Surveillance Demystified: Cultivating Fearlessness through ‘Apotropaic Belittlement’ in Turkey and Its Diaspora
What is it like when the state is potentially listening in on every conversation you have? How can you maintain an attitude of calm and composure in the face of pervasive surveillance?
This article explores how Turkish dissidents try to handle state surveillance through the performance of what I call ‘apotropaic belittlement’. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and its diaspora, I show how critics of the Turkish regime cultivate fearlessness by casting undercover agents and informers as trivial and inferior, through mockery and pity, and by degrading the surveillance state through unfavourable comparison with an all-knowing, omnipresent God.
The article is published in the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology as part of the special issue Hall of Mirrors: Spying, Surveillance and Ethnographic Method edited by Trine Mygind Korsby and Matthew Carey.