During his half-century of scholarship, Michael E. Meeker, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, has conducted ethnographic, historical, and literary research on Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. Although he did his PhD fieldwork in the town of Of, Turkey, in the late 1960s, he never published his dissertation and did not study Turkey for the following two decades until he resumed his research on the Black Sea Coast in the late 1980s, this time with a historical focus. What came out in 2002, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity, was simply a unique product. Methodologically, Meeker combined extensive ethnographic fieldwork with in-depth historical research, which was unprecedented and perhaps is still unmatched. Argumentatively, A Nation of Empire challenged the canonical state–society distinction firmly embedded in historiography and instead gave us an elaborate picture of “state society” relying on exhaustive ethnographic and archival evidence. The book repeatedly showed that what we customarily assume as exogenous or in opposition to the state domain, such as local dynasties, were in fact a product of the imperial social system. Decentralization did not mean the weakening of the state domain and the centralization process did not eliminate the local powers. Hence, Meeker was able to detect the legacy of the pre-Tanzimat “time of aghas” in the actual business and political relations of the 1940s to 1960s. He saw the continuity between the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey neither in bureaucracy nor in folk societies but in a political cosmology centered around provincial intermediaries. In the following interview, conducted via email between March and June 2021, Meeker’s readers will for the first time listen to his fascinating life story in pursuit of intellectual discovery.
Ali Sipahi: Could you tell us about your early life? Where did you grow up? How would you describe your family background?
Michael Meeker: I was born in 1935 in Fort Worth, Texas, but grew up in Palestine, Texas. At the age of five, my father took a job overseeing his brother’s wells that supplied natural gas to a glass factory in Palestine, a town of ten to fifteen thousand souls at that time. The population was composed of both blacks and whites, to mention the principal distinction of the time, and perhaps now as well. The school system was segregated as were the football teams, school bands, and football games. During the week, the town shops and streets were patronized by “whites,” but on Saturday they were patronized by “blacks.” This situation was a long way from the image of American democracy that was presented abroad.
The character of racial separation in Palestine changed some time after the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court that struck down legal segregation, but it did not disappear. The “whites” of Palestine were largely “conservative” Christians, to use contemporary terminology. There was a spectrum of churches ranging from so-called “holy rollers,” who might speak in tongues and pass out during religious services, to “bible-carrying” Baptists (for whom dancing was forbidden), to somewhat moderate Methodists and Presbyterians, to Episcopalians who were usually well off. I have not mentioned still other denominations. The Catholics lay outside this spectrum of Protestant churches, and to tell the truth, I was only vaguely aware of their existence.
Anderson county, in which Palestine was situated, was a “dry” county. This meant that it was forbidden to sell any kind of alcoholic drinks, both privately or publicly. Throughout the year there were more than a few “revival” meetings in churches and in outdoor tents, some of which I would have attended. A sunrise Easter service was held each year in the football stadium, and I also attended some of these services. By my memory the attendees were almost exclusively “whites.” My parents attended Sunday morning church services more or less regularly, but my mother was a West Texan and my father was an Oklahoman. So they were not altogether accustomed to the racial conventions of East Texas, and they were not especially religious either. On the other hand, my mother was socially active, a member of a garden club, one of the founders of the county animal shelter, and ran a nursery school from our home. And yet, my parents more or less turned me over to the church for my social education.
AS: How did your interest in scientific research flourish?
MM: In the course of my high school years, I gradually became more interested in the physical sciences and much less interested in religion. It was not an easy transition. By the benefit of a special science summer program for high school students at Northwestern University in Chicago—possibly paid for by my oil-rich uncle who employed my father—I became determined to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During the 1950s, elite American colleges and universities began to encourage attendance by promising pupils from all over the country (whites of course, but including Jews). To the surprise of many locals, I was accepted by MIT. Taking a train for two days or so (I remember it as having a coal-burning engine), I arrived in Boston in 1954, a city altogether different from Palestine. The key social distinction was no longer “blacks” and “whites” but rather ethnic, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Yankee, and others, including “blacks.”
I began my studies in physics at MIT, a branch of science that was receiving public attention, perhaps because of the emergence of atomic weapons, and eventually because of Sputnik, but this was not what inspired my interest in physics. I imagined that it was a key and foundational science, a science for understanding existence. My earlier religious experiences must have had some role in this perception.
By my second or third year, I became a kind of protégé of Joseph Everingham, a professor of literature and the director of the MIT “Dramashop.” I owe my discovery of literature and the arts to Mr. Everingham’s teaching (especially his discussion of James Joyce’s The Dubliners) and his coaching in Dramashop. Our performances were impressively both “avant-garde” and “classical,” even for Boston: E. E. Cummings, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare, William Wycherley, Ben Jonson, etc. My Dramashop activities gradually opened the door for my eventual exit from physics, but this did not take place definitively until 1962.
