Field Notes. Çangal, Turkey. August 2008. I am walking in the forest. It's quiet except for the conversations between the forest villagers and the sounds of their machinery. . . . I chat with the men, then step away. The timber overwhelms me, the trees tower over me. I walk on the wet soil and watch the forest. A landscape where nature meets culture. A landscape upon which the story of the nation has been inscribed. A landscape that is nature and culture.
In the depth of the forest lie ruins of Zingal's industrial past. Scattered across the forest, poignant reminders of the recent past. Visible but buried. Glorious but decaying. Embedded within the land, yet obviously foreign. Forgotten, yet constantly remembered. The symbols of the making and unmaking of a region. Zingal represents pride, but also resentment. It is a ghost, haunting the land, the forest, and the people. It defies forgetting, yet is it a memory?
But this is not where this story begins.
The story begins in 1926 with the establishment of Zingal, a forest industry located in the coastal town of Ayancık in the Sinop province of northern Turkey. Named after the Zindan and Çangal forests to the south, during the early 20th century Zingal transformed Ayancık from an obscure location to a regional hub. Yet, less than two decades later, this emblem of modernity, described by one weekly as “one of the last foreign companies” in the country, was triumphantly appropriated by the government.Footnote 1 Why was this important industrial project nationalized in 1945? How is it remembered today and what do these memories tell us about the state and citizenship? I will answer these questions by situating Zingal's forestry within the context of Turkey's nation building and by analyzing differing narratives of its history as iterations of a fragmented modernity.Footnote 2
Literature on Turkish nationalism has largely neglected the environment. In addressing this gap, I argue that forestry played a constitutive role in Turkey's nation-building process. Rather than merely a fascinating episode in Turkey's industrial history, Zingal conveys how imaginaries and practices of nature were among the pillars of nationalism, and how ideas of the nation-state and modern citizenship were constructed through forestry.Footnote 3 I also contend that conflicting Zingal narratives within the official archival record and in citizens’ memories illustrate that the discourse of modernity at the center of Turkey's nation-building project was fragmented and incomplete rather than monolithic. As I will discuss, the contradictions of modernity continue to manifest today in the context of a new industrial venture that looms in the future of the region.
MODERNITY, NATIONALISM AND VERDURE
Historical overlaps between Turkey's forestry policies and its economic regime confirm forestry's foundational role in the nation-building process, and the persistence of state ownership and management of forests reinforces the strong connections between the state, the nation, and forests. Early republican intellectuals defined forestry as a “national cause” that would contribute to development in two ways. First, forestry was considered indispensable to the national economy. In the solidarist-corporatistFootnote 4 framework of elites, the economy was imagined as an organism whose functioning depended on the contributions of its various organs, among them forestry.Footnote 5 Some foresters went so far as to define forests literally as capital.Footnote 6 This conceptualization led to the consolidation of state forestry through the 1937 Forest Act, which created state forest enterprises and outlawed free access to forests, giving the state the ultimate authority in managing the country's forest wealth. An amendment to the law in 1945 nationalized all forests, making the state the manager and owner of all forests.
Alongside this emphasis on the economic significance of forestry, elites defined “verdure” (yeşil) as an attribute of civilization that was necessary for the development of the nation. Verdure, which comes from the old French word verd, translates as “lush green vegetation,” perfectly encapsulating the meaning of yeşil in modernist discourse. Footnote 7 A cultural idiom reminiscent of Diane Davis's environmental Orientalism, yeşil was employed to define some natural landscapes as symbols of civilization, and others—deserts, steppes, and swamps— as unruly, uncivilized, and unmodern.Footnote 8 By defining forests as the symbol of productivity and civilization, while representing arid landscapes as backwardness and decay, elites formed a connection between the natural landscape and the level of a nation's modernity. Their ultimate goal was to modernize the nation by improving landscapes, which in turn would transform subjectivities. Represented through an Orientalist gaze, arid landscapes were deemed the reason for the people's apathy and laziness whereas verdant landscapes were assumed to engender human productivity as well as an aesthetic appreciation of life.
