Solicited and Unsolicited History: The Transformation in Ömie Self-Presentation

The history presented by the Ömie in the pre-Independence research appears fundamentally different from the history presented by the Ömie in more recent research. The basis for considering these two renditions as analytically equivalent is examined. It is proposed that the justification lies not so much in the content of the two representations as in the negotiations of the terms of the ethnographic encounter which elicited them. It is proposed that these renditions of history are actually the terms of the relationship between the researcher and the informants negotiated in the course of their interaction on two separate occasions.     

The Dynamics of Incrementalism: Subsystems, Politics, and Public Lands

A host of research has been produced in the decade since Baumgartner and Jones' theory of punctuated equilibrium first drew attention to the dynamics of policy change over time. Much of this research follows a topic across time, highlighting the shift from negative to positive feedback as challengers push an issue from subsystem to institutional level. Far less attention has been paid to the periods between major punctuations, neglecting key questions about whether incremental periods reflect an absence of challengers or the successful defense of established subsystem interests.
This research is a comparison of policy change across two segments of environmental policy. The breakup of the timber subsystem was a clear victory for environmentalists, yet these same actors have been largely unsuccessful at dislodging established grazing interests. These findings highlight the strategic value of venue shifting for bypassing entrenched interests and illustrate the potential for successful challenges to occur in judicial venues.     

Material Politics Facing Post-Truth: Speculation,Infrastructure, and Ecology in Turkey

Despite their imposing material presence, the values and harms stemming from the construction of infrastructural megaprojects remain speculative affairs in Istanbul, Turkey. This article distinguishes two modes of speculation pertaining to megaprojects that present different ethical and political possibilities, namely de-materialising and re-materialising speculation. Contributing to debates about material politics informed by Noortje Marres (Material Participation; Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and William Connolly (The Fragility of Things; Duke University Press, 2013), our framework of de- and re-materialising speculation avoids isolating material and planetary agency to instead consider how their uncertainties and potentials play a role at the intersection with politico-economic life. Accordingly, we analyse the coalescence of ecological and democratic crises. In Turkey, populism’s anthropocentric construction of “the will of the people” exacerbates ecological collapse. But also, ecological collapse inspires a search for a politics and ethics that acknowledge human–nonhuman ecological entanglements. The contestation between de-and re-materialising speculation underscores possibilities and limitations of ecological politics in contexts of populism and post-truth.     

Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat,India

This article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the outcome of a dialectic between the limited capacity of the state to provide public services and the strategies that local politicians employ to win elections.     

Politics,Society and Financial Liberalization: Turkey in the 1990s

This article focuses on the political economy of Turkey in the 1990s to illustrate the importance of analysing economic variables that intersect with the quality of political democracy. In 1989, the debt‐ridden state moved to systematically and completely deregulate Turkey’s financial markets. Together with the ongoing processes of liberalizing commodity markets and integrating with global capital markets, financial liberalization was expected to achieve fiscal and monetary stability, stimulate business confidence to invest in productive sectors, produce stable growth, encourage privatization and control inflation. However, the new hegemony of the capital markets has gone hand‐in‐hand with deteriorating macroeconomic performance, a worsening income distribution, the discrediting of politics and its isolation from society. The authors examine several key dynamics which are helping to legitimate the neoliberal agenda of the 1990s. These include the distribution of state largesse to manipulate electoral capitalism; the rise of an informal sector in the ‘Anatolian Tigers’; promotion of the seductive attractions of the market; and an antipolitical reform populism adopted by political actors to exploit popular disillusionment with the political system.     

Brashier,K.E.Public Memory in Early China

In his previous book, Ancestral Memory in Early China (2011), K.E.Brashier, a religious studies professor at Reed College, illuminated our understanding of early Chinese ancestral cults and established himself as an indisputable authority on the topic.To do so, he delineated how deceased ancestors were transformed into living memory in early China, covering roughly the early Zhou to the end of the Later Han dynasty.Brashier examined a wide variety of textual records relevant to rituals and customs surrounding ancestral worship and also analyzed their cognitive aspects.Adopting the performance theory framework, he showed the interactions between the living and the dead via the practice of rituals and the psychological manipulation of the ritual performers before and during ceremonies of ancestral sacrifice.This effort also advanced discussions of the concepts of afterworld and afterlife in early China.