Joel Ferrall
University of Southern California
Seth M. Holmes
University of California Berkeley
In Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, Salih Can Açiksöz theorizes bodies in fascinating, troubling, and convincing ways. The nuanced theorization weaves together analyses of sacrifice, sovereignty, violence, gender, exchange, disability, and loss. The ethnography is especially important and timely against the backdrop of rising right-wing, white supremacist, and ethnonationalist movements around the world. As anthropologists who also inhabit the field of medicine, we focus on the compelling ways in which Açiksöz shows how bodies become politicized in the service of violence and ethnonationalism.1
Sacrificial Limbs draws on fieldwork with disabled veterans’ associations in Turkey during the early 2000s, a period of ethnonational counterinsurgency warfare against Kurdish guerrilla fighters in the absence of an officially declared war. Açiksöz explores bodily meanings and experiences in relation to the state, masculinity, racialization, and ability as they bolster the rise of ultranationalism. In many ways, Açiksöz has a great deal in common with the Turkish academics whom the associations come to identify as their public enemies. In the Preface, he asks, “How does an ethnographer become the enemy of his own ‘informants,’ about whom he deeply cares?” (xxii). Açiksöz shows understanding and respect for his interlocutors, while he also acknowledges and takes seriously his own positionality, for example through intentional limitation, sidelining himself in protests targeting intellectuals while maintaining contact and communication throughout these events (e.g. p.150). This results in a nuanced, complicated and impressive practice of ethnography.
BODIES SYMBOLIC
Readers come to know disabled veterans whose individual bodies are sites of negotiation and re-negotiation through demanding symbolic contracts between the state—with its ethnonational violence—and society—with its ableism and heteropatriarchal masculinity. Açiksöz shows how working class, male bodies in Turkey are required to sacrifice (parts or all of) themselves in military violence in order to maintain their end of the contract. Compulsory military service with its customary violence and bodily sacrifice serve to shore up the vulnerable sovereignty of the nation-state. The exchange is simple: the able-bodied man gives his body to the state, and, in exchange, is allowed to participate in capitalist, heteropatriarchal society through production, consumption, and marriage.
However, for disabled veterans, the state and society do not hold up their end of the contract. No longer can the man function in an ableist society that legally requires anti-discrimination without providing accommodations for non-normative bodies. No longer is he productive for a capitalist economy focused on efficient exploitation and accumulation. No longer is he acceptable for parents searching for socially and economically suitable husbands for their daughters. The social symbolic contract of military conscription is a “failed gendered promise” (47) on the part of the nation-state. Not only does the state not live up to its promise of providing for these men who experience poor medical treatment and threats of repossession of their prosthetic limbs, but society does not accept them, calling them “half-men” or even “half-dead” (51). This sacrificial crisis leads to collective, embodied demands on the state and growing anger toward those constructed as other, from scholars to leftists to Kurdish people.
BODIES AFFECTIVE
In the context of its failure to provide opportunities for economic and heteropatriarchal social inclusion, the state offers an affectively, politically, and religiously charged title through political decree to veterans injured in the absence of an officially declared war—that of gazi. This historically religious, nationalistic title had previously been given to the most exalted political leader-warriors understood to violently protect the Turkish nation-state. Experiencing the impossibility of acceptance by a profoundly ableist society, disabled veterans struggle to distinguish themselves as gazis from other disabled people, whom they refer to as “beggars”. They are told that they deserve honor, whereas they observe that “beggars” receive pity. Because of their bodily sacrifice, they are told the nation-state is indebted to them as gazis.
In the midst of these pronouncements, Yaman, Aykan, and other disabled veterans we come to know in the book attempt to negotiate healthcare mismanagement and bureaucratic indifference, demanding care as deserving members of society with the honorific title of gazi. There is a symbolic demarcation in this and other societies2 between the deserving, sacralized body of the veteran, and other bodies considered undeserving who were disabled in other ways. Yet, disabled veterans experience this distinction as threatened and false as the state and society repeatedly fail them. This juxtaposition of intermittent promises of honor with everyday experiences of exclusion produces feelings of betrayal and anger with increasing protest. Disabled veterans wield their prosthetic body parts—threatening their own individual and the nation’s collective dismemberment—to call for violence toward and exclusion of the nation’s others. The sacrificial crisis they experience leads to increasing populist, ultranationalist activism.
