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What to do with conspiracy theories? Insights from contemporary Turkey
Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7192-5113
2020 (English)In: Anthropology Today, ISSN 0268-540X, E-ISSN 1467-8322, Vol. 36, no 5, p. 18-21Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This article presents ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of people who circulate conspiratorial narratives through an ethnographic study of ultranationalist men in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on the findings of this research, the author suggests that conspiratorial discourses should be examined not solely in terms of their (anti‐)truth qualities but as social practices through which masculine subjectivities and socialities are engendered. The author then explores how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives forges agency and political subjectivity for the men involved, while also inducing sociopolitical effects such as vigilantism and paramilitary violence. This article contends that through the circulation of conspiratorial narratives and everyday engagements with vigilantism and extralegal violence, the men reconfigure sovereignty and the way that the state operates in contemporary Turkey. The findings of this research suggest that the focus should be moved away from the epistemological shortcomings of conspiratorial narratives or strategies to debunk them – such as fact‐checking – which presume that exposure of ‘the truth’ would lead to the dissolution of ‘untruthful’ conspiracies. Rather, the author suggests that researchers attend to the particular forms conspiracies take in concrete situations, how they mould political subjectivities and social groups and reconfigure the ways that the state operates alongside the law in other similar settings. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2020. Vol. 36, no 5, p. 18-21
Keywords [en]
masculinities, conspiracy, state, Turkey
National Category
Social Anthropology
Research subject
Sociology; Gender Studies; Political Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-192852DOI: 10.1111/1467-8322.12606OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-192852DiVA, id: diva2:1548350
Funder
Swedish Institute, 23969/2017Available from: 2021-04-30 Created: 2021-04-30 Last updated: 2022-02-25Bibliographically approved

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Saglam, Erol

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