 307 years, where the Turkish
population was higher than the Greek, for the names given to fields, slopes and
rivers to be almost completely in Greek in the formal registers and maps is a
concrete illustration of the future plans of the British and the Greeks.
However, the Turk of Cyprus, who has been conscious of this, has, against all
odds, continued to use the Turkish names under the colonial administration as
well as under the Republic of Cyprus which followed it, adding further new
[Turkish] names up to this day.
The administrative work on the geographical names of Cyprus, especially on vil-
lage names, was started in 1957 in Ankara under the Generalship for Maps, with
the printing of topographical map series for Cyprus in the scales of 1/50,000 and
1/25,000 and physical maps in the scale of 1/250,000. The Turkish village names
changed by the British and the Greeks were brought to the foreground again and
all the villages that were settled by Turks, but which had Greek names, were
assigned proper Turkish names.
The great majority of these names, after receiving the approval of the Cy-
priot Turkish Community Parliament and of the village folk, was used in maps
and continues to be used.
The standardization procedures of geographical names in the territory un-
der the sovereignty of the T.R.N.C. according to international rules and rele-
vant laws and procedures was started by the Parliament of the Cypriot Turkish
Federal State on 30 November 1978 under law number 28/1978. Along the lines
of decision number C-289/79 taken by the Council of Ministers on 25 April
1979, the Permanent Committee for the Standardization of Geographical
Names of the C.T.F.S. (later the T.R.N.C.) has continued its work for eighteen
years and assigned Turkish names to every inch of land of the T.R.N.C. as a
concrete illustration of our sovereignty and presence.
The project to standardize the geographical names of the T.R.N.C. involves
the Turkification of all the geographical names in the area under the sov-
ereignty of the T.R.N.C., which owns 35.04% of the island of Cyprus, consisting
of 3,241.68 [square kilometers] of land and about 3,600 title deed maps.≥
This ideological preface to the catalogue makes transparent its political

motive. Giray argues that it is natural for those who claim sovereignty
over a territory to want to assign names to geographical units on this
land in their own language.
INTRODUCTION 5
As the names were changed, Turkish-Cypriots recount, the old sign-

posts signaling the entrance to villages (or exits from them) were re-
moved. Any linguistic or symbolic reference to the Greek language was
erased or uprooted in administrative practices on site that coincided with
the activities of the Maps Department.∂ Only in a few places did shadowy
marks of the Greek alphabet remain under paint that had washed off over
the years. New signposts erected along an altered roadscape instructed
the old and new inhabitants of northern Cyprus about their transformed
space and assisted them in revising their orientation. The catalogue of
name changes is available to the public today in bookshops and at super-
markets in northern Cyprus, alongside new maps of the island, so that
Turkish-Cypriots can match the old and familiar places with the new
names provided for them. As it has disoriented by altering names of
places, the catalogue, in its printed form, aims to aid the inhabitants of
the new territory in adjusting to the new phantasmatic space. ‘‘Beyler-
beyi’’ now used to be ‘‘Bellapais.’’ ‘‘Karşıyaka’’ now was once ‘‘Vasilya.’’
‘‘Karaoğlanoğlu’’ used to be ‘‘Ayyorgi.’’
The Make-Believe
This book is about a make-believe space. It is about the make-believe as a
social form, referring not only to space and territory but also to modes
of governance and administration and to material practices. The make-
believe is an analytical category that emerged from my ethnographic work
in the territory of the unrecognized state, the Turkish Republic of North-
ern Cyprus. As I construe it, the make-believe refers not singularly to the
work of the imagination or simply to the materiality of crafting but to both
at the same time. Much recent literature in anthropology and allied disci-
plines has problematically disassociated the phantasmatic from the mate-
rial, as if they could be disentangled from each other. While scholars in the
social-constructionist vein have emphasized the imaginative aspects of
social formation,∑ the new materialists have upheld the agency of non-
human objects in distinction from (and against) the work of the human
imagination.∏ The concept of the make-believe that I introduce in this book
challenges the opposition between these two approaches—the social con-
structionist and the new materialist—conceptualizing the phantasmatic
and the tangible in unison by privileging neither one nor the other. The ma-
terial crafting is in the making. The phantasmatic work is in the believing.
During my fieldwork in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Turkish-Cypriots
6 INTRODUCTION
who lived under the administration of the trnc often referred to their
polity by using the Turkish phrase uyduruk devlet, which can be translated
literally as ‘‘the made-up state.’’ The Turkish verb uydurmak refers to mak-
ing something up, with connotations of falsehood, fakeness, or trickery.
Good English renderings of uydurmak would include ‘‘to fabricate,’’ ‘‘to
dream up,’’ ‘‘to concoct,’’ ‘‘to cook up,’’ ‘‘to mock up,’’ ‘‘to manufacture,’’ ‘‘to
forge,’’ ‘‘to fudge,’’ ‘‘to improvise,’’ and ‘‘to invent.’’ The local northern
Cypriot metaphor of the made-up state assumed all these meanings. Im-
plicit in such representations of the administration on the part of its
subjects was a reference to the lack of recognition of the trnc, to its
international status as an illegal state.
However, Turkish-Cypriots who chose to conceptualize their admin-
istration in this way were also referring to the actual labor that goes into
making something up, a social practice, procedure, and process that they
either were subjected to or were party to in the making. The make-believe
as a driving analytical category in this book is a concept that I derived from
the ethnographic (or local) northern Cypriot notion of making something
up, by reference to administration as well as to territory, and therefore to
the space of a distinct and historically specific polity. The imagination that
goes into fabricating something is part and parcel here of the materiality
of this manufacture, a process of making-and-believing, or believing-and-
making, at one and the same time.
In this book, northern Cyprus figures both as real space to be described
ethnographically and as an example of the make-believe that we shall
conceptually explore. Northern Cyprus has been crafted in two senses of
the term: through actual material practices on its land and territory and
through the use of the political imagination. The catalogue, the form and
contents of which I have described, is a solid illustration, as an object, of
the sorts of material administrative practices and ideologies that have
shaped this specific make-believe space. Arguably, all spaces, when aligned
with state practices, have make-believe qualities.π In this regard, northern
Cyprus is not an exception.
Space and Time

This book performs a conceptual incision into the space and time of
northern Cyprus, which has been defined as a separate territory since the
partition of the island in 1974. This means drawing attention to the
INTRODUCTION 7
spatial quality of temporality in this bordered territory whose inhabi-

tants experienced time in a different and special way during the enclave
period (between 1963 and 1974) and in the aftermath of the partition in
1974. Therefore, this ethnographic manuscript is as much about time as it
is about space.∫ I argue that the aftermath of partition and the lack of
international recognition created in the administrative zone of northern
Cyprus, and among the people who inhabited it, a unique, territorially,
and politically referenced feeling of stunted temporality. This was espe-
cially apparent in the period in which I conducted a large part of my
fieldwork, between 1998 and 2003, up to the opening of checkpoints for
access to the Greek side. Here I offer a historically situated account of
spatially qualified time. The feeling of stunted temporality I refer to
should be confused neither with ‘‘synchronicity’’ nor with a state of being
out of time. I would rather interpret this, based on northern Cypriots’
accounts of their experiences of time as the twentieth century ended and
the twenty-first century began, as a historically referenced account of
being spatially enclosed and temporally in a limbo status for an indefinite
period. Turkish-Cypriots explained this special affect of halted temporal-
ity before 2003 in northern Cyprus by reference to the border with south-
ern Cyprus and the confinement it imposed, the ongoing stalemate in ne-
gotiations with the Republic of Cyprus, as well as the unrecognized status
of the trnc and its inability to circulate in the international economy.
This feeling of interrupted temporality was due to change after the check-
points opened in 2003, something I attend to in the epilogue.
Cyprus was instituted as a bi-communal state in 1960 in the aftermath of
decades of British colonialism. The administration of the independent and
postcolonial Republic of Cyprus, which was to be shared according to consti-
tutional prerogatives by the Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots on the
island, broke down into segregated components after critical events in 1963,
when Turkish-Cypriots were attacked and killed by Greek-Cypriot gunmen
or made to ‘‘disappear.’’ For Turkish-Cypriots, 1963 constitutes the first
landmark in the breakdown of coexistence with the Greek-Cypriots. It is
therefore to be taken as a milestone of major significance for the subjects of
this ethnography. The attacks by the Greek-Cypriots in 1963 pushed the
Turkish-Cypriots to inhabit ghettoized enclaves until 1974, units of habita-
tion separate from the Greek-Cypriots that were guarded by United Nations
peacekeeping forces to prevent the recurrence of intercommunal conflict.
In this interim period, Greek-Cypriots became the de facto owners of the
8 INTRODUCTION
Republic of Cyprus, taking over all aspects of its administration, while

Turkish-Cypriots began to develop their own administrative practice in
the enclaves into which they were pushed to live.
In 1974, following a military coup in Greece, General Georgios Grivas of
Cyprus attempted a parallel coup d’état against the Makarios regime in the
Republic of Cyprus. This coup was brought down, almost immediately,
with the invasion of northern Cyprus on 20 July by Turkey’s military,
which claimed to represent Turkish-Cypriots’ interests. With the Turkish
army’s invasion of northern Cyprus, Greek-Cypriots who lived there were
forced to flee southward from their ancestral homes, with many killed and
missing. In turn, Turkish-Cypriots who lived in enclaves in the south of
Cyprus were forced to flee to the north due to Greek-Cypriot attacks, as
well as reprisals, against them, including killings and kidnappings. Since
1974, Cyprus has been partitioned, with Turkish-Cypriots living on one
side of the island and Greek-Cypriots on the other, and a militarily
guarded border (the Green Line) running roughly through the middle.Ω
The Republic of Cyprus, which has been claimed almost entirely by the
Greek-Cypriots (against its bi-communal constitution of 1960, which in-
cluded the Turkish-Cypriots), is a state recognized by the international
community and has direct access to international trading circuits. Since
1974, it has administered areas south of the Green Line, although it
claims to represent the entirety of Cyprus. In the north, Turkish-Cypriots
have been governed by a series of administrations that led to the declara-
tion in 1983 of a separate state, which has never been recognized by any
member of the international community other than Turkey. Since 1983,
the trnc has claimed sovereignty over and representation of northern
Cyprus, with backing by the Turkish army, which still maintains about
40,000 soldiers on the island. Economic embargoes have been imposed
on the trnc, making northern Cyprus almost completely dependent on
Turkey. Political sanctions have been introduced, as well, so that the
administrative practice of the trnc and its representations in documen-
tary forms are contestable outside northern Cyprus. As a result, Turkish-
Cypriots have felt entrapped in a slice of territory, especially until the
sudden opening in 2003 of checkpoints across the Green Line that allow
access to the south.
The year 1974 is significant for Cypriots, both Turkish and Greek; it has
affective properties, symbolizing a point at which things changed forever.
Cypriots assign different meanings to this date and to the events that
INTRODUCTION 9
preceded and followed it, but it is memorable for everyone. In northern