In the meantime, I took summer jobs in 1956 and 1957 in a laboratory that was part of Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My work there was directly connected to atomic weapons. My anti-war sentiments began to grow in the course of my Sandia experiences, which included introductions to atomic weapons and museums displaying models of the first atomic bombs. There is a “small bomb-trigger” article published at Sandia with my name on it. In the course of my Sandia experiences, I became increasingly interested in the “anti-war” movement. And at some point, I became determined never to work on a weapons project again.
I should mention that my father did not serve in the military during the Second World War by the circumstance of being employed in the “critical” petroleum industry. I should also mention that my brother bravely attempted to claim the status of “conscientious objector” during the Korean War of the early 1950s. After extraordinary family and social pressure, he eventually agreed to volunteer for three years of military service in Thule, Greenland. This family background, along with my early religious engagements, must have had a role in my pacifism.
AS: After such a successful start in a physics career, how did you end up becoming an anthropologist?
MM: In 1958, I graduated from MIT in physics and received a Fribourg Fellowship for a year’s study in Paris. I went to Paris in September, 1958, with the intention of studying the history of science. The door out of physics was slowly opening wider and wider.
After the year in Paris, and a romantic relationship there, I decided to return to physics in order to have a job and support a prospective family. I began a PhD degree program in physics at MIT in the Linear Accelerator Group. The romantic affair ended abruptly at the beginning of the PhD program, and I found myself back in a science discipline for which I had little commitment. I began to work in MIT Dramashop again.
By 1960, I decided to drop out of the PhD program at MIT with the intention of becoming an actor. After dropping out, to earn a living, I took a job with Thermo-Electron company in Waltham, Massachusetts, with very good pay, hoping to save money in order to follow a new career in the theater. Soon realizing, after a notable disappointment, that I could not face the requirements of an acting career and, perhaps also, lacked the talent for it, I decided on another career change.
One evening, perhaps in 1962, I went to the MIT library, checked out a Harvard catalogue, and turned to the last page where every academic program at Harvard was listed. I made a list of ten or twelve possible fields of study, and then began to cross them off as suitable or unsuitable career choices. For example, it was too late to study Chinese or Arabic literature. I was too old, twenty-six, to learn a difficult script and language at the level required for literary study. I came away that evening with the decision to study anthropology. A discipline that did not demand that one knew anything at all! Or so I believed.
Having saved some money from my salary as an engineer at Thermo-Electron, I applied to three or four university programs in anthropology. Then, in the spring of 1962, after reading Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss in French, I left Boston to travel for several months, on my own, in Mexico, Guatemala, Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru, in order to learn what anthropologists did. During the trip, I visited at least two anthropologists – an archaeologist and an ethnographer – at their sites, in Mexico and Peru, respectively.
Sometime during the summer, I made a telephone call to my parent’s home and learned that I have been accepted by the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago.
AS: Which subject(s) did you aim to study there, and how were your interests shaped by Chicago Anthropology?
MM: By my memory, I began the program in anthropology at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1962, intending to study archaeology. However, my first course in archaeology persuaded me that I did not want to be an archaeologist. The distance between the evidence found in digs and the character of human behavior was just too great. I was still fleeing from the physical sciences.
At the time, I believe Clifford Geertz and Lloyd Fallers had received significant grants for anthropological studies, probably from the government, for what was called “New Nation” studies. This was the period of “decolonization” in Africa. Geopolitical configurations were in a state of rapid transformation. Various American politicians and officials seem to have believed that the social sciences would contribute to US global understanding and therefore policy formation. Or perhaps, to be more generous, officials had been persuaded that Americans, now the citizens of a world power, needed to know more about other countries in detail. The education of academics with foreign experiences would serve this purpose.
In truth, I am not well-enough informed to explain the policies of the later 1950s and early 1960 accurately. Whatever the case, I was fortunate. I had started my social science studies during a brief period when research was generously funded by the government. Here, I can comment that the graduate students at Chicago, and certainly myself, had no thought of fulfilling some kind of “official” mission during the course of their research. Whatever their intellectual misapprehensions—and that is another subject—I do not think anyone saw themselves as serving a “governmental” mission or purpose in any way.
During the first two years of my studies, I was much attracted to the ideas and writing of Geertz and what was then called “cultural anthropology.” He was soon intending to carry out a study in Morocco, and I asked him if I could work with him as part of this project. He agreed and assigned me the task of studying Berber groups in the mountains above Sefrou where he intended to launch an ethnographic study. However, in 1964, I changed direction the direction of my studies and decided to learn Turkish instead of Arabic. This came about some time after meeting İpek Aksüğür (Duben), a graduate student in political science at the time. Through my relationship with her, I became increasingly interested in Turkey, with her encouragement. Eventually, I also changed advisors from Geertz to Fallers who was then planning an extended study of provincial Turkey. I also began to write a master’s thesis on modernization in the Turkish Republic under the direction of Nur Yalman. Nevertheless, I am indebted to Geertz for his support and by his example. I don’t think he took the discipline of anthropology as a narrow scholarly context. Rather, his intellectual horizons were broader. I think I learned something from that example.