BODIES POLITICIZED
“Sacrificial limbs, they suggest, are unreturnable gifts that render the state forever in debt” (160). This understanding of exchange, proclaimed by both politicians and disabled veterans, undergirds the emotional fervency with which disabled veterans in the book engage in political activity and public displays of protest and rebellion. “It is this excess – the spectral power of loss resignified as sacrifice and unreturnable debt – that disabled veterans mobilize in their political and welfare activism, in their spectacles of prosthetic protests and prosthetic debts” (174). The book describes many forms of protest, from attending and attempting to speak at highly publicized trials of Kurdish guerrillas and leaders, to demonstrations against Turkish intellectuals, to graphic displays of the separation of limb from prosthetic. While quite different in nature, these forms of protest are attempts to hold someone accountable. In dangerous irony, these movements – injured by the violence of the right-wing, ethnonationalist nation-state and its failed promise – project the body of the other as the “site of vengeance” (149). At different moments, the othered include Armenians, intellectuals, Kurds, Turkish politicians seen to be too lenient, the European Union, and supporters of the European Union. The ethnography explores the affective valences of the sacrificial crisis experienced by disabled veterans who develop graphic means to call for even more extreme ultranationalist violence and further sacrifice.
Açiksöz’s theorization of bodies, sacrifice, masculinity, experience, and affect are fascinating and chilling. The ethnographic moments in which readers come to know in specificity and detail some of the individual disabled veterans form some of the most compelling moments in the book. And Açiksöz’s reflexive reflections on his own experiences add nuance and compassion to the analysis. More broadly, the book helps readers understand ultranationalist right-wing subjectivation through embodied experience, shedding light on the underlying affective processes that foster allegiance toward intensely violent regimes. Reflecting on ethnography in general and in this particular context, Açiksöz writes,
In the attempt to attune to a political world outside one’s own, the anthropologist is unavoidably sucked into a gray zone… It is only from within this gray zone that we can come to grips morally, intellectually, affectively, and politically with the suffering of those whose politics we find reprehensible, even inimical, to our lifeworlds, political ideals, and understandings of truth and justice, especially when their suffering is directly put into service of their politics. (xxiii).
The book is successful in this nuanced terrain, adding depth to our understanding of bodies symbolic, affective, and politicized in an important and complicated context. Writing from the intersection of anthropology and medicine in the U.S., we see colleagues in the health professions struggling with new connotations and politics of bodies and autonomy metastasizing across state legislatures and into hospitals and clinics. Açiksöz’s multi-layered theorization of bodies can help us confront the mechanisms in our own sociopolitical environment directing how we interact with and treat differently gendered patients and their bodies. This work might allow us to conceive of bodies and gender in all their symbolic, affective and politicized nuance, while countering the ways in which “suffering is directly put into service of…politics” (xxiii) that excludes certain people and limits the possibilities of care. Sacrificial Limbs promises to influence and become a classic in the fields of medical and political anthropology as well as gender studies, Turkish studies, disability studies, right-wing studies, peace and conflict studies, and veteran health.
References
Jones, B. (2020, September 30). Increasing share of Americans favor a single government program to provide health care coverage. Pew Research Center. Retrieved July 8, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-share-of-americans-favor-a-single-government-program-to-provide-health-care-coverage/
Scheper-Hughes, N., & Lock, M. M. (1987). The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1(1), 6–41.
The Party of Veterans: Democrats or Republicans? Stevens Institute of Technology. (2019, February 7). Retrieved July 8, 2022, from https://www.stevens.edu/news/party-veterans-democrats-or-republicans