Cyprus, there are references to the pre- and post-1974 generations. There
are discussions among Turkish and Greek-Cypriots about the relative
importance of 1974 against 1963. Turkish-Cypriots will prioritize 1963 as
the turning point on the island, both preceding and anticipating 1974—
the reference is to attacks on Turkish-Cypriot community members by
the Greek-Cypriot fighters of the Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston
(National Organization of Cypriot Fighters; eoka) under the umbrella of
the Republic of Cyprus in that year and to the enclave period that fol-
lowed.∞≠ In turn, Greek-Cypriots will most often refer to 1974 as the
cutoff point or the brink in the recent history of the island, downplaying
the importance of the period of intercommunal conflict between 1963
and 1974. But on both sides of the island, 1974 symbolizes a point at
which the world turned upside down.
Since 1974, northern Cyprus has been designated a territory apart and
distinct from the south of the island. Northern Cyprus did not exist as
such before. To ‘‘make it up,’’ the city of Nicosia (Lefkoşa, Lefkosia), the
capital of Cyprus, was carved in half with the creation of a ceasefire line
and a buffer zone through neighborhoods, marketplaces, streets, and
even individual homes. Likewise, border marks and checkpoints were
erected across the territory, dividing fields from the villages with which
they were associated and rivers from the wells they fed, as well as cutting
through the seashore. Numerous activities were geared to create north-
ern Cyprus as a distinct entity with its own administrative structure and
polity.
But 1974 was only a landmark. The partition of Cyprus had been imag-
ined, as well as crafted, well before, not just by the Turkish army or by
leaders of the Turkish-Cypriot community aligned with politicians in
Turkey, but also by the British, at the time of colonial dissolution.∞∞
Partition—or, in Turkish, taksim—had been considered a countermeasure
against Greek-Cypriot wishes and plans for enosis, or union with Greece.∞≤
With an eye to the future of the Turkish minority on the island in the
event of union with Greece (which was the desire at the time of the
majority of Greek-Cypriots), the partition of the island along ethnically
segregated lines had been contemplated (and planned) as an alternative.
So if northern Cyprus did not actually or materially exist as a distinct
entity before 1974, it was present and vivid in the political imagination. In
the 1950s and ’60s, nationalists in Turkey walked in demonstrations in
10 INTRODUCTION
favor of the partition of Cyprus, chanting ‘‘Ya Taksim Ya Ölüm (Partition

or Death).’’ Practices geared toward partition were well in place before
1974. Separate spheres of existence for Turkish and Greek-Cypriots, as
well as ceasefire lines between them, had already been implemented when
the island was under British sovereignty and administration (in the 1950s
and until independence in 1960). When conflict emerged between Turk-
ish and Greek-Cypriot fighters on the island between 1963 and 1974, some
of the old ceasefire lines and separation barriers were re-erected and
reactivated. Others were newly invented in this period of intercommunal
conflict, segregating Turkish-Cypriots into ghetto-like enclaves, separate
from the Greek-Cypriots.∞≥
Partition in 1974, then, was the culmination or boiling point of earlier
practices oriented toward the division of Cyprus along ethnically defined
lines and has assumed a crucial role in the popular memory and imagina-
tion. But every feature of the imagination also has a concrete material
counterpart. The year 1974 is not only a memory, a dream, an ideology, a
nightmare, or a vision. It is inscribed all over the materiality, physicality,
texture, surface, and territory of Cyprus. It has transformed the land (not
just the landscape). It exists as a tangibility, in the solid and material
form of barrels and barbed wire cutting through the city of Nicosia to the
present day; of mines beneath village fields; of bodies in mass graves,
identified and not; in bullets found in rocky cliffs full of thistles and
thorns; at shooting points with a view to the sea hidden behind over-
grown bushes; in bullet holes in buildings and rooftops; in the carved
space that cuts through Nicosia. The make-believe is real. Therefore,
every reference to the phantasmatic in this book is also a reference to the
material or the tangible. The phantasmatic has an object quality, and vice
versa. As argued by Begoña Aretxaga, the fictional and the real are not
distinct; one does not precede, antecede, or determine the other.∞∂ To-
gether they constitute a kernel.
How is a make-believe space made? What are its properties? What are
the practices that constitute it? What does a make-believe space feel like?
These are the key questions of this book. In flagging northern Cyprus’s
make-believe qualities, I do not isolate, corner, or carve it out as an
anomaly or exception because it is an unrecognized state. The make-
believe comes in the multiples, and although the ethnographic site or
location for this research project is northern Cyprus, this territory and the
administration that governs it are not unique or incomparable in their
INTRODUCTION 11
make-believe-ness. In the process of anthropologically thinking through

the materiality of northern Cyprus, the make-believe, in this book, meta-
morphoses from an ethnographically descriptive to a conceptual and
theoretical category. Of course, knowledge production is another phan-
tasm, another crafting. It is also another order of materiality. In this
instance, and in proper anthropological fashion, the conceptual crafting
emanates or emerges from the tangibilities of the field. It is a make-
believe upon a make-believe, one thing upon another, like a palimpsest.
When turned into a conceptual category, northern Cyprus, then, figures
as a notion that could make us visualize or envision the make-believe
qualities of other spaces and other social forms, not just the one that
happens to exist in the north of Cyprus. In other words, the make-
believe, and northern Cyprus in this instance, are good for thinking.
A Spectral Territory
Northern Cyprus is a space composed in the aftermath of a war that
culminated in an unofficial exchange of populations along ethnically de-
fined lines.∞∑ Before the association of place with ethnicity that developed
in the enclave period (between 1963 and 1974), Cyprus was spotted with
Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots (as well as members of other com-
munities, including Maronites, Armenians, and Britons) living across its
territory. Many villages were mixed, with both Turkish and Greek-Cypriot
inhabitants. Other Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot villages were in
close proximity to one another. In fact, until the rise of nationalism in
Cyprus, with influence from mainland Turkey and Greece, Turkish and
Greek-Cypriots did not necessarily conceive of each other as distinct com-
munities in ethnic or national terms.∞∏ The difference in religion was
acknowledged along the lines of the Ottoman millet system, which classi-
fied communities on the basis of their religious affiliation. However, even
these religious distinctions were ambiguous, as there were communities,
famously the linobambaki, that switched their religious affiliation prag-
matically, according to what was demanded of them by the Ottoman
administration, or who practiced more than one religion.∞π Differences
between Turkish and Greek-Cypriots were likewise unclear or complicated
from the linguistic point of view, as a significant number of villages existed
in which the inhabitants were Muslims who spoke Greek as their native
language.∞∫ Such villagers were classified as ‘‘Turks’’ in the intercommunal
12 INTRODUCTION
conflicts that assigned them an ethnicity or nationality. This is not to

paint a rosy picture of coexistence or cosmopolitanism prior to the rise of
nationalism on the island; it is merely to state the facts of cohabitation or
mixed dwelling prior to the segregation along ethnic lines that emerged
with the enclave period from 1963 onward and with partition after 1974.
Prior to this period, Turkish and Greek-Cypriots did not live apart in
total administrative distinction. All of the main towns and cities of Cy-
prus (Nicosia, Paphos, Larnaca, Limassol, Kyrenia, and Famagusta) had
both Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot inhabitants before partition.
Each of these towns had Turkish quarters or streets with Turkish names
specifically designating Turkish places of habitation or work. But living
spaces in these towns were also mixed, and there were neighborhoods in
all of these towns where Greek and Turkish-Cypriots lived side by side.
Likewise, the marketplaces were shared, with shops and craftsmen from
all of the communities on the island. Differences between the commu-
nities were acknowledged, recognized, or coded, and social practices on
the island (including kinship and marriage) followed the knowledge of
such difference. Yet distinctions had not yet been articulated in the form
of separate ethnically or nationally defined, divided spaces for living.
The territory of northern Cyprus described in this book is a space carved
out and composed after the fact of partition. Since 1963, Turkish-Cypriots
had been living in segregated enclaves governed as well as protected by the
armed Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı (tmt), the Turkish-Cypriots’ special
fighting unit backed by Turkey.∞Ω In fact, for many Turkish-Cypriots, 1963
marks the date of their displacement from their ancestral villages or
homes, when they moved to enclaves guarded by the tmt out of fear of
being attacked by the unit’s Greek-Cypriot counterpart, the eoka. The
separation lines between the Turkish-Cypriot enclaves and areas of Greek-
Cypriot habitation were managed and guarded by the United Nations, but
the Turkish-Cypriot enclaves were internally defended (as well as gov-
erned and administered) by the tmt.
With the advent of the war in 1974 and the invasion by the Turkish
army of the northern part of Cyprus, Turkish-Cypriots who lived in the
south, which was not occupied by the Turkish army, began to flee, via
various mountainous routes, to the north in anticipation of Greek na-
tionalists’ reprisals. Many Turkish-Cypriot families, communities, and
individuals were unable to reach the north quickly and describe their
calamitous journeys, often hiding in caves or being rescued by the United
Nations at the last minute before their villages were taken over by eoka.
INTRODUCTION 13
The consequences of 1974 for the Greek-Cypriot communities living in

the northern parts of the island invaded by the Turkish army were drastic
as well, as they had to find ways to escape and find refuge in the southern
part of the island, which was left in Greek hands.≤≠ Many Greek and
Turkish-Cypriots were killed or kidnapped in the conflicts, while others
sought refuge on the side of Cyprus where they thought they would get
protection.≤∞ Some personal belongings were taken along to the other
side, but almost everything else—homes, fields, gardens, animals, house-
hold furniture, dowry chests—were left behind. On all of these occasions,
people were separated from their personal effects, from the materialities
and environments with which they identified or with which they were
associated. Although the people (villagers, town dwellers, farmers, house-
wives, doctors, lawyers, teachers, traders, merchants, artists, writers, and
others) were no longer there, having died during the conflicts or escaped
to the south or north, their belongings, the things and spaces with which
they were associated, remained behind. The people were cut off from
their things.
In this sense, we might speak of northern Cyprus as a phantomic space
(as distinct from phantasmatic, as I explain later), referring concretely to
the presence of things that are perceived, by the contemporary Turkish-
Cypriot inhabitants of the northern part of the island, as connected to the
Greek-Cypriots who used to lived there. The ‘‘Greek side’’ of Cyprus could
be studied as such as well, of course, with environments and spaces left
behind by the Turkish-Cypriots. The objects left behind (homes, fields,
trees, and personal belongings) continued to be associated with members
of the community who had fled to the other side. The ascription Rumdan
kalma (left from the Greeks), used to this day by Turkish-Cypriots in
reference to objects, houses, or fields, is a recognition of the previous life
of these materialities, as well as of the force or affect they maintain in their
post-1974 afterlife. In other words, northern Cyprus is a space where the
spectral is visible and tangible.≤≤
The ‘‘phantom’’ in the attribution of the phantomic, then, has to be
read for real, must be understood literally or concretely. The specter is
not just a figment of the imagination, an illusion, or a superstition. In the
ethnographic space and time in hand, phantoms or ghosts appear or
linger in a slice of territory in the form of ‘‘non-human objects.’’≤≥ Al-
though northern Cyprus was carved out as a territory for the separate
habitation of ‘‘Turks,’’≤∂ the Greek-Cypriots remained there, not phys-
ically, but through their material objects, their dwellings, and their fields.
14 INTRODUCTION
The Greek-Cypriots exert a phantomic presence in northern Cyprus. In