AS: By the end of the 1960s, with Fallers’ other students Peter Benedict, Alan Duben, and Bahattin Akşit, you constituted a brand new study group of Turkey, a place which was not known to anthropologists except through Paul Stirling’s thesis. So, what did it mean to do “anthropology of Turkey” at Chicago in the 1960s? In what kind of a disciplinary context did interest in Turkey arise?
MM: I understand your way of describing the beginning of Turkish studies at the University of Chicago, retrospectively. At the time, however, I saw the matter differently. I am and was not aware that Fallers had been working on Turkey as early as 1962. I would have thought it was a few years later than this. I do not recall an especially “cooperative” atmosphere among the graduate students at the University of Chicago. I would be inclined to call it a “competitive” atmosphere.
Since I was some years older than the graduate students in my class, I have the memory that I was not easily included in their friendship circles, although I considered some of them especially intelligent and interesting, including Robert A. Paul, Johannes Fabian, and Michael M. J. Fischer. Others will explain my thinking and perception in terms of my own character, rather than the atmosphere at the University of Chicago.
I did not know Peter Benedict during my graduate studies. Rather I recall that he began his work on Turkey shortly after me, but this is my memory, not a fact. It is possible that Peter had already been to Turkey before my trip in the summer of 1965 on a tourist visa. I did not meet Alan Duben or Bahattin Akşit until after my return to Chicago, perhaps sometime after December 1968. We knew one another, but we did not really collaborate in any way.
I must add that Professors Fallers and Yalman were always very kind, helpful, and encouraging. They were always hospitable to me, and later to both me and Gesine. They were very much inclined to give me advice, if asked, but they let me make the final decision in terms of my interests.
In summary, graduate studies at the University of Chicago were relatively atomistic, and the other graduate students that you mention, gifted scholars who have done important work, did not really contribute to my own thinking.
There were studies of rural society other than Paul Stirling’s Turkish Village. Some were in Turkish, of course, and not accessible to me at the time, others were in French. I hesitate to write more about this without a detailed search of the literature. Let me just say that I did not find much support in the sociological or anthropological literature for the kind of study that I hoped to accomplish.
Aside from Yalman, the one person from whom I had the most to learn about Turkey at the time, and with whom I spoke the most, was perhaps Hüseyin Atay, for obvious reasons, since they were both Turkish.
AS: You spent the summer of 1965 in Turkey to find your future fieldwork site and decided on Of. Why Of?
MM: When I first went to Turkey in 1965, I was less naïve than at the time of my arrival at MIT in 1954, but I was still very naïve, if not ignorant. My studies and work experiences had been in physics, and I did not have a good background in social studies or history. I had an especially poor understanding of Turkish society and history. I had spent less than a year studying Turkish before my arrival in Turkey. I did realize that the “modernization” paradigm for Turkish society and history from the nineteenth century forward was flawed, or let us say, seriously “partial.” I am sure that Yalman helped me to see the shortcomings of the modernization paradigm. So, from the beginning, I had the intention to look for a field site that did not neatly fit the norms of Turkish modernity. However, my fieldwork impressed me with how much I did not know, rather than how much I was able to discover.
My first “field trip” beyond Istanbul began in the summer of 1965 with a bus ride to Kastamonu. The Aksüğür family drove me to the bus “depot” where we discovered that the bus company had sold my reserved seat to someone else. After a “big fuss,” the bus company, described at the time as a “yobaz” company (!), found an empty five or ten gallon tin can for olive oil, placed it in the middle of the aisle in the back of the bus, and sent me on my way to Kastamonu. Within an hour, the tin can had collapsed from the bumpy side roads. I found myself sitting on the floor, much to the amusement of the other passengers. But also shortly thereafter, the other passengers had accepted me as a “good sport” and so made accommodations to tuck me in between others at the back of the bus. I had “arrived” in provincial Turkey and found myself among the “people.”
I spent my first night in rural Turkey in the town of Kastamonu. There I met two Peace Corps volunteers. I also spent some time with a local Representative of the National Parliament who was campaigning. I decided that Kastamonu would be the place for my study, but I felt obliged to continue my “field survey” as I had intended. This involved several further stops along the Black Sea coast, Samsun, Ordu, Trabzon, Rize, and then, finally, by chance, Of.
Yalman had mentioned the town of Of as a potential field site. He had bought a carpet there the summer before and sensed that it was an especially interesting place. I happened to stop there for just a few hours on my way to Rize. More or less immediately, I sensed that the town of Of was something special, with a history that touched on various important dimensions of Ottoman and Turkish history. Proceeding to Rize, I was sure that I would return there as I have described in my book, A Nation of Empire.
AS: In 1966, the freshly married Michael and Gesine couple moved to Turkey for the long-term ethnographic study of Of. First of all, how was your research funded?
MM: It was my good fortune to meet Gesine sometime after my return to Chicago from Turkey. We spent the summer of 1966 together, and then married in San Francisco. By then, she had accepted the idea of coming to Turkey with me in the fall.
