Gezi Direnişi’nden Bugüne Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu

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Gezi Direnişi’nden Bugüne Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu

By : Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu

[Bu yazı, Jadaliyya Türkiye Sayfası Editörleri tarafından hazırlanan “Gezi'yi Hatırlamak: On Yıl Sonra Nostaljinin Ötesinde” başlıklı tartışma serisinin bir parçasıdır. Konuk editörler Birgan Gökmenoğlu ve Derya Özkaya tarafından hazırlanan serinin giriş yazısına ve diğer makalelerine buradan ulaşabilirsiniz.]

Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu (YKF), 2013 yılında Gezi direnişinin hemen ardından İstanbul’un farklı semtlerinde kurulan park forumlarından günümüze kadar aralıksız devam eden, tüm kadınların katılımına açık, bağımsız bir forum. İlk olarak 26 Haziran 2013 tarihinde Kadıköy Yoğurtçu Parkı’nda toplanan forum, o günden itibaren her hafta Çarşamba akşamları foruma katılan kadınların ortaklaşa belirlediği gündemlerle, feminist ilkeler etrafında bir araya gelmeye devam ediyor. YKF, Gezi direnişinin kolektif hafızasının bir parçası olduğu gibi Türkiye’de feminist hareketin/kadın hareketinin önemli öznelerinden biri olarak yoluna devam ediyor. 

YKF, 21 Haziran 2023 tarihinde, “Trans çalışmaları: Cinsiyet ve bilim” adlı kitabı tartışacağı forumunu polis ablukası nedeniyle gerçekleştiremedi. Kadın+’lara ve LGBTQI’lara karşı işlenen nefret suçlarının arttığı bu günlerde, bir araya geliş hikayelerini ve yürüttükleri faaliyetleri kendilerinden dinlemek için sözü Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu’na bırakıyoruz. Aralarındaki kesişimler dolayısıyla YKF’yle ilgilenen okuyucularımızın bu sayı kapsamında Çatlak Zemin[1]  hakkında yaptığımız söyleşiye de göz atmalarını öneririz. 

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Biz on yıldır memlekette ve dünyada kadınların gündemini izlemeye ve müdahil olmaya çalışıyoruz. Miladımız olan 2013’ten bu yana çok alametler belirdi, çok şeyler değişti ama sömürü gibi, şiddet gibi ezeli ve ebediymişçesine duran patriyarka, değişmemekte ayak diredi. Olsun… Biz eteklerimizdeki taşlarla, üzerimize kapanan duvarlarda delikler açmaya, buralardan soluk almaya çalışıyoruz. Biliyoruz, birlikte ve bir arada olmak gerekiyor duvara yüklenmek, onu yıkıp geçmek için…

Derya ve Birgan Gezi’nin 10. yılı vesilesi ile hazırladıkları dosya için aylar öncesinde Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu'nun (YKF) kendini anlatması için bizimle iletişime geçmişti. Ancak 2023 Şubat ayında yaşadığımız depremlerin, yıkımın üzerimizden atamadığımız etkisi ve bölgeyle, bölgedeki kadınlarla dayanışma gayesi ile bu anlatı biraz ertelendi. YKF’de duyurusu yapıldıktan sonra kurulan küçük komisyonda haftada bir toplanarak bu yazıyı hazırladık. Efendim YKF, övünmek gibi olmasın ama… Dünyada eşi benzeri olmayan bir oluşum olduğu için bu yazıyla tarihe ve tarihimize bir not düşmek istedik. Lessing’in dediği gibi; “kadınlar çoğu zaman hafızalardan, sonra da tarihten silinip gitmesinler” diye…

Baştan başlayalım, en baştan. “Gaz ve toz bulutu idi her şey önce” gibi olacak ama…

Feministlerin Gezi Park’ına kurduğu mor çadır etrafında toplanan kadınlar ve LGBTİ+lar olarak bu sürecin nasıl yaşandığını konuşmak üzere İstanbul Feminist Kolektif’in (İFK) çağrısı ile 26 Haziran’da Anadolu Yakası’nda Yoğurtçu Parkı'nda, Avrupa Yakası’nda da Maçka Parkı'nda bir araya geldik. O günden bugüne devam eden tek kadın forumu olan YKF'yi, yapılan bu çağrıyla bir araya gelen kadınlar olarak bağımsız bir örgütlenme şeklinde devam ettiriyoruz.

Ve hikayemiz sürüyor, ilk 10 yılımız bitmek üzere… (Nice nice on yıllara)

Yoğurtçu Parkının yeşil çimenlerine çok yakışan mor örtülerimiz, şimdiye kadar kaç yaz, kaç onlarca forum, atölye gördü kim bilir? Biz biliriz elbet. Dilimiz döndüğünce birkaç kelam etmeye çalıştık biz de. 

26 Haziran 2013'ten bugüne her Çarşamba, yazları Yoğurtçu Parkında, kışları bize mekanını açan dayanışmacı bir dernekte, kadınların hayatına dokunan her şeyi gündemimize aldık ve almaya da devam ediyoruz Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu’nda. 

Forum günlerimizde yeri geldi mahalle örgütlenmelerini konuştuk[1], mahalleleri kadınların daha rahat ve güvende hissedebileceği yaşam alanlarına dönüştürmek için talepler ürettik. Sokak lambalarının ışıklarını azaltanlara karşı dayanışmamızla aydınlatmak istedik sokakları.

Yetmedi, “Oyumuz kadınlardan yana bir Kadıköy için” diyerek Bahariye Caddesi’ndeki Süreyya Operası önünde yaptığımız eylemle, Kadıköy Belediyesi’nden istediğimiz talepleri de sıraladık: Kadın sığınağı, ücretsiz kreş, bakımevi, çamaşırhane, kadınlar için acil durumlarda 7/24 açık kriz masası, göçmen kadınlara barınma desteği…[2]

Hızımızı alamayıp 1 yıl sonrasında Kadıköy Belediyesinin Yerel Eşitlik Çalıştayı’nda bulduk kendimizi. Mahallemizi, yaşam alanlarımızı konuşmaya, sorgulamaya ve dönüştürmek için çabalamaya devam ederek 2019’da yine yerel yönetimlerden beklentilerimiz üzerine konuştuk, “2014 seçimlerinden önce adaylara ilettiğimiz taleplerden hangilerinin uygulamaya konulabildiğinin” peşine düştük.[3]

Çarşambalar çarşambaları, aylar yılları kovaladıkça “Gezi'den sonra bir araya gelip sonra da birbirini bırakmamacasına başlayan ve her seferinde yeni dostlarla büyüyen kadın forumumuzun” yıldönümlerinde, yılbaşlarında bir araya geldik. Hep birlikte olmak, birlikte gülmek, “afedersiniz” birlikte kahkaha atmak, geceleri de sokakları da bırakmamak üzere birbirimizden enerji bulmaya çalıştık. Çünkü “Kötülüğün bu kadar sıradanlaştığı şu zamanda bir arada olmamız, kadın bedeni/emeği üzerinde bu kadar tahakküm kurmaya çalışanlara karşı ‘buradayız’ deyişlerimiz, kadın direnişimiz güçlendiriyor hepimizi” demiştik bir kere.[4]

YKF’de dünyadaki diğer kadınlarla birlikte gündemlerimize, patriyarka ve kapitalizmle olan mücadelelerimize perde açtık forumlarda. OHAL ilan edildiği 2016’da “Ortadoğu’da direniş, darbeler ve bu koşullarda kadın olarak nasıl var olduğumuz”dan[5] Güney Afrika’da kadınlara ve LGBTİ+’lara yönelik erkek şiddetinin can yakıcılığına[6], Ortadoğu ve Kuzey Afrika'daki feminist mücadeleden[7] kadın kurtuluş mücadelesi tarihinin Batı Almanya’daki örneği Rote-Zora’ya[8], haklarımıza saldırıların, nefret söylemlerinin, ırkçılığın yükseldiği, bunun yanında eylemler, direnişler ve mücadelelerin de yoğunlaştığı 2022 yılında Afganistan, İskoçya, Arjantin, Fransa, ABD, Polonya, Pakistan ve daha birçok ülke ile dünyanın dört bir yanından kadın mücadelelerine…[9]

Tarihe de el atmışken bastık zaman makinesinin “götür bizi istediğin yere” düğmesine. 

YKF’nin kendi tarihinde/tarihimizde dolaşırken neler yaptığımıza, neler konuştuğumuza, nelere ses çıkarıp isyan ettiğimize göz attık.

Bu 10 yılda sadece forum gündemleri yapmadık mesela. Yeri geldi hem dayanışmayı büyütmek hem de dayatılan tüketim çılgınlığına karşı koymak için takaslar, mezatlar yaptık[10]. Yetmedi, ihtiyaç duyduğumuz çeşitli atölyeler düzenledik. Bu atölyelerde kimi zaman, erkek şiddetinin bir aracı haline dönüşebilen küfürler üzerine düşündük kimi zaman politik bir mekanizma olarak teşhir-ifşa yöntemini kurcaladık.[11] Bazen nefes almak; kendimizi, zihnimizi dinlemek, dinlendirmek istedik ve stencil, kartpostal ya da kokedema atölyelerine atıldık.[12] Bir soluklanmanın ardından da çeşitli serilere giriştik: Psikoloji, queer, tarih…[13]

“Aşk” ı hiç ihmal eder miyiz, etmedik tabii… Masallarda, tragedyalarda, mitolojide, yapay zeka evreninde izini sürdük; romantik ilişkilerin evrelerine, ilişkilenme biçimlerine, psikanalitik, hümanistik yaklaşımlara varıncaya aşkı konuştuk. Feminist psikoloji serisi ile kadının mağdur, travmatize, acı çeken, tek tip profiline karşı sorunun aslında erkek egemen bir çevrede yaşamaktan kaynaklandığını, yani kişisel olanın politik olduğunu bir kere daha gördük.[14] 

Queer… Normun dışından bakmaya, duymaya, olmaya kafa yorduk, birlikte düşündük. Queer’in düşünsel kaynaklarını, sanata yansımasını konuştuğumuz forumlarda feminizmle, toplumsal hareketlerle ilişkisine, queer siyasete ve siyasetin queer’leşme olasılıklarına baktık.[15] 

Patriyarkanın en gözde nüfuz alanı tarih; tarih aynı zamanda kadının varoluş mücadelesi verdiği en geniş kulvar. Eh, hal böyleyse tarihi baştan yazmak, geçmişi güncellemek, emeğimize sahip çıkmak boynumuzun borcu. 

Eril tarihin tekerrürden ibaretliğine karşı (aman ne sıkıcı) mücadele ile dolu kadın tarihi. Kendi tarihimizi kendimizden dinlediğimiz, tarihi dönüştürmenin, geliştirmenin yollarını birlikte aradığımız, erkek egemenliğin üretmiş olduğu tarihlere karşı bilgi, gerçeklik, algı ve hafızamızı açtığımız forumlarda Osmanlı’dan erken Cumhuriyete, 80’lerden günümüze feminist hareketin, kadın hareketinin tarihine daldık.[16] Eril destanlara karşı kadınların kendi hikayelerini yazmalarının önemini biliyoruz, bir kez daha bunun önemini kavradık.[17]19. yüzyılda Osmanlı taşrasında haneiçi çatışmalara pencere aralarken kocasını zehirleyen kadınların hayatına çevirdik fenerimizi. E, fenerimiz var madem, elektrikli modernleşme ile kadının gündelik hayatının dönüşen ritmine de bakmasa mıydık?[18]

Tarih içinde tarihe doğru yol aldıkça Selma Rıza’larla, Sabiha Sertel’lerle, Semiha Es’lerle tanıştık. Zabel Yeseyan’la bir kahve içelim, Yaşar Nezihe ile hoşbeş edip şiirler düzelim, Zehra Kosova ile “Ne olacak bu sendikaların hali?” ile başlayıp politika konuşalım derkeeeen… Bir baktık 1870’lerin Paris’inde, komünün merkezinde direnen kadınlarla omuz omuza mücadele içindeyiz.[19] Bir baktık Osmanlı sokaklarında, hanelerinde, fabrikalarında ter dökerken “ben de varım” seslerine ortak oluyoruz. Hoop ordan Güney Amerika’ya, ön safları kadınların tuttuğu masalsı direnişleriyle hepimizi heyecanlandıran Zapatistalara…[20]

Bir sonraki durakta kendimizi “ilk” dalganın üzerinde bulurken yüzyıllardır varlığını saçımızdan tırnağımıza, gülüşümüzden cinselliğimize hissettiren patriyarka karşısında, yine yüzyıllardır farklı isimlerle, çehrelerle ama hep mücadele eden kadınlarla, feministlerle karşılaştık, selam çaktık, sarıldık, seviştik. Yeri de gelmişken efendim, söylemeden geçemeyeceğiz. Cinselliğimizi, hazzımızı elimizden almak isteyen erkekler bir kenara çekilsin hele; biz kendi bedenimize bakmanın, hazzımızı sahiplenmeni peşine de düştük. Neymiş bu seks oyuncakları yahu diyerek bir de böyle oyuncakları keşfedelim dedik.[21] 

Ah zaman da makinesi de durmuyor a canım.

Hop geldik, kendimizi bir güzellik yarışmasında bulduk. Bulduk bulduk da “1929-33 yıllarında düzenlenen güzellik yarışmalarında ırkçılığa doğru hızla ilerleyen Türk milliyetçiliğini, üçüncü dünya ülkesi olmayı yedirememenin dayanılmaz sancısını, Avrupa medeniyetine dönük aşk-nefret ilişkisini ve Osmanlı’dan kopuşu ispatlama isteğine” de tanıklık ettik.  Ardından geldik karma örgütlerde, sendikalarda, odalarda yer alan kadınların mücadelesine.[22]

Tarihte, hanede, sokakta, siyasette, odalarda modalarda, bulunduğumuz her alanda kendimizden, birbirimizden, mücadelemizden, mücadele tarihimizden güç aldık hep. Çünkü “Erkekler yüzünden asırlarca hatta dünya dünya olalı çekmekte olduğumuz zulmün defini (defedilmesini) bugün biz erkeklerin mürüvvetinden (iyiliğinden) istemeye tenezzül eder miyiz?”[23]

Etmeyiz be canım.

Kimi zaman (hatta çoğu zaman) üstümüze kara bulutlar, tek adamlar çöktü. Kadın ve LGBTİ+ düşmanı politikalarıyla, ırkçılığıyla, savaşıyla; haklarımıza, İstanbul Sözleşmesi'ne, 6284'e saldırılarıyla peşimizi bırakmadı da bırakmadı. Hayır dedik, “Geleceğimizi tek adam rejimine teslim etmeyeceğiz”!

“Biz kadınlar geleceğimizi, özgürlüğümüzü, yıllardır mücadelelerimizle sahip olduğumuz kazanımlarımızı tek adam rejimine teslim etmeyeceğiz!” dedik, dedik, 2017’de başkanlık referandumunu da masaya yatırdık.[24]Üstüne, tüm höt höt konuşmalara karşı biz de “bilir o kendisini” diyerek bir şarkıyı uyarlayıverdik, düm tek tek, çıkı çıkı çıkı çıkı: 


“Son verdi meclisin işine
Hayır diyoruz biz bu işe
Son verdi meclisin işine
Hayır deyin onun dikta rejimine 

Her gün yeni bir dert açıyor
Kendini bilmem ki ne sanıyor
İsyandayız ve de kararlıyız
Tüm hayır diyen kadınlar 

Barıştan yaşamdan yanayız biz
Feminist isyanda hep kararlı duruş
Barıştan yaşamdan yanayız biz
Feminist isyanda kararlıyız.” 