The representation of yeşil as civilization is evident in canonical Turkish literature, such as Yakup Kadri's Ankara, about a couple's journey to Anatolia between the 1920s and 1940s. Throughout the novel, Kadri's heroine, Selma, thrives in the productive verdant environments of rural northern Turkey. Once the couple transitions from the northern forests into Central Anatolia's arid steppe, however, Selma comes within an inch of losing consciousness: “She almost suffocated and fainted from the smell of hot manure.”Footnote 9 In Kadri's usage, manure is a metaphor, representing the arid, unverdant rural landscape of Central Anatolia as abject.Footnote 10 Faced with the abject, Selma becomes deficient as a subject, teetering on the verge of unconsciousness. Selma's reaction to the grotesque qualities of Central Anatolia's unverdant rural landscape illustrates the strong link between Turkish nationalism's imaginary of the modern subject-citizen and the rejection of the abject.Footnote 11 Verdure's centrality to this link is conveyed in another of Kadri's novels, The Stranger, about a retired and disillusioned officer's “journey” to Central Anatolia during the British occupation of İstanbul. The officer compares the plush vegetation of western Turkey with the languor of Central Anatolia's arid landscape: “In western Anatolia I had seen such green and beautiful gardens, whereas here; only reality. Naked, ugly, crude reality. Waves of grey earth go on and on . . . And the hills . . . And the hills are tumors. . . . Every afternoon, I feel as if it is the end of the world.”Footnote 12
Elizabeth Emma Ferry and Mandana E. Limbert show that nation-states claim modernity through the transformation of nature into resources.Footnote 13 Through state forestry Turkey redefined verdure as national patrimony and the foundation of modern civilization, situating nature making at the core of the nation-building project. “National nature” was influential in inculcating a sense of belonging, while forestry provided a venue for changing ideas and practices of nature and transforming subjectivities. For instance, veteran forester İbrahim Kutlutan, who worked for the forestry departments of the late Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey, blamed the “primitive life” of Central Anatolian peasants on a lack of forests and claimed that learning how to appreciate forests would elevate peasants to a state of civilization.Footnote 14 Because foresters were often the only representatives of the state in rural areas in this period, forestry was a vital platform for the state and social groups to meet. For this reason, in addition to having technical expertise, foresters were expected to serve as vanguards of the new modern Turkey, imbuing their social relationships in rural areas with a didactic component.Footnote 15
Ironically, scholarship on Turkish forestry has remained contained within the technical framework of forestry schools, where it has been reduced to an “anti-politics machine,”Footnote 16 stripped of its social, cultural, and political significance, which is not surprising considering the long-term academic silence around Middle Eastern environments. Over the past decade some of the most rigorous scholarship on the Middle East has come from environmental historians, yet, as noted by George Trumbull, it is too early to define this body of work as a specific subfield.Footnote 17 A stronger silence, addressed by the articles in this special issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, prevails in disciplines such as geographyFootnote 18 and anthropology despite their potential to articulate vernacular approaches to Middle Eastern environments. These disciplines’ relative weakness within Turkish academia has reinforced this silence within Turkish studies.Footnote 19 Considering how foundational representations and practices of nature have been for the region's colonial and national administrations,Footnote 20 anthropological inquiries of Turkish environments are vital to understanding the complexities of vernacular practices of nature.Footnote 21 In Turkey, nature has been a contested domain in recent years, generating a heightened awareness among scholars in socio-cultural analyses of specific environmental cases. This article shares with these scholars an interest in a specific story of nature management, but my underlying objective is to theorize the wider implications of specific environmental narratives for understanding Turkish nation building. I interpret current environmental conflicts in Turkey as the manifestation of different articulations of modernity, characterized by state-sponsored, high modernist developmentalism or local conservation efforts that conceive nature as constitutive of identities. Therefore, analyzing the ambivalences in Zingal's archival record as symptoms of the fragmented nature of Turkish modernity provides a framework for scholars to understand past and present environments as various iterations of modernity.
The heyday of scholarship on modernity was the alternative/multiple modernities literature, which delivered a valuable critique of Eurocentric articulations of social phenomena. However, this literature was chastised for reducing a complex reality to a temporally and spatially limited episode, for assuming the west's ownership of modernity, which relegated non-westerners to secondary roles, and for not questioning the arbitrarily differentiated categories “west” and “nonwest.”Footnote 22 In response, some scholars argued for coeval or regional modernities, complicating the single-source origin of modernity and illustrating entangled histories.Footnote 23 Postcolonial scholars went further by challenging the homogeneity of modernity and its supposed antimodernist resistance.Footnote 24 For instance, Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper maintained that “colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent,” but were organized around “competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture.”Footnote 25 Stoler's later work on colonial Dutch archives deconstructed the uniformity of the colonial project, emphasizing the uncertainties and anxieties of modernity on which colonialism depended.Footnote 26 Perhaps the most succinct articulation of this challenge to the earlier scholarship was Timothy Mitchell's theorization of modernity as a singular, yet inherently incomplete project that can never be fully realized due to its main principle, representation, “the source of modernity's enormous capacity for replication and expansion, and at the same time the origin of its instability.”Footnote 27 This critical scholarship on modernity would not have been possible without prior scholarship on state theories that challenged the homogeneity of binary categories such as “the state” and “society” by exploring how they constitute one another in localized, everyday settings.Footnote 28 Contributing to the literature on modernity's incompleteness, this article examines the simultaneity of two narratives within the archival and ethnographic record, one glorifying Zingal and the other vilifying it.
The modern project envisioned by republican elites rests upon the modernist efforts of the Ottoman state, which also strived to distinguish between social categories within the imperial domain.Footnote 29 Yet, I will argue that this envisioned modernity was monolithic neither in design nor application. By now there is an extensive literature on Turkish modernity that has produced a robust critique of the modernist project and the forms of resistance it has engendered. Supplied with insights from studies on the Ottoman legacy of a strong state, earlier examples of this literature analyzed what Reşat Kasaba calls the “organized, well-articulated, linear process of modernization through which the whole nation was going to move simultaneously and with uniform experience.”Footnote 30 This work was later accompanied by a new wave of scholarship that chose to focus on dispersed forms of everyday resistance to state-led modernity rather than the role of the strong state.Footnote 31 However, even scholarship that challenged binaries by repositioning elements previously assumed to be antimodern as derivatives of modernity have taken the homogeneity of the imagined project of modernity as a given.Footnote 32 As a result, scholars have yet to examine their unquestioned faith in the monolithic nature of the project that official cadres imagined.