After my first year at Chicago, paid for with the remainder of my Thermo-Electron savings, my graduate studies were supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health, and this support continued during my fieldwork and afterwards during my “write-up” of the PhD dissertation. I received about $220 a month. I remember this sum because the Kaymakam in Of received a salary that was less than this. I was embarrassed by this amount of money and never told anyone in Of exactly how much I received. When I was asked by my acquaintances (repeatedly), I divided the amount I received in half, $100, if they insisted on knowing. They thought even this was an incredible amount.
AS: Were you the first Americans in Of? How were you received by the local people?
MM: After a brief “honeymoon” in Istanbul, including one night in the Pera Palas, we took a ship from Istanbul to Rize. Gesine had never been to Turkey before and spoke no Turkish. One of her first impressions of provincial Turkey was the face of a Turkish man, with an impressive “alaturka” moustache, peering through the porthole of our cabin. At the time, young Americans were rarely seen in provincial Turkey. We arrived in Rize with the proverbial shouting “Laz” boatman unloading our suitcases into a small boat pulled alongside the ship. She was impressed! And so was I! When we arrived after a minibus ride from Rize, we found that the town of Of was no longer innocent of Americans. Two Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) had been assigned to Of during the interval between my first and second visit. The first PCV was a young woman whom I never met. My informants in Of felt that she had been treated badly. Men and boys gathered at her windows at night, trying to see her undress. The men did not respect her, etc. I believe that she may have had a romantic relationship with an Oflu. That was an unfortunate mistake on her part, and a serious violation of local norms. She soon decided, or perhaps she was obliged, to leave the town for reassignment. She was followed by another PCV, a young man. My informants told me that he was “terrified” of the locals. I can understand why he might have been. For a young American, Of could have been an unsettling and perhaps even frightening place. Many men were armed (illegally). Many men had a gruff, if not seemingly hostile, manner by American standards. You had to know how to move beyond their “tough” appearance. This was not hard, if you knew how to do it, using the local conventions for greeting and discussion. The young man left after a short stay. I never met these two PCVs and do not know their names.
At the time of our return in 1966, the Turkish press was sometimes publishing negative stories about PCVs in various parts of Turkey. A PCV had shouted to his class, calling them “animals” (hayvan) to their faces, resulting in a minor national scandal. Of course, it was never pointed out that Turkish teachers here and there call their students hayvan somewhere in Turkey every day of the week. There were also press stories, probably imagined, about helicopters dropping fuel and supplies to PCVs in Turkey. This was the period after the Cyprus crisis and President Johnson’s block on any Turkish invasion of the island. Anti-Americanism was widespread. It was a fact of daily life for me in Of.
Of course, I was considered a “spy” in Of by many people. As one man said to a crowd in my presence, “Why did they send this young man to Of? What reason could there be for anyone to come to Of. There could only be one reason. He is a spy.” I didn’t really follow this logic. I would have said, “If a young man should bother to come to Of, that proves he is not a spy. A spy would want to go somewhere that really mattered.”
After one or two months of unlimited access to the town records, I was placed under surveillance in the town of Of and subject to restrictions. There were “informants” for the security agency in Ankara, the Emniyet, who reported regularly about me (I believe). Many of the people with whom I spoke also considered me a spy, but even if they did so, good-naturedly. Of course, from their point of view, any foreigner asking questions was a spy. Some of my later experiences in the town were tense and anxious, even a bit scary now and then. At the same time, many people welcomed me, spoke freely with me, and gave me all kinds of help and even encouragement. It was a very special time.
Even though I may have been considered a “spy” by some in Of, I was treated very well by a great many people, in a friendly and helpful way. This was all the more the case because Gesine and I respected local customs. She always covered her hair when going to the market and wore modest clothes. We were far more conservative than the Istanbulite wife of the pharmacist, for example, who was often denounced for her Istanbul dress. Of course, the social norms in Of changed drastically over the years, especially with its growing population. At the same time, during our stay in Of, there were some locals who were hostile, who treated me with contempt and ridicule in the coffeehouses. But they were not the majority by any means. I must repeat that many people in Turkey treated us very, very well, with great kindness and generosity. We received much help and much positive attention from many Turks.
Coming from a small town in East Texas, I imagined that I had an exceptional empathy and understanding of provincial townsmen that some of my fellow students from more urban environments did not have. I did not identify with peasants and townsmen, but I thought I understood them better than my peers due to my background. I was also drawn into the study of Islamic and Ottoman background of provincial society in Turkey, more the cultural approach of Geertz, rather than modernizing Republican themes, the main interest of Fallers. I should remind the reader that Turkey was still at this time an overwhelmingly provincial and rural country. Migration to cities had certainly begun but had not yet transformed a majority of its citizens into urban residents.
AS: You settled in Of without an official permit yet a couple of months later, in early 1967, you were made to apply for one, which did not end up very well. Could you tell us about those hectic months?
