Until the fairly recent turn towards therapy and mental health of educated middle classes in Turkey, talking with one’s neighbor, family, or friend substituted what people seek out in therapy today and continues to do so like in many other places. One of the indispensable components of these therapeutic conversations, perhaps alongside when smoking a cigarette, has been those held around Turkish coffee. Turkish coffee talk (Türk kahvesi muhabbeti) is one of the simplest and most mundane ways of forming intimacies: drinking Turkish coffee and sharing whatever is weighing one’s heart to find compassion and relief. The ethnographic research in the context of Turkey and the intimacy of the relationship that is formed between the researcher and the interlocutor resembles the dynamics of Turkish coffee talk. There is nothing inherently Turkish about this form of conversation, nor is it limited to the boundaries of the nation-state. However, therapeutic relationality emerging with the Turkish coffee talk pushes me to think about the possibilities intimacy generates in ethnographic research, as well as the emotional and ethical challenges it poses for the ethnographer. Drawing from my ethnography with theatre industry workers in Turkey in 2020 and Uzbek women care workers in Turkey in 2021, I will discuss the importance of building samimiyet (genuineness/intimacy) with our interlocutors, how listening carefully contributes to that, and how that space of intimacy can be fruitful for ethnography while also creating emotional and ethical dilemmas for the researcher.
Coffee and Samimiyet
Ethnographic research can generate different forms of intimacies, but intimacy is always mediated through a conversation, a shared practice, sharing secrets, or participation in everyday practices. One of the ways in which intimate relationship tend to get form in Turkey is through drinking Turkish coffee together. Turkish coffee is a subject of national and ethnic debate in Turkey and the surrounding geography. Both Turks, Kurds, Greeks and Armenians claim ownership to the same coffee. One question we can ask is why coffee, among other foods and beverages, is very important in defining national boundaries and what the persistence of national and ethnic conflicts through the appropriation of taste can tell us. However, in this paper I will focus on the kind of intimate relationality this coffee mediates and how that intimacy can open up new questions about the relationship between the ethnographer and interlocutors while creating tensions that require further scrutiny.
The intimacy that gets established through the mundane act of drinking coffee together is intriguing. As Berlant (1998) shows, far from only constituting the domain of the private, intimacy governs what we conventionally identify as public life. Intimacy has different connotations and different translations in Turkish and can refer to privacy, sexuality, closeness, and secrecy (Zengin and Sehlikoglu 2016). The two main translations of intimacy in Turkish are samimiyet and mahremiyet. They convey different sets of meanings while also being quite entangled with each other. Samimiyet originates from the Arabic root “ṣamīm”, meaning the innermost part, the essence, the marrow. Samimiyet indicates a “physical and emotional closeness that comes from everyday practice rather than kinship relations” (Liebelt 2016). Samimiyet also signifies a relationship where boundaries are lifted. When a relationship becomes samimi, it becomes purified from artificial manners, words, poses, and pretentions, and people who become samimi with one another reveal their “true” selves (Sehlikoglu 2015, 79). Mahremiyet, on the other hand, originates from the Arabic root “ḥ-r-m”, and it means forbidden, taboo or one who has permission to enter forbidden areas, a confidant. Referring to kinship relations, the word mahrem means close kin who cannot marry each other. When we zoom out of its literal definition, mahremiyet has also been conceptualized as a border-making mechanism in relation to sexuality in everyday life, but it also creates borders between spaces, between individuals, and within the body of the same individual (Sehlikoğlu 2015, 2). The concept of samimiyet also draws from the border-making mechanism of mahremiyet, where the boundaries of samimiyet distinguish how closeness and distance are imagined between people, spaces, and bodies.
The ethnographic research in the context of Turkey and the intimacy of the relationship that is formed between the researcher and the interlocutor resembles the dynamics of Turkish coffee talk.
The type of intimacy I’m referring to in this article is samimiyet, the close and safe forms of relationships that open the space for people to share experiences. There are numerous ways samimiyet can be established, and one of them being through sharing mahrem (private, secret) parts of our lives. In a recent study, Korkman (2023) shows that in the context of Turkey, coffee divination conjures intimate publics through the space it opens up for sharing intimate topics about one’s personal life and constitutes predominantly feminised, queer and homosocial intimacies. In my experience, samimiyet can be born during an ethnography between ethnographers and their interlocutors through sharing details about one’s life and experiences. Ethnographic relationships bear the fruits of a potential samimi relationship which in my experience either resembles, or is precisely born out of Turkish coffee talk.