spite of their bodily absence,≤∑ the Greek-Cypriots have had an enduring
affective presence in the spaces where the Turkish-Cypriots have lived or
settled since 1974 through the things they could not carry with them to
the south and through the imaginations of the Turkish-Cypriots about
them. Turkish-Cypriots have been living for decades now in (or in close
proximity to) spaces evacuated by the Greek-Cypriots and with properties
they left behind. These materialities have exerted a force over life (includ-
ing politics, law, and the economy) in northern Cyprus through their very
presence. I argue in this book that they carry an effect that can be studied
and detected in all social, political, legal, and economic transactions in
northern Cyprus.
A separate administration, distinct from the Republic of Cyprus, has
existed among Turkish-Cypriots since the period of intercommunal con-
flicts between 1963 and 1974. From 1974, this administrative practice was
geared to transforming northern Cyprus into a singularly Turkish space.
The catalogue I described earlier is only an artifact, a concrete product, of
this project to turn northern Cyprus into a new and distinguished space
with its own administration and designated territory. A separate state
under the name Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was declared by the
Turkish-Cypriot administration under the leadership of Rauf Denktaş in
1983 but was not recognized as such by the United Nations. Although
there has been an administrative practice akin to a state system in north-
ern Cyprus, the polity is considered illegal under international law. Later
in the book, I explore the meaning of administration and the law in a
context of lack of recognition or illegality. For the moment, however,
suffice it to say that the declaration of a separate state, as well as the prior
organization of distinct administrative bodies for the Turkish-Cypriots,
was part of the attempt to make out of northern Cyprus a new spatial-
political entity, what I study through the concept of the make-believe.
Arguably, then, the phantasmatic (the make-believe state) was em-
ployed in this instance, bureaucratically and in practice, to gloss over the
phantomic qualities of the new, carved-up territory. In other words, the
phantasm of a new state that would provide protection to the Turkish-
Cypriots from attacks by the Greek-Cypriots, as well as shelter, a liveli-
hood, community, and conviviality, was supposed to gloss over the phan-
toms that remained in the territory of northern Cyprus in the shape of
the materialities left behind by its former inhabitants. In my analysis, in
northern Cyprus the phantasmatic has come into discursive and political
INTRODUCTION 15
conflict with the phantomic as Turkish-Cypriots, depending on their po-

litical affiliations, either invoke the ideologies that support the separate
state in the north or remember the violations on which such a polity was
established.≤∏ Members of the political opposition in northern Cyprus,
represented by various organizations, parties, and trade unions, have
often invoked what I have called the phantomic, referring to the illegal
expropriation of Greek-Cypriot property, as well as to missing Greek-
Cypriot people to critique what I have called the phantasmatic practices
of the administration in northern Cyprus.≤π The phantomic is therefore
also a marker of political stances, affiliations, conflicts, and differences in
northern Cyprus.
In this instance, I propose that we understand the fantasy factor in the
phantasmatic not as a figment of the imagination, a construct, or a
discourse, but as a concrete manifestation of a social practice, as a tan-
gibility, and as real. Here we do not employ fantasy as a constructionist
exercise in conceptualizing that which stands for and therefore influences
the real. Fantasy is not that which exceeds discourse.≤∫ I propose, rather,
that we construe fantasy, or the phantasm in the phantasmatic as a
materiality, an actual, tangible object. Here, there is no construct that
runs ahead of a material realization.≤Ω Rather, the fantasy element is in
the materiality itself, or the fantasy and the object are one and the same
entity. They cannot be disaggregated for conceptualization. They exist
and act in unity.
This book explores the phantomic as it ‘‘transmits an affect,’’ in Teresa
Brennan’s terms, through its material presence and endurance within a
phantasmatically crafted space and polity.≥≠ In that sense, it is a study of a
‘‘haunting.’’≥∞ The ghosts that linger in a territory exert a force against the
grain of the make-believe. Or the phantoms, in the shape of built and
natural environments, survive and challenge the agencies geared to phan-
tasmatically transform a territory.
Identifying hauntology as his project in Specters of Marx, Jacques Der-
rida has written:
There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A
traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the
virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does
not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual
and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being (‘‘to be or
not to be,’’ in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is
16 INTRODUCTION
present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity. Beyond this
opposition, there is, for the scholar, only the hypothesis of a school of thought,
theatrical fiction, literature, and speculation. If we were to refer uniquely to
this traditional figure of the ‘‘scholar,’’ we would therefore have to be wary here
of what we could define as the illusion, the mystification, or the complex of
Marcellus. . . .
Inversely, Marcellus was perhaps anticipating the coming, one day, one
night, several centuries later, of another ‘‘scholar.’’ The latter would finally be
capable, beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality
and inactuality, life and non-life, of thinking the possibility of the specter, the
specter as possibility. Better (or worse) he would know how to address himself
to spirits. He would know that such an address is not only already possible, but
that it will have at all times conditioned, as such, address in general. In any
case, here is someone mad enough to hope to unlock the possibility of such an
address.≥≤
In addressing ghosts—specifically, the specters of communism that haunt

Europe—Derrida asks, ‘‘What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the
presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective,
virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum?’’≥≥ I share with Derrida an interest
in the specter, or in the force of the specter in the making of that which is
contemporary. I agree with his observation that ‘‘hegemony still orga-
nizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting,’’ or that
‘‘Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony,’’ which I consider
a brilliant analysis of sovereignty.≥∂ In precisely this sense, the specters I
study as exerting a force over the present of northern Cyprus should not
be perceived as an anomaly, as examples for a localized ethnographic case
unto itself, or as an incomparable space apart, one under a different
unrecognized, illegal state. Quite to the contrary, and in keeping with
Derrida’s intentions in this instance, I mean for a reflection on ‘‘the
haunting’’ in northern Cyprus to assist us in drawing a comparative
conceptualization of the specters that underlie the making of nationalist
modernity in more places than one—including, of course, the Republic of
Cyprus south of the Green Line. (In that instance, the ghosts would be
Turkish-Cypriot properties left behind in the south.)
Here I invite a comprehension of ghostliness that differs from Derrida’s.
He is a critic of positivism and, thereby, of any search for what he would
call a ‘‘metaphysics of presence,’’ or an objective truth.≥∑ Against the no-
tion of presence, he privileges the simulacrum, that which is textual,
INTRODUCTION 17
constructed, or a second-order interpretation of the real. In his reading,

the ghost is a simulacrum and should be taken seriously in that way.
Through the lenses of my ethnographic material from northern Cy-
prus, I propose another conceptualization of a ghost. Here, the ghost is
material (if not physical or embodied). It exists in and through non-
human objects, if not as an apparition in human form or shape.≥∏ Rather
than standing as a representation of something or someone that disap-
peared or died—which would be a simulacrum—a ghost, as conceptual-
ized out of my ethnographic material, is what is retained in material
objects and the physical environment in the aftermath of the disap-
pearance of the humans linked or associated with that thing or space. In
other words, rather than being a representation of something or some-
one else, the ghost is a thing, the material object, in itself. It is the
presence of such ghosts in the shape of material objects and environ-
ments in northern Cypriot social practices that I study in this book.
For something to have the effect of a haunting, an enduring force or
afterlife despite physical absence, it is not necessary for those afflicted to
have a metaphysical belief in ghosts. Here, my ethnographic material
differs from that of Heonik Kwon, who studied narratives of apparitions
(in embodied form) of the war dead in contemporary Vietnam.≥π In my
research in northern Cyprus, I did not encounter local references to
perceiving apparitions of the Greek-Cypriots (or of the Turkish-Cypriot
dead). My employment of the notion of the haunting to understand
social reality in northern Cyprus therefore is more conceptual. It is not
that Turkish-Cypriots spoke of actual ghosts (or djins) appearing to them
but that the objects and spaces left behind by the Greek-Cypriots exert an
effect (and affect) of haunting through the ways in which they get tangled
around the feet of northern Cypriots in their inhabitation of Greek-
Cypriot properties, as well as their economic transactions in and through
them.≥∫ This haunting, then, exerts a determinate force over politics in
northern Cyprus.
An Animated Environment
This book is about the affect that is discharged by a postwar environ-
ment. In framing my project in this way, I invite a reconceptualization of
the relation between human beings and space. In the social-construction-
ist imagination, space has meaning only insofar as it is embroiled in the
interpretations projected onto it through human subjectivities. This
18 INTRODUCTION
would require a culturalist—or contextualizing—reading of the sorts of

implications that its inhabitants graft onto a spatial environment. This is
not completely wrong. I argue, rather, that this reading is limited in its
possibilities of analysis. The assumption in human-centered frameworks
in hermeneutics is that there is nothing that exceeds the human inter-
pretation of spatial surroundings. No excess. No leftovers. No remains.
Rather than negating the constructionist project outright, as do Amiria
Henare and colleagues, Bruno Latour, Brian Massumi, and Nigel Thrift,≥Ω
in this book I take a ‘‘both–and’’ approach, arguing that the human-
centered perspective must be not eradicated but complemented with an
object-centered one.∂≠ The argument is that the environment exerts a
force on human beings in its own right, or that there is something in
space, in material objects, or in the environment that exceeds, or goes
further and beyond the human imagination, but that produces an affect
that may be experienced by human beings, all the same. It is this excess,
explored through the terms of affect, that I study ethnographically in this
book. I argue that against the ideological, social, and political force of the
phantasmatic, the phantomic makes itself present in an environment in
the shape and form of affect.
‘‘Is there anyone,’’ writes Teresa Brennan, ‘‘who has not, at least once,
walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?’’∂∞ Focusing on what she
calls ‘‘the transmission of affect,’’ Brennan studies affective energies that
influence us from without, either from other people, externally, or from
the outside, the outer environment. Writing in critique of psychoanaly-
sis, Brennan argues that in the Western tradition, affect has been con-
ceived to emerge solely, singularly, or primarily out of the interiority of a
human subject.∂≤ Challenging the subject–object, subjective–objective
divide that such framings entail, she proposes an approach that attunes
to affective transmission between human subjects (in relation with one
another) and between human beings and the environment.∂≥ Brennan
takes seriously the affects emitted by what has been called ‘‘the objec-
tive,’’ that which presumably lies outside the subjective or that which is
supposedly distinct from it. She argues that ‘‘objective’’ (or outer, exte-
rior) agencies may be interpreted as exerting affective forces or energies
in their own right. She writes, ‘‘All this means, indeed the transmission of
affect means, that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies.
There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environ-
ment.’ ’’∂∂ This, I argue, radically challenges approaches to the realm of
affect that would singularly center human subjectivity.∂∑
INTRODUCTION 19
Brennan studies not just intersubjectivity but also the relation between
human beings and their environment as a locus for affective transmis-
sion. In this sense, she outlines a theory of relationality that moves
beyond the distinction between people and things.∂∏ However, her work
focuses primarily on intersubjective transmissions of affective energy:
how, for example, one person can become a magnet for another’s depres-
sion or inner tension.∂π She suggests that an exploration of the affective
forces of an environment, in itself, on human beings falls outside the
scope of her study.∂∫ This book picks up where Brennan, sadly because of
her passing, left off. It also claims to study affect not just philosophically
or theoretically but anthropologically, which means ethnographically.
Scholars other than Brennan have alerted us to the charges or resonance
of spatial environments. Writing in critique of Weberian (or Kafkaesque)
notions of a disenchanted modernity, the political theorist Jane Bennett
has studied ‘‘the enchantment of modern life.’’∂Ω Against the monopoly
over the notion of ‘‘enchantment’’ by theologians, or scholars of religion,
where ‘‘some sort of divinity remains indispensable to enchantment,’’
Bennett is interested in the animated properties or potentialities of secu-
lar modernity,∑≠ including its high-tech culture and bureaucratic prac-
tices.∑∞ She imagines ‘‘a contemporary world sprinkled with natural and
cultural sites that have the power to ‘enchant.’ ’’∑≤ ‘‘To be enchanted,’’ she
writes, ‘‘is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the
familiar and the everyday. . . . [It is] to participate in a momentarily
immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.’’∑≥ Through this
attunement to the animated charges of secular life, Bennett would like to
produce a philosophical ethics that takes affective resonance, rather than
alienated distancing, as its raison d’être.∑∂
Although I agree with Bennett’s analysis of modern life as ‘‘enchanted,’’
I differ from her in the positive attributes that she grants to this affective
tuning in to the charge of the modern world. I detect a certain roman-
ticizing celebration, an aestheticizing of affect in Bennett’s work that can
be observed in her attempt to extract an ethical philosophy out of it. For
her, affect represents an openness to sensing the charges of secular mo-
dernity. In this intense connectedness, she envisions more progressive
possibilities for ethical positioning. But this, I would argue, is a rather
narrow reading of the propensities of affect—or, for that matter, of mo-
dernity. In line with her approach, Bennett is particularly interested in
‘‘joyful attachment’’ as an affect, representing a fashion of being in happy
resonance with the outside world.∑∑ In studying a postwar environment, I
20 INTRODUCTION
explore ‘‘enchantment’’ not in the sense of positive ethical charging, but

