Yael Navaro-Yashin

Trained in her native Turkey and the United States, Navaro-Yashin is Reader of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of two books: Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, about the interface between secularism and Islamism manifested in Taksim Square in Istanbul, and The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity, compiling her articles on the Cyprus problem in the northern zone of partitioned Cyprus, the internationally unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. She originally delivered her article Affective spaces, melancholic objects: Ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge [JRAI 15 (1): 1-18, 1999] as the Malinowski Memorial Lecture for 2007. It is the product of her interest in post-Ottoman societies, the ethnography of the state, and her "long-term" fieldwork in 2001 and 2002. It is also a product of her biographical ties to Turkey, Greece, and the "Cyprus problem". Yael Navaro is Sephardic Jewish. The Ottoman Empire formally welcomed the Sephardim after their violent expulsion from Spain in 1492. She belongs to the diaspora that settled in Istanbul as a frequently harassed minority. There, the Cypriot inter-communal violence affected her Ladino-speaking grandparents. Turkey deported Greeks after nationalist Greek-Cypriots seeking union with Greece attacked Turkish-Cypriots, eventually leading to their retreat into enclaves in 1963. Her Greece-bornand-raised grandfather faced expulsion. He was tolerated in Turkey after being categorized as a Jew by a judge. Navaro-Yashin is also connected to Cyprus from her marriage to acclaimed poet and post-colonial literature professor Mehmet Yan, from a renowned family of Turkish-Cypriot writers. Her sister-inlaw Nee Yan, internationally known among the most important Cypriot poets, is a peace activist advocating reconciliation and reunification, and was the first Turkish-Cypriot candidate for parliament since 1963, after the Republic of Cyprus allowed Turkish-Cypriots to run for office in 2006. The fame of her affines gave Navaro-Yashin apparent privileges during her fieldwork, but she perceives that her Turkish-Cypriot interlocutors construed her as part of another marginalized and alien minority, Turkish and Jewish, giving her another ethnographic position.