As a scholar from Turkey, I cannot not help but see the fundamental resemblance between the everyday intimacies born out of Turkish coffee talk and the intimacy born between strangers during ethnographic research. I do not intend to exaggerate this intimate relationship as timeless or unconditional, and neither do I think that intimacy is inevitable and essential to ethnographic research. However, conducting interviews while drinking coffee and elaborating on the private or emotionally loaded aspects of one’s life has strong continuities with Turkish coffee talk. This talk pulls people towards the domain of the intimate and, in doing so, creates a safe space among people. However, this intimacy neither stems from the assigned Turkishness of this coffee nor the taste of it. Non-Turkish people in Turkey and beyond also drink this coffee and engage in the same type of talk. Turkish coffee mainly becomes a medium that generates intimate talk. We can search for the root of this intimacy in the “talk” part. Muhabbet is not any form of talk. The Turkish word comes from its Arabic root “ḥ-b-b”, which became mahabba(t), meaning “loving, friendship, being a pal.” Muhabbet is different from a speech, a monologue, or plain talk. It is interactional and intimate, generates close friendship, love, compassion, and trust. Therefore, Türk kahvesi muhabbeti is a culturally specific act that forms a therapeutic space for those familiar with its ability to develop intimacy. It is even common for people in this geography to engage in coffee muhabbet, as a substitute for, or in addition to therapy, to talk about their intimate problems with their neighbors, friends, or family to get things off their chest. Therefore, while doing ethnography, the act of carefully listening to the personal experiences of someone inevitably establishes a therapeutic and intimate relationship between the researcher and the respondent, which resembles the samimiyet generated through Turkish coffee talk.
From Conversation to Muhabbet
A recent example of this emerged from my fieldwork with Uzbek care workers in İstanbul. I contacted my interlocutors through an acquaintance who was providing shelter for women and working as a mediator between employer and employees. To conduct an interview with one of my interlocutors, I went to the small apartment in Yenikapı, İstanbul where Neşe and my other interlocutors were staying during their off days. Neşe agreed to meet and speak to me, yet I wasn’t sure if she was comfortable with me being there or even actually willing to answer my questions. When I arrived at the apartment, Neşe was welcoming, yet the awkwardness of us being inside a private space as two strangers was lingering in the air. She kindly offered to make me Turkish coffee as a gesture of hospitality and I kindly accepted. As I was sitting at the kitchen table while she made coffee, we started small-talking. I reiterated what my research was about and how she shouldn’t feel obliged to answer anything. She once again agreed to speak with me, but I could feel the distance between us.
As we started drinking our Turkish coffees, and I started to ask my questions, Neşe seemed to get used to me and loosened up. Next to the act of drinking coffee together, the space seemed to help. We were in a small kitchen, and sitting right across from each other at a small table. There was only one other person in the apartment, so our conversation was not interrupted. Both the smallness of the space and the act of drinking coffee, and the content of our conversations were transforming the ethnographic conversation into muhabbet. Notably, this intimacy was also closely connected to my research interest in women’s relationship to care work. I was asking questions to my interlocutors about what kind of caring relationship they had with the children or the elderly they took care of. For Neşe, recalling her caregiving experiences and the familial ties she established with children was already an emotional topic. As the conversation turned towards a more intimate, private, and emotional direction, the conversation also started to transform into a muhabbet. I also listened to her carefully and tried to understand and relate to her experience, and Neşe seemed to pick up on that, and eventually became more comfortable. The moment when I thought that this was a muhabbet, and that there was an intimacy getting formed here was when Neşe started shedding some tears. After I asked her where she felt comfortable in this city, she mentioned the shopping mall where, every weekend, she would spend some time with the boy she used to take care of. She missed him a lot, and recalling her intimate memories with this child created another form of intimacy between us. When a regular conversation transforms into muhabbet might be different for everyone. While coffee mediates the muhabbet, my interlocutor lifted certain boundaries and a type of samimiyet was established between us, creating a safe space. As I listened to her stories carefully and expressed my empathy, this samimiyet also established a therapeutic relationship between us. The more she sensed that it is a safe space, the more she did not hesitate to share intimate details and her emotions. She opened up more, shared details and insights, and became more comfortable.