Çiki çiki çiki çiki, oh oh.
 

Patriyarkanın, erkek devletin, şiddetin, sömürünün karşısında söz ürettik, yeri geldi şarkı yazdık-söyledik, yeri geldi hayır’larımızı haykırdık, sokakları meydanları terk etmedik. Haklarımızın erkekler ve iktidar tarafından gasp edilmesine, kadına yönelik erkek şiddetine, tacize, tecavüze karşı sesimizi hiç kısmadık ki. Erkek şiddetine karşı 8 Mart’larda, 25 Kasım’larda, sokaklarda eylem yaparak haykırdık, failleri ifşa ettik. Kadına yönelik şiddeti, bu şiddetle mücadele mekanizmalarını konuştuk.[25] 

Bunca saldırının, şiddetin, kadın ve LGBTİ+ düşmanı politikaların, cezasızlığın, savaş çağrılarının, pandeminin, ekonomik krizin, KHK'ların yarattığı yıkımın ortasında hiç mi umutsuzluğa kapılmadık? Kapıldık. Üzüldük, yalnız hissettik…

Pandeminin bizi evlere kapattığı dönemde bir araya gelmenin farklı yollarına atıldık, forumlara ara vermedik.[26] Online forumlarla, pandemi öncesinde de var olan sinema ve okuma gruplarımızla dünyanın farklı yerlerinden farklı kadınlar ve kadınlık deneyimleriyle tanıştık, karşılaştık. Bu karşılaşmalar, evlere kapandığımız günlerde üstümüze gelen duvarlarda kâh delikler açmamıza, bazen de üstlerinden atlayıp geçmemize vesile oldu, çok iyi oldu.  Çünkü her umutsuzluğa düştüğümüzde, yalnız hissettiğimizde dayanışmamıza, birbirimize, mücadele tarihimize döndük biz.

Bazen kendimizi, birbirimizi yorduk, küstük, küstürdük. Eleştirdik, eleştirildik.  “Birbirimizle ilişkiler geliştirirken kurduğumuz dili, davranışlarımızı, kendimize ya da bu ilişkilere dönüp baktığımızda yaşadığımız sorunları, bu sorunları gidermek için neler yaptığımızı” konuştuk; “patriyarkanın sistemli olarak bizi karşı karşıya getirmeye çalışan politikalarına karşı farklılıklarımıza rağmen, Kadın Dayanışmasını güçlendirecek, birlikte güçlü olduğumuzu hissettirecek araçları,” feminist politikanın ilişkilenme biçimlerimizde bize açabileceği yolları aradık, taradık;[27] az gittik, uz gittik; kimi zaman yolun sonuna vardık, kimi zaman da girdiğimizden farklı bir yoldan çıktık.

Çıktığımız her yoldan başka bir hikayeyle çıkmış olduk belki. Ama arşınladığımız o yolları hem kişisel tarihimize hem de YKF tarihine not düştük. Feminist politikayı tartışmaktan da hiç vazgeçmedik.

Velhasıl geldik zaman yolculuğumuzun, şimdilik son ama başka yolculukların başlangıcı olan bir durağına. 2013 yılında yaşadığımız, tanık olduğumuz Gezi Direnişi ile feministlerin Gezi Parkı’nda kurduğu Mor Çadır'la başlayan yolculuğumuz, Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu;na evirildi ve bugün hâlâ devam ediyor. Afişe çıkmalar, protestolar, gece yürüyüşleri derken on yıldır çarşambalar bizim için Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu. Mor çadırla başlayan bu serüvende Gezi’den aldığımız mirasla ve belki de Gezi’nin mirası olarak da.


[3] Yerel Yönetimlerden Ne Bekliyoruz?: https://www.facebook.com/events/560044534406434/ - Ocak 2019.

[4] Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu Yıldönümü Partisi, https://www.facebook.com/events/1640352412954981/ - Temmuz 2016; YKF'de Bu Hafta: Piknikli oyunlu forum, https://www.facebook.com/events/486682218777077/ - Ağustos 2019 vb. Yılbaşı partileri için örneğin Şaraplı Yılbaşı Sohbetleri, https://www.facebook.com/events/116673055375058/ - Aralık 2015; YKF 2023 Yılbaşı Partisi, https://www.facebook.com/events/1560046417800862/ - Aralık 2022; Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu - 2022 Yılbaşı Partisi, https://www.facebook.com/events/3217657301887817/ - Aralık 2021 vb.

[5] Ortadoğu : Darbe, Direniş, Kadın! 1.Hafta: Direnişler ve Kadın: https://www.facebook.com/events/1771051056475642/ - Temmuz 2016; Ortadoğu : Darbe, Direniş, Kadın! 2.Hafta: Darbeler ve Kadın: https://www.facebook.com/events/111625712614620/ - Ağustos 2016; Ortadoğu : Darbe, Direniş, Kadın! 3.Hafta: Türkiye'de Darbeler: https://www.facebook.com/events/595356690644325/ - Ağustos 2016.

[6] Güney Afrika’da toplumsal mücadele ve kadın hareketi: https://www.facebook.com/events/273601264214319/ - Ağustos 2021.

[7] Ortadoğu ve Kuzey Afrika'da Feminist Mücadele: https://www.facebook.com/events/4190292027672966/ - Ağustos 2021.

[8] Rote-Zora’yı konuşuyoruz: https://www.facebook.com/events/1055037488593563/ - Eylül 2021.

[9] 2022'de dünyadan kadın mücadeleleri: https://www.facebook.com/events/684091380084201/ - Ocak 2023.

[10] Örneğin YKF Geleneksel Takas Şenliği, https://www.facebook.com/events/530511287781566/ - Kasım 2019; YKF Takas Şenliği: Kışlıklar Dışarı!, https://www.facebook.com/events/379280845972710/ - Kasım 2018; Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu Takas Pazarı, https://www.facebook.com/events/279036142554325/ - Mayıs 2017. Mezatlar için Dayanışma Mezatımız, https://www.facebook.com/events/533629363685525/ - Şubat 2018 ve YKF Dayanışma Mezatı, https://www.facebook.com/events/467305027273702/ - Ocak 2020.

[11] İfşa/Teşhir Üzerine, https://www.facebook.com/events/1784814381778722/ - Aralık 2016.

[12] Atölyeler için örneğin; YKF'de Bu Hafta: Kokedema Atölyesi, https://www.facebook.com/events/993691738293119/ - Nisan 2023; YKF'de Bu Hafta: Ritim ve Beden Perküsyonu Atölyesi, https://www.facebook.com/events/1215842689305395/ - Kasım 2022; YKF’de Bu Hafta: Arzu ve Gökçe ile vegan mutfak atölyesi, https://www.facebook.com/events/577405410365508/ - Eylül 2021; Kart yazıyoruz, https://www.facebook.com/events/935710457331970/ - Aralık 2021; Şiddetsizlik Atölyesi https://www.facebook.com/events/972573439429489/ - Ekim 2015.