MM: In 1967, while in Of, I had begun to receive “cool” reactions from local governmental officials, whom I constantly bothered about an official permission to stay in Of. By the way, I was always treated “correctly,” but gradually, less warmly. By official requirements, a foreigner had to apply for a residence permission from the place where one wanted to reside. However, the central government in Ankara did not respond to local requests for my permission. At one point I think I was told to go to Trabzon. I went to Trabzon once or twice for this reason, but with no luck. Finally, I decided that I would go to Ankara and apply at the Emniyet itself. When I visited the Emniyet, an official eventually received me. He had a large file for “Meeker,” perhaps three centimeters or more thick. He told me to return to Of for an answer (a ten to fifteen hour bus journey at that time). We returned to Of, and there I was told that I had two weeks to leave the country.
We immediately returned to Ankara, found a room in a modest hotel in the old city, and started making appeals to overturn the requirement to leave. At some point, Gesine became ill in the hotel. We had been put in contact with Frederic Shorter and his wife, and they invited us to stay in their house until Gesine had recovered. We did this, eventually returning to the hotel. I then spent weeks and weeks unsuccessfully trying to appeal the order to leave the country. I was constantly writing requests for permission to stay during the summer.
We were very much indebted to the Shorters for their help. I think we “babysat” for their children on one occasion. As I recall, their children were both adopted, from South Asia. They helped us a great, great deal! They were, I think, very Christian, in the best sense of that term. Academically, I did not have much in common with Shorter. He was a thoughtful and serious man who wanted to serve the modernization of Turkey. I came from a later generation, less enamored with the American “mission,” and perhaps less enamored with “modernization.” I considered myself a scholar, rather than someone who was either trying to “help” Turkey or “serve” the US government.
During this time, I was advised by Fallers and Shorter that I should stick to official Turkish procedures for asking for permission. I should not try to use any special contacts or connections. I should not go to the US embassy. By the way, the US embassy considered ordinary American citizens a nuisance, as we learned later, especially those having difficulties with Turkish officials. By the insistence of Shorter and Faller (and others), I should follow Turkish bureaucratic procedures. I would be a “test” case for establishing routine bureaucratic procedures for granting research permits. This was mistaken advice; indeed, very mistaken. I am convinced that I would never have been given permission to carry out a scholarly study through normal channels, certainly not in Of! However, Fallers and Shorter were committed to the ideal of a rationalized Turkish modernity. But I am not sure they even understood how the rationalized US modernity really worked! We struggled with the permission problem for weeks and weeks.
At some point, an unofficial contact with Aydın Yalçın (deputy chairman of the Adalet Partisi in the National Assembly at the time) took place, probably brought about by one of my advisors with Turkish contacts, and a “solution” was conceived. In my opinion, my research permission had to be approved by the Turkish military authorities, but no one would admit to this. There was no procedure for approaching these authorities. They were behind a curtain, so to speak. I was strictly forbidden to return to Of, ever again. I was told (unofficially) that the military authorities regarded any part of Turkey east of a line drawn from Samsun to Adana as “off-limits.” The “solution” was as follows. Mübeccel Kıray, chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Middle East Technical University (METU), would accept me as a teacher to offer a class during the fall term, and she would accept Peter Benedict for the spring term. By the agreement, Peter and I would make a “contribution” to Turkey by teaching a course at METU and advising students. In return, we could carry out our fieldwork somewhere in western Turkey.
Since I was required to select a more acceptable field site for my study, I decided to look for a suitable town somewhere in the province of Antalya. Together, Gesine and I began to visit different towns in the late summer of 1967, before the academic year had begun. We were accompanied by Mustafa Şevket, who served as my research assistant. He gave me good advice about how to deal with local elites. Mustafa was a Cypriot Turk. He had been a “fighter” (mücahit) during the conflicts between Greeks and Turks. Nonetheless, he had a more nuanced understanding of Greek–Turkish relations than mainland Turks. He was an interesting man with a good sense of humor. He was very helpful and good company, and I regret losing contact with him.
During our survey trips, I considered a study in Elmalı and then in Akseki. The latter would have been a wonderful place to compare with Of. It was a big mistake that I did not choose this town for a field study. Eventually we decided on Finike. One might accuse me of being captivated by the extraordinary beauty of the Mediterranean in this area. Perhaps. By my memory, however, I was fascinated with the transformation of the town after the War for Independence and the complexity of its social formations. A substantial population of “Rum” had left the town after the declaration of the Republic. Their most substantial houses had been occupied by Turks in a position to do so. A certain family had come into possession of an immense farm on the plain, just before the sea, perhaps by questionable means. As well, there were Turkish nomads who summered in thatched shacks on the mountain borders, and a large group of “çingene” had settled at the edge of the town. Nearby, there were Alevi villages.
In the winter of 1968, after the end of the term at METU, Gesine and I rented a house in Finike, and I began my fieldwork in the town, while visiting the “çingene” and Alevi in the vicinity. Unfortunately, my fieldwork in Antalya came to nothing, despite being deepened by a further stay in the summer of 1970; nonetheless, it was a place of great interest and deepened my knowledge of provincial Turkey.
