By Bürge Abiral, The Ohio State University §
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2023 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists.
ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on back-to-the-landers in Turkey, secular and educated urbanites who transition to sustainable living and farming as a response to neoliberal agricultural restructuring and urban precarity. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021, I explore how back-to-landers navigate failure and disappointment to sustain hope in their pursuit of alternative agri-food systems. Contextualizing this movement within Turkey’s recent history, including the Gezi Park uprising of 2013 and the subsequent expansion of the criminalization of dissent, I analyze three forms of politically motivated action present among back-to-the-landers: individualized lifestyle politics, oppositional struggles, and prefigurative politics. By juxtaposing the temporalities afforded by these different engagements and the affective orientations they engender, I argue that prefigurative action offers a more sustainable source of hope than lifestyle or oppositional politics. Mere lifestyle changes fail to transcend the present immediate moment, while preventative collective action often used against extractive projects seeks to save the future from an indeterminate present. Against the uncertainty and disempowerment generated by these, I turn to the concept of slog as pragmatic agency and illustrate how back-to-the-landers counter disappointments and setbacks by focusing on present-oriented tasks and building the future out of the present.
A woman in her mid-20s, Perihan settled in a village in western Turkey with her friends after she finished college. Having access to land acquired by a friend’s parents, and inspired by anarchist principles, they built an earthhouse and started farming. “We had dreamed of making small adobes to have our own private spaces,” she later explained to me. “I was going to build my own [place]. Then I imagine that I will do painting there, we produce food in the garden, we eat what we produce, I will have a small job and I will make do.” This escapist fantasy, though collectivist at heart through a communal venture, was interrupted when a friend called and told her, “This place will be full of cyanide. There is a marble quarry here, there is a thermal power plant there.”
Perihan joined the struggle against the Canadian gold mining company, which later removed 200,000 trees in the region, four times more than permitted in the environmental impact assessment (Environmental Justice Atlas n.d.). Thanks to effective public mobilization, construction was eventually stopped. Yet success was blurry. Since such decisions are often a diversion tactic and legal regulations are seldom followed, activists expected that the company’s operations would resume at any time. In the interim, other threats surfaced. As revealed in Perihan’s spatial designation in the recounting – one “here” another “there” – extractive projects sprung up like mushrooms.
When we chatted in 2021, Perihan was living alone. Her activist engagement, coupled with a health issue, had her drift away from her friends, and communal life. She was worn down. She had lost much of her hope that anything would change for the better. Possibilities seemed to wither. Referring to various resistance movements through out the country elsewhere, both rural and urban, she exclaimed, “It doesn’t end. It won’t end.”
“This place will be full of cyanide. There is a marble quarry here, there is a thermal power plant there.”
In Turkey, as elsewhere, access to educational capital no longer promises the good life it once did. But disillusionment with the dream of upward mobility is not the sole reason why back-to-the-landers like Perihan seek a life in the countryside. Growing precarity among white-collar professionals is intertwined with agroecological preoccupations amid a neoliberal and fast-industrializing agri-food system. Concerned with the effects of climate change, an increasing number of urbanites thus turn to sustainable living, take up ecological farming, and organize alternative food networks that bridge the city and the country. All this happens in a milieu where the increasing authoritarianism of the Justice and Development Party during its 20+ years of uninterrupted rule has led to a grave sense of political disenfranchisement. My larger research project examines the moral ecology of Turkey’s back-to-the-land movement amid these conditions, spotlighting how participants engage in moral striving at individual and collective levels.
The paper I submitted for the Rappaport Prize more specifically focuses on the sustenance of hope. Following the Gezi Park uprising in 2013, an event that generated much hope for radical political change but ultimately delivered very little in shaking larger power structures, a perpetual vacillation between hope and hopelessness has become a steady condition among secular urbanites with socio-economic privileges. If change always looms on the horizon, but never quite materializes, how do back-to-the-landers like Perihan return to hope and sustain at least some capacity to continue? The answer to this question hinges on what type of politically motivated engagement one shoulders. I identify three modes of action that the back-to-the-land movement assembles: individualized lifestyle politics, oppositional struggles against extractive projects, and prefigurative politics. Through a close study of back-to-the-landers’ articulations of ideals, evaluations of reality, and projections into the future as they engage in their activism, I show that present-oriented and collective work that builds a model for the future in the here and now endures against hopelessness in more substantial ways than individualized lifestyle politics and oppositional politics. Drawing from Jessica Greenberg and Sarah Muir’s (2022) conceptualization of slog as a form of pragmatic agency, I argue that a commitment to repetitive everyday action in prefigurative work is what enables activists to slog through disappointment and recast it as a constitutive part of hope.
By prefiguration, I refer to “the strategies and practices employed by political activists to build alternative futures in the present and to effect political change by not reproducing the social structures that activists oppose” (Fians 2023). Back-to-the-landers engage in prefigurative action when they organize in consumer cooperatives, informal food provisioning groups, or other sorts of collectives working towards a common aim, like Perihan’s friends who continued their experiments in communal living and connected to sustainable food networks. Often, these are participatory, volunteer-based, and horizontally structured initiatives. Instead of waiting for top-down structural change, they seek to enact alternative systems out of forging alternative relationalities. As I experienced first-hand at the consumer cooperative where I volunteered during fieldwork, negative experiences, ranging from failed outcomes to relational shortcomings, seldom serve as proof of impossibility. Rather, the disappointment they engender signals the beginning of newer forms of engagement (Greenberg 2014).
Figure 2. Kadıköy Consumer Cooperative is a nonprofit enterprise working on a volunteer, nonhierarchical, and participatory basis. Its store in Istanbul is open to the public and features ecological products from throughout the country. Photo by Irem Öztürk.
The study of environmental movements in anthropology largely focuses on oppositional politics and advocacy concerning environmental degradation, toxicity, land rights, etc. Despite calls to study the creation of “ecotopian” alternatives (Lockyer and Veteto 2013), the social and affective work that goes into generating proactive solutions has received relatively little attention. The back-to-the-land movement in Turkey offers a productive case for environmental anthropology because it harbors varying forms of action as modalities for environmental politics, enabling a comparative perspective on these engagements among similarly positioned subjects. The focus on urbanites with socio-economic privileges also expands the conversation from the environmentalism of marginalized populations to a larger segment acting on the world with ecological concerns. Finally, this work speaks to ongoing academic and public discussions on the advent of individual behavior change as a potential solution. Critiques often hail collective organizing as a panacea. The distinctions I detail between prefigurative and oppositional engagements in the paper offer a more nuanced understanding of the sustainability of collective action, especially under conditions of severe authoritarianism.
Works Cited
Environmental Justice Atlas. (n.d.). “Ida Mountain (Kazdagi) Prospecting for Gold, Turkey.” Last updated August 9, 2019. Accessed June 2023. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/ida-mountain-kazdagi-prospecting-for-gold-turkey
Fians, Guilherme. 2023 (2022). “Prefigurative politics”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Accessed September 10, 2023. http://doi.org/10.29164/22prefigpolitics.
Greenberg, Jessica. 2014. After the Revolution: Youth Democracy and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. Stanford California: Stanford University Press.
Greenberg, Jessic and Sarah Muir. 2022. “Disappointment.” Annual Review of Anthropology 51 (1): 307-323.
Lockyer, Joshua, and James R. Veteto. 2013. Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages. New York: Berghahn Books.
Engagement 