[13] YKF'de Bu Hafta: Psikolojiye Feminist Yaklaşımlar, https://www.facebook.com/events/464666037268119/ - Aralık 2017; 

[14] Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu'nda bu hafta "AŞK" ı konuşuyoruz!, https://www.facebook.com/events/327290727778144/ - Şubat 2018; YKF’de Bu Hafta: 'Bilim kurgu sinemasında yapay zeka-insan aşkı, https://www.facebook.com/events/655882851547663/ - Temmuz 2019; YKF'de Bu Hafta: Aşk'ı Konuşuyoruz, https://www.facebook.com/events/1178136132537384/ - Mayıs 2020; Aşk mı hayatta kalma mücadelesi mi?, https://www.facebook.com/events/313364947346976/ - Aralık 2021.

[15] Örneğin YKF'de Bu Hafta: Queer Teorinin Düşünsel Kaynakları, https://www.facebook.com/events/2376364362609644/ - Şubat 2019; Lgbti+ Hareketin Türkiye Tarihi, https://www.facebook.com/events/2136128236700060/ - Şubat 2019; YKF'de Bu Hafta: Queer’den Ses, Söz, Göz, https://www.facebook.com/events/3123715517654644/ - Mart 2019; Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu Online'da bu hafta Asya Leman’la “Türkiye’de Queer ve Sanat”, https://www.facebook.com/events/231165681682126/ - Aralık 2020.

[16] Osmanlı'dan Erken Cumhuriyet'e Kadın Hareketi: https://www.facebook.com/events/1962082424068698/ - Temmuz 2017 ve 80'lerden İtibaren Türkiye'de Feminizm Tarihi: https://www.facebook.com/events/120745715229186/ - Ağustos, 2017.

[17] Bu Hafta: Eril Destanlara Karşı Kadınlar Kendi Tarihini Yazıyor, https://www.facebook.com/events/295034034280024/ - Mayıs 2017.

[18] “Elektrikli Modernleşme”:Kadın ve Gündelik Hayatın Dönüşen Ritmi, https://www.facebook.com/events/333166117101122/  ve 19.yy Osmanlı Hane İçi Çatışmalar,Kocalarını Zehirleyen Kadınlar, https://www.facebook.com/events/301768606932666/ - Haziran 2017.

[19] Paris Komününde Kadınlar: https://www.facebook.com/events/102488860407417/ - Temmuz, 2017.

[20] Osmanlı Son Döneminde Kadın İşçiler: https://www.facebook.com/events/570975766723397/ - Nisan, 2019; YKF'de Bu Hafta: Zapatista Kadınlarını Konuşuyoruz, https://www.facebook.com/events/392716008188745/ - Mart 2019.

[21] Yoğurtçu Kadın Forumu'nda Bu Hafta: Ben & Beden - Kadın, Toplum, Cinsellik Söyleşisi, https://www.facebook.com/events/1204207806256270/ - Haziran 2016; Hazzın erkek egemen kurgusuna karşı: bedenimizi tanıyor muyuz?, https://www.facebook.com/events/1383991801644871/ - Ocak 2017; YKF'de Bu Hafta: Seks Pozitif Bir Sunum, https://www.facebook.com/events/281053932406798/ - Ekim 2017.

[22] 1929-1933 Yılları Arasında Cumhuriyet'in Güzelleri: https://www.facebook.com/events/2203164199935673/ - Kasım 2018; Karma Örgütler, Meslek Odaları ve Sendikalarda Kadın Olmak: https://www.facebook.com/events/705505169631794/ - Nisan 2017.

[23] 4 Nisan 1913 - Kadınlar Dünyası’ndan alıntı, aktarılan etkinlik YKF'de Bu Hafta: Osmanlı'dan Erken Cumhuriyet'e Kadın Hareketi, https://www.facebook.com/events/1962082424068698/ - Temmuz 2017.

[24] YKF de Referandum Sürecini Kadınlar Açısından Değerlendiriyoruz, https://www.facebook.com/events/268074876937251/ - Nisan 2017.

[26] Nisan 2020’de YKF'de:Salgının Hayatlarımızda Yarattığı Değişimi Anlamlandırmak (https://www.facebook.com/events/223297835557584/) forumu ile başlayarak Ağustos 2021’deki YKF Bu Hafta Parkta - Miras'ı Devralmak (https://www.facebook.com/events/198166655615634/) forumuna kadar, yıldönümü pikniği hariç olmak üzere forumlarımızı online gerçekleştirdik. Akabinde parka çıkarak yüz yüze forumlara geri döndük, ara ara hibrit şekilde hem online hem yüz yüze forumlar gerçekleştirdik ancak sonrasında yalnızca yüz yüze forumlarla devam ettik. Aynı şekilde edebiyat, sinema ve okuma grubu gibi grupları da online toplantılarla sürdürdük.

[27] Birbirimizle İlişkilenme Biçimlerimiz: https://www.facebook.com/events/1106537112779327/ - Nisan 2017 ve Kadın Dayanışması Bizim İçin Ne İfade Ediyor: https://www.facebook.com/events/474220236405905/ - Ekim 2018.


Link to Catlak Zemin interview on Jadaliyya

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya`s electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.]

(1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally?

When I first began studying Arabic and, subsequently, formulating a research project in Yemen in the early 2000s, I did not consider myself to be working in or on the "Arabian Peninsula," as such. Rather, what drew me to Yemen was its historical, geographical, and cultural distinctiveness, which remains even now quite remarkable, but which nevertheless often obscures the relations, connections, and shared histories and presents that do exist within the region and beyond. This oversight is born perhaps out of what Sheila Carapico identified nearly ten years ago as a pernicious "dualism" that shaped not only American research agendas, but also the stereotypical conceptions, popular and academic, of "the Gulf" (rather than the peninsula as a whole): "Yemen is kaleidoscopic; the Gulf is monochrome…The Gulf is good for business; Yemen is good for ethnography" (Carapico 2004).

This same oversight—what Adam Hanieh in his response discusses as a "methodological nationalism"—is also born out of what we may call a secondary Orientalism: a way of "knowing" that considers the majority of the Arabian Peninsula without "culture" and without "history" in comparison to the Arab states of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. This fallacy has been exacerbated, of course, by the relative difficulty for short-term visitors and new scholars of actually engaging on a deeper level with the citizenry in countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it may be easier to befriend migrants from Egypt or Sri Lanka than its small minority of "nationals." As a result, although there have been notable exceptions—including recent scholarship on the political economy, political ecology, and youth and urban cultures in Saudi Arabia, in addition to an older, rich tradition of studies on kinship and its Bedouin—anthropological scholarship on Gulf-state citizens has seemed relatively flat in comparison to the "thicker" ethnographies of migrant populations in "the Gulf" and of "tribal" communities in Yemen. In both cases, these research foci emerge from the historically dominant approaches to these "two" areas: oil and security in the Gulf (and its resulting dependence on cheap, imported labor) and state-tribe relations in Yemen (and related studies on tribalism, sociality and gender). Nevertheless, they are also being productively complicated by theoretically informed analyses of space, political subjectivities, and belonging. A similar and amplified turn to non-labor migrant populations in the Gulf (as in the work of Mandana Limbert in Oman) and non-tribal populations in Yemen (such as Marina de Regt’s work on Ethiopian domestic workers or Susanne Dahlgren on the public sphere in Aden) remains welcome.