AS: Before moving to Finike, in the fall of 1967, you taught “Social Change and Cultural Systems” at METU. How was living in Ankara? What about your relationship, if any, with faculty members, Turkish intellectuals, or local Americans? In one of your letters, you mentioned that you had received some warnings concerning Mübeccel Kıray. What were they about?
MM: In the fall, we returned to Ankara. We rented an apartment. I am now forgetting the name of the well-known quarter of the city where we lived. I think it was near Kocatepe where there was no Great Mosque at the time, of course. I gave the agreed course at METU for which I was of course not paid. Fred Shorter offered Gesine a brief, temporary job as a secretary in the Ford Foundation. We were very comfortable in Ankara. Our apartment was more or less above the smog that prevailed at that time!
Our time in Ankara was very pleasant, and we had generous and helpful Turkish neighbors. While teaching at METU, I continued my research on Of by interviewing Oflus who resided in or passed through Ankara. Indeed, a substantial part of what I know about Of came from material collected during my Ankara residence. It represents an important part of my notes on the town and district of Of.
Mübeccel Kıray was always very pleasant and welcoming to me. She helped me when I was very much in need of help. She believed that I was reporting back to the CIA or something equally sinister. While this was not true, I never tried to deny it because I was afraid it might damage our friendship. I could have told her exactly my experiences with the US government (which were encounters not relationships) but I feared she might think me a liar. Our work and thinking were very different in character. Nevertheless, she was very open, generous, and supportive, a true democrat. I cannot say enough good things about Mübeccel, all the more striking because she thought I had “bad” political connections by her estimation.
If I remember correctly, those warnings from my advisors had to do with her leftist affiliations and identifications. As I remember, she had been imprisoned for some time during the fifties because of her leftist affiliations. The “warnings” were not because she was a leftist herself but rather because the Turkish government would have deported me if they detected a pattern of leftist associations. This is my memory in any case. At the time, my own political sentiments were “on the left,” anti-war, anti-bomb, and anti-US suppression of leftist movements abroad. In Boston, in the very early 1960s, I had participated in anti-nuclear political movements. By the early 1970s, I could describe myself as “radicalized” on the left, in opposition to the Vietnam war, and of course, the Nixon scandals.
Because of my difficulties in remaining in Turkey to carry out research, I avoided contacts with Turkish activists and leftist figures, but also academics in general. Mübeccel Kıray was an exception because she was chairwoman of the social science department and gave me a job there (as required by the “solution”). Ned Levine was another exception. I met him at METU and we became friends. Unfortunately, I have also lost contact with him but I understand he has had a successful career as director of a social research company, first in Los Angeles and then later in Houston. Finally, Nur Yalman also helped me repeatedly, but he was usually not in Turkey. So I developed a habit of cultivating “ethnographic” contacts, villagers, townspeople, etc., and avoiding academic contacts. I was never very “close” to either Turkish or American researchers in Turkey for this reason.
AS: In 1970, you defended your dissertation on kinship and local politics in Of, “The Black Sea Turks: A Study of Honor, Descent and Marriage.” However, after finishing your PhD, you did something very unusual and proceeded to a completely new project instead of publishing your dissertation as a book. The result was Literature and Violence in North Arabia (1979), which was quite an early example of the narrative turn in anthropology as it combined hermeneutic anthropology with structural analysis, yet also stretched to literary criticism. What kinds of ideas led you to venture into learning a new language, and working on a different place and time, at such an early stage of your career?
MM: During the late summer of 1969, while still completing my PhD thesis, I received an invitation from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to join the Center for Advanced Study there. How this came about is another story that does not bear directly on my Turkish research. By the fall of 1970, having completed my doctoral dissertation, I accepted a teaching job at Cornell University. There, James Siegel, an Indonesianist, introduced me to a new kind of anthropology and also, more importantly, a new kind of thinking about scholarly work. I came to see the deficiencies of my Turkish work. I had not paid enough attention to language. My Turkish had not been good enough. My Turkish material seemed severely inadequate to me. And yet, I knew that I had stumbled on social conditions and a political history in Of that raised many questions about the received history of Turkish modernity, the character of the Turkish state, and the character of Turkish citizenry. Unfortunately, I did not have enough depth in my material to address these matters.
Frustrated by the deficiency of my Turkish research, and wanting to consider issues of language and society, I began to read ethnographies of Bedouin narratives and poetry, and eventually, to study Arabic. Ambitiously and outrageously, I launched a new study of narrative and poetry in North Arabia, with the aim of developing an entirely new approach to ethnography for myself. Early on, my efforts were rewarded in terms of my own intellectual interests; however, the career costs were significant. Having a draft of a new book was not sufficient for tenure at Cornell. Denied tenure, we left immediately for a temporary job at the University of California, San Diego, in 1975.
With the book, Literature and Violence in North Arabia, accepted for publication, I was offered a permanent position at the University of California, San Diego. At the same time, I benefitted from a research award from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a sociological study of Turkish folklore in Turkey. But with the award in hand, the Turkish government in 1975 was even less accommodating to American researchers than in 1968. They refused to grant me permission, forcing me to change my plans and spend a year in Paris on a fellowship that I had won for studying in Turkey! Perhaps my three centimeter file at the Emniyet was a factor! The year in Paris was spent entirely revising the Bedouin book, now accepted by Cambridge, but in need of much more work than I had expected.