My goal in this article is neither to provide another case of the elite-envisioned, state-led project of Turkish modernity, nor to offer examples of how it was appropriated or resisted by social actors. Instead, I propose analyzing the uncertainties of the modernity intended by elites as well as the various ways that social groups appropriated it. I argue not only that modernity was fragmented in the social realm where it was received, but also that the modernity envisioned and dictated by elites was itself fragmented. Moving beyond binary investigations of intended projects versus their fragmented reception, I propose rethinking the modernity imagined by Turkish elites as an incomplete project, inherently laden with contradictions. This redefinition requires an ethnographic interpretation of the official archival material as well as a historical interpretation of the ethnography. In the discussion that follows, I will not treat official archival material and ethnographic accounts as categorically separate sources; instead I will trace the continuities in their representations to demonstrate that, together, they form an archive of Turkish modernity as an incomplete entanglement of representations. First, I will explain the historical context of Zingal's origins and its transformative role in Ayancık. Then I will examine the narratives on Zingal to show the complex ways in which citizens have internalized nationalism within an environmental framework. Finally, I will discuss different narratives of modernity in the present by juxtaposing the discourse of resentment caused by deindustrialization and the current antinuclear movement.
ZINGAL'S ORIGINS
Sinop province, a peninsula in the Central Black Sea region, has been neglected in scholarly analyses. Combing through pages of travel writing on Asia Minor from the early 20th century, I was struck by how this region's isolation was a predominant theme among a range of earlier writers. Austrian geologist Ernest Nowack described Northern Anatolia as one of “the least-known parts of Asia Minor,”Footnote 33 a view reiterated in American archaeologist David M. Robinon's 1906 account of the region's ancient past.Footnote 34 Turkish writer Hasan Tarkan's 1941 monograph on Sinop also highlights the trope of “unknown Sinop.”Footnote 35 The recent lack of scholarly interest in Sinop contrasts with its significance in antiquity as a port and timber production site. After its incorporation into the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, the province experienced major growth. However, in part due to a decline in transit trade in the Black Sea during the 17th century, it gradually fell off the radar.Footnote 36 The pre-19th-century history of Sinop's district Ayancık, located fifty-five kilometers west of the province's center, is even more obscure, making its transformation after the introduction of Zingal even more remarkable. Tapping into the history of and potential for forestry in the region, Zingal successfully reconstructed Ayancık through modern industrial development, while instilling a nationalist ethos among foresters and residents by forging a link between nation and nature as well as a native–foreigner dichotomy.
Within the early republic's mixed economic regime combining protectionist tendencies with liberal practices, the Ottoman practice of contracting forests to individuals or companies continued to be the main form of forest management.Footnote 37 After the Great Depression, this ideologically ambiguous economic regime was replaced by étatism, gradually giving rise to state forestry.Footnote 38 This process culminated in the 1937 Forest Act, which replaced all previous forestry legislation, initiating the establishment of state forest enterprises throughout the country to manage forests. Meanwhile, between the establishment of the republic and 1937, the state awarded twenty-nine forestry contractsFootnote 39 to private businesses, including the one that leased Zindan and Çangal forests to Zingal.Footnote 40 Forest labor in Turkey has historically been conducted by forest villagers, defined by law as residents of villages in or near forests. Forest villagers work for contractors or state forest enterprises as self-employed individuals or through cooperatives. Due to a lack of agricultural areas in forest villages, the seasonality of forest labor, and minimal social compensation by the state, they are, to this day, among the poorest in the country.