in the eeriness discharged by a territorial space and material objects left
behind by a displaced community. Rather than ‘‘enchantment,’’ then, in
my study of this specifically postwar modernity I flag the notion of ‘‘irri-
tability’’ as representative of the affects invoked by the environment of
northern Cyprus. Of course, such interpretations can be made about
south Cyprus, as well as other postwar environments.
‘‘Irritability’’ is a term that I have produced in critical dialogue with the
work of Gabriel Tarde.∑∏ I conceptualize irritability as a dis-resonating
feeling produced by environments that harbor phantoms. This notion
runs against the grain of Tarde’s vision of ‘‘harmonious’’ inter-mental
transmission, which Lisa Blackman has interpreted as a reference to
contagions of suggestibility.∑π Reading Tarde as a theorist of affect (as
Blackman does), I propose ‘‘irritability’’ as a reigning concept in this book
against the grain of an imaginary harmonious attunement. Against the
warm and cozy attributions of ‘‘enchantment,’’ ‘‘irritability’’ gauges the
uncanny qualities of environments and temporalities that might be
glossed through ideological and material practices. The irritable quality
of a postwar environment has a long-term afterlife; it persists.
Unlike in the work of Jane Bennett, then, in my ethnographic render-
ing, which reads an environment by being attuned to it, affect does not
become a project in ethical self-formation. It is, rather, an analytical
approach that allows sensing as a method to understand and conceptual-
ize one’s surroundings. I argue that affect is a charge that has a part to
play in the sociality of the human beings who inhabit a space. Conse-
quently, it must also play a part in the analysis produced by the anthro-
pologist.∑∫ In fact, were the anthropologist to ‘‘cultivate detachment’’ or
‘‘distance’’ from her subject matter, in Amanda Anderson’s sense,∑Ω such a
reading or comprehension of an ethnographic environment would be
impossible. I propose that anthropological practice requires a degree of
affective attunement to one’s surroundings (and to those of one’s eth-
nographic subjects) as a component of the research experience.
‘‘Ordinary affects,’’ writes the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, ‘‘are an
animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and
disjunctures. . . . The ordinary registers intensities—regularly, intermit-
tently, urgently, or as a slight shudder. . . . The ordinary is a circuit that’s
always tuned in to some little something somewhere. A mode of attend-
ing to the possible and the threatening, it amasses the resonance in
INTRODUCTION 21
things.’’∏≠ In studying the affects of a space that appears extraordinary—

the realm of the unrecognized state in northern Cyprus and the postwar
space carved out for it—I draw attention to the ordinariness, in Stewart’s
terms, of what seems unique.∏∞ The charges I describe as emanating from
the natural and the built environment, as well as from material objects, in
northern Cyprus are sensings of tension, disturbance, or jarring, which I
study sometimes in terms of the uncanny and at others through the
notions of eeriness or what I have called irritability. As a methodology, a
sensing of the affects discharged by the environment requires an open-
ness to the possibility of dis-resonance or non-harmony. The chapters
that follow can be read as different entry points into this jarring sensa-
tion that a contemporary postwar environment produces.
Affect beyond Subjectivity

I propose that affect can be explored beyond the realms of subjectivity
but not in complete opposition to or negation of it. Conventionally, the
affective realm has been associated with human subjectivity or with the
inner world of human beings, their interiority.∏≤ Significantly, the disci-
pline of psychoanalysis has elevated the notion of ‘‘the psyche’’ (or ‘‘the
unconscious,’’ as studied by Freud) to a status where it has been taken to
represent the heart or core of affective possibility or potentiality.∏≥ In this
tradition, the notion of ‘‘the psyche’’ matches specifically with an imagi-
nation of a human subjectivity with an ‘‘inside.’’ Non-human (or, at least,
non-organic) beings are never argued to have psyches (or unconsciouses).
Variant streams and currents of psychoanalysis have to be acknowl-
edged, of course, and the subtleties of psychoanalytic notions of subjec-
tivity must be duly granted. For example, in the British Kleinian school of
psychoanalysis, object relations has been prized as a method through
which it is possible to study people’s (especially children’s) inner worlds.
Famously, Melanie Klein studied children’s play with toys and wooden
objects, as well as their paintings, prioritizing relations between people
and objects in her analytic approach.∏∂ However, this relation between
subject and object in Kleinian psychoanalysis could be argued to have
reduced the object to the status of a reflector or mirror of the subject’s
psyche. In this reading, the object is no more than a tool for the analyst
into the unconscious of her patient. Therefore, human subjectivity, envi-
sioned as an interiority (or an ‘‘inside’’), still reigns supreme.
22 INTRODUCTION
In the French Lacanian tradition, other subtleties in the approach to

subjectivity must be acknowledged. For Lacan, subjectivity is never a
ready-made product or a bare and given reality. Lacan’s notion of the
‘‘mirror phase’’ articulates the manner in which an infant only develops
his identity as a separate being or subject through the ways in which this
is reflected onto him in his intersubjective relations with his parents or
caregivers.∏∑ So in Lacan, subjectivity is a product of relational construc-
tion. The psychoanalytic notion of transference also describes the inter-
subjective relation that influences a person’s psychical mechanism, how
one revisits one’s childhood experiences with one’s primary caregivers by
way of projecting them onto others in adult life, including the analyst.
Therefore, no one could argue that in psychoanalysis there is a stand-
alone or independent notion of the ‘‘human being’’ or ‘‘human subjectiv-
ity’’ (let alone of ‘‘the individual’’). Rather, intrinsic to psychoanalysis,
including its various schools and strands, is an emphasis on the making of
subjectivity in relation to other subjects. Yet I would argue, with all of
these qualifications, that psychoanalysis to this day prioritizes the human
self or subjectivity as the primary locus for affective charge or energy.∏∏ I
challenge this assumption, which we could call the psychologizing of af-
fect. I argue that affect is to be studied or detected not only in the inte-
riority or inner worlds of human beings. However, my argument also
differs from that of Nikolas Rose, who has suggested that the psyche does
not exist other than as a product of the discourses (in the Foucauldian
sense) of the psychological disciplines and professions.∏π By relegating it
to the status of a discursive construction or truth effect, Rose radically
attacks the notion of a human interiority (‘‘the soul’’ or ‘‘the inner world’’).
The conceptual path of this book is different.
Let us first consider the inside–outside distinction. How has an ‘‘in-
side’’ been conceived in Western philosophical traditions? And what is
the ‘‘inside’’ an inside of ? As I suggested in reference to the psychoana-
lytic traditions, an imagination of a human interiority has dominated
approaches to the origins and trajectories of the affective realm. Or, until
recently, affect was regarded as coinciding with a notion of an embodied
and psychical inside, imagined as the inside of a human being.∏∫ The
psychoanalytic idea of the unconscious is the product of such an imagina-
tion of human subjective interiority.∏Ω Now, let us see if we can muddy the
water a bit and mess with the distinction between the inside and the
outside, what Brennan has called ‘‘the subjective and the objective.’’π≠
INTRODUCTION 23
Why assume a separation between interiority and exteriority? Why con-

ceive of human beings as distinct from the environments, spaces, and
objects with which they coexist, correlate, or cohabit? Likewise, why
presume that interiority (conceptualized as a separate entity) will always
reign supreme, that it will, through its projections onto the ‘‘outer’’ world,
determine everything? This would be a limited approach.
More recently, scholars have given due attention to the outside—to the
environmental, spatial, and tangible material world. Famously, Michel
Foucault has argued that the inside is an effect of the outside and that the
two cannot be disaggregated or analyzed apart.π∞ If we were to take
Foucault’s notion of ‘‘subjectivation’’ seriously, subjectivity would be read
as existing only as a product of governmentalizing practices (Foucault’s
notion of the outside) that bring a ‘‘subject’’ into being.π≤ According to
Foucault, the subject does not exist sui generis or merely as such, in and
of itself. In fact, through Foucault’s work we could go even further, to
argue more radically that subjectivity does not exist at all, that it is only
an effect of truth, the reflection of governmentality.π≥
Bruno Latour takes his cue from Foucault’s privileging of the outside.
In a vast attack on the human sciences and their imaginaries, à la Fou-
cault, Latour proposes an ‘‘object-centered’’ approach, one that particu-
larly attends to the embroilment of human beings in relations with what
he calls ‘‘non-human actants.’’π∂ Material things, tangible objects of vari-
ous sorts, are considered effective in this approach, to have agencies in
their own right, outside and beyond what may be projected onto them by
human beings.π∑ Latour can be read as having enhanced Foucault’s cri-
tique of humanism in Western philosophy, where ‘‘man’’ or the ‘‘human
being’’ was taken as the singular or primary being, the ultimate entity. In
seeing so-called human potentialities in the outside world, Latour has
proposed that we must ‘‘distribute subjective quality outside.’’π∏
In this book, I take my cue from such positionings and look, with them,
‘‘outside.’’ In place of the agoraphobia of the humanist disciplines, includ-
ing psychoanalysis, which would primarily look inward, I explore what
exteriorities, outer spaces, environments, and objects, may offer for in-
terpretation. But in following this trajectory, there is another danger, a
counterpart to agoraphobia—that is, what we might call the claustro-
phobia of the recent theoretical orientations to open ‘‘out.’’ If the exterior
was left unattended in the humanistic disciplines and approaches, in
recent calls for an ‘‘object-centered philosophy,’’ there is an equal danger
24 INTRODUCTION
of losing touch, through theoretical negation or distancing, with any-

