REDUX: Abjected Spaces, Debris of War
To close our thematic week on the anthropology of the state, we re-publish (with the permission of the author) this […]
Yael Navaro-Yashin
Yael Navaro-Yashin is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge where she has been teaching since 1999. A native of Istanbul, she studied at Robert College, leading onto Brandeis University for a BA in Sociology, and Princeton for a masters and PhD in Anthropology (1998). Prior to Cambridge, she taught at the University of Edinburgh for two years, and she has also held Visiting Professorships at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Cyprus (Nicosia), and Australian National University (Canberra). Navaro-Yashin is the author, among many articles, of two books: Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002) and The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012). The latter book is an ethnographic and theoretical meditation upon the space of Northern Cyprus post-1974 and prior to the opening of check-points with the south of the island. Navaro-Yashin is best known for her work on peoples' engagements with spaces and objects left behind in post-war environments. She presently holds a five-year grant from the European Research Council which she directs as Principal Investigator under the title of "Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality, and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey." This project studies relations between people and material spaces after the 1915 genocide of Armenians in Turkey. Navaro-Yashin's specific ethnographic research has been focused on Antakya (Antiochia) in south Turkey (close to the border with Syria) where she has been conducting work on violence and spirituality.