The lease for Zindan and Çangal was initially given to Société Anonyme Usines Allumtière de Flandres (Match Corporation and Factory of Flandres), a Belgian company known in the region as the Match Monopoly after it was tasked with Turkey's match production.Footnote 41 The state monopolized match production in 1924, but as in other sectors, foreign investment was expected to provide the infrastructural and commercial base for a national match industry.Footnote 42 Société Anonyme Turque des Forêts de Zindan et Çangal (Turkish Forestry Corporation of Zindan and Çangal), known as Zingal, was founded in 1926 with the participation of the Turkish Match Monopoly, Türkiye İş Bankası (Turkish Labor Bank),Footnote 43 and another Belgian company, Usine Allumetière de Flandres (Match Factory of Flandres). Subsequently, the rights to Zindan and Çangal forests were transferred from the Monopoly to Zingal.Footnote 44
Although Zingal was a Belgian company, its workforce was comprised of technical-clerical staff from various European countries and Turkish workers from Ayancık's hinterland. Zingal operated on two fronts: forest production was spread over 53,000 hectares of forest, while the processing of forest resources was carried out in the timber factory, which started operating in the town in 1931. In the 1930s, Zingal was the only timber company that had standardized its production,Footnote 45 and it claimed to produce 75 percent of Turkey's timber.Footnote 46 Forest production was organized into five districts, of which Çangal was the most important. Mixed forests of beech and fir dominate the landscape of the region and shaped the expansion of the factory. In 1941, the company projected an increase in its beech production fueled by the overall increase in demand throughout the country, leading it to purchase new equipment.Footnote 47 The factory also produced bee hives, food crates, and furniture, and in 1934 launched Turkey's first parquet flooring production effort.Footnote 48 Pitprops used as beams in coal-mining were one of Zingal's major products, and their constant demand by the coal-mining industry shaped the company's growth, as evidenced by the expansion of the railway system to access appropriate trees.Footnote 49 Leftover wood was used by locals as fuel.Footnote 50
To transfer timber from the mountains to Ayancık, where it was loaded onto boats, Zingal built a complex transportation system connecting the forest to the factory via waterways, narrow-gauge railway, and air cable. Oxen and special Hungarian horses were used where the terrain did not allow modern techniques of transportation. In addition to carrying timber, the rail system was socially significant to forest villagers who used it to travel between the mountains and Ayancık. Zingal was unique for its self-sufficiency in terms of machine repairs and spare parts production, to the point that foresters and locals defined it as “a factory that built factories.”Footnote 51 In the 1960s and 1970s, Zingal's foremen and journeymen lent their expertise to other state-owned timber factories, further establishing the company's legacy. The factory contributed to the Turkish modernization project through auxiliary activities such as furniture production, including a model house presented at the 1933 National Products Day.Footnote 52 Zingal also represented Turkey at the 1935 Thessaloniki International Trade Fair, where it received multiple awards.Footnote 53 The company was unique for providing its workers with modern living arrangements, a health clinic, and social activities such as sporting events and movie screenings. Most importantly, workers were imbued with a modern disciplinary work ethic.
Despite these economic and social achievements, Zingal was nationalized on 24 April 1945 and its assets were bought by the government, which transformed it into a state forest enterprise.Footnote 54 To justify this act the government referred to Article 35 of Zingal's contract, which provided the government the right to annul the agreement if the company did not fulfill its requirements,Footnote 55 as well as the National Protection Law, a controversial law put into effect during World War II.Footnote 56 The government also filed a lawsuit against Zingal, demanding reparations for their faulty extraction practices.Footnote 57 Zingal did not go down without a fight; the company filed fourteen lawsuits against the government in which it demanded reparations for the annulment of their contract. The appointment of renowned law professors Hıfzı Veldet Velidedeoğlu and Sıddık Sami Onar as the ministry's legal counsel hints at the scale of this legal battle.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, it was resolved peacefully in 1954 when Zingal agreed to retract some of its complaints and the state agreed to pay reparations.Footnote 59
After thriving economically for more than a half century from Zingal's success, Ayancık experienced a recession due to the privatization of the state-owned factory in 1996 and the de facto cease of operations shortly thereafter. Today, the region is an icon of deindustrialization, with high rates of migration to big cities and other countries as well as a sense of resentment among residents. A recent plan by the government to build one of Turkey's first two nuclear plants in Sinop is a unique development that could effectively end the region's recession. However, as I will discuss in the conclusion, Ayancık residents who bemoan the end of industry have not welcomed the nuclear industry project.
NARRATIVES OF MODERNITY
Fieldnotes. Çangal. March 2010. Mud is everywhere. It snowed for a few minutes. I'm cold and dirty. The mud is so thick that I do not venture far from the men for fear of getting swallowed by it. I imagine a slow, cold death in the forest . . . It is one thing to think about mud's grotesqueness and another to watch it ruin a pair of boots. The jeep cannot even come to pick us up, so we walk. Was there so much mud back then? Did Zingal elites think of the mud? I ponder over the most banal things that modernity cannot overcome. Such as mud. What other ambivalences are buried in Zingal's ruins under the soil?