As for the difficulties in carrying out, rather than framing, research in the Arabian Peninsula, the challenges of conducting research in Yemen may be somewhat distinct. Adam Hanieh, Ahmed Kanna, Madawi Al-Rasheed and Neha Vora have touched on the lack of (Western) research institutes and networks in the Gulf, the dearth of statistical data, and the difficulty of gaining unmediated access. In Yemen, a robust network of foreign research institutes work in tandem with several Yemeni research and studies centers to house and fund scholars and to facilitate their research there. These include the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS), the French Center in Sana’a for Archaeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). In the early 2000s, when I lived in Sanaa, these centers supported a vibrant research community of both foreign and Yemeni scholars who frequented their libraries and attended their talks. The deteriorating security situation in Yemen and the subsequent evaporation of US funding for in-country research has had an unfortunate impact on these centers, which, during my visits in recent years, have appeared particularly vacant. Still, even with this institutional support, it could be challenging to be an anthropologist in Yemen. For one, as Ahmed Kanna notes, anthropology is one of the less known and less understood of the social science disciplines. And when my Yemeni acquaintances did have an understanding of anthropology, they were also well aware and suspicious of its colonial and imperial legacy. This was made clear to me when a professor of anthropology at Sanaa University asked me in March 2003 in front of his class of students why the United States had not sent one hundred anthropologists to Iraq, instead of bombing it. Suspicion toward the discipline and a more general suspicion of foreign researchers as spies was not new. One only needs to read Steve Caton’s remarkable account of his arrest and imprisonment in 1980 to see what an effect such suspicions have had on the kind of knowledge that is produced. Indeed, in reflecting on his own encounter with the National Security in Raydah, Paul Dresch notes that it is often the most mundane of facts that are the most heavily guarded.

This was certainly true of my own experience of fieldwork in Socotra. Whereas I was made privy to various conspiracy theories, extra-marital affairs, secret religious conversions, etc.—all things I hesitated to take note of, much less write about—it was nearly impossible for me to ask my hosts quite straightforward questions about their genealogies, tribal structures, and political past. Of course, I was conducting research at a time when US presence in Iraq as well as in Yemen was acutely palpable. Moreover, it made little sense to my Socotran friends that a US student would receive funding to hang out in Socotra or anywhere else if she did not have significant ties to the political powers that be. As a result, I turned to and became more interested in Socotri poetry where people’s opinions, struggles, and contestations were more forcefully voiced. In so doing, I thus followed, or rather stumbled, in the footsteps of a group of scholars who work on poetry in Yemen, including Steve Caton, Flagg Miller, Lucine Taminian and Samuel Liebhaber, but without their expertise! Fortunately, such suspicions do ease over time. Although it has become even more difficult in the past five years for anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Yemen, now that I live in Abu Dhabi where I am easily accessible by telephone and where my current position is more comprehensible to my Socotran interlocutors, Socotrans are more comfortable reaching out to me, calling upon me for help, and working with me. I know that if I were to have the chance to return again for a lengthy period of time, fieldwork—in terms of the questions I could ask and the answers I would receive—would be very different this time.

(2) What are some of the new and innovative ways of thinking and theorizing the Arabian Peninsula and how has your work drawn on these approaches? How do these new theoretical interventions address elisions or tensions within more traditional approaches?

In my view, one of the most useful attempts to reframe and theorize the Arabian Peninsula occurred with the 2004 publication of Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (edited by Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis). It is here that Sheila Carapico issued her "Arabia Incognita: An Invitation to Arabian Peninsula Studies" cited above. Carapico’s is a research agenda that would bridge the conventional divide between Yemeni and Gulf Studies to focus on the interconnections between the inhabitants and nations of the peninsula as a whole. Whether in direct response to Carapico’s invitation or in reaction to the region’s most recent and emblematic transnational phenomena, such as the global “war on terror,” the emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the spread of the Arab uprisings, several scholars and even academic journals have now taken up this call. For example, in the past two years we have seen the 2011 launch of the Journal of Arabian Studies: Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea followed by, in 2013, the conversion and expansion of the journal Chroniques yéménites into Arabian Humanities: International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, both focused on the Arabian Peninsula en bloc and from antiquity to present.

What is needed when it comes to theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, however, is not just an expansion of scope—a sort of micro "area studies"—but also scholarship that explicitly draws on and forwards this transnational and interdisciplinary peninsular perspective. This approach breaks with the traditional dualism described above in its recognition that one cannot adequately study migration, religious reformism, sectarian identities, state and popular (or cultural) sovereignty, youth cultures, urbanism, natural resource exploitation and conservation, gender transformations, heritage production, or class, etc., within one nation without at least recognizing the influences and entanglements of these phenomena throughout the peninsula and across its surrounding waters. New scholarship that exemplifies this approach includes, of course, Engseng Ho’s work on Hadhrami migration; Adam Hanieh’s work on transregional (Khaleeji) capital and class formation; Laurent Bonnefoy’s work on Salafism in Yemen (and yet highly contingent upon grassroots flows to and from Saudi Arabia); Steve Caton’s emerging research on water scarcity in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; and Andrew Gardner’s comparative studies of the kafala system in Bahrain and Qatar, among others.

Even in a relatively "remote" and off-shore location such as Socotra, this "peninsular" perspective is imperative to an understanding of the "local" and of how Socotra has been produced recently as a World Heritage Site and a "natural" biodiverse research laboratory. Yet, in the early stages of my research on the development, conservation, and heritagization of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, and perhaps due to the pervasiveness of the distinctions drawn between Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, I was surprised by the degree to which my Socotran friends and neighbors were oriented not toward Sanaa or Aden, but rather toward Salalah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Sharjah, Bani Yas, and Jeddah. It was the cities and representations of "the Gulf" and Saudi Arabia—not mainland Yemen—which captured their imaginations and fueled their aspirations. Indeed, I soon learned that I could not examine heritage production in Socotra—conventionally understood to be a "national" project—without first examining heritage projects and discourses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For example, the annual Festival of the Socotran Poet which, as I wrote about in MERIP last May, was transformed in 2012 into a platform for public debate on the viability of Socotra’s cultural and political sovereignty, was originally modeled after the United Arab Emirates’ reality television show, The Million’s Poet, created by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (now the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority) to promote and safeguard national Emirati culture. This small example demonstrates to me the importance of seeing and understanding the peninsula holistically instead of continuing to bifurcate it into Yemen and the rest.

This is not to say, however, that the space and study of the Arabian Peninsula is any more "natural" than are the constructed borders of its nation-states. I agree with Toby Jones and John Willis’ deep reservations about area studies and about the "Arabian Peninsula" as yet another imperially produced category. As well as they state it here, these reservations are, of course, not new. And yet, as all of the contributors to this roundtable point out or imply, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf—Yemen, too (hence Lisa Wedeen’s book title, Peripheral Visions)—have long been treated as peripheral, geographically and conceptually, to the Middle East and to Middle East studies. One only needs to look through the bibliography of Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s excellent review article, "Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies," to note that ethnographies and anthropological articles situated in Egypt or in Palestine far outnumber the recent scholarship produced on all of the Arabian Peninsula states combined. There is thus obviously no a priori reason to theorize the "Arabian Peninsula"—but we may still learn a lot in doing so.

Here, at New York University in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Pascal Ménoret, Justin Stearns, and I were hired into a nascent program named "Arab Crossroads Studies." During our first year teaching at NYUAD, we spent many hours debating both the merits and productivity of the name and the rationale for turning this then-concentration into a full-fledged undergraduate major. The legacy of US area studies’ Cold War roots was something we took seriously. What does "Arab Crossroads" even mean? And was it productive or just as flawed to move from a geographic focus, that is, Middle East studies, to a linguistic, cultural, and ethnic one: the Arab world? Even as these are questions we continue to ask, the renaming and reframing does something. If nothing else, it reminds me as a scholar and a teacher to focus more explicitly on the historical, political, economic, and social connections between the "Arab world" and its immediate surroundings (Africa, South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and Europe) as well as on the human, material, and conceptual "crossroads" within "it." In doing so, it draws our attention away from place and toward movement across space and within various spaces.

