Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:56:17.941Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

REMEMBERING ZINGAL: STATE, CITIZENS, AND FORESTS IN TURKEY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Hande Özkan*
Affiliation:
Hande Özkan is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology/Anthropology Program, Transylvania University, Lexington, Ken.; e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

This article analyzes Turkish forestry as a site of nation building. To understand the ways in which forestry shaped ideas of the state and citizenship, I explore the history and memories of the forestry enterprise, Zingal, from the early 20th century to the present. I argue that the conflicting narratives around Zingal in archives and memory are symptoms of the contradictions inherent to nationalist modernity. I also reveal the continuation of similar contradictions in the 21st century by showing how citizens’ discourse of resentment over deindustrialization can coexist with their objection to a potential nuclear industry.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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

NOTES

Author's note: Special thanks to Samuel Liebhaber, Robert Greeley, Chris Gratien, and Graham Pitts from the “Working Papers on the Environment and Society in the Middle East” workshop at Middlebury College, as well as Jamie Vescio, Brian Rich, Christopher Zollo, Fulya Özkan, Ayşegül Okan, and the peer reviewers. This research was funded in part by the MacMillan Center at Yale University and the Jones Grant at Transylvania University.

1 “Zingal Şirketine El Kondu,” Ormancı Postası, 26 March 1945.

2 For a similar study, see Grodzins, Ann and Gukar, Bhoju Ram, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajashtan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

3 Similar ethnographies of the nation include Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; El-Haj, Nadia Abu, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lutz, Catherine, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Silverblatt, Irene, Modern Inquisitons: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

4 Parla, Taha and Davison, Andrew, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

5 Yiğitoğlu, Ali Kemal, Türkiye İktisadiyatında Ormancılığın Yeri ve Ehemmiyeti (Ankara:Yüksek Ziraat Enstitüsü Matbaası, 1941)Google Scholar; Oksal, Esad Muhlis, “Ormanların Ulusal Ekonomideki Vazifeleri,” Verim 1 (1935): 23Google Scholar.

6 İktisat Meclisi, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Ali, Ali İktisat Meclisi Raporları: Ormanlarımızdan En İyi Surette İstifade Şekli Ne Olmalıdır? (Ankara: Başvekalet Matbaası, 1934)Google Scholar.

7 English Oxford Living Dictionaries, s.v. “verdure,” accessed 11 February 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/verdure.

8 Davis, Diana K and Burke, Edmund III, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri, Ankara (İstanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 1967), 30Google Scholar.

10 For the concept of the “abject,” see Kristeva, Julie, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

11 This contrast between desired natural landscapes and their abject counterparts was the motivation for swamp drainage and reforestation throughout the 20th century. See Evered, Kyle, “Draining an Anatolian Desert: Overcoming Water, Wetlands, and Malaria in Early Republican Ankara,” Cultural Geographies 21 (2014): 475–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gratien, Chris, “The Ottoman Quagmire: Malaria, Swamps and Settlement in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017): 583604CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri, Yaban (İstanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 1942), 1314Google Scholar.

13 Ferry, Elizabeth Emma and Limbert, Mandana E., introduction to Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Their Temporalities, ed. Ferry, Elizabeth Emma and Limbert, Mandana E (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

14 Kutlutan, İbrahim, “Çorak ve Çıplak Topraklarımız,” İktisadi Yürüyüş 2 (16) (1940): 11Google Scholar.

15 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 490.1.0.0-596.59.3.

16 Ferguson, James, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

17 Trumbull, George R. IV, “The Environmental Turn in Middle East History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017): 173–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Evered, Kyle T., “Beyond Mahan and Mackinder: Situating Geography and Critical Geopolitics in Middle East Studies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017): 335–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Arsel, Murat, “Environmental Studies in Turkey: Critical Perspectives in a Time of Neo-liberal Developmentalism,” The Arab World Geographer 15 (2012): 7281Google Scholar.

