Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Christa Salamandra

Committee Members

Miriam Ticktin

Karen Strassler

Ayse Parla

Subject Categories

Anthropology | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Turkey, temporality, built environment, political aesthetics, state, good life

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography of everyday life in Turkey’s Black Sea region, where nationalist and conservative sensibilities are deeply rooted. How do people imagine and pursue a good life within the tempo of rules, plans, and projects that repeatedly arrive and recede? Based on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023 in Uzungöl, it follows residents through an unsettling landscape shaped by migration, tourism, construction, demolition, shifting legal conditions, and unfinished projects. People neither simply wait for resolution nor organize their lives around a single anticipated future. In the meantime, they compare governments across time; build with concrete, wood, containers, and tarps; act on possibilities under conditions they expect may change again; and aspire toward other ways of living together.

From an ordinary phrase that recurred throughout the fieldwork, bu arada (in the meantime), the dissertation develops the meantime as an analytic of political temporality that terms such as interval, limbo, and deferral do not fully capture. It names a temporal condition in which consequential matters remain unresolved, interventions take effect and fall away, and people are compelled to act before they know which rules, promises, or arrangements, if any, will endure. The meantime is not something people wait through.  Building in the meantime means claiming, and inhabiting, a present in which multiple unfinished futures and contested pasts remain simultaneously active.

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