In treating the Arabian Peninsula as a "center" rather than a periphery, we are forced to widen our geographical focus and broaden our conceptual one. That is, we cannot design classes or research projects as if the "Arab world" or the "Middle East" begins in Morocco and ends in Muscat. Nor can we ignore the capital and labor flows that link South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant (and also to the United States). Finally, as Tom Looser has convincingly argued, it is with the export of Western universities and branch campuses to the Gulf and East Asia, for example, that area studies gains new salience. With the fashionable emphasis today on all things "global," a critical area studies approach can ground and situate an otherwise imperialist (and predominantly Western) sense of "global" knowledge and "cosmopolitan" belonging. Through the newly established "Arab Crossroads Studies" major at NYUAD, we seek to emphasize to our "global" students that their being here, in Abu Dhabi—in the Arabian Peninsula—does matter and that Abu Dhabi is not merely the "global" city it aspires to be, but that it, too, has been historically and politically produced. Included, however, among the required courses for all undergraduate majors is a "Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies" course: a course that examines area, area studies, and areas like the "Arabian Peninsula" critically, while asking what new theoretical interventions such a focus may uncover. We welcome further discussion on this!

(3) "Sectarianism" seems to have reemerged in popular and academic work on the Arabian Peninsula as both the label for and analytic of a socio-political phenomenon. What is the utility of both past and more recent formulations of "sectarianism" as an analytical tool for the study of the Arabian Peninsula? What challenges or problems have these formulations created?

This is an important question.  As I have not worked on sectarianism directly, however, I will defer here to the other roundtable participants.

(4) What is the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics in the United States, Western Europe, Russia, etc.? What kind of attention has been given to local and regional knowledge production, if any?

I think it fair to say that the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics from the outside is growing stronger, while still remaining contingent upon or even hampered by the hegemonic status of English as the scholarly lingua franca. We see this even in the shift from French- and German-language publications to English-language ones. Serious scholarship produced by "Western" academics does rely on local scholarship and knowledge production, but more can and should be done to translate these works to make them more widely accessible. For example, I recently assigned Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City as Corporation to my students at NYUAD. Kanna draws heavily and productively on the writings of Emirati scholar Abdul-Khaleq Abdullah, thereby introducing his important work to Kanna’s English-language readership. As the majority of Abdullah’s articles have been published in Arabic, however, I am less able to assign them directly, meaning that "local" scholarship, like his, may be in danger of being presented or perceived as secondary to the English-language publications that build upon it.

Similarly, in my work on Socotra, I draw considerably on the texts written and published by the Socotran historian Ahmed al-Anbali (who resides in the United Arab Emirates), as well as on knowledge production by non-academics. The latter include Socotran guides, heritage brokers, and activists who, in response to and as a rejection of the international regime of "experts," are now fashioning themselves as what one may call "para-experts," engaged in an explicit and self-aware counter-form of knowledge production. Although I am mostly interested in the development and deployment of this parallel expertise (as opposed to the content itself), it remains a challenge to adequately present this knowledge production as scholarship and not just as ethnographic artifact. This is due in great part to what John Willis identifies as the incommensurable position of Yemeni academics in terms of their institutional and financial support and the different intellectual and political project in which they are engaged. Until recently, Socotran scholars were eager to promote a narrative of Socotran unity, stability, and exceptionalism. This has started to change, however, in the wake of the Arab uprisings, which have opened a space for more critical histories to be told.

Finally, as someone teaching at a US institution of higher education in the Gulf, I should say something about intellectual exchange and the proliferation of Western branch campuses mentioned by Al-Rasheed, Hanieh, and Vora. Madawi Al-Rasheed expresses concern that Western academic institutions (not just in the Gulf, but also in the West) may be forced through their funding sources to engage in self-censorship, if not the kind of outright censorship that occurred when Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen was denied entry into the United Arab Emirates for a conference sponsored by the London School of Economics this past March. Adam Hanieh questions whether these institutions will reproduce dominant narratives about the Middle East and both Hanieh and Neha Vora raise the specter of their financial motives. It is undeniable that there are restrictions on academic freedom in these places—as there are in the United States and in Western Europe, especially when it comes to untenured faculty. Here at NYUAD we are guaranteed academic freedom in the classroom and within the institution more broadly, as long as we do not criticize the ruling families or Islam. Critics of these institutions perceive this as a profound infringement upon academic freedom and knowledge production. On the other hand, my students—Emirati, Filipino, American, and Palestinian—are reading and discussing Yasser Elsheshtawy, Andrew Gardner, Ahmed Kanna, and Neha Vora on structural violence, labor regimes, citizen-foreigner relations, and the politics of race, class, and space in the Gulf. In history classes, such as the ones taught by Pascal Ménoret, students are reading Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mamoun Fandy, Stephen Hertog, Toby Jones, Amelie Le Renard, Timothy Mitchell, and Robert Vitalis on resource extraction, corporate capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, political protest, and gender in the Arabian Peninsula. If our collective efforts to "theorize the Arabian Peninsula" take root, it will be in universities like NYUAD where students are eager to engage these analyses. This is only one way, but an important one, of creating a new generation of critical scholars and also of developing spaces of inquiry in which "local" scholarship is given serious attention within "Western" universities.

(5) Some argue that the Arab Uprisings changed the ways in which the Middle East can and will be studied. What has been the immediate impact of the Arab uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula and what are likely to be the long-term effects?

The immediate impact of the uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula has been an increased attention to both the transnational reverberations of these events and their antecedents—the politics of sectarianism in and across Arabian Peninsula states, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the peninsula, the impact of social media transnationally, etc. Another result seems to be a renewed attention to various modes of sovereignty—state, popular, cultural—and its contestations. What may and hopefully will emerge with this, then, is the more thorough replacement of the Orientalist notion of "Gulf" states and societies as monolitihic and monochrome sites with a "thicker" understanding of the richness and complexities that underpins each Arabian Peninsula state individually and in relation to one another. To paraphrase Sheila Carapico, it should now become increasingly obvious that the entire Arabian Peninsula "is good for ethnography"—or, more importantly, that it deserves and requires a broader group of scholars’ critical attention.

 


Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula
electronic roundtable contributions:

Thinking Globally About Arabia by Toby C. Jones.

Knowledge in the Time of Oil by Madawi Al-Rasheed.

Capital and Labor in Gulf States: Bringing the Region Back In by Adam Hanieh.

Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption by Neha Vora.

Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia by Nathalie Peutz. 

Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place by John Willis.

Towards a Critical Cartography of the Political in the Arabian Peninsula by Ahmed Kanna.

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya`s electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.]

(1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally?

When I first began studying Arabic and, subsequently, formulating a research project in Yemen in the early 2000s, I did not consider myself to be working in or on the "Arabian Peninsula," as such. Rather, what drew me to Yemen was its historical, geographical, and cultural distinctiveness, which remains even now quite remarkable, but which nevertheless often obscures the relations, connections, and shared histories and presents that do exist within the region and beyond. This oversight is born perhaps out of what Sheila Carapico identified nearly ten years ago as a pernicious "dualism" that shaped not only American research agendas, but also the stereotypical conceptions, popular and academic, of "the Gulf" (rather than the peninsula as a whole): "Yemen is kaleidoscopic; the Gulf is monochrome…The Gulf is good for business; Yemen is good for ethnography" (Carapico 2004).