20 Davis and Burke, Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa.

21 The scholarship of Yücel Çağlar and forestry school faculty working on the history and politics of forestry is an exception. Their contributions are, nevertheless, limited to discipline-bound frameworks. In more recent years Selçuk Dursun and Alan Mikhail have produced significant work on Ottoman forestry.

22 Eisenstadt, S.N., “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129 (2000): 129Google Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For a comprehensive overview of Turkish modernity, see Kasaba, Resat and Bozdogăn, Sibel, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1997)Google Scholar. For an early example of the alternative modernity approach, see Göle, Nilüfer, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

23 Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan and Agrawal, Arun, Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Harootunian, Harry D., Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

24 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in “Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis,” special issue, October 28 (1984): 125–33; Thomas, Nicholas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Mueggler, Erik, “Reading, Glaciers, and Love in the Botanical Exploration of China's Borderlands,” Michigan Quarterly Review 44 (2005): 722–54Google Scholar.

25 Stoler, Ann L. and Cooper, Frederick, introduction to “Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule,” special issue, American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 609–21Google Scholar.

26 Stoler, , Along the Archival Grain.Google Scholar

27 Mitchell, Timothy, introduction to Questions of Modernity, ed. Mitchell, Timothy (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xii–xivGoogle Scholar.

28 Philip Abrams's call to regard the state as an idea, which was revived by Mitchell's poststructuralist critique, was followed by Scott's sketch of high-modernism; Abrams, Philip, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 5889CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Timothy, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” The American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 7796Google Scholar; Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Recent examples include Turam, Berna, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Navarro-Yashin, Yael, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2002)Google Scholar; Thomas Blom, Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and White, Jenny, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2002)Google Scholar. This newer approach to the state has also been welcomed by environmental anthropology. See Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests; Moore, Donald, Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agrawal, Arun, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Harris, Leila M., “States at the Limit: Tracing Contemporary State–Society Relations in the Borderlands of Southeastern Turkey,” Local Environment 14 (2009): 699720CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Makdisi, Ussama, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 768–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Turkish Orientalism, see Ozkan, Hande, “Tek Parti Dönemi Coğrafya ve Mekan Anlayışları,” Toplum ve Bilim 94 (2002): 143–74Google Scholar.

30 Kasaba, Reşat, “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Kasaba, Reşat and Bozdoğan, Sibel (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

31 Examples include Aslan, Senem, “Everyday Forms of State Power and the Kurds in the Early Turkish Republic,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 7593CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Belge, Ceren, “State Building and the Limits of Legibility: Kinship Networks and Kurdish Resistance in Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 95114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yılmaz, Hale, “Learning to Read (Again): The Social Experiences of Turkey's 1928 Alphabet Reform,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 677–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Murat Metinsoy's analysis of a “flexible authoritarian regime” comes closer to my argument; Metinsoy, , “Fragile Hegemony, Flexible Authoritarianism, and Governing from Below: Politicians’ Reports in Early Republican Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 699719CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For examples, see note 26.

33 Nowack, Ernest, “Journeys in Northern Anatolia,” Geographical Review 21 (1) (1931): 7092CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Robinson, David M., “Ancient Sinope: First Part,” The American Journal of Philology 27 (1906): 125–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Tarkan, Hasan, Sinop Coğrafyası (İzmir: Marifet Matbaası, 1941), 20Google Scholar.

36 Donovan, Owen P., Sinop Landscapes: Exploring Connection in a Black Sea Hinterland (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2004)Google Scholar; Faroqhi, Suraiya, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

37 Ökçün, Gündüz, 1920–1930 Yılları Arasında Kurulan Türk Aonim Şirketlerinde Yabancı Sermaye (Ankara: Sevinç Matbaası, 1971), 89Google Scholar.

38 Boratav, Korkut, “Kemalist Economic Policies and Etatism,” in Atatürk: Founder of a Modern State, ed. Kazancıgil, Ali and Özbudun, Ergun (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981)Google Scholar.

