Life goes on (Hayat devam ediyor)—and so do disasters, once set in motion by events such as earthquakes. Christopher Dole’s Living On convincingly demonstrates that the intimate connection between progress and a given disaster under capitalism is always historically situated and resistant to generalization, producing strikingly diverse forms of suffering, endurance, and sometimes even thriving among survivors and their loved ones. It is this diversity that Dole sets out to track, focusing on how the Marmara Earthquake of 1999 generated a process of “psychiatric world making” in Turkey (p. 8). He describes Living On “quite literally [as] a study of psychiatry in ruins” and “a study of psychiatry as ruins” (p. 11). Rather than categorically dismissing experts’ concepts and tools—grounded in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)—Dole works with them as an ethnographer, taking seriously what these tools do in the lives of survivors. From this stance, he builds a politically valuable argument: accounting for the particularities of each disaster and its connection to progress (in this case, to psychiatric progress) requires attending both to the specific forms of disaster response and to the heterogeneity of the forms of life—including survival, endurance, and thriving—a disaster and responses to it forge. These forms of life matter because they hint at “the outlines of a model—the concepts of a plan—for human flourishing within worlds increasingly ravaged by planetary ecological crisis” (p. 205).

In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The concept of progress is to be grounded in the idea of the catastrophe. That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe. It is not that which is approaching but that which is.”Footnote ¹ Showing how the catastrophe of things just going on manifests in the world, Dole’s ethnography is, among other things, a historical account of what human survival, suffering, and thriving look like in the absence of consistent, long-term state or civil society support (which is absent everywhere) or of radical, ground-up, collectively driven political organizing. I am interested in the connection between what Dole calls “the outlines of a model for human flourishing” within environmental and political disasters and political organizing (p. 205). More specifically, I argue that the depoliticization of social life after the 1980 military coup in Turkey silently undergirds Dole’s ethnography. After I sketch the book’s three-part structure, I will return to my argument about the book at the end through the final chapter, which follows a group of survivors who protested state officials’ gradual eviction of all residents from “Saddam’s Homes,” a housing complex donated by the Red Crescent Society of Iraq.

After laying out in Part I the conditions within which the Marmara Earthquake transformed into a disaster with mass death and displacement, Dole turns in Parts II and III to two corresponding registers: the humanitarian psychiatric response by experts from Turkey and survivors’ subjective and embodied experiences—their individual and collective struggles, and their forms of survival and thriving. Part II demonstrates how psychiatric expertise and practice were mobilized, scaled up from the individual to the collective, and innovated. Part III examines how these processes were in turn received, internalized, and at times politically mobilized by survivors.

In Part I, “Sensing the Conditions of Disaster,” Dole argues that disasters are not events with clear boundaries. The Marmara Earthquake of 17 August 1999 emerges in this compelling ethnography as “a complex and open-ended convergence of multiple processes that long preceded and extended far beyond the earthquake” (p. 54). With remarkable precision, Dole historicizes the structural conditions, policies, and corruption that preceded the earthquake, rendered its consequences significantly more devastating, and made the Turkish state’s response to it deeply inadequate—while also noting how the “romance of civil society” quickly faded in the prolonged devastation (p. 20). Following his interlocutors’ understandings and uses of “the earthquake,” Dole does not distinguish the event of the earth quaking from the disaster it both revealed and generated. This subtle analytical choice—privileging lived experience, including his interlocutors’ conceptions—makes Dole’s book as complex as the history of the Marmara Earthquake itself.

In Part II, “The Psychiatry of Disaster,” this complexity shows up in the lived afterlives of Western-born psychiatric concepts that presume a particular psychological subject of disaster: the “autonomous, self-knowing and self-mastering liberal subject of the modern psy disciplines” and “the vulnerable behavioral subject of habituation, conditioning, and adaptation, with the capacity for self-directed action” (p. 82, 93). Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-two psychiatrists and psychologists, Dole shows how their desire to heal and desire to measure converged in the production of novel, if inevitably limited, scaled-up forms of treatment—ranging from individualized CBT-based self-exposure to group EMDR protocols and community-integrated interventions—that, at times, both helped and frustrated survivors, while generating transnational networks, civil society initiatives, and a significant literature on psychiatric disaster response. While these psychiatrists surely provided some survivors with tools to better cope, their understanding of “culture” as the source of others’ resistance—and their framing of class differences as religion-bound fatalism or ignorance—shaped their practices: “The history of psychiatry in Turkey entailed the authorization not only of European forms of medical expertise but also, together with them, a set of orientalist discourses ready-made to explain instances of psychiatric refusal” (p. 90).

Part III (Living On) shows, through the stories of several survivors, how life went on differently for each of them while all cultivated potentialities, “to some extent or none,” through indeterminacy within structures of inequality, in Alize Arıcan’s terms.Footnote ² When asked if she had any lasting injuries from the earthquake, Derya answers by posing a different question: “Is there anything that remains of me?” Her words capture how survivors in Part III narrate their post-earthquake lives through a Turkish lexicon—such as çökmek, yıkılmak, dayanmak, yıpratmak—that “slip[s] between outer and inner worlds” (p. 150). Though working-class experiences remain inevitably underexplored in Part II, as it is based on interviews with experts, Part III clearly lays out survivors’ classed and gendered post-earthquake potentialities as they struggle with what Dole calls “disaster’s minor feelings,” such as irritability (p. 177).

Esra, who became a disability rights advocate following the earthquake, generated energy to live on by keeping herself busy. A working-class, middle-aged, single woman who lost her husband to a traffic accident and her son in the earthquake, she struggled financially and sought accountability by turning to the state—to no avail. Living with a realistic acceptance of the contingency of present and future, she embodied what Dole interprets as a form of optimism. Yet potentialities can take strikingly different shapes. At twenty-two, Bülent lost both legs above the knee in the earthquake and went on to thrive as an outdoor sports athlete, motivational speaker, and life coach—the figure of “a new sort of citizen” that the neoliberal phase of capitalism produced: self-reliant, resilient, thriving against structural odds (p. 222).

The book does not give the reader clear outlines of “a model for human flourishing” within contemporary, manifold disasters precisely because of the diversity and complexity of lived forms of survival and thriving. The survivors who became residents of “Saddam’s Homes” faced state officials’ systematic efforts to displace them once again. They organized, protested, and often relied on psychiatric concepts while trying to prove the psychological and social effects of their potential displacement. Their experiences coincided with the consolidation of neoliberal policies following the 1980 military coup, which ended the radical socialist and communist organizing of the 1970s. The depoliticization of social life from the 1980s onwards implicitly undergirds Dole’s ethnography and manifests most explicitly among the residents of “Saddam’s Homes” in the form of “protest psychiatry” and intra-group conflicts about whether to use official psychiatric reports to prove the effects of their struggle or risk further stigmatization and the delegitimization of their political cause (p. 238).

“What does it mean to begin relying on psychiatric concepts and categories when discussing personal distress, interpersonal struggles, or nonnormative states?” Dole asks (p. 161). Since the February 2023 twin earthquakes—on which Dole wrote a moving epilogue—leftist circles in Turkey have been facing a related question: what does it mean to rely on funding-contingent civil society and volunteer efforts after cataclysmic disasters such as the 1999 and 2023 earthquakes, which defy the distinction between natural and political-economic disasters? Living On is a compelling ethnographic demonstration that what has been lacking since the 1980s is a sustained, working-class-oriented politics with the potential to interrupt the catastrophe of “things just go on” and actualize multiple models of human flourishing.