This same oversight—what Adam Hanieh in his response discusses as a "methodological nationalism"—is also born out of what we may call a secondary Orientalism: a way of "knowing" that considers the majority of the Arabian Peninsula without "culture" and without "history" in comparison to the Arab states of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. This fallacy has been exacerbated, of course, by the relative difficulty for short-term visitors and new scholars of actually engaging on a deeper level with the citizenry in countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it may be easier to befriend migrants from Egypt or Sri Lanka than its small minority of "nationals." As a result, although there have been notable exceptions—including recent scholarship on the political economy, political ecology, and youth and urban cultures in Saudi Arabia, in addition to an older, rich tradition of studies on kinship and its Bedouin—anthropological scholarship on Gulf-state citizens has seemed relatively flat in comparison to the "thicker" ethnographies of migrant populations in "the Gulf" and of "tribal" communities in Yemen. In both cases, these research foci emerge from the historically dominant approaches to these "two" areas: oil and security in the Gulf (and its resulting dependence on cheap, imported labor) and state-tribe relations in Yemen (and related studies on tribalism, sociality and gender). Nevertheless, they are also being productively complicated by theoretically informed analyses of space, political subjectivities, and belonging. A similar and amplified turn to non-labor migrant populations in the Gulf (as in the work of Mandana Limbert in Oman) and non-tribal populations in Yemen (such as Marina de Regt’s work on Ethiopian domestic workers or Susanne Dahlgren on the public sphere in Aden) remains welcome.

As for the difficulties in carrying out, rather than framing, research in the Arabian Peninsula, the challenges of conducting research in Yemen may be somewhat distinct. Adam Hanieh, Ahmed Kanna, Madawi Al-Rasheed and Neha Vora have touched on the lack of (Western) research institutes and networks in the Gulf, the dearth of statistical data, and the difficulty of gaining unmediated access. In Yemen, a robust network of foreign research institutes work in tandem with several Yemeni research and studies centers to house and fund scholars and to facilitate their research there. These include the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS), the French Center in Sana’a for Archaeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). In the early 2000s, when I lived in Sanaa, these centers supported a vibrant research community of both foreign and Yemeni scholars who frequented their libraries and attended their talks. The deteriorating security situation in Yemen and the subsequent evaporation of US funding for in-country research has had an unfortunate impact on these centers, which, during my visits in recent years, have appeared particularly vacant. Still, even with this institutional support, it could be challenging to be an anthropologist in Yemen. For one, as Ahmed Kanna notes, anthropology is one of the less known and less understood of the social science disciplines. And when my Yemeni acquaintances did have an understanding of anthropology, they were also well aware and suspicious of its colonial and imperial legacy. This was made clear to me when a professor of anthropology at Sanaa University asked me in March 2003 in front of his class of students why the United States had not sent one hundred anthropologists to Iraq, instead of bombing it. Suspicion toward the discipline and a more general suspicion of foreign researchers as spies was not new. One only needs to read Steve Caton’s remarkable account of his arrest and imprisonment in 1980 to see what an effect such suspicions have had on the kind of knowledge that is produced. Indeed, in reflecting on his own encounter with the National Security in Raydah, Paul Dresch notes that it is often the most mundane of facts that are the most heavily guarded.

This was certainly true of my own experience of fieldwork in Socotra. Whereas I was made privy to various conspiracy theories, extra-marital affairs, secret religious conversions, etc.—all things I hesitated to take note of, much less write about—it was nearly impossible for me to ask my hosts quite straightforward questions about their genealogies, tribal structures, and political past. Of course, I was conducting research at a time when US presence in Iraq as well as in Yemen was acutely palpable. Moreover, it made little sense to my Socotran friends that a US student would receive funding to hang out in Socotra or anywhere else if she did not have significant ties to the political powers that be. As a result, I turned to and became more interested in Socotri poetry where people’s opinions, struggles, and contestations were more forcefully voiced. In so doing, I thus followed, or rather stumbled, in the footsteps of a group of scholars who work on poetry in Yemen, including Steve Caton, Flagg Miller, Lucine Taminian and Samuel Liebhaber, but without their expertise! Fortunately, such suspicions do ease over time. Although it has become even more difficult in the past five years for anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Yemen, now that I live in Abu Dhabi where I am easily accessible by telephone and where my current position is more comprehensible to my Socotran interlocutors, Socotrans are more comfortable reaching out to me, calling upon me for help, and working with me. I know that if I were to have the chance to return again for a lengthy period of time, fieldwork—in terms of the questions I could ask and the answers I would receive—would be very different this time.

(2) What are some of the new and innovative ways of thinking and theorizing the Arabian Peninsula and how has your work drawn on these approaches? How do these new theoretical interventions address elisions or tensions within more traditional approaches?

In my view, one of the most useful attempts to reframe and theorize the Arabian Peninsula occurred with the 2004 publication of Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (edited by Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis). It is here that Sheila Carapico issued her "Arabia Incognita: An Invitation to Arabian Peninsula Studies" cited above. Carapico’s is a research agenda that would bridge the conventional divide between Yemeni and Gulf Studies to focus on the interconnections between the inhabitants and nations of the peninsula as a whole. Whether in direct response to Carapico’s invitation or in reaction to the region’s most recent and emblematic transnational phenomena, such as the global “war on terror,” the emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the spread of the Arab uprisings, several scholars and even academic journals have now taken up this call. For example, in the past two years we have seen the 2011 launch of the Journal of Arabian Studies: Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea followed by, in 2013, the conversion and expansion of the journal Chroniques yéménites into Arabian Humanities: International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, both focused on the Arabian Peninsula en bloc and from antiquity to present.

What is needed when it comes to theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, however, is not just an expansion of scope—a sort of micro "area studies"—but also scholarship that explicitly draws on and forwards this transnational and interdisciplinary peninsular perspective. This approach breaks with the traditional dualism described above in its recognition that one cannot adequately study migration, religious reformism, sectarian identities, state and popular (or cultural) sovereignty, youth cultures, urbanism, natural resource exploitation and conservation, gender transformations, heritage production, or class, etc., within one nation without at least recognizing the influences and entanglements of these phenomena throughout the peninsula and across its surrounding waters. New scholarship that exemplifies this approach includes, of course, Engseng Ho’s work on Hadhrami migration; Adam Hanieh’s work on transregional (Khaleeji) capital and class formation; Laurent Bonnefoy’s work on Salafism in Yemen (and yet highly contingent upon grassroots flows to and from Saudi Arabia); Steve Caton’s emerging research on water scarcity in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; and Andrew Gardner’s comparative studies of the kafala system in Bahrain and Qatar, among others.

Even in a relatively "remote" and off-shore location such as Socotra, this "peninsular" perspective is imperative to an understanding of the "local" and of how Socotra has been produced recently as a World Heritage Site and a "natural" biodiverse research laboratory. Yet, in the early stages of my research on the development, conservation, and heritagization of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, and perhaps due to the pervasiveness of the distinctions drawn between Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, I was surprised by the degree to which my Socotran friends and neighbors were oriented not toward Sanaa or Aden, but rather toward Salalah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Sharjah, Bani Yas, and Jeddah. It was the cities and representations of "the Gulf" and Saudi Arabia—not mainland Yemen—which captured their imaginations and fueled their aspirations. Indeed, I soon learned that I could not examine heritage production in Socotra—conventionally understood to be a "national" project—without first examining heritage projects and discourses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For example, the annual Festival of the Socotran Poet which, as I wrote about in MERIP last May, was transformed in 2012 into a platform for public debate on the viability of Socotra’s cultural and political sovereignty, was originally modeled after the United Arab Emirates’ reality television show, The Million’s Poet, created by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (now the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority) to promote and safeguard national Emirati culture. This small example demonstrates to me the importance of seeing and understanding the peninsula holistically instead of continuing to bifurcate it into Yemen and the rest.

This is not to say, however, that the space and study of the Arabian Peninsula is any more "natural" than are the constructed borders of its nation-states. I agree with Toby Jones and John Willis’ deep reservations about area studies and about the "Arabian Peninsula" as yet another imperially produced category. As well as they state it here, these reservations are, of course, not new. And yet, as all of the contributors to this roundtable point out or imply, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf—Yemen, too (hence Lisa Wedeen’s book title, Peripheral Visions)—have long been treated as peripheral, geographically and conceptually, to the Middle East and to Middle East studies. One only needs to look through the bibliography of Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s excellent review article, "Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies," to note that ethnographies and anthropological articles situated in Egypt or in Palestine far outnumber the recent scholarship produced on all of the Arabian Peninsula states combined. There is thus obviously no a priori reason to theorize the "Arabian Peninsula"—but we may still learn a lot in doing so.