thing that might be associated with human subjectivity or interiority.ππ
Instead of tilting the seesaw singularly in one or the other direction, I
propose to maintain it in a position of balance. In this book, I propose an
approach that merges the inside and the outside, making them indis-
tinguishable.π∫ The ethnographic material in hand pushes us to question
any distinction between interiority and exteriority, the subjective and the
objective, or the human and the object. Approaches that would favor the
outside (or the objective), as in Actor-Network Theory, are as vulnerable
to impoverishment (by way of outright negation of the inside) as those,
like psychoanalysis, that have conventionally privileged the inside (the
subjective). In what follows, I propose an anthropological approach that
would study affect and subjectivity in tandem. The purpose is not to
privilege a new theory of affect against previous constructions of subjec-
tivity but to develop a perspective that could be called the affect-subjec-
tivity continuum, one that attends to the embroilment of inner and outer
worlds, to their codependence and co-determination. ‘‘Affective geogra-
phy,’’ in the subtitle of this book—a key thematic and concept for the
whole manuscript—precisely captures this factor of being inside–outside
or outside–inside. It claims to draw a cartography, at one and the same
time, of the affects of an outer environment and those of interior human
selves, as they are interrelated.
To date, most anthropological work on the emotive domain has fo-
cused on culture and the self.πΩ Anthropologists until very recently have
not studied affect; rather, they have considered the emotions or feelings
from a cross-cultural or cultural-relativist perspective. In such works,
emerging from the culture and personality school carried into the psy-
chological anthropology of the 1980s and 1990s, the project was to study
the cultural constructedness of the emotions against Western renderings
of them as biological or psychological.∫≠ In the culturalist–poststruc-
turalist trajectory of such works in the anthropology of the emotions,
language was highlighted as the primary site for the interpretation of
emotions.∫∞ Emotive worlds were understood to be shaped by and expres-
sible through words that coincided with specific culturally determined
ways of feeling.∫≤ The contribution of these works was to divorce the
emotions from their primarily psychological attribution, or to kidnap the
emotions from the psychological disciplines, turning them into anthro-
pological objects of study. This was certainly a turn to the outside. And
INTRODUCTION 25
‘‘culture’’ was understood to be that outside.∫≥ So the emotions were to be

no longer psychologized but, rather, interpreted in terms of the different
cultural contexts through which they were put into discourse. This turn
appeared to suggest a move beyond Eurocentric notions of the ‘‘self’’;
instead, it was proposing to couple the notion of culture with the self,
studying notions of the self as culturally variable or multiple. The main
limitation of this approach, I would argue, was its singular association of
the emotions with human beings, ‘‘culture’’ being construed as a context,
base, domain, or background produced by humans.
Anthropologists have shown a similar tendency in studies of ‘‘culture
and depression,’’ ‘‘social suffering,’’ and ‘‘subjectivity.’’∫∂ Here we find a
meeting point between cultural, political, medical, and psychological an-
thropology; the project is to explore how subjectivity is formed within a
fraught and conflicted political field and in distinct cultural contexts. In
Violence and Subjectivity, Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman write, ‘‘It be-
comes necessary to consider how subjectivity—the felt interior experi-
ence of the person that includes his or her positions in a field of relational
power—is produced through the experience of violence.’’∫∑ The anthro-
pologists who contribute to this collection and who conceptualize in this
vein are interested in studying the interiorization of violence, how people
in their inner worlds experience drastic political events or cataclysms
through the moral repertoires provided by their specific cultural milieus.
In this vein, and in reference to their first edited volume, Social Suffering,
Das and Kleinman have written: ‘‘It gave illustrations of how transforma-
tions in cultural representations and collective experiences of suffering
reshape interpersonal responses to catastrophe and terror.’’∫∏ The ques-
tion is how subjectivities, understood as human interiorities or as ‘‘the
lived and imaginary experience of the subject,’’ are produced in engage-
ment with or subjection to violence.∫π From one vantage point, the proj-
ect of Das and Kleinman may appear close to mine. There is, however, a
difference. There certainly is an attempt to bridge the gap between an
inside and an outside in these works on subjectivity in a political field,
where the inside is understood as the emotional world of a subject (their
subjectivity) and the outside, as his or her moral, discursive, and cultural
references in a broader arena of violent politics.∫∫ Yet I would argue that
in the manner in which subjectivity has been conceptualized (as referring
to human interiority) and the fashion in which the exterior (in this case,
the cultural and political) world is considered as made singularly by hu-
26 INTRODUCTION
man hands, these works on ‘‘social suffering’’ and ‘‘violence and subjec-
tivity’’ remain within the humanist philosophical tradition. I suggest that
there is a way to build on the contribution of these studies while moving
further.
If affect does not refer to subjectivity, if it is something that simply
cannot be reduced to human interiority, then what is it? And if affect is
different from the emotions or feelings, how are we to conceptualize it?
Furthermore, if we were to take the notion of affect on board, how would
we have to alter our notions of subjectivity without losing the possibility
of analyzing human emotionality altogether? And finally, one of the core
questions of this book: Is it possible to imagine affect and subjectivity as
embroiled in one another, as cohabiting, or as being mutually implicated?
For such a conceptualization, what sorts of new terminologies or catego-
ries of analysis would we need to invent?
On ‘‘affect,’’ I suggest that we return to the sources. I refer to Spinoza’s
Ethics, in which man is regarded as being part of nature, not as standing
apart from it, commanding over it, or superior to it. Man and nature are
not distinct in Spinoza’s philosophy; they are inextricable, or one and the
same. Human nature is not different from or separate from nature. Spi-
noza construes his notion of ‘‘affect (affectus)’’ in this light:
Most of those who have written about the affects, and men’s way of living,
seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of Nature,
but of things which are outside Nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in
Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs,
rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his
actions, and that he is determined only by himself. And they attribute the cause
of human impotence and inconstancy, not to the common power of Nature, but
to I know not what vice of human nature, which they therefore bewail, or laugh
at, or disdain, or (as usually happens) curse.∫Ω
In line with his encapsulation of man within the broader category of

nature (‘‘for Nature is always the same’’), Spinoza crafts his notion of
affect as a category that applies to human beings and the natural world
alike, or at one and the same time:
The affects, therefore, of hate, anger, envy, and the like, considered in them-
selves, follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as the other singular
things. And therefore they acknowledge certain causes, through which they are
understood, and have certain properties of any other thing, by the mere con-
INTRODUCTION 27
templation of which we are pleased. Therefore, I shall treat the nature and
powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same
method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I
shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines,
planes, and bodies.Ω≠
According to Spinoza, a proposition that nature and human nature

should have different properties, forces, or potentialities would be laugh-
able, because man and nature are made of the same properties, the same
materials: they were co-created. Were we to follow this trajectory of
thinking, we would no longer be able to consider human emotionality a
genre apart from the affects of the natural environment. Spinoza’s notion
of affectus applies to both man and nature, radically challenging the
binarism in Cartesian philosophy. In affectus, affect and subjectivity coin-
cide; they do not refer to different orders of phenomena or species.
It is in this merging of the forces, energies, and affective potentialities
of human beings, with their natural, built, and material environment,
that I locate the core theoretical framework for this book. Out of this
unison, which we could call a co-charging or co-inhabitation of nature in
man and man in nature, we derive a conceptual apparatus for studying
what I call the affect-subjectivity continuum in a postwar environment, a
meaning captured in the notion ‘‘affective geography’’ in the subtitle of
this book.
A Make-Believe State
I return to the field, to the space of northern Cyprus, and I pick another
object up from it: the North Cyprus Almanack, which was published as a
‘‘national handbook’’ in 1987, soon after the declaration of the trnc as a
separate state. The publisher and chief editor is Kemal Rüstem, the owner
of a famous bookshop in Nicosia, and the almanac has been endorsed by
Rauf Denktaş, the former president of the trnc, as the official manual
on every aspect of administration in northern Cyprus. I describe this
handbook in some detail as an illustration of the element of the phan-
tasmatic in state practices, which I am studying under the rubric of the
make-believe.
The North Cyprus Almanack was produced as a tangible object to render
concrete an unrecognized state by describing its administration. As we
have seen, an administrative practice akin to a state system has existed
28 INTRODUCTION
amongst the Turkish-Cypriots since the period of enclaves. Before the

declaration of the trnc as a separate state in 1983, the Turkish-Cypriot
administration in the enclaves and in northern Cyprus was given other
names: the General Committee (from 1963), the Provisional Turkish Cy-
priot Administration (from 1967), the Turkish Cypriot Administration
(from 1971), and the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus (from 1975).
These series of administrations in practice among the Turkish-Cypriots
have had only de facto statuses. The Republic of Cyprus, of which the
Turkish-Cypriot administration is an offshoot (or breakaway), considers
the trnc illegal. Officially, Greek-Cypriots construe the difference be-
tween the Republic of Cyprus and the trnc as that between law and the
outlaw. Legalistic discourses and practices, then, imbue relations between
northern and southern Cyprus.
In this book, I study what existence is like under a de facto state. The
make-believe can be read as a play on the notion of the de facto: some-
thing that exists, but not really; an entity that has been crafted and
erected phantasmatically, that has been believed through the making or
materialized in the imagining. What, then, does it mean to be a ‘‘citizen’’
of a de facto state whose documents are not properly recognized any-
where in the world outside northern Cyprus? I explore how the make-
believe seeps into the everyday, how the phantasmatic is rendered ordi-
nary, how it is normalized. In focusing on such an entity, I do not intend
to encourage comparisons with other offshoot states in different parts of
the world, such as Kosovo, the most recent example, or Abkhazia, in the
Republic of Georgia, currently fighting for its independence. Such com-
parisons would be a narrow reading of what an ethnographic lens onto a
de facto administration can offer, though they should not, of course, be
ignored. A more interesting comparative viewing, I propose, would be
through a consideration of the phantasmatic elements in the making of
the trnc as a separate state. These, I suggest, are not at all unique to
northern Cyprus but promise to bring to the fore aspects that have not
been analyzed under other, legally recognized states—by which I mean all
of those states that are officially recognized by the United Nations and
that count as member states of the international system. There is a
phantasmatic element to all state practices. The North Cyprus Almanack
makes this practice in the make-believe only more visible. I would like
readers to consider the extent to which the practice of delineating a space
with a territory and a population resembles conventional ethnographic
INTRODUCTION 29
practices of circumventing place, the phantasmatic element in the writ-

ing of ethnography.Ω∞
Under the heading ‘‘Basic Facts on the trnc,’’ the Almanack lists the
following:
Founded on: 15 November 1983

President: Rauf R. Denktaş
President of the National Assembly: Hakkı Atun
Prime Minister: Dr. Derviş Eroğlu
Number of Seats in the National Assembly: 50 . . .
Area: 3,355 square kilometres (1,295 square miles)
Population: 160,287
Per capita income: 1,300 U.S. Dollars
Yearly economic growth: 7%
Density per square kilometre: 47.78% (average)
In towns: 51%
In villages: 44%
Principal Towns (with estimated populations)
Lefkoşa (Nicosia): 37,400
Gazi Mağusa (Famagusta): 19, 428
Girne (Kyrenia): 6,902
Güzelyurt: 11,179 . . .
Exports
1984: 38.8 (million U.S. dollars)
Imports
1985: 145.6 (million U.S. dollars) . . .
Finance
Turkish currency (q.v.) is in useΩ≤
Numbers are employed in the Almanack to render the de facto concrete.