I was left with the question of whether we, as researchers, have the necessary methodological and psychological tools to deal with the type of feelings that come out while deep-diving into people’s intense emotional experiences.
The creation of intimacy paves the way for much more nuanced, detailed, and complex accounts of interlocutors’ experiences. In a previous ethnography I conducted with theatre professionals, the creation of a safe and intimate space became a necessary component of my ethnography because I was working with sensitive topics such as sexual harassment and mobbing (Aydın 2021). Through developing a similar space of trust and intimacy, my interviewees shared many private experiences, testimonies, and insights with me about these delicate issues. To create a safe space, I constantly expressed my critical feminist stance on these issues in various ways, showing that I was listening without judgement, with care and on their side. Similar to that previous study, it became apparent that the researcher has to create a space in which the interlocutor feels safe to share experiences in which they felt vulnerable, and do not feel judged.
Especially when researchers are listening to stories of harassment, different forms of violence, oppression and injustice, respondents get certain things off their chests in that safe space. As samimiyet gets established, boundaries get lifted, and my interlocutors get a better grasp of my critical feminist perspective, and they share more and without hesitation. As my interlocutors reflected more on their experiences and opened up, I realised that there is a lingering emotional risk for me in the creation of these kinds of intimacies. I was able to handle the emotional intensity of the stories they shared. I had the sense that although a certain safe space was established, there was still a lot left unsaid, perhaps because of the privacy of these experiences or because these were kinds of experiences that one does not want to talk more about. I was left with the question of whether we, as researchers, have the necessary methodological and psychological tools to deal with the type of feelings that come out while deep-diving into people’s intense emotional experiences. Ethnographic settings can make us become like therapists, but not everyone might have the necessary skills to deal with these complex emotions. The conventional ethnographic research methods do not prioritize the interviewer’s well-being because the general assumption about the position of the researcher is that they should be distant parties in these conversations. Ethnographers working with vulnerable and emotionally distressing topics have been grappling with the same questions. Some scholars emphasise the emotional exhaustion, the physical manifestation of distress, and the sense of powerlessness that researchers experience while listening to stories of isolation, loss, or violence (Dickson-Swift et al. 2009). Others highlight how they emotionally detach during their ethnographies, both from their research topics and from their interlocutors for self-protection (Emerald and Carpenter 2015). While highlighting the “emotional labour” as an aspect of the researcher’s job, they show that institutions only focus on the well-being of the participants in their ethics processes while leaving the researcher’s well-being out. Although there has been substantial critique of the notion of objectivity in social sciences, especially from the feminist critical standpoint (Haraway 2016; Harding 1992), these scholars argue that the vulnerabilities and struggles of researchers continue to be overlooked due to conventional objectivity bias in academia, as well as a lack of institutional support and training.
Listening with Care
One of the many things we do when conducting ethnographic fieldwork is to listen to our interlocutors very closely and carefully. Yet, care should not be reduced to paying attention to the nuances and details of people’s narratives. Listening carefully is also about listening to them with care. Although the elevation of distant and disinterested ways of doing ethnography has long been critiqued, the anxieties surrounding the question of reliability still seem to exist. However, my experience in the field shows me that establishing a distant relationship with the interviewee tends to become the very obstacle to collecting reliable, detailed, and complex data from my respondents. Once our interlocutors sense a lack of empathy, an absence of care, or simply a feeling that we reduce them to an object of study, it threatens the essential rapport. The interlocutors then become skeptical and discreet, which removes the researcher’s chances of getting detailed and nuanced data. This is especially an issue when it comes to researching subjects that trouble the minds of the respondents, issues that they have complex feelings about, ethical dilemmas, or that are causing them discomfort or shame. Our intention should be to reexamine and reconceptualise the caring practice of listening.