Here, at New York University in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Pascal Ménoret, Justin Stearns, and I were hired into a nascent program named "Arab Crossroads Studies." During our first year teaching at NYUAD, we spent many hours debating both the merits and productivity of the name and the rationale for turning this then-concentration into a full-fledged undergraduate major. The legacy of US area studies’ Cold War roots was something we took seriously. What does "Arab Crossroads" even mean? And was it productive or just as flawed to move from a geographic focus, that is, Middle East studies, to a linguistic, cultural, and ethnic one: the Arab world? Even as these are questions we continue to ask, the renaming and reframing does something. If nothing else, it reminds me as a scholar and a teacher to focus more explicitly on the historical, political, economic, and social connections between the "Arab world" and its immediate surroundings (Africa, South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and Europe) as well as on the human, material, and conceptual "crossroads" within "it." In doing so, it draws our attention away from place and toward movement across space and within various spaces.

In treating the Arabian Peninsula as a "center" rather than a periphery, we are forced to widen our geographical focus and broaden our conceptual one. That is, we cannot design classes or research projects as if the "Arab world" or the "Middle East" begins in Morocco and ends in Muscat. Nor can we ignore the capital and labor flows that link South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant (and also to the United States). Finally, as Tom Looser has convincingly argued, it is with the export of Western universities and branch campuses to the Gulf and East Asia, for example, that area studies gains new salience. With the fashionable emphasis today on all things "global," a critical area studies approach can ground and situate an otherwise imperialist (and predominantly Western) sense of "global" knowledge and "cosmopolitan" belonging. Through the newly established "Arab Crossroads Studies" major at NYUAD, we seek to emphasize to our "global" students that their being here, in Abu Dhabi—in the Arabian Peninsula—does matter and that Abu Dhabi is not merely the "global" city it aspires to be, but that it, too, has been historically and politically produced. Included, however, among the required courses for all undergraduate majors is a "Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies" course: a course that examines area, area studies, and areas like the "Arabian Peninsula" critically, while asking what new theoretical interventions such a focus may uncover. We welcome further discussion on this!

(3) "Sectarianism" seems to have reemerged in popular and academic work on the Arabian Peninsula as both the label for and analytic of a socio-political phenomenon. What is the utility of both past and more recent formulations of "sectarianism" as an analytical tool for the study of the Arabian Peninsula? What challenges or problems have these formulations created?

This is an important question.  As I have not worked on sectarianism directly, however, I will defer here to the other roundtable participants.

(4) What is the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics in the United States, Western Europe, Russia, etc.? What kind of attention has been given to local and regional knowledge production, if any?

I think it fair to say that the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics from the outside is growing stronger, while still remaining contingent upon or even hampered by the hegemonic status of English as the scholarly lingua franca. We see this even in the shift from French- and German-language publications to English-language ones. Serious scholarship produced by "Western" academics does rely on local scholarship and knowledge production, but more can and should be done to translate these works to make them more widely accessible. For example, I recently assigned Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City as Corporation to my students at NYUAD. Kanna draws heavily and productively on the writings of Emirati scholar Abdul-Khaleq Abdullah, thereby introducing his important work to Kanna’s English-language readership. As the majority of Abdullah’s articles have been published in Arabic, however, I am less able to assign them directly, meaning that "local" scholarship, like his, may be in danger of being presented or perceived as secondary to the English-language publications that build upon it.

Similarly, in my work on Socotra, I draw considerably on the texts written and published by the Socotran historian Ahmed al-Anbali (who resides in the United Arab Emirates), as well as on knowledge production by non-academics. The latter include Socotran guides, heritage brokers, and activists who, in response to and as a rejection of the international regime of "experts," are now fashioning themselves as what one may call "para-experts," engaged in an explicit and self-aware counter-form of knowledge production. Although I am mostly interested in the development and deployment of this parallel expertise (as opposed to the content itself), it remains a challenge to adequately present this knowledge production as scholarship and not just as ethnographic artifact. This is due in great part to what John Willis identifies as the incommensurable position of Yemeni academics in terms of their institutional and financial support and the different intellectual and political project in which they are engaged. Until recently, Socotran scholars were eager to promote a narrative of Socotran unity, stability, and exceptionalism. This has started to change, however, in the wake of the Arab uprisings, which have opened a space for more critical histories to be told.

Finally, as someone teaching at a US institution of higher education in the Gulf, I should say something about intellectual exchange and the proliferation of Western branch campuses mentioned by Al-Rasheed, Hanieh, and Vora. Madawi Al-Rasheed expresses concern that Western academic institutions (not just in the Gulf, but also in the West) may be forced through their funding sources to engage in self-censorship, if not the kind of outright censorship that occurred when Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen was denied entry into the United Arab Emirates for a conference sponsored by the London School of Economics this past March. Adam Hanieh questions whether these institutions will reproduce dominant narratives about the Middle East and both Hanieh and Neha Vora raise the specter of their financial motives. It is undeniable that there are restrictions on academic freedom in these places—as there are in the United States and in Western Europe, especially when it comes to untenured faculty. Here at NYUAD we are guaranteed academic freedom in the classroom and within the institution more broadly, as long as we do not criticize the ruling families or Islam. Critics of these institutions perceive this as a profound infringement upon academic freedom and knowledge production. On the other hand, my students—Emirati, Filipino, American, and Palestinian—are reading and discussing Yasser Elsheshtawy, Andrew Gardner, Ahmed Kanna, and Neha Vora on structural violence, labor regimes, citizen-foreigner relations, and the politics of race, class, and space in the Gulf. In history classes, such as the ones taught by Pascal Ménoret, students are reading Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mamoun Fandy, Stephen Hertog, Toby Jones, Amelie Le Renard, Timothy Mitchell, and Robert Vitalis on resource extraction, corporate capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, political protest, and gender in the Arabian Peninsula. If our collective efforts to "theorize the Arabian Peninsula" take root, it will be in universities like NYUAD where students are eager to engage these analyses. This is only one way, but an important one, of creating a new generation of critical scholars and also of developing spaces of inquiry in which "local" scholarship is given serious attention within "Western" universities.

(5) Some argue that the Arab Uprisings changed the ways in which the Middle East can and will be studied. What has been the immediate impact of the Arab uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula and what are likely to be the long-term effects?

The immediate impact of the uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula has been an increased attention to both the transnational reverberations of these events and their antecedents—the politics of sectarianism in and across Arabian Peninsula states, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the peninsula, the impact of social media transnationally, etc. Another result seems to be a renewed attention to various modes of sovereignty—state, popular, cultural—and its contestations. What may and hopefully will emerge with this, then, is the more thorough replacement of the Orientalist notion of "Gulf" states and societies as monolitihic and monochrome sites with a "thicker" understanding of the richness and complexities that underpins each Arabian Peninsula state individually and in relation to one another. To paraphrase Sheila Carapico, it should now become increasingly obvious that the entire Arabian Peninsula "is good for ethnography"—or, more importantly, that it deserves and requires a broader group of scholars’ critical attention.

 


Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula
electronic roundtable contributions:

Thinking Globally About Arabia by Toby C. Jones.

Knowledge in the Time of Oil by Madawi Al-Rasheed.

Capital and Labor in Gulf States: Bringing the Region Back In by Adam Hanieh.

Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption by Neha Vora.

Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia by Nathalie Peutz. 

Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place by John Willis.

Towards a Critical Cartography of the Political in the Arabian Peninsula by Ahmed Kanna.