39 Two of these were inherited from the Ottoman state.

40 Günay, Turhan, Ormancılığımızın Tarihçesine Kısa Bir Bakış (Ankara: Tarım-Orman Sen, 2003), 88Google Scholar.

41 Tekeli, İlhan and İlkin, Selim, Para ve Kredi Sisteminin Oluşumunda bir Aşama: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Merkez Bankası (Ankara: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Merkez Bankası, 1997)Google Scholar. The name of this company was later changed to Société Générale Allumettière et Foréstière.

42 The twenty-five-year contract granted to the company was ratified in the National Assembly in 1924 (Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.18.01.01.019.35.13.001). It was tasked with forming a new company half of whose capital and board members would be Turkish, and with building a match factory in Sinop that would use domestic wood from Zindan and Çangal forests (Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.18.1.1.17.84.2). S.A. Usines Allumtière de Flandres started operating in 1925, but it was short-lived. While some blame its fall on the location chosen for the factory, economic rivalry between the Match Monopoly and the Swedish Match Company, which eventually led to the transfer of the match industry to the Turkish state (1946), was the more likely culprit. Founded in 1927 by Ivar Kreuger (known as the father of financial scams), the Swedish Match Company was the world's biggest match producer. As the competition escalated, Kreuger bought some of the Belgians’ share in the Turkish Match Monopoly (Tekeli and İlkin, Para ve Kredi Sisteminin Oluşumunda Bir Asama [Ankara: Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası, 1981]). When he decided to buy the rest in 1928, the government annulled the contract, arguing that the requirements of the 1925 contract had not been met. In 1930, after a legal battle, the Swedish Match Company, renamed as the American-Turkish Investment, reacquired the monopoly (Patnoy, Frank, The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals [New York: Public Affairs, 2009])Google Scholar. With Kreuger's death and the Swedish Company's bankruptcy in 1946, the state took over match production.

43 İş Bankası, Turkey's first national public bank, opened in 1924 under the guidance of Atatürk, who, like other politicians, held shares in the bank. It has close ties to Turkey's founding Republican People's Party and was instrumental in the creation of a national economy through a wide range of investments.

44 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.18.01.01.019.35.13.001.

45 İbrahim Kutlutan, “Zingal Ormanlarında ve Kereste Fabrikasında Tetkikler,” Orman ve Av 11–12 (1938): 240–73.

46 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.010.000.000.183.264.9.

47 Şirketi, Zindan ve Çangal Ormanları Türk Anonim, 1941 Hesab Yılı Idare Meclisi ve Murakıb Raporu (Istanbul: L.Murkides Basımevi, 1942)Google Scholar.

48 Kantay, Ramazan, “Parkelik Ağaç Malzemenin Kurutulması,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Orman Fakültesi Dergisi 36 (3) (1986): 5369Google Scholar.

49 Şirketi, Zindan ve Çangal Ormanları Türk Anonim, 1942 Hesab Yılı Idare Meclisi ve Murakıb Raporu (Istanbul: L. Murkides Basımevi, 1943)Google Scholar; Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.183.265.16.

50 Kutlutan, “Zingal Ormanlarında ve Kereste Fabrikasında Tetkikler.”

51 This is confirmed by the statements of Zingal officials and by the Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.010.000.000.183.265.16.

52 Mimar Sedar Emin ve Suat Nazım, “1933 Yerli Mallar Sergisinde Zingal Pavyonu ve Evi,” Mimar 9–10 (1933): 278–82.

53 “Zingal Şirketi Selanik Panayırında Büyük Muvaffakiyet Kazandı,” Sinop Gazetesi, 28 November 1935.

54 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 080.18.01.02.108.23.16 and 030-0-018-001-002-110-22-9.

55 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.265.16.

56 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.18.1.2.110.22.9.

57 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.18.01.02.114.50.2.

58 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.18.01.02.117.69.7; Hıfzı Veldet Velidedeoğlu, Türkiye'de Üç Devir, İkinci Cilt (İstanbul: Sinan Yayınları, 1973).

59 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.0.011.001.000.248.38.18 and 30.18.01.114.50.2.