Numbers have a phantasmatic quality; they give a semblance of solidity.
They make the tentative appear symbolically more tangible or true. I
would argue that they are therefore real, because statistics actually and
concretely generate (and not only reflect) social practices. The admin-
istration in northern Cyprus has mimicked state practices elsewhere,
circumscribing its territory with figures quoted in square kilometers,
providing counts for its population and averages in calculated percentage
30 INTRODUCTION
for indices of economic growth.Ω≥ These are the figures a state practice
needs to be recognized as real.
A separate state must also have its distinct history. For this, the Alma-
nack provides what it calls a ‘‘Chronological History,’’ beginning in 4000
b.c., identified as the ‘‘New Stone Age,’’ and ending on 15 November 1983
with the ‘‘Proclamation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.’’
Cyprus’s history, with its roots in ancient times, now culminates in the
foundation of the trnc. Hence, the trnc is inscribed in stone, is ren-
dered akin to archaeological ruins, is turned into a fossil, a solid carving
on a rock. This could be studied as mimicking the practices and discourses
of the Republic of Cyprus, now on the ‘‘Greek side,’’ which claims roots in
the ancient Hellenic past of Cyprus.
The Almanack next provides a genealogical history of administration
among the Turkish-Cypriots. This section describes how all areas of
Turkish-Cypriot habitation were assumed under the new governmental
practices. In reference to the Provisional Turkish Cypriot Administration,
the Almanack provides the following description: ‘‘The Basic Law of this
Administration consisted of nineteen sections. Section 1 thereof provided
that until all the provisions of the 1960 Constitution were implemented,
all Turks living in Turkish-Cypriot areas of Cyprus were to be attached to
this Administration, and Section 2 thereof provided for the establishment
of a Legislature to enact all necessary legislation for the Turkish zones.’’Ω∂
Implicit in this description is the inventiveness that was built into the
making of administration. A Legislative Assembly was introduced; regula-
tions were put in place to define the powers of the Executive Council.Ω∑
When the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus was formed, a Constituent
Assembly was founded to draft a constitution, which was then voted in for
approval and published in the Official Gazette in 1975.Ω∏ The Almanack
provides detailed accounts of government in northern Cyprus, including
the constitution, the presidency, the National Assembly and its functions,
the party system, the prime minister, the cabinet, ministerial respon-
sibilities, the national anthem, defense, the police force, the judiciary
(including the Supreme Court, subordinate courts, and the Supreme
Council of Judicature), the legislature (including political parties), the
functions of government departments (including ministries, the Public
Information Office, the State Planning Bureau, and the Office of Popula-
tion Censuses), the bar association, the district administration (including
local authorities and municipalities), and town and country planning (in-
INTRODUCTION 31
cluding the Department of Land and Surveys).Ωπ And in a classification of

functions akin to recognized states in the international system, the official
handbook lists further facts on health, economy and finance, agriculture,
other natural resources, flora and fauna, the cooperative movement, trade
and marketing, industrial relations, education, religion, art and culture,
transport and communications, geography and climate, and tourism.Ω∫
The booklet, with the logo of the trnc printed on its cover, is an
attempt to render solid (in the form of its own object quality) the state-
ness of the administration in northern Cyprus by way of illustrating,
concretely through description, each and every element of its form of
governance. The implication is that no aspect of administration is miss-
ing from this state practice, that its system of governance and its span
lack nothing in comparison with recognized states.
As a phantasmatic object, the Almanack illustrates the agencies and
creativity involved in the making of a stand-alone administrative practice
akin to a state system. Nowhere in the Almanack is there any reference to
the illegal status of the trnc under international law, only that the
trnc ‘‘is not yet a member of the United Nations.’’ΩΩ Here, I would like to
follow in the lead of the inventiveness of this administrative practice to
argue that it can assist us in reconsidering legal, theoretical, and analyt-
ical distinctions between law and the outlaw.
Affect in Law and Administration

This book charts affect in unlikely sites. An interest in affect in itself
requires an openness to the possibilities of sensing in multiple realms,
beyond projections out of human subjectivities. This widening of the
scope for the study of affect has led me to observe institutions and
administrations, modes of governance, and legal practices as capable of
inducing, and being charged with, affect. Here, I do not consider admin-
istration solely as a product of human agency (and therefore only as an
entity charged with affectivity). Although administrations are certainly
‘‘manmade,’’ I would argue that they also have the potential to generate
and exert affective forces in their own right. The tools of administration,
such as official handbooks, gazettes, legal forms and documents, filing
cabinets, office furniture, buildings, as well as institutional practices such
as surveys, audits, censuses, legal practices, and procedures in national
assemblies and in court-hearings, have ways of producing affect.∞≠≠ This
32 INTRODUCTION
institutional (or legal and administrative) affect is not just a reflection of

the human agencies that practice in and through it. My argument is that
institutions have a life (or liveliness) of their own that goes further than,
and beyond, human life. Institutions exceed, and are excessive of, human
potential. They are animated (alive) in their own right. To borrow Ben-
nett’s term, institutions are ‘‘enchanted.’’ They are not simply ‘‘disen-
chanted,’’ as Max Weber influentially called them.∞≠∞ In this book, I eth-
nographically explore the liveliness of (the charge within) a specific set of
institutions, those under (what the Greek-Cypriots call) a ‘‘pseudo-state.’’
However, I would emphasize that it is not the pseudo-factor in the trnc
that makes it more prone to inducing affect. A focus on this particular set
of administrative practices in northern Cyprus only makes it necessary
for us to qualify the genre in which affect makes itself sensed, or appar-
ent, in this specific case. Institutionally induced affect, then, comes in
variegated forms and fashions and must be qualified.
Studying an institution anthropologically, through attention to admin-
istrative practices, is a project of this book, and here I follow the works of
anthropologists who have studied audit cultures, organizations, docu-
mentary practices, and industry.∞≠≤ An ethnographic interest in admin-
istration, it must be stressed, is different from one in the state,∞≠≥ even if
the administrative practice in question is representative of, and aligned
with, a state practice. Rather than picking out states as phenomena sup-
posedly of a different order for anthropological analysis, a focus on admin-
istration renders the difference between state and non-state practices of
governance and modes of institutionality more banal. The intention is
explicit. I am trying to bring state practices down to earth, to reduce the
potency they exert by way of comparing them, by implication, with other
institutional practices. When studied at the scale of the everyday, in the
minute practices of lower-level civil servants, social workers, and border
guards, a state practice (its administration) appears much more ordinary.
Having brought it down to ground level, I then extract the extraordinari-
ness implicit in administrations more broadly.
The counter-Weberian framework is well known. If Weber argued that
bureaucracies in the formation of capitalism would lead themselves to
produce forms of disenchantment and alienation (made iconic in his
famous image of the iron cage), others have suggested that institutions
cannot be studied solely through the terms of rationalization.∞≠∂ Reading
Foucault’s interest in discipline and the rationalities of government in a
INTRODUCTION 33
similar light, attention has been drawn, instead, to the psychical man-
ifestations of power, or power as fantasy. In this book, in line with Ann
Laura Stoler’s work, I develop this argument, further exploring the ‘‘non-
rational’’ potentialities and inclinations of institutions. This requires that
we conceptualize governance (here, administration) in a fashion that
moves beyond Foucault’s notion of ‘‘governmentality.’’ Implicit to govern-
mentality is the concept of ‘‘political reason,’’ and many have studied
neoliberal institutions in this guise.∞≠∑ In the notion of governance I
explore, administrations are read not singularly as exemplars for govern-
mentality (or cool and distant, rationalized disciplinary practice) but as
working through exuding affect and potency. Another portrait of institu-
tions come to light, then, in this study, akin to Karl Deutsch’s notion of
‘‘the nerves government.’’∞≠∏
I am trying to work against the grain of the sterilization and desensitiza-
tion induced by bureaucracies and argued academically to be representa-
tive of them. Rather than mimicking the rationalizing postures of institu-
tions in my writing style and ethnographic description, then, I explore the
affects that are generated by this sterilization as a practice and process,
which I study as the senses of governance, or governance as sensorial. Desen-
sitization (what some have called ‘‘detachment’’) is an affect of sorts, with
a certain quality.∞≠π So is what Michael Herzfeld has called ‘‘indiffer-
ence.’’∞≠∫ I study the affects discharged by institutions, their objects, and
practices. We can conceive of institutions as having nerves or tempers or,
alternatively, as having calming and quieting effects. We can study docu-
ments as charged with affect: documents that induce fear; others that
inflict confidence; and likewise those that transmit apathy among those
who use them.∞≠Ω Here I study administration as animated, as having its
own charge.∞∞≠ We explore, therefore, what could be called, following
Stoler’s notion of ‘‘affective states,’’ an affective administration.
Notes
Preface
1. This attack was apparently according to the Acritas Plan, which Tassos Papa-
dopoulos, the former president of the Republic of Cyprus, was also involved in
designing.
2. The ‘‘disappeared’’ refers to the missing people of Cyprus. In Cyprus, there
are people who were made to disappear in the events of 1963 and 1974. In 1963, a
number of Turkish-Cypriots were made to disappear, never to be found by their
families. In 1974, numerous Greek-Cypriots disappeared, as did some Turkish-
Cypriots. For an ethnography on the missing people of Cyprus, see Sant-Cassia,
Bodies of Evidence. For an excellent account based on interviews with witnesses,
see Uludağ, İncisini Kaybeden İstiridyeler.
3. For a masterly account of the 6–7 September events in Istanbul, see Vryonis,
The Mechanism of Catastrophe. See also Bali, 6–7 Eylül 1955 Olayları; Fahri CokerD
Arşivi, 6–7 Eylül Olayları; Güven 2005. The film Güz Sancısı (Pain of Autumn),
directed by Tomris Giritlioğlu, is one of the few Turkish-made films about the 6–7
September events: Tomris Giritlioğlu, dir., Güz Sancısı, Yapım Filmcilik Produk-
siyon, Istanbul, 2009. Kıbrıs Türktür Cemiyeti (Cyprus Is Turkish Association)
was directly linked with this pogrom on the Greek community of Istanbul in
particular. However, it was later revealed that the Turkish government had been
aware of and involved in planning these attacks. For an assessment of the links
between the events in Cyprus’s and Turkey’s policies vis-à-vis its Greek minority,
see Demir and Akar, Istanbul’un Son Sürgünleri, chaps. 1–3.
4. For a full historical account of the deportation of Istanbul’s Greek citizens in
1964, see Demir and Akar.
5. When my grandfather was born, Didimoticho was Ottoman. It then was
briefly held by the Bulgarians (1913–19), until it devolved into a possession of
Greece under the Treaty of Neige (27 November 1919).
6. For an account in the form of oral history and memoirs of the departure of
the Greeks of Büyükada (Prinkipo) and their subsequent life in Athens, see Tan-
rıverdi, Atina’daki Büyükada; Tanrıverdi, Hoşçakal Prinkipo.
7. In later years, Israel’s actions against the Palestinians would have similar re-
224 NOTES TO PREFACE
percussions in Turkey. Every major attack by Israel (the bombing of Lebanon, the
war on Gaza, the Mavi Marmara event) would produce anti-Semitic slogans in
demonstrations in Turkey that addressed and targeted Turkey’s own Jewish com-
munity.
8. ‘‘Minority’’ is not a taken-for-granted category. It is as a result of a historical
event, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, when Turkey’s non-Muslims (the Jews,
Greeks, and Armenians) were given the official status of ‘‘minority’’ (azınlık in
Turkish) in the newly established Republic of Turkey: see Clark, Twice a Stranger.
Under the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslims were classified as ‘‘religious commu-
nities’’ according to the millet system.
9. For a study of Turkey’s Jews in the course of the twentieth century, see Bali,
Musa’nın Evlatları Cumhuriyet’in Yurttaşları.
10. Dimitriu and Vlahos, İhanete Uğramış Ayaklanma, 56.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. ‘‘Deep state (derin devlet)’’ is an idiomatic term developed in Turkey to refer
to underground links between Turkey’s statesmen, militaries, and the far-right-
wing mafia. Informally, the Turkish-Cypriots linked Adalı’s murder with Turkey’s
deep state. In the early 2000s, an underground army-state-mafia network opera-
ting under the code name Ergenekon was revealed in Turkey, and several people
were brought to court as suspect members of the ring.
14. Dimitriu and Vlahos, İhanete Uğramış Ayaklanma, 57.
15. Ibid., 58.
16. Ibid., 62.
17. For an excellent account of this period of demonstrations, see Ilıcan, ‘‘The
Making of Sovereignty through Changing Property/Land Rights and the Con-
testation of Authority in Cyprus,’’ chap. 7. For a problematic account that misin-
terprets the motives behind the protests and miscontextualizes them, see Hatay
and Bryant, ‘‘The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia.’’
18. Ilıcan, ‘‘The Making of Sovereignty through Changing Property/Land
Rights and the Contestation of Authority in Cyprus,’’ 195.
19. See Dimitriu and Vlahos, İhanete Uğramış Ayaklanma.
20. The ctp at the time was one of the organizations that had formed the This
Country Is Ours Platform.
21. The feeling of protest continued in northern Cyprus until the election of
Mehmet Ali Talat (formerly of the ctp) as president of the trnc in place of
Denktaş in 2005.
22. The Green Line refers to the ceasefire line between northern and southern
Cyprus determined after Turkey’s invasion of the north. Turkish-Cypriots refer to
the line as ‘‘the border (sınır)’’ while Greek-Cypriots usually prefer to call it the
Green Line in order not to appear to be granting sovereignty to the administra-
tion in the north. For studies of the eventful crossing and its aftermath, see
Demetriou, ‘‘Freedom Square’’; Demetriou, ‘‘To Cross or Not to Cross?’’; Dikom-
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 225
itis, ‘‘A Moving Field’’; Dikomitis, ‘‘Three Readings of a Border’’; Hadjipavlou, ‘‘ ‘I