In the view of locals and foresters, Zingal elevated Ayancık from its backwardness by introducing modernity to the region. Locals still praise Zingal for having built Turkey's most modern timber factory, and I was told the factory was the biggest in Europe and the third biggest in the world. I could not confirm this claim in the official record, but such declarations are noteworthy beyond their accuracy because they illustrate how citizens situate Zingal within their claims to modernity. A symbol of the town's rapid development repeatedly brought up in my conversations with locals was electricity, which at the time was a luxury for a small town.Footnote 60 In a 1938 exposé in Orman ve Av (Hunting and Forestry), the regime's leading forestry publication, veteran forester Kutlutan praised Zingal as an example to be followed by the state, emphasizing its technological advancements and the “perfect harmony” that existed between its more than 2,000 workers and managers.Footnote 61 In his memoirs, another forester who traveled to Ayancık as a student intern in 1945 recalls how he took pleasure in the luxurious conditions provided by Zingal, which stood in stark contrast to foresters’ experiences elsewhere. “It was as if we had traveled to another country,” Tokmanoğlu wrote, recalling the down pillows he was provided. Ironically, accustomed to difficult conditions on field trips, he reported suffering from insomnia after he laid his head on the pillows that night.Footnote 62 Likewise, a 1926 memo from the interior minister to the prime minister celebrating the first “Turkish” match factory is evidence of the transformative role attributed to this industrial development. Yet, the minister's description of Zingal as “Turkish” is also both ironic and symbolic of how foreign elements were internalized within the representation of modern Turkey.Footnote 63
Despite the minister's disregard for this national industry's international connections, a theme that stands out in both archival and contemporary narratives is the presence of foreigners, whom residents associate with Ayancık's urban, cosmopolitan characteristics. This association is not surprising given the transformative role attributed to foreign expertise in the development of Turkish forestry. For example, the journal Verim (Productivity) announced the translation of German Schüpfer's conference “Forests’ Function for Civilization” as “required reading” for every Turkish intellectual.Footnote 64 The leading forestry journal Orman ve Av not only attributed Turkey's scientific forest management to the expertise adopted from European foresters, but also recommended future Turkish foresters to be trained in Germany.Footnote 65 Zingal's staff were among these European experts residing in Ayancık with their families, making up the town's elites alongside the Turkish foresters and creating an unusually cosmopolitan social environment for a provincial setting. In my visits to Ayancık, local intellectuals repeatedly called my attention to their town's exceptional past as a progressive, modern place, praising details such as women's participation in public life. They associated modernity with the industrial past and the ability to encounter foreigners, who were, as Europeans, modern by default, and Zingal was what made Ayancık unique. Interestingly, while most of these intellectuals espouse left-leaning politics that privilege a protected national economy and critique the imperialist connotations of foreign capital, they saw no contradiction between their ideological convictions and the foundational role they attributed to Zingal's foreignness.
Forest villagers replicated this discourse by highlighting infrastructural developments and the abundance of jobs, which they compared with the region's current deindustrialized state and the ghost town feel of their empty villages. They also praised the work ethic, discipline, and compassion of foreign personnel. Hikmet Amca, who worked for Zingal, explained the company's modernizing role by reciting the lyrics of a folk song.Footnote 66 The song suggests that Çangal has become Istanbul and portrays the transformation of everyday practices such as wearing boots instead of raw-hide sandals or using silverware as modern. Hikmet Amca also talked about “the man who sliced his bread with a knife,” an almost-mythological character who, in his narrated exaggeration, stood as a metaphor for the changes wrought by Zingal's presence. This character from local folklore embodied being modern so well that when the village imam bought a watch from him, he told everyone that he got it from the “the guy who eats bread with his fork.” Hikmet Amca grew nostalgic as he explained how Zingal's ethos, which he defined as “their system,” was adopted by the state-owned factory following nationalization. During our conversation he paid special attention to foreigners’ ethical standards, which he distinguished from those of the “backstabbing Turks,” reproducing internalized notions of the westerner's superiority. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant define symbolic violence as “violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity,”Footnote 67 and view it as the product of a structured misrecognition through which social agents take the world for granted. Likewise, Hikmet Amca's praise of Zingal's foreign personnel was premised upon the assumed superiority of the west, through which he assessed himself.
The representation of westerners as rational, disciplined, and ethical was reinforced by villagers’ memories about a specific employee by the name of Surkis. I first heard about Surkis from community elders in 2008. Their description of him was so romanticized that I questioned whether they had accurately recalled him or whether he had actually existed. I was ultimately able to confirm his identity in my archival research. Named Mesulam Surkis, he was a Romanian citizen of Jewish descent whom Temel Amca claimed worked at Zingal from its beginnings until its nationalization. Although I was unable to verify this the latter claim, six work permits signed by Presidents Atatürk and İnönü confirm Surkis's employment at the company between 1939 and 1944.Footnote 68 Temel Amca both admired and identified himself with Surkis, who spoke Turkish, had strong relationships with the forest villagers, and helped those in need. As Temel Amca described Surkis, he added a detail that seemed out of context at the time: “One of his eyes was injured like mine.” Initially I ignored why Temel Amca, who had also lost one of his eyes, emphasized a medical condition he apparently shared with Surkis; however, upon further reflection I remembered another odd detail: “Surkis owned one hundred sheep.” I then realized that while representing Surkis as the ultimate other to whom he aspired, Temel Amca also clung to details from Surkis's life with which he could identify. Despite his outsider status, by owning sheep and living like the forest villagers, Surkis had gained metaphorical entry into the everyday aspects of rural peasant culture. As a result, Temel Amca imagined Surkis as the ideal other, who was simultaneously different and similar, and by identifying with Surkis, he claimed modernity for himself.