I have to say that I am very proud of Literature and Violence in North Arabia, whatever its faults. My decision to write this book caused me and my family difficulties; nonetheless, the project was part of my education that led me away more definitively from physics to literature and society. The project was certainly inspired by my friendship with James Siegel, the most important figure in my personal intellectual development over several decades, and the anthropologist whom I most admire. More specifically, to answer your questions, it was sometime in 1972 that Siegel came to me with a copy of Grammatologie by Jacques Derrida, not yet translated into English. Siegel did not know French very well and suggested that we read it together, as I translated for him. Naturally, this did not work out very well. However, I did read Grammatologie on my own as well as other books by Derrida, including La voix et le phénomène and L’écriture et la différence. Literature and Violence is directly inspired by Derrida, but I did not insist on this in the book. I did not really consider myself a “Derridean,” either by ambition or qualification, but rather a “striver” from a small town in Texas.
AS: How did you decide to resume your studies on Turkey after writing Literature and Violence?
MM: I did not return to Turkish studies after my first book. I was completely discouraged about working in Turkey for some time. I engaged in several radically different projects and wrote another book, this time a comparison of the ethnographies on Nuer and Denka, before I began to think of returning to Turkish studies once again. I was still caught up in the problems that I had encountered in writing Literature and Violence. First, there was a more or less lengthy manuscript on early Islam that toyed with the idea of some connection or anti-connection between camel-herding Bedouins and early Islam. Then, there was a very lengthy manuscript on heroic poetry that toyed with idea of its connection with pastoralism. However, I eventually realized that I was overextended, reaching into fields that involved languages and histories that I had not mastered. To save some piece of this research and writing, I first published “Culture, Exchange, and Gender: Lessons from the Murik” (1986), with Kathy Barlow and David Lipset, in the then new journal, Cultural Anthropology. This is a comparison of the Nuer of the Sudan and the Murik of New Guinea. The argument is that Nuer men gain a certain independence from the labor of women by virtue of their pastoral ecology and the pastoral practices of raiding while the Murik are more dependent on the labor of women by virtue of the more limited role of hunting and perhaps also fishing. With this somewhat Marxist argument, I intended to account for the pastoral patriarchal monotheism in the Sudan and its contrasts with rituals that co-opted women’s reproductive powers in New Guinea. The same kind of somewhat Marxist argument is pursued in The Pastoral Son and the Spirit of Patriarchy (1989) where Dinka and Nuer patriarchy are compared. When the latter manuscript was finished (but before its publication), I realized a break with this line of work was necessary. I kept returning to the issues and structural comparisons that I first composed in Literature and Violence, issues that had arisen from reading, however mistakenly, Jacques Derrida. To break away from intellectual repetition, I decided to try to return once again to Turkish studies in the mid-1980s. I had the intention of deepening my Turkish language skills and knowledge of Turkish and Ottoman history. I had always believed that my Of material was important and unusual. I decided to give this material the effort that I believed it deserved. I began to search for some way of returning to Turkey for a significant period of time, not just for a visit.
Around this time, for better or worse, I had agreed to sign the petition that scholars had submitted to the US Congress, opposing congressional censure of Turkey for the Armenian genocide. Once this signature was in place, the doors of Turkey suddenly reopened to me. A new chapter had been added to the Meeker file in the Emniyet. I was no longer a persona non-grata for the Turkish government.
AS: You stayed in Istanbul with your family for almost two years between 1986 and 1988 mainly for archival and library research. Could you tell us about this period? Where did you live? Who were in your friendship circles? Did you travel in Turkey?
MM: We came to Istanbul in the fall of 1986 with the support of a modest Fulbright grant that barely covered school tuition fees and health insurance for the family. But we were otherwise very fortunate because of savings from my position at the University of California. We rented the top floor of what might be called a gecekondu structure just below the cemetery up the hill toward Levent in Bebek. We chose this location because my two daughters were in school, one in Robert College and one in the International School in Rumeli Hisarı. In addition, Gesine took a position teaching German in Robert College.
In 1987, our Ordulu landlord raised the rent so that we were obliged to move. Fortunately, Shirley Yalman was able to offer us her comfortable but small apartment in Bebek at this time. The Bebek locations were not good locations for my research. It was especially difficult to reach the city along the Bosphorus road in those days. I spent a great deal of time working on Turkish and reading Turkish literature. Yurdanur Salman tutored me in Turkish. I am very grateful to her for advice and instruction. She was a wise and sympathetic lady. We also saw Alan and İpek Duben from time to time. They were gracious and hospitable toward us.
I toured the city, often with Gesine on the weekends, visiting each district of the city, observing and listening. At some point, I became interested in the Topkapı Palace as I began to sense a certain resemblance between social practices in the provinces, and now in the city, and the organization of court rituals. I applied for permission to examine the Topkapı archives, but was refused by the authorities.