Grow in Different Ways Every Time I Cross.’’
Introduction
1. ‘‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’’ is placed in quotation marks in most
sources outside northern Cyprus and Turkey. I put it in quotation marks here but
refrain from doing so in most of the rest of the book, which attempts to place the
trnc conceptually as a case comparable with other (including legally recognized)
states.
2. Throughout the book, I identify Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots with a
dash between the references to so-called ethnicity and nationality, or vice versa
thereof. This is to emphasize the ‘‘Cypriot’’ quality of identities and social rela-
tions in Cyprus in the period when I conducted my field research. In the Turkish-
Cypriot dialect of the Turkish language, the term of ascription used for Turkish-
Cypriots has recently been Kıbrıslı Türkler. Turkish-Cypriot (with a dash) is the
best English rendering of that. In the Turkish language, the reference for citizens
of Greece is Yunan, while that for Greek-Cypriots is Rum. My use of the term
‘‘Greek-Cypriot’’ throughout the book also helps in differentiating members of
this community from citizens of Greece. Likewise, the term ‘‘Turkish-Cypriots’’
differentiates members of this community from citizens of Turkey. ‘‘Turkish-
Cypriot’’ and ‘‘Greek-Cypriot’’ renders, as well, how members of these two com-
munities, separated by war and partition, differentiate between one another.
3. Giray, K.K.T.C. Coğrafi İsimler Katalogu (Cilt-III). Girne İlçesi, i–iii.
4. Copeaux and Mauss-Copeaux have also studied toponymic changes in north-
ern Cyprus: see Copeaux and Mauss-Copeaux, Taksim!, 74–78. The distinction of
my account is its attention to the administrative practice (the bureaucracy) that
went into the geographical name changes and the theoretical conceptualization I
derive from this. For a comprehensive glossary of old (Armenian, Greek, Syriac,
Kurdish, Arabic, Georgian, Circassian, Laz) and new (all Turkish) geographical
names in Turkey, see Nişanyan, Adını Unutan Ülke. The name-changing practices
in northern Cyprus would have followed and modeled themselves on similar such
earlier practices in Turkey. For a study of toponymic changes in Turkey, see
Öktem, ‘‘The Nation’s Imprint.’’
5. See, e.g., Anderson, Imagined Communities.
6. See, e.g., Henare et al., Thinking through Things; Latour and Weibel, Making
Things Public.
7. Since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the in-
ventiveness that goes into the establishment of nation-states has been widely
explored. For an elaboration of a specific use of the phantasmatic, which implies
the imaginary in Anderson’s, Castoriadis’s, and Lacan’s senses of the term, see Ivy,
Discourses of the Vanishing, 4. In my earlier work, I distinguished the work of
fantasy from that of discourses in a political arena, arguing that the term ‘‘fan-
226 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
tasy’’ (by reference to Lacan and Žižek) better captures psychical attachments to
power than ‘‘discourses,’’ which can be deconstructed: see Navaro-Yashin, Faces of
the State. In turn, rather than appearing in the guise of a psychic glue for the
imagination, the phantasmatic emerges in this book in tangible material shape
and in the form of actual social practices.
8. For a comparable account, see Killoran, ‘‘Time, Space and National Identities
in Cyprus.’’
9. Many Greek-Cypriots prefer to refer to the border that separates northern
and southern Cyprus as the Green Line, because the notion of a border might
imply granting separate sovereignty to the northern Cypriot regime.
10. eoka was a guerrilla unit that fought the British defending the union of
Cyprus with Greece (enosis). In the process of anti-colonial resistance, eoka
targeted many members of the Turkish-Cypriot community, as well.
11. For comparison and to consider British colonial projects for partition else-
where, see Butalia, The Other Side of Silence.
12. Perry Anderson, ‘‘The Divisions of Cyprus.’’
13. Volkan, Cyprus.
14. Navaro-Yashin, ‘‘Fantasy and the Real in the Work of Begoña Aretxaga.’’
15. There was a historical precedent for the exchange of populations between
northern and southern Cyprus. The internal displacement of Greek-Cypriots to
the south and Turkish-Cypriots to the north of Cyprus was the materialization of
a reference point to an earlier and major exchange of populations between Greece
and Turkey in 1922. The pushing of Turks and Greeks into separate enclaves
between 1963 and 1974 and the absolute partition along ethnically defined lines
from 1974 could be interpreted as a repetition of an earlier such event of enforced
separate habitation. For studies of the exchange of populations between Greece
and Turkey in 1922, see Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe; Hirschon, Cross-
ing the Aegean; Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement.
16. Bryant, Imagining the Modern; Yashin, Step-Mothertongue.
17. Linobambaki means literally the bringing together of linen and cotton and
refers to syncretism between two religious frameworks. For a more detailed
account, see Yashin, Step-Mothertongue.
18. Ibid.
19. See Volkan, Cyprus, for a detailed account of the period of enclaves.
20. Loizos, Heart Grown Bitter.
21. It must be noted that the tmt and eoka targeted not just members of the
other community in the intercommunal conflict but also those within their own
communities who were identified as left-wing or communist, including anyone
who was working for coexistence between the communities of Cyprus. Therefore,
protection was not unproblematic for many left-wing Turkish and Greek-Cypriots
in the areas administered by the guerrilla forces representing their respective
ethnic groups.
22. A comparable study of south Cyprus, by reference to the absent Turkish-
Cypriots in the spaces they once inhabited is yet to be done. The present eth-
nographic project focuses on northern Cyprus, but the analyses it produces could
very well be of use for thinking about south Cyprus (and other comparative post-
war locations) too.
23. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
24. Here, I refer to Turks rather than Turkish-Cypriots because the north of the
island was subsequently also opened for the settlement of migrants from Turkey
who were classified as ‘‘Turks’’ by the northern Cypriot administration (even if
they might not have been so because they were of Laz, Kurdish, or Arab origin).
25. In this book, I study the aftermath of 1974 until 2003, when checkpoints
between north and south were opened for the first time for mutual crossing. The
reference to the bodily absence of Greek-Cypriots from the north refers to the
period between 1974 and 2003. After the checkpoints opened in 2003, many
Greek-Cypriots crossed to the north to visit their ancestral homes and villages.
For studies of the aftermath of 2003, see Bryant, The Past in Pieces; Demetriou,
‘‘Freedom Square’’; Demetriou, ‘‘To Cross or Not to Cross?’’; Dikomitis, ‘‘A Moving
Field’’; Dikomitis, ‘‘Three Readings of a Border’’; Hadjipavlou, ‘‘I Grow in Different
Ways Every Time I Cross.’’
26. Mete Hatay and Rebecca Bryant, working on northern Cyprus, have tended
to normalize what I call the phantasmatic, representing modernity under the
trnc as undifferentiated from globalizing modernities elsewhere and therefore
reiterating the line and framework of nationalist ideologies in northern Cyprus:
see Hatay and Bryant, ‘‘The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia.’’
27. For an extensive study of the plight of missing people on both sides of the
divide conducted by a Turkish-Cypriot journalist and writer, see Uludağ, İncisini
Kaybeden İstiridyeler.
28. In Faces of the State, I employed the notion of fantasy to refer to psychical
attachments to power that exceeded deconstruction. My use of the phantasmatic
in this book is different, as it incorporates materiality.
29. Here I therefore differ from Henare et al., Thinking through Things, as well as
from Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public, works that want to dissociate the
material from the imaginary to emphasize its separate ontological agency and
potency.
30. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect.
31. Gordon, Ghostly Matters. For other anthropological studies of ghostly pres-
ences, see Aretxaga, States of Terror; Carsten, Ghosts of Memory; Kwon, After the
Massacre.
32. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10, 12.
33. Ibid., 10.
34. Ibid., 37. See also Negri, ‘‘The Specter’s Smile.’’
35. Derrida, Writing and Difference.
36. I have not come across Turkish-Cypriot references to seeing or suspecting
apparitions of Greek-Cypriots. This aspect of my ethnography is different from
the material on apparitions documented by Heonik Kwon in postwar Vietnam:

see Kwon, After the Massacre.
37. Ibid.
38. In an instructive comparison from the same region, Orhan Miroğlu de-
scribes the apparition of djins to the Kurds of Mardin and Midyat in contempo-
rary Turkey in the aftermath of the massacres committed against the local Syriac-
Christians and the expropriation of their properties: see Miroğlu, Affet Bizi Marin.
39. Henare et al., Thinking through Things; Latour, Reassembling the Social; Mas-
sumi, Parables for the Virtual; Thrift, Non-Representational Theory.
40. See Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public.
41. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 1.
42. Ibid., 24–25.
43. Ibid., 19.
44. Ibid., 6.
45. I propose that this approach could challenge human-centered conceptual-
izations of subjectivity as referring to interiority, as in Biehl et al., Subjectivity;
Das et al., Violence and Subjectivity; Kleinman et al., Social Suffering.
46. See also Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect.
47. See Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 6.
48. Ibid., 8.
49. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 1–2, 8.
50. Ibid., 11. See also Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist?
51. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 14.
52. Ibid., 3.
53. Ibid., 4–5.
54. Ibid., 3.
55. Ibid., 12–13.
56. Tarde, On Communication and Social Influence.
57. Blackman, ‘‘Reinventing Psychological Matters.’’
58. The materialism of ethnography and the surprise elements that it harbors
are what distinguish an anthropologist’s approach to affect from that of a cultural
theorist or a philosopher. In this sense, I would also distinguish the present study
from geographers’ works on affect, which lack proper ethnographic methodolo-
gies and remain mostly Eurocentric: see, e.g., Anderson, ‘‘Becoming and Being
Hopeful’’; McCormack, ‘‘An Event of Geographical Ethics in Spaces of Affect’’;
Thrift, Non-Representational Theory.
59. Anderson, The Powers of Distance.
60. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 3, 10, 12.
61. Ibid. See also Green, Notes from the Balkans.
62. For a key anthropological text that takes this approach to subjectivity,
associating it singularly with the interiority of human beings, see Biehl et al.,
Subjectivity.
63. Freud, ‘‘The Unconscious.’’ For a critique of the notion of the psyche as
invented by the psychological (psy) disciplines, see Rose, Governing the Soul; Rose,
Inventing Our Selves.
64. Born, ‘‘Anthropology, Kleinian Psychoanalysis, and the Subject in Culture’’;
Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis; Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children;
Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein.
65. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
66. Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie.
67. Rose, Governing the Soul; Rose, Inventing Our Selves.
68. João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman mention that ‘‘the current
understanding of subjectivity as a synonym for inner life processes and affective
states is of relatively recent origin’’: Biehl et al., Subjectivity, 6. However, having
historically situated the concept of subjectivity in a Western tradition, Biehl and
his colleagues still proceed to employ it unproblematically as the core analytical
category for their project.
69. Freud, ‘‘The Unconscious.’’
70. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 19.
71. Deleuze, Foucault.
72. See Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.
73. This, in fact, is what Nikolas Rose argues in Governing the Soul and Inventing
Our Selves.
74. Foucault, The Order of Things; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Latour
and Weibel, Making Things Public.
75. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell have combined Latour’s
insights with those of Alfred Gell, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Marilyn Strat-
hern to enhance this new materialism that privileges the ontology of the object:
see Henare et al. Thinking through Things; Gell, Art and Agency; Strathern, Property,
Substance, and Effect; Viveiros de Castro, 1998.
76. Latour, ‘‘On Recalling ant,’’ 23.
77. Henare et al., Thinking through Things; Latour and Weibel, Making Things
Public.
78. Here, I refer to Lisa Blackman’s work, which, as I found out in the final
editorial stages of this book, takes a similar cue vis-à-vis the inside and the
outside. She develops the notion of suggestibility, via Tarde, arguing that affective
contagion moves through ‘‘porous’’ and ‘‘permeable’’ boundaries: Blackman, ‘‘Re-
inventing Psychological Matters,’’ 39–41.
79. See, e.g., Mageo, Power and the Self. Most of this work follows from the
origins of the American anthropological tradition, specifically the ‘‘culture and
personality school.’’ There has subsequently been a special interest in merging
culturalist and psychological approaches in American anthropology. The early
work of students of Franz Boas (Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and others) was
followed by Clifford Geertz and his students in orienting anthropological queries
to the symbolic interpretation of selfhood: see Biehl at al., Subjectivity, 6–7. Both
Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod and Biehl and his colleagues could be consid-
ered heirs of this tradition: see Lutz and Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of
Emotion; Biehl et al., Subjectivity. In turn, British social anthropology has conven-
tionally distanced itself from studies of psychology (or the self), as well as culture.
This can be traced back to a well-known article by Edmund Leach that clearly
differentiates the project of social anthropology from psychology: see Leach,
‘‘Magical Hair.’’ For a critique of Leach’s gatekeeping by someone who arguably
spans both national traditions in anthropology, see Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair.
80. See Lutz, Unnatural Emotions.
81. Lutz and Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion.
82. See, e.g., Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion.
83. See Latour, Reassembling the Social for a critique of the category of the social
that could be productively extended to the notion of the cultural.
84. See, e.g., Biehl et al., Subjectivity; Das et al., Violence and Subjectivity; Klein-
man et al., Social Suffering; Kleinman and Good, Culture and Depression.
85. Kleinman et al., Social Suffering, 1.
86. Ibid., 1–2.
87. Ibid., 5, 8, 10.
88. See, e.g., ibid., 5.
89. Spinoza, Ethics, 68–69.
90. Ibid., 69.
91. See Gupta and Ferguson, Anthropological Locations.
92. North Cyprus Almanack, 1–2.
93. See Green, Notes from the Balkans, for an ethnography of maps and numbers.
94. North Cyprus Almanack, 20–21.
95. Ibid., 21.
96. Ibid., 22.
97. Ibid., 24–72.
98. Ibid., 73–186.
99. Ibid., 36.
100. See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
101. Weber, ‘‘Bureaucracy.’’
102. On audit cultures, see Strathern, Audit Cultures. On organizations, see
Wright, Anthropology of Organisations. On documentary practices, see Riles, Docu-
ments. On industry, see Born, Rationalizing Culture; Corsin-Jimenez, ‘‘Industry
Going Public.’’
103. See, e.g., Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State.
104. See, e.g., Aretxaga, Shattering Silence; Aretxaga, States of Terror; Navaro-
Yashin, Faces of the State; Stoler, ‘‘Affective States’’; Stoler, Along the Archival
Grain.
105. See Barry et al., Foucault and Political Reason; Burchell et al., The Foucault
Effect; Cruikshank, The Will to Empower.
106. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government.
107. Amanda Anderson has introduced the concept of detachment as an exem-
plary motif and methodology left by the Enlightenment tradition. Anderson
NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 231
propagates this approach, which she calls ‘‘the cultivation of detachment,’’ as one
that human scientists might take on from the natural scientists: Anderson, The
Powers of Distance. In turn, in this work I critique precisely such attempts to
resuscitate the Enlightenment tradition of positivism and objectivity by arguing
that detachment is an affect in its own right, one that is induced and produced by
specific modes of governance. I argue, as well, against a certain Weberian associa-
tion of bureaucracies with detachment. Instead, I propose that bureaucracies
themselves are affective entities, detachment being one kind of affectivity they
might transmit, produce, or inflict.
108. Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference.
109. See also Patel, ‘‘Imagining Risk, Care, and Security.’’
110. This project may ring bells with those of psychologists and other scholars
in organizational behavior and management on ‘‘emotion in organizations’’: Fine-
man, Emotion in Organizations. However, a distinction must be drawn between
scholarship that would address the role of the emotions in organizations to
provide consultancy and solutions for it in organizational management and the
approach developed in this book about administrative practices as inducing and
producing affect in and of themselves.
1. The Materiality of Sovereignty

1. A dönüm is a land measure of 1,000 square meters.
2. See, e.g., Bender and Winer, Contested Landscapes; Hirsch and O’Hanlon, The
Anthropology of Landscape.
3. See, e.g., Weiner, The Empty Place.
4. Hirsch, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 5, 22–23.
5. Hetherington, ‘‘In Place of Geometry,’’ 188–89.
6. Ibid., 183–84.
7. Ibid., 184, 187.
8. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Schmitt, The Concept of the Political.
9. See, e.g., Strathern, The Gender of the Gift.
10. I employ the term ‘‘Turkey-fying’’ instead of ‘‘Turkifying’’ here because the
Maps Department also changed the names of villages and towns in the Cypriot
dialect of the Turkish language, giving them names that resonate more with
Turkey and its standard official Turkish language.
11. This specific kind of mosque architecture is recognized by the Turkish-
Cypriots as different from the traditional mosques they used to have in Cyprus.
The old mosques of Cyprus are smaller and have short minarets, while the new
ones built under the sponsorship of the Turkish army are much more prominent
and dominant in size and shape. Some Turkish-Cypriots comment that this new
kind of mosque has been designed and implanted in northern Cyprus as a mes-
sage of Turkish sovereignty in the north against the material presence of domi-
neering Greek Orthodox churches in the south.
12. Hirst, Space and Power, 3.
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The Make - Believe Space

Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity

Yael Navaro -Yashin

YAEL NAVARO -YASHIN

YAEL NAVARO -YASHIN

THE MAKE-BELIEVE SPACE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2012

The frontispiece and

PART I. SPATIAL TRANSFORMATION

PART II. ADMINISTRATION

PART III. OBJECTS AND DWELLINGS

MY FIRST CONNECTION WITH CYPRUS was not through research but

Nicosians. We ﬁrst drove through erratically erected low-rise cement

being affectively attuned to the environments and history that Cypriots

intellectuals as a major event in the city’s declining cosmopolitanism,

non-Muslims always experienced each other’s discrimination by the

In 1996, the journalist Kutlu Adalı was assassinated in front of his

In referring to the ‘‘Greek side (Rum tarafı),’’ Turkish-Cypriots spoke

an economic crisis in Turkey, numerous banks in northern Cyprus went

privileged to work with Ken Wissoker through the editorial process. I

A brief section of the introduction and most of chapter 1 were previously

an Island in Conﬂict, ed. Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela

I HOLD IN MY HANDS an object that is the product of a distinct admin-

As is well known, every group of humans, whatever level of civilization they

This ideological preface to the catalogue makes transparent its political

As the names were changed, Turkish-Cypriots recount, the old sign-

Space and Time

spatial quality of temporality in this bordered territory whose inhabi-

Republic of Cyprus, taking over all aspects of its administration, while

preceded and followed it, but it is memorable for everyone. In northern

favor of the partition of Cyprus, chanting ‘‘Ya Taksim Ya Ölüm (Partition

make-believe-ness. In the process of anthropologically thinking through

conﬂicts that assigned them an ethnicity or nationality. This is not to

The consequences of 1974 for the Greek-Cypriot communities living in

The Greek-Cypriots exert a phantomic presence in northern Cyprus. In

conﬂict with the phantomic as Turkish-Cypriots, depending on their po-

In addressing ghosts—speciﬁcally, the specters of communism that haunt

constructed, or a second-order interpretation of the real. In his reading,

would require a culturalist—or contextualizing—reading of the sorts of

explore ‘‘enchantment’’ not in the sense of positive ethical charging, but

things.’’∏≠ In studying the affects of a space that appears extraordinary—

Affect beyond Subjectivity

In the French Lacanian tradition, other subtleties in the approach to

Why assume a separation between interiority and exteriority? Why con-

of losing touch, through theoretical negation or distancing, with any-

‘‘culture’’ was understood to be that outside.∫≥ So the emotions were to be

In line with his encapsulation of man within the broader category of

According to Spinoza, a proposition that nature and human nature

amongst the Turkish-Cypriots since the period of enclaves. Before the

practices of circumventing place, the phantasmatic element in the writ-

Founded on: 15 November 1983

Numbers are employed in the Almanack to render the de facto concrete.

cluding the Department of Land and Surveys).Ωπ And in a classiﬁcation of

Affect in Law and Administration

institutional (or legal and administrative) affect is not just a reﬂection of

itis, ‘‘A Moving Field’’; Dikomitis, ‘‘Three Readings of a Border’’; Hadjipavlou, ‘‘ ‘I

the material on apparitions documented by Heonik Kwon in postwar Vietnam:

1. The Materiality of Sovereignty

YAEL NAVARO -YASHIN

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