THE LAYERS OF AN ONION Food and nation in Turkey

Abstract

Food is a bundled social fact, banal and eminently practical, but also shot through with broader questions of markets, nation making, the power of place, inclusion and exclusion, and the politics of affect. This chapter explores the political meanings and practices surrounding food in Turkey. Food is shown to be deeply entangled with the unfinished project of nation-building in Turkey, and with attendant questions related to the politics of localism and topophilia, of the limits of belonging and nation-building as damage, and the anxieties of daily life in times of neoliberal precarity. The overall aim is to offer a way of thinking about food as a rich practical site where the sensual and semiotic overlap with tensions of inequality, injustice, biopolitics, and power, and to raise some questions about future work on the political lives of food in Turkey.