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Authentication and Affect: Why the Turks Don't Like Enchanted Counterpublics, A Review Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2008

Gregory Starrett
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Extract

Anthropological fashion moves in a rhythm unlike the deliberate seasonal cycle of the couture houses that design the foulards the French find so troubling these days. But if gray or green is the new black this season in Paris and New York, public has been the new structure in anthropology for several long seasons now, and is only just beginning to live up to some of its considerable potential as a design element in cultural analysis, and also to show its age. The advantage of the public sphere as a concept is that—like its predecessor, structure, which can stand against chaos, anti-structure, agency, process, and so on—“public” resides within a rich semantic network in which it can signify a number of oppositions and complements: privacy, secrecy, domesticity, isolation, individualism, sectarianism, market, state. Despite its normative reputation as a concept associated with rational deliberation over the public good, in the hands of John Bowen, Lara Deeb, Charles Hirschkind, and Esra Özyürek, the public sphere turns out rather surprisingly to rely on cultivated affect and on sets of embodied dispositions that it shapes in the process of people's participation in it. Like Bourdieu's Kabyle house writ large, the public sphere is an opus operatum, a space channeling the interactions that create it, a set of relationships maintained by the interests and capacities it generates.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2008

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References

1 This paragraph's first quote is from a letter by Noel Temple Moore to Dufferin, Lord, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in “Correspondence Respecting Reorganization in Egypt,” in the British House of Commons Parliamentary Papers vol. 83 (1883), 26Google Scholar. The second is from Dufferin, Lord to the Earl of Granville, in “Further Correspondence Respecting Reorganization in Egypt,” Parliamentary Papers vol. 88 (1883), 230Google Scholar.