Emrah Yildiz
Harvard University
»Traffic in Value on the Line: A Road Ethnography of Pilgrimage, Contraband Commerce and Border Crossings across the Iran/Turkey/Syria Landscapes«
ABSTRACT
This research draws upon micro-historical and ethnographic approaches to transnational mobility to examine the increasingly popular Hajj-e Fuqara (“pilgrimage of the humble”) route that transports not only pilgrims but also contraband goods from Iran, through Turkey, to Syria. The project studies how a seemingly disparate set of social actors (pilgrims, smugglers, and merchants) employ the bus as a critical vehicle of mobility, and negotiate not only this transforming border, but also the seemingly distinct borders between religion, economy, and politics. More specifically the research studies (1) the material conditions and social relations through which various actors and goods come together on the Hajj-e Fuqara bus route and (2) how this border landscape emerges through social actors’ creation of religious, economic, and political value on the move. In so doing, this project aims to re-conceptualize the anthropological concept of value, contributing to the multidisciplinary literature on transnational mobility as well as a multifaceted and historically attuned anthropology of religion, economy, and sovereignty.
BIOGRAPHY
Emrah Yildiz is a Joint Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He holds a B.A. in Anthropology and German Studies, and an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Wesleyan University. He also studied at the University of Regensburg and Humboldt University in Germany. As a DAAD Research Fellow at the Institute for European Ethnology in Berlin during the 2005-2006 academic year, he examined predominantly Turkish-German youths’ artistic entrepreneurship and its complex entanglements with local, national and EU-level policy making on immigrant labor, global creative industries, and current economic potentials of Germany’s weltoffen metropolis in the making. His current research interests include historiography and ethnography of borderlands, citizenship and sovereignty, political economy as well as studies of gender and sexuality in the Middle East.