Erol Sağlam - How do Men Embody the State? State, Societal Violence, and Masculinities in Contemporary Turkey

Contemporary resurgence of authoritarian politics has redirected our attention to the way conspiracies operate across socio-political contexts. Various populist political figures, such as Trump in the US or Orban in Hungary, have relied on the dynamism of conspiracies to strengthen their political bases, to justify their political strategies, and to establish alternative truths. In the meantime, many initiatives have emerged to counter the harmful effects of the prevalence of conspiracies (e.g., factcheck.org in the US or teyit.org in Turkey) and to “re-stabilize” our senses of truth. Within this context, most scholarly analyses have, time and again, studied dismissed these conspiratorial narratives as epistemologically untruthful accounts. And yet, how conspiracies operate within concrete socio-political structures and across everyday life is still to be comprehended. This research particularly focuses on these long-neglected aspects of conspiratorial socialities and follows a number of questions: How are men appealed into these conspiratorial enunciations? What does the circulation of conspiracies do to subjects and socialities? How does this circulation affect the way we conceive the state and law?

Drawing on an ethnographic research in northeastern Turkey, this talk explores the political and social dynamics that are generated and exacerbated by the everyday circulation of conspiracy theories among me. Focusing mainly on masculine socialities, this study aims to trace the socio, political, and juridical implications of conspiratorial enunciations as well as offering insights into the ways through which we are to study contemporary politics and society. Rather than articulating conspiracies as untruthful narratives that reflect the “inability of masses to cope with a changing world”, I aim to highlight how ordinary subjects forge and circulate these accounts to regenerate themselves as knowing and potent subjects. I then explore how conspiratorial narratives fuel vigilantism and extralegal violence through which stately responsibilities are taken over by men, leading to the emergence of sovereign subjectivities who embody the state and can inflict violence upon those whom are deemed to be “subversives”.

Erol Saglam is a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University. He completed his doctoral studies at Birkbeck, University of London as of 2017. His current project explores men’s circulation of conspiracies in order to comprehend how the state is maintained in the everyday through extralegal violence and vigilantism conspiracies seem to fuel. Saglam is also studying treasure hunts to get a better grasp of collective memory, violence, and subjectivities in contemporary Turkey. His publications dealt with everyday configurations of Islamic piety in the Turkish context, everyday dynamics that forge and maintain heteronormative masculinities, how Turkish public space accommodates socio-cultural distinctions in different modalities, and the challenges facing ethnographic methodology in contemporary world. His primary research interests involve masculinities, extralegal violence, memory, and subjectivities.