With the advice of Şerif Mardin, I began a study of Muslim intellectuals that eventually led to several articles. He directed my reading and, of course, I always followed his work very closely. I conducted several interviews for the purpose of my interest in Muslim intellectuals, with İsmet Özel in the Fatih Quarter of Istanbul and with Rasim Özdenören in his government office in Ankara.
I was contacted by a group of Oflus who were publishing an “Oflu” magazine. To my embarrassment, they published a “Hamzi” poem under my name and listed me as their “Research Director” in their magazine. Since the magazine was read in the offices of the Emniyet, two officials were soon dispatched to Of in order to “find me.” My Oflu friend and informant, Ahmet Hızal, hosted the two officials, took them to lunch, and informed them that I was a “good guy” and also that I was not in Of and had not been in Of.
I also took road trips, on my own, into various parts of Turkey. I spent some days in Ankara visiting the Kocatepe Mosque and the Anıtkabir. I traveled to Trabzon, Gaziantep, Mardin, and to Antalya with my family.
AS: A Nation of Empire (2002) is unique as it synthesized your ethnography in Of with your later historical research, namely anthropology with history. What made you focus on history? How do anthropology and history talk to each other in your work?
MM: To answer this question briefly, I would say that there was no name or concept for the socio-political practices that I observed in Of. They were neither “Turkish” nor “Islamic” in the contemporary meaning of these terms. They were more or less taken for granted and so not named or explained. What then were they? Where did they come from? Why did they persist? These questions led me to consider the historical background of contemporary socio-political practices in Of (and elsewhere in Turkey). That is, they led me to the socio-political culture of the Ottoman period.
AS: How to do anthropology dramatically shifted from the 1960s to the 1980s and later. Looking back from today, in what ways did young Meeker’s thinking and interests evolve?
MM: I think I may have answered this question in part in my preceding responses. For someone like myself, who came to anthropology from another discipline, later in his twenties, there was never a strong “investment” in the discipline of anthropology. Like a number of University of Chicago graduates, I was interested in intellectual discovery rather than following a discipline. I only occasionally went to meetings. I never followed the journals closely. It’s a fault, perhaps, perhaps not.
AS: UC San Diego was your home during almost your entire career. What were the distinctive features of UCSD Anthropology for you? How did the anthropology community in California receive your work on Turkey?
MM: The Department of Anthropology at UCSD was known for “psychological anthropology.” Its most prestigious figure, among others, was Melford Spiro, for whom I had the highest respect. I always looked upon psychological anthropology as basically “mistaken.” Nonetheless, I admired my colleagues for their intellectual seriousness and their impeccable collegiality. I was especially close to Gananath Obeyesekere, Robert Levy, and Frederick Bailey. I miss them terribly. Did the anthropology community in California receive my work? I was not aware of this. The Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, invited me to teach there for a semester. Student and faculty engagement with my work was limited to a graduate student or two; however, the hospitality of the Department of Anthropology was faultless.
I am not aware of any Americans significantly interested in my work with perhaps one or two exceptions. On the other hand, after my retirement in 2001, I enjoyed a number of years of discussion and participation with European scholars, first with the Turkish Studies group at the University of Washington, at the invitation of Reşat Kasaba, second with scholars at the Max Planck Institute in Halle, Germany, at the invitation of Chris Hann, third, at the seminars and colloquia of the Turkish Studies group in Paris and Istanbul, at the invitation of Elise Massicard and Gilles Dorronsoro. I also benefitted from rewarding interactions with European scholars in general, in the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Germany, and Greece. There are just too many names here to mention.
AS: I believe you now live in the countryside of Seattle. How have you been experiencing the pandemic?
MM: We live on Mercer Island which is five minutes from downtown Seattle in a renovated “cabin” originally built in 1913. It was acquired and restored by Gesine’s mother and father in the 1970s. We built an addition to the house in order to live side by side with Gesine’s mother. Both parents are now deceased. In recent decades, Mercer Island has become an expensive area, largely, but not wholly, inhabited by wealthy people, especially along the waterfronts. Almost all the older houses have been replaced by oversized, upscale mansions. However, we are more or less surrounded by a few older, modest houses dating from the 1950s or 1960s, or earlier. During the pandemic, our kind neighbors did our shopping for us so that we never entered a store for more than a year. The two of us take daily walks in the nearby parks. I have myself been busy with various carpentry projects, like the Ottoman sultans, and Gesine with sewing for our grandchildren, like Ottoman wives? I also bake bread, make Texas chili, and broil salmon and lamb chops, while Gesine prepares various delicious meals. We are very, very fortunate.
I must now confess that we have spent almost half our lives in Paris since around 1996, even before my full retirement. We have a number of friends there, more than on Mercer Island, and we miss them terribly, especially James Siegel and Anne Berger.
AS: Thank you very much for this interview, Professor Meeker. I hope that you stop by Istanbul during your next Paris visit and that we have a face-to-face follow-up conversation.
