Of Conspiracies and Men: The Politics of Evil in Turkey

Abstract

This project is an ethnographic study of the belief in conspiracy theories in Turkey; a growing conviction that an insider evil agent is stirring the harmony and unity of society. Based on fieldwork in Northeastern Turkey, where belief in conspiracy theories are prevalent and a folk festival of evil power expulsion is celebrated, this project asks: what are the cultural and historical roots of believing in conspiracy theories? Once religiously dominated by Christian Orthodox, Northeastern Turkey, in particular the Trabzon province, became the hotbed of suspicion of Christian and non-Muslim “others” in the mid-1990s—a suspicion that continues today. Portrayed as the propagators of deeds disrupting the community, these agents of conspiracies are inquired as to where they could be hidden (inside or outside the society) and how their actions could simultaneously be visible and secretive—creating a parallelism vis-à-vis the legitimate authority. I view this conspiratorial perspective on par with Trabzon’s costumed celebration of the New Year, called Kalandar—a theatrical reenactment of the expulsion of a monstrous evil being. Kalandar’s ambiguous origin, Greek or Turkish, animates the tensions within Trabzon’s ethnic and religious identity and provides the folkloric ground for the appeal of conspiracy theories. The resulting ethnography sheds light on the increasing references to conspiratorial powers in Turkish politics by drawing attention to the conspiratorial thinking in Trabzon, one of the strong voter bases of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP). Kalandar, from its costumes and reenactments to its relation to historical religious conversions and state violence, provides a lens for its participants to interpret the concept of a nation that they imagine to be in constant defense of “insider conspiratorial” threats. This project contributes to the field of political anthropology through an ethnographic analysis of the belief in conspiracy theories, tracing its roots to folkloric expressions of the memory of past violence. This project further contributes to a novel understanding of xenophobia, not as the fear of an outsider imagined as a threat to the “nation”, but rather as a suspicion about a community’s imagination of itself that is reflected on others as evil conspirators.