60 Tarkan, Sinop Coğrafyası, 33.

61 On the state's support for Zingal, see Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.018.001.002.14.68.8.

62 Tahsin Tokmanoğlu, Yeşil Elmas (Ankara: T.C. Orman Bakanlığı Yayın Dairesi Başkanlığı, 1996), 11.

63 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.171.187.8.

64 See the journal Verim, 5 August 1935.

65 M.H.R., “Bizde Amenajman İşleri”; “Talebemiz Almanya'ya Gitmelidir,” Orman ve Av 34 (1931): 6–8, 4–5.

66 Amca, Turkish for “uncle,” is also used as a respectful way to address older men.

67 Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc, “Symbolic Violence,” in Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Bourgois, Philippe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 272–75Google Scholar.

68 It is likely that Surkis's imminent prosecution upon returning to Europe must have been a factor in the extension.

69 While the Persian word gāvur refers in its original sense to those who do not adhere to a monotheistic religion, in the Ottoman and Turkish context it has been used as a slur to define non-Muslim and non-Turkish groups. It is obvious that in my informant's usage the term also connotes modernity—thus, the reference to “Muslim infidels.”

70 Bois, W. E. B. Du, The Souls of Black Folk (William Edward Burghardt, 2006), Kindle edition, 6768Google Scholar.

71 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1964)Google Scholar, Kindle edition, xxxvii–xxxviii.

72 “Görüşler,” Orman ve Av 37 (1931): 15–16.

73 “Dr. Şerafettin Ayancık Halkevi Başkanlığına Seçildi,” Sinop Gazetesi, 26 November 1936.

74 For a similar discussion, see Quataert, Donald and Duman, Yüksel, eds., “A Coal Miner's Life during the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001): 153–79Google Scholar.

75 Following the 1980 military coup, an open-market economy gradually replaced five decades of state capitalism, paving the way for a series of privatizations.

76 Tchangal, Société Anonyme Turque des Forêts de Zindan et, “ZINGAL,” Rapports du Conseil d'Administration et du Contrôleur (Istanbul: Imprimerie EGE, 1938), 4Google Scholar.

77 Coronil, Fernando, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3Google Scholar.

78 I shared this misconception until the archival material revealed the overlaps between the Match Monopoly and Zingal.

79 Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132Google Scholar.

80 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.265.16.

81 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.264.4.

82 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 30.10.0.0.183.264.9.

83 The rapid growth of state forestry enterprises between 1938 and 1940 was followed by a lag due to the war. By 1943 one-third of forests were managed by twenty-one state forest enterprises and later an additional eighteen were established. Thirteen new enterprises opened in December 1943. “Devlet Orman İşletmelerinde Altı Yeni Revir Açıldı,” Ziraat Dergisi 38 (1943): 45–46; “Devlet Orman İşletmeleri,” Ormancı Postası, 29 October 1943; “Devlet Orman İşletmelerinde Yeniden On Üç Revir Açıldı,” Ormancı Postası, 15 December 1943; “Devlet Orman İşletmelerinde Altı Yeni Revir Açıldı,” Ziraat Dergisi 38 (1943): 45–46; “Zingal Şirketine El Kondu,” Ziraat Dergisi 68 (1946).

84 Prime Ministry Republican Archives, Document 030.0.010.000.000.183.265.12.

85 Sivaramakrishnan, K. and Cederlöf, Gunnel, Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2006), 6Google Scholar, 223.

86 A third locomotive is at the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Istanbul.

87 For a similar discussion, see Han, Clara, Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

88 Öztürkmen, Arzu, “Remembering through Material Culture: Local Knowledge of Past Communities in a Turkish Black Sea Town,” Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2003): 179–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001)Google Scholar; Confino, Alon and Fritzsche, Peter, eds., The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Özyürek, Esra, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mueggler, Erik, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

89 Stoler, Ann, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 191219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 That the people are rejecting development, improvement, and a better life by opposing projects such as the nuclear power plant is a common line of thought that the government has expressed often over the last decade.

91 Chua, Jocelyn Lim, In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berlant, Laurent, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Fischer, Edward, The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014), xiGoogle Scholar.

93 Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 255Google Scholar.