Browsing by Author "Yilgur, Egemen"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Teneke Mahallesi in the Late Ottoman Capital: A Socio-Spatial Ground for the Co-Inhabitation of Roma Immigrants and the Local Poor
(Liverpool Univ Press, 2018) Yilgur, Egemen
The term teneke mahalle, literally "tin can neighbourhood," has been widely used since the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 to describe a specific kind of urban fabrication, possibly poor and physically dilapidated, but also the sole, cheapest, and undoubtedly creative solution for the urgent housing needs of the poorest segments of the urban population. Even though these neighbourhoods were initially built at least partly by Muslim refugees, the Roma Mohadjirs,(1) teneke mahalles also welcomed other poor members of society seeking informal, easily accessible, and safe housing in late Ottoman Istanbul. This study discusses the role of the Roma in the formation of teneke mahalles, and the socio-historical dynamics that directed the non-Roma poor to co-inhabitation with Roma in these teneke mahalles, and outlines their socio-economic and cultural profile from various respects on the basis of the two oldest examples of this socio-spatial and perceptual phenomenon in Istanbul.
Territorial Stigmatization as a Process of Bio Politics: The Case of Hacihusrev
(Middle East Technical University, 2018) Yilgur, Egemen
This paper discusses the stigmatization of Hacihusrev Neighborhood as a criminal area utilizing concepts borrowed from Agamben's understanding of bio-politics and the territorial stigmatization of Wacquant. The stigmatization of Hacihusrev Neighborhood, where peripatetic Roma groups as homo sacers reduced to 'bare life' had settled, occurred by means of the popular narrative produced by the mass media of the era. The manipulative representation of the social transformation occurring in the neighborhood turned it into a place where the exception became the rule. There are two different late-peripatetic groups in Hacihusrev Neighborhood. Roma tobacco workers, who came to the neighborhood during the Turk-Greek Population Exchange of 1923-24, had had an intense experience of waged occupation due to massive labor demand in the geography from which they came, late Ottoman Macedonia. Roma tobacco workers thus became a part of a mainstream social process, participating in waged occupations and in the leftist politics of the era and so pushed the limits of the area in which the peripatetics had been placed historically by means of legal pretexts and social relations. The other late-peripatetics, who came to the neighborhood mainly after 1950 from Bursa and its surroundings, had almost no opportunity for waged occupations. Excluded from the mainstream social relations, they were forced to be a part of criminal activities. Popular crime narratives in the media in the 1960s increased the visibility of the late-peripatetics from Bursa and rendered the Roma tobacco workers invisible. Thus, Hacihusrev Neighborhood was perceived as the natural habitat of criminal suspects. The stigma that surrounded the neighborhood in this process imprisoned the Roma tobacco workers in the very area where they had partly escaped before and their historical distinctiveness as a productive force became less certain. This paper aims to reveal the mechanisms of the stigmatization process through content analysis of the related news published between 1930-2009 in Milliyet and Cumhuriyet newspapers, the review of relevant literature, and the data collected during field research.