Navigating Dangerous Fields: Storytelling, Waiting and Ethnography as not “Writing Down”

In the summer of 2012, when the war between the Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish army reached a crescendo, I started my ethnographic research in Gever (Yüksekova in Turkish), a Kurdish border town in the southeastern tip of Turkey. As I was spending my first days with my family and friends and slowly getting ready to embark on my first extensive fieldwork, the town was shaken up by the news that the Turkish helicopters, fighter jets, and artilleries were pounding the mountainous terrain in the neighbouring town of Şemzînan, located just 50 kilometres to the southeast of Gever. Everyone in the town was sure that Gever would be the next battleground. Conducting ethnographic research under these conditions as a native anthropologist was a considerable risk for me, my interlocutors, and my family and friends. Instead of immediately “writing down” or digitally recording my fieldwork data, I turned to the Kurdish oral tradition and devised storytelling as the primary mechanism to tell and retell the stories I collected during my research. Postponing the process of “writing down” was a tactic I developed during my fieldwork as I learned how local Kurds used waiting as a distinct temporal orientation to evade state control, organize political action, and navigate highly militarized borderlands. By elaborating on the methodological tactics I developed by combining Kurdish oral tradition with the everyday strategies of my research participants, namely waiting, this paper will offer some practical advice to researchers on developing flexible research designs and learning from their research participants how to navigate repressive or militarized settings.

Dr. Omer Ozcan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and he holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. His work focuses on the temporal and spatial effects of militarization and human rights violations in Turkey. Approaching waiting as a distinct temporal orientation and modes of political action, his work explores how local Kurds withstand, challenge, and evade spatiotemporal restrictions and human rights violations that shape the rhythm of everyday life in the Kurdish borderlands. He currently works on his book manuscript, Strategic Waiting: Violence, Mobility, and Agency in the Kurdish Borderlands in Turkey.