Nur Yalman

This dissertation is about the ongoing transformation of the Turkish state's incorporative policies vis-à-vis the Alevis and the subsequent faith-based collective action of the Alevis through their nonprofit organizations. The data were collected during eighteen months of ethnographic field research between 1998 and 2001 in Istanbul's Alevi organizations. I identify Alevi associations and foundations that have, for the most part, emerged within the last fifteen years, as the locus of both the state's incorporative policies and the subsequent collective action of the Alevis. Since Alevi accommodation of and resistance to official policies take shape in these organizations, I present them as key sites to observe the imperfect implementation and the unintended consequences of the state's incorporative policies. By focusing on the interaction taking place in, around, and through these organizations, I assess the limits and the successes of the emerging discourse and regime of governance in Turkey. Overall, I show that the manifested regime and discourse of incorporation are the end result of the complex interaction between official policies, their formulations, expressions, and imperfect implementation on the one side, and the Alevi organizations' strategies of reacting against, contesting, negotiating, accommodating, and cooperating with the official policies on the other. In an attempt to explore the overall transformation of governance I focus on highly intimate and localized values such as prejudices, stereotypes, and beliefs concerning heresy, sexual perversion, impurity, and bestiality. Since the implementation of incorporative policies depends on the practices, discourses, and attitudes of state functionaries who are predominantly Sunni, the outcome of the Alevis' interaction with the agents and agencies of the state is often guided and shaped by sectarian values. To throw light on the dynamics of such unpredictable encounters, I show different instances in which the Alevis and Sunnis creatively rework their beliefs, values, cosmologies, and faiths to accommodate, facilitate, or impede incorporation. I conclude that as a result of the interaction not only the Turkish state's service provision in, and the control and regulation of the field of religion are challenged, but also the Alevi belief and practice, and consequently, the Alevi subjectivities are irrevocably altered.

This dissertation addresses the efforts of contemporary Jewish Israelis to harness the new reproductive technologies to the task of reproducing Jews. In my thesis, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel, I focus particular analytic attention on the unusual confluence of social forces that have come together to enable unmarried Israeli women to conceive and give birth to children using state-subsidized, rabbinically-sanctioned artificial insemination. This ethnographic focus serves to highlight my larger theoretical concerns about how cultures are produced, contested and transformed through cultural imaginings of reproduction.

At the core of my research lies the question: How are Jews believed to come into being? A question that both secular and religious Jewish Israelis have been hard-pressed and yet eager to answer as they attempt to create cogent legislation for the appropriate uses of reproductive technology to assist in the reproduction of Jews. Indeed, the fact that secular legislation regarding the new reproductive technologies is grounded in orthodox rabbinic interpretations of Halakhic sources makes for very imaginative and innovative laws concerning the appropriate combinations of reproductive genetic material.

My dissertation research is grounded in two methodologies; one half of the dissertation is based on traditional ethnographic field research among Israelis who are using the new reproductive technologies to get pregnant; the second half is based on textual analysis of public discourse, government documents, legal materials and rabbinic responsa concerning the origins and nature of relatedness.

This research contributes directly to current anthropological debates about the nature of kinship and the ways the new reproductive technologies force cultural assumptions about relatedness to become explicit. I argue that the social uses of the new reproductive technologies in Israel do not necessarily destabilize foundational assumptions about kinship, nor do they necessarily privilege biogenetic understandings of relatedness. Indeed, in Israel the social uses of these technologies serve to enhance the authority of rabbinic conceptions of kinship while reinforcing the cultural imperative to reproduce.