Many researchers in the Global South or researchers who experience social and global inequalities tend to draw from their own experiences and aim to transform the oppression and challenges they experience or witness into an academic study. They do not engage with a field or a subject simply because there is a gap in the literature. Far from making neutral scholarly choices, some researchers tend to study subjects and people that they “care” about. They have a positionality in relation to their object of study. Of course, this affective relationship has its challenges as well. These topics might become an emotional burden for the researcher, who do not necessarily have the tools to deal with. But also, depending on one’s political/ethical position as a researcher, the intimacy of the conversation might drag the researcher into a vulnerable place as well. This challenge arises when the interviewees whom one listens to with empathy says something entirely against one’s political stance. As researchers listen with care, they may also let their “guard” down and become vulnerable to what our respondents say as well. It does not necessarily have to be about hearing a traumatic story. An intimate connection gets formed throughout the interview, and while one sympathise with their respondents, they might make an extremely sexist or racist remark that shatters the intimate and understanding environment for the researcher.
One of the many things we do when conducting ethnographic fieldwork is to listen to our interlocutors very closely and carefully. Yet, care should not be reduced to paying attention to the nuances and details of people’s narratives. Listening carefully is also about listening to them with care.
While I was interviewing Uzbek care worker women, who predominantly worked in upper-class households, many emphasized different forms of discrimination and mistreatment they had to endure in the households they worked in. One of my interlocutors, Leyla, stated that she stayed away from extremely wealthy households even if they paid well. Her choice was informed by years of experience as a care worker. Another one of my interlocutors, Aslı started the interview by telling me that she had given interviews like this back in Uzbekistan where she was a local public persona and had properties. She was in Istanbul to earn a bit of money to travel and to do whatever she wanted. Even though she said that she was in Turkey for the quick money, she did not want to stay there or commit to a household because she did not like Turkish people or their behavior and wanted to leave as fast as she could. I felt the blend of class-based resentment and the anger towards the discrimination and racism she was experiencing. She continued to express her anger towards upper-class Turkish families who treated her and her friends abusively, such as by not allowing them to shower. It was not very difficult to understand class-based anger because it was easily relatable. However, as she continued to express her anger towards Turkish people, she began to essentialise class-based behaviour with racist remarks, which left me, as a Turkish person, speechless. Not because of my commitment to my Turkish identity, but on the contrary, the awkward position of being Turkish and privileged in so many ways in that setting. The racial hierarchies in Turkey situate Turkishness and/or Sunni Muslim Turkishness at the top and ensure economic, social, and political privileges to those who commit to these identities while violently erasing the existence of Kurds, non-Muslims and others in Turkey and denying the existence of such hierarchies and violence in the first place (Ergin 2008; Ünlü 2016; Sehlikoglu 2023). Migrant populations are also subjected to this racial hierarchy and experience different forms of precarity and discrimination, even though the state promises security to some migrants and creates a sense of hope through the promise of legally benefitting from racial or ethnic kinship with Turkishness (Parla 2019). Although her anger was very much justified and valuable for me to think further about racial hierarchies and migrant precarity in Turkey, my initial reaction was to be startled and not know what to do or say. I was not even sure if there was something to say. I came to realise that the intimate, safe, trustworthy space that is constructed through our muhabbet is also a vulnerable space that can easily shatter. Nonetheless, establishing that care, empathy, and intimacy is fundamental, and the means of doing this is inevitably linked to thinking further about our privileges as native scholars. The intimacy in ethnography cannot be a top-down, paternalistic, and infantilising form of care, but rather, should involve establishing intimacy through honesty to our interlocutors and with ourselves. The goal should not be giving up this intimacy to protect our position but rather developing methodological tools for researchers to grapple with and adapt to these changing intimacies.
Conclusion
Native scholars in the Global South continue to decolonise established norms of ethnography, and I position myself within that thread of research methods and ethics (Das and Singh 1995; Chatterjee 1991). While Eurocentric forms of knowing, analysing, or engaging with people continue to dominate our understanding of how to do ethnography or how to engage with local forms of knowledge, decolonial critique posed in various geographies by native scholars expands our ethnographic horizon with their critical perspective. My experiences in the field reflect that prioritizing careful listening, affective engagement, and the well-being of the researcher are crucial aspects of conducting ethnography. These are also key to ensure reliability and address ethical concerns. Researchers who study their geographies or the power relations that they are affected by tend to become very vulnerable to different forms of emotional distress in the field, and decolonising ethnography also requires us to acknowledge the positionality of researchers from this angle and to develop more methodological tools and new training to navigate difficult intimate encounters.
This publication is part of the ERC StG 2019 TAKHAYYUL Project (853230).
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