Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:56:11.484Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Serbest meslek sahibi”: Neoliberal subjectivity among İstanbul's popular sectors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

Cihan Tuğal
Cihan Tuğal*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology, CA 94720, USA, ctugal@berkeley.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Some of the literature on neoliberal subjectivity tends to attribute omnipotence and impeccable consistency to neoliberalism. Other recent literature, by contrast, has emphasized how actually existing neoliberal subjectivity combines liberal and non-liberal elements, some of the latter emanating from local culture. However, even this revisionist scholarship holds that the non-liberal elements only lead to a smoother functioning of neoliberalism. A focus on informal workers and small merchants in a squatter district in İstanbul reveals that neoliberal subjectivity harbors contradictory orientations that might actually undermine some aspects of neoliberalism. The mixture of self-reliance, individual responsibility (condensed in an emphasis on hard work and pious patience), and entrepreneurial spirit with extra-market survival techniques, as well as non-liberal orientations toward legal property, land and money, and desire of redistribution (as well as state protection against big capital) all exhibit how marketization is restricted, twisted, and perhaps endangered, even within the process of neoliberalization.

Keywords

NeoliberalismsubjectivityIslamentrepreneurialismworkers
Type
Dossier on Urban Classes and Politics in the Neoliberal Era: Turkey in Comparison
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 46 , Spring 2012 , pp. 65 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnason, Johann P., and Stauth, Georg “Civilization and State Formation in the Islamic Context: Re-Reading Ibn Khaldun.” Thesis Eleven, no. 76 (2004): 29–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkey, Karen. Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Blackman, Lisa. “Self-Help, Media Cultures and the Production of Female Psychopathology.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2004): 219–236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brand, Peter. “Green Subjection: The Politics of Neoliberal Urban Environmental Management.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 3 (2007): 616–632.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brenner, Neil, Jamie, Peck, and Theodore, Nik “Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies, Modalities, Pathways.” Global Networks, no. 10 (2010): 182–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Cahn, Peter S. “Consuming Class: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3 (2008): 429–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Can, Yasemin ipek. “Türkiye’de Sivil Toplumu Yeniden Düşünmek: Neo-Liberal Dönüşümler ve Gönüllülük.” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 108 (2007): 88–128.Google Scholar
Daromir, Rudnyckyj. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elisha, Omri. “Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 154–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erder, Sema. Kentsel Gerilim. Ankara: Umag, 1997.Google Scholar
Erder, Sema. “Where Do You Hail From? Localism and Networks in İstanbul.” In İstanbul: Between the Local and the Global, edited by Çağlar, Keyder, 161–171. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008 [1978–1979].Google Scholar
Fourcade-Gourinchas, Marion, and Babb, Sarah “The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries.” American Journal of Sociology 108, no. 9 (2002): 533–579.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, Carla. “The ‘Reputation’ of Neoliberalism.” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (2007): 252–267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fries, Christopher J. “Governing the Health of the Hybrid Self: Integrative Medicine, Neoliberalism, and the Shifting Biopolitics of Subjectivity.” Health Sociology Review 17, no. 4 (2008): 353–367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.Google Scholar
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffman, Lisa, Monica, deHart, and Collier, Stephen J. “Notes on the Anthropology of Neoliberalism.” Anthropology News 47, no. 6 (2006): 9–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Islamoğlu, Huricihan. Osmanlı Imparatorluğu’nda Devlet ve Köylü, İstanbul: iletişim, 2010.Google Scholar
Işık, Oğuz, and Pınarcıoğlu, MelihNöbetleşe Yoksulluk: Gecekondulaşma ve Kent Yoksulları - Sultanbeyli örneği. İstanbul: iletişim, 2001.Google Scholar
Kanna, Ahmed. “Flexible Citizenship in Dubai: Neoliberal Subjectivity in the Emerging ‘City–Corporation’.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 1 (2010): 100–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keyder, Çağlar. Stote and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development. London: Verso, 1987.Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: NLB, 1977.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Matza, Tomas. “Moscow’s Echo: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian Talk Show.” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2009): 489–522.Google Scholar
McNay, Lois. “Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault’sthe Birth of Biopolitics.” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 55–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mole, Noëlle J. “Precarious Subjects: Anticipating Neoliberalism in Northern Italy’s Workplace.” American Anthropologist 112, no. 1 (2010): 38–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations of Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Park, Yun-Joo, and Richards, Patricia. “Negotiating Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Mapuche Workers in the Chilean State.” Social Forces 85, no. 3 (2007): 1319–1339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phoenix, Ann. “Neoliberalism and Masculinity: Racialization and the Contradictions of Schooling for 11–to 14–Year-Olds.” Youth ef Society 36, no. 2 (2004): 227–246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potoğlu-Cook, Öykü. “Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dancing and Neoliberal Gentrification in İstanbul.” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 4 (2006): 633–660.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies.” In Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, edited by Andrew, Barry, Thomas, Osborne and Rose, Nikolas37–64. London: UCL Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Sharma, Aradhana. “Crossbreeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle: Women’s Empowerment, Neoliberal Governmentality, and State (Re)Formation in India.” Cultural Anthropology (2006): 60–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Song, Jesook. “Ά Room of One‘s Own’: The Meaning of Spatial Autonomy for Unmarried Women in Neoliberal South Korea.” Gender, Place and Culture 17, no. 2 (2010): 131–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
St Martin, Kevin. “The Difference That Class Makes: Neoliberalization and Non-Capitalism in the Fishing Industry of New England.” Antipode 39, no. 3 (2007): 527–549.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuğal, Cihan. “Islamism in Turkey: Beyond Instrument and Meaning.” Economy and Society 31, no. 1 (2002): 85–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuğal, Cihan. Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie. “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace.” American Ethnologist 35, no. 2 (2008): 211–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc. “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism.” Social Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2012): 66–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar