Boundaries, Borders, and Borderlands at the Middle Eastern Studies Association
About the author: Miray Cakiroglu is a 1st year PhD student in Anthropology at Stanford University and FSI Conference Grant recipient.
The Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) annually brings together scholars working on the region and its intersections from around the world. This year’s meeting took place in San Antonio, Texas between November 15–18 with the theme “Without Boundaries: The Global Middle East: Then and Now.” As Judith E. Tucker noted in her presidential address, while we witness today immense mobility of materials, archives, and artifacts across boundaries of various scales, there are increasingly greater restrictions on people to move across borders. This selective mobility was immediately visible from the absence of colleagues who could not make their way across to attend the conference due to travel bans in some cases and academic budget cuts in others. The theme of the boundary, thus directly related to our everyday lives, was reflected in many panels in discussions that ranged from territoriality, historical production of borders, and imperial mobilities to soundscapes and urban social movements in the Middle East.
I found it particularly helpful to think through the questions raised in the panel on the emerging borderlands of the interwar Middle East. In this panel, Ramazan Hakki Oztan discussed the forming of Turkey’s southern border as a zone of intervention in the 1930s in relation to the moral economy of smuggling. Jordi Tejel Gorgas, in his paper on the making of the Turkey-Syria border, offered to consider borderlands as privileged areas for observing the globalist agendas. He sought the conditions of the emergence of a new boundary regime in the global economic crisis as well as the cross-border mobility of actors on the land.
The panel’s discussant, Sabri Ates, stressed in his response that a linear and ethnocentric teleology is common to all state-making projects. Engaging with global developments as well as individual actors, presenters helped shed light on multiple dimensions that go into this process. Ates also posed a critical question: whether there is a way to narrate the stories of border-crossing from a perspective that is not exclusively nationalist. “Methodological nationalism,” privileging the nation-state as the unit of analysis, has been openly criticized in social sciences in recent years. A borderland, however, by its definition emerges out of its position between two bounded entities. I am intrigued to think about what thinking beyond the nation-state would entail for borderland studies.
My paper “The Uses of Ancestors: Mobilizing the Tomb of Suleyman Shah” concerned another aspect of cross-border mobility in the Middle East. I tried to portray the participation of the tomb of Suleyman Shah in place-making in Turkey’s southern border. While tombs are fixed and by this virtue they mark land, the tomb of Suleyman Shah has been animated at times of territorial contention, resulting in multiple relocations and reconstructions in the tomb’s biography. The tomb, I argue, emerges as an actor in borderland politics, influencing the relation of different actors with the land in each instance of conflict. Questions that I received helped me to understand the directions that I can further explore. I received a question concerning the consumption of the narratives created around the tomb, and to my surprise, I learned that the historical figure to whom the tomb is attributed, was mentioned in a popular Turkish TV series. I received another question concerning the architectural aspects of the monument and the changes it went through in all of its material instantiations, which encourages me to look closer in the archives.