The most interesting anecdote about Surkis came from Cavit, a witty man in his fifties who, like his peers, thought highly of Zingal's foreign personnel and whose Zingal memories were based on stories that his grandfather had told him. The anecdote he shared with me was about the oxen that forest villagers used for transporting logs. Cavit related that forest villagers would prod the oxen with spiked sticks whenever they paused. My initial reaction of outrage to this cruelty was welcomed by Cavit, who apparently expected and wanted to use my shock to reiterate the moral superiority of the foreigners; he described in vivid detail how a foreign foreman grabbed the stick from his grandfather and poked him in the back, saying: “It hurts, doesn't it? But when you hit the ox, it cannot speak and tell you that it hurts.” This foreman was, in fact, Surkis, or Silküs the InfidelFootnote 69 as they called him, who later told Cavit's grandfather: “You'll see what this place is like one day when it is Muslim infidels who run it.” By attesting to the cruelty of this act, Cavit identified himself with Surkis, the modern foreigner. However, this idiom of kinship was predicated on the implied superiority of Europeans. Consequently, Cavit reproduced the same us–them distinction that was prevalent in Hikmet Amca's discourse. Writing about African-American subjectivities, W.E.B. DuBois defined “double consciousness” as a way of “looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”Footnote 70 More than a half century later, Fanon described the state of being colonized in similar terms: “The colonized subject is constantly on his guard: Confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line.”Footnote 71 These men's narratives on the superiority of Europeans indicate that their sense of personhood was likewise constructed through the hegemonic encounter with foreigners. Through this encounter, they strived to imagine themselves as part of a modern reality but ultimately failed by undermining the self as inferior.
A very different Zingal narrative exists in archives and memories. This narrative represents the company's foreignness as destructive and exploitative in material and affective terms. Just as the glory narrative in memories was premised upon a categorical admiration of foreigners in the logic of Turkish modernity, the contempt for foreign Zingal was part of a larger discourse that interpreted the modern project in nativist terms. Orman ve Av could thus present a chauvinistic, even xenophobic attitude towards foreign experts while simultaneously praising them. This is exemplified in a commentary which derided officially-invited foreign experts by depicting them as unqualified forest guards.Footnote 72 A similar nativist discourse is evident in a series of complaints about Zingal forwarded by a parliamentarian to the prime minister in 1932. The authors support their claims of exploitation by foreigners by emphasizing the ethnic identities of their Turkish employees. The Circassian doctor or the Kurdish manager are accused of collaborating with the Jewish foreign staff, profiting from the misery of their fellow citizens. In addition, the Circassian doctor—praised in a local newspaper for his accomplishments in the company as well as his role in local politics a few years laterFootnote 73—is blamed for letting Turkish workers die while caring excessively for the foreign personnel. These letters also abound with corruption allegations, similar to those raised by journalist Arif Oruç, an opponent of the ruling party, in the Turkish-language daily Yarın (Tomorrow) in the 1930s.
A second component of Zingal's vilification that the complainants discussed earlier also incorporated within their xenophobic critique was the company's unsustainable methods. Locals and foreigners agree on Zingal's disregard for national interests in its extraction practices;Footnote 74 therefore, some praise the nationalization as a symbol of Prime Minister Inönü’s patriotism, while others, such as the president of the Forestry Cooperatives Union, whose grandfathers protested Zingal's clear-cutting practices, define it as the “peoples’ victory.” Hikmet Amca explained that instead of adhering to scientific methods of continuity, Zingal's personnel selected the most profitable trees:
If there was a hole this big [he gestured with his fingers to indicate a small hole] at the root of a tree, they didn't take it. [They took] the good ones . . . There was too much destruction then. They didn't take the fuelwood. They didn't take the hollow ones. The mountains rotted that way . . . They took whatever served their purposes.
Temel Amca's comments on Zingal's extraction practices were similar: “It was good that the company was transferred to the state because the state takes fuelwood and the decayed [trees], the state takes everything. They [Zingal] take whatever suits their needs and they leave the rest.”
Praising Zingal's nationalization and reminding me that these forests were originally leased to the Match Monopoly, locals and foresters defined Zingal's nineteen-year presence as a liminal period between two phases of state ownership, thereby naturalizing the nationalization. Ironically, the Match Monopoly, which evokes state ownership to anyone born in Turkey before the 1980s,Footnote 75 was not a national investment in the sense imagined by citizens. As I described earlier, like Zingal it was a foreign investment and the Match Monopoly's list of shareholders reveals the intricate ties between the ruling elite, the national bourgeoisie, and foreign capital in the early republic, İsmet İnönü, Turkey's first prime minister and later second president, Celal Bayar, founder of Türkiye İş Bankası (Labor Bank of Turkey) and Turkey's third president, and Yunus Nadi, founder of the daily Cumhuriyet (Republic), were involved with Zingal in different capacities.Footnote 76 This reality stands in stark contrast to the way İnönü is imagined as the national hero in the context of Zingal's nationalization. The intimacy between Zingal and the state was also evident at the local level, as exemplified by Enver Gök's positions as Zingal's manager and president of the local Republican People's Party branch. The Match Monopoly occupied an affective niche in memories because of this historical inaccuracy, engendering the misrepresentation that Zingal took over the concession of these forests from a national company. The underlying assumption behind locals’ interpretation of Zingal's nationalization was that the forests had been returned to where they belonged: the state.
Discussing the connections between state making and history, Fernando Coronil argues that “what is forgotten screens what is remembered. The persuasiveness of a historical account, like that of a magical performance, depends on rendering invisible the artifice of its production.”Footnote 77 Likewise, the social imaginary of the Match Monopoly's nativeness is not a simple misconception; it informs us of Turkish citizens’ embedded “structures of feeling” toward the state.Footnote 78 Williams defines structures of feeling as “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.”Footnote 79 Drawing on this definition, I argue that the ability to create, maintain, and naturalize an ethos based on the state's rightful ownership of forests has been the success of state forestry in Turkey. During fieldwork, no one from the local community talked to me about the settlement and the reparations; for them nationalization was a one-sided victory and not a two-party process that concluded with the government compensating the company for its loss. Their silence on the conclusion of the lawsuit between the government and Zingal confirms both the fragmented aspects of their historical knowledge as well as their understanding that the state's ownership of the forest as well as the factory was normal and expected. Comments made by forest villagers during my fieldwork about the need for the state to act as a mediator in forestry further prove the hegemonic patriarchal role attributed to the state.
Zingal's nationalization was neither sudden nor confined to unsustainable practices; instead, nationalization was the final stage of ongoing disagreements between the government and the company going back to 1935. Initial disputes between the company and the local forestry agencyFootnote 80 were followed by a detailed complaint letter addressed to the prime minister in 1938.Footnote 81 Around the same time, in 1937, Yunus Nadi addressed the prime minister warning him that the new Forest Act's protectionist and statist elements would impact the private sector negatively.Footnote 82 In 1942, by which time state forest enterprises had spread throughout the country,Footnote 83 disagreements between Zingal and the government escalated over the procurement of pit-props for the coal mines in the western Black Sea area.Footnote 84 Moreover, the date of Zingal's nationalization is also noteworthy; in 1946, the single-party regime in Turkey came to an end with the creation of an opposition party whose populist rhetoric challenged the state's prerogative over forests. It is no coincidence that Zingal was nationalized in the same year that an amendment to the law nationalized all forests; in fact, nationalization was an inevitable step in the consolidation of a state-led national economy. However, regardless of the trajectory of Turkish statism, which makes Zingal's nationalization seem almost inevitable, the public remembers it as a patriotic move to conserve national forests, disparaging the company as a parasitic entity despite widespread recognition that Ayancık could not have existed without it.
These two narratives on Zingal connote contradictory yet simultaneous ways of being modern citizens. While one narrative illustrates citizens’ interpretation of nature as part of the national domain through a nativist ideology, the other highlights their cosmopolitan attitude steered by the internalization of the west's superiority. K. Sivaramakrishnan and Gunnel Cederlöf's ecological nationalism theory, which argues for the coexistence of seemingly contradictory agendas, can easily be applied to analyze the entanglement of contradictory discourses on Zingal. They define ecological nationalism as “a condition where . . . versions of nature devotion converge and express themselves as a form of nation-pride in order to become part of processes legitimizing and consolidating a nation,” thereby deconstructing the idea of a single nationalist modernity and demonstrating the “ways in which varieties of nationalism are mediated and constructed through reference to the natural.”Footnote 85 Interpreting Zingal narratives as variants of nationalist modernity that coalesce around an environmental idiom allows us to investigate natural resource policies by deconstructing strict binaries such as the state and society, and prioritizing the entanglement of state building, nature making, and subject formation. Moreover, the coexistence of these two narratives in the official archival record demonstrates that modernity did not dissolve into contradictory fragments as it was disseminated within the social realm but rather was a fragmented project from the beginning. The complaint letters that I analyzed earlier provide a good example. The most striking aspect of these letters is not their xenophobic resentment, but their location in the archival record next to several other complaints about forestry department officials. The report that rules out the allegations about other forestry officials as defamation completely disregards the accusations against Zingal. Similar examples of government inaction in response to allegations of misconduct survive in the archival record alongside the government's tacit approval of Zingal, reinforcing the ambivalences. In sum, these contradictory Zingal narratives constitute not an envisioned modernity and resistance to it, but rather modernity itself, which is reflected though fragmented representations.
CONCLUSION: REMEMBERING IN THE PRESENT, REMEMBERING AS THE PRESENT
Field Notes. Ayancık. April 2010. The ghost of Zingal is everywhere. Reality stems from absence, not presence, decay not growth. Wherever I go, I am greeted by black and white images, overwhelming me with eeriness. Everyone asks if I have seen the old photos. “Old photos” is like a code here, anchoring the past within the present. But, if Zingal's ghost is always here, is Zingal a memory? Or perhaps, as Ricoeur writes, what is remembered, must first be forgotten. . .
Memories of Zingal are not confined to the past; they define citizens’ sense of self in the present. During my research, the defunct timber factory, the first structure one encountered driving into Ayancık from Sinop, loomed like a ghost at the eastern edge of the town. Its buildings and machinery intact—though rusty and ragged—this ghost factory stood as a symbol of the region's transformation during the 20th century. When I returned to Ayancık in 2016 and 2017, most of these ruins had been removed and the elderly I interviewed had passed away. Today's deindustrialized landscape and empty villages stand in stark contrast to Ayancık's earlier thriving economy. Although forestry continues to be the main source of income for the remaining forest villagers, the factory's closure after privatization has left Ayancık as a shell of the vibrant economic hub that it once was, generating resentment among residents. One beam of the old air cable transportation system piercing the sky from a hilltop in Çangal and two steam locomotives are all that remains of Zingal.Footnote 86 The rest is buried under the forest fog and foliage.
Yet, the ghost of Zingal is a permanent presence in the town, embodied in the black and white photographs that emerge as everyday inscriptions of the town's industrial golden age. Adorning the walls of public offices, storefronts, and living rooms, photos of Ayancık's past glory compete with the ever-present portraits of Atatürk. Challenging the public–private binary, the photographs bridge these realms, attesting to the production of the political in everyday contexts.Footnote 87 Although inscriptions of the ruins within Ayancık's social and political landscape serve as a statement of industrial capitalism's signature, their function within the discourse of resentment in deindustrialized Ayancık illustrates how subjectivities are formed in the spaces between the state and society, challenging the rigidity of strictly separate categories. The affective space created by ruins is not a naive romanticized narrative, but a deliberate political engagement with the present. Building on the literature on nostalgia, which defines it as a constructive and agentive political stance,Footnote 88 I define the photographs as emblems of modern citizens’ engagement with the present. The photographs allow residents of the region to claim modernity and to respond to the failures of late capitalism through a discourse of resentment.
Ann Stoler's distinction between ruins and ruination allows us to understand Ayancık residents’ agentive engagement with Zingal's legacy. By juxtaposing ruins—passive, timeless remainders of the past—with ruination—the process by which the remains of the past actively influence individuals and social reality—Stoler situates the process of ruination beyond binary categories such as structure and agency. She invites us to abandon the melancholic trope of ruins as the “quintessential image of what has vanished from the past” and to reflect on ruination as “a corrosive process that weighs on the future and shapes the present” by reorienting our gaze away from “inert remains” to “their vital refiguration.”Footnote 89 Likewise, the ruins of Zingal and the black-and-white photographs, rather than passive reminders of the past, provide locals with agency to reflect upon and engage with the present. Romanticized representations of the industrial past are modern citizens’ deliberate discourse of resentment about today's deindustrialization.
Like the modernity embedded within Ayancık residents’ memories of Zingal, their current engagement with modernity via nostalgic resentment is inherently contradictory. A major development in the region in recent years has been the government's plan to build one of Turkey's first two nuclear plants in Sinop. Today, complaints over Sinop's recessive economy accompany massive local resistance to the nuclear plant, presenting an obvious paradox. Because Ayancık residents make sense of the present through an industrial past, and resent the languor engendered by deindustrialization, it is logical to expect they would endorse a new industrial venture. How can we explain that the same people who bemoan the loss of a certain industrial past oppose a nuclear-industrial future? How can they expect their lives to get better while simultaneously rejecting a project that can help them realize that expectation?Footnote 90 How can the majority of the citizens living in this area reject the economic opportunities that the plant would engender while a minority of the population cites those very opportunities as their main reason for supporting the project?
Recent discussions in the humanities and social sciences on “the good life” attempt to explain the coexistence of such incommensurate aspirations in the context of globalized modernity. I read this recent scholarship as a continuation of the ecological nationalism literature. If the ecological nationalism theory is about the various discourses of nationalist modernity in the 20th century, the discussions of the good life seek to understand the coexistence of conflicting responses to globalized modernity by paying closer attention to the complexities of the 21st century.Footnote 91 Providing examples from urban middle-class Germany and rural peasant Guatemala, Edward Fischer argues that economic anomalies, instances wherein individuals or groups do not support profit-maximizing rational choices, can only be understood through culturally embedded notions of a good life. He explains that “individuals give meaning to their economic activities, each seeking the good life each in his or her own way, and often in ways that run counter to their immediate material interests.”Footnote 92 Likewise, Ayancık residents define a good life in ways more complicated than the assumption that the economic opportunities provided by a nuclear power plant supersede other realities. Economic livelihood and wealth feature in their contemporary definition of being modern citizens, but this version of modernity does not always align with other citizenship demands such as a healthy, sustainable future. Their opposition to a nuclear power plant proves that nostalgia and the good life are predicaments of complex and dynamic processes contingent upon history and culture. Although heavy industry is at the core of their definition of past modernity, their current expectations do not necessarily rely on industry alone, underscoring the contingent definitions of a good life.
In this article, I narrated the history of Zingal's modern forest industry within the context of nation building in Turkey, pointing to ways in which ideas of the nation, the state, and nature have been constructed simultaneously. Revealing the conflicting ways Zingal is narrated in the archival record, I also argued that we need to rethink Turkish modernity as an ambivalent process composed of competing discourses. As the current paradox of these citizens’ resentment over deindustrialization and vehement opposition to the introduction of nuclear industry shows, the coexistence of contradictory aspirations continues to be a feature of 21st-century modes of citizenship.
While I was doing my research in the region in 2009–10, I often felt frustrated that the rest of Turkey was oblivious to Zingal's remarkable history. How could such an important aspect of Turkish history evade much of the country's memory when it held such significance in locals’ sense of self? Over the years, I realized a flaw in this question. I understood that while Zingal is remembered in various ways by locals, perhaps it is not a memory. If remembering is the present, are we not refuting the very idea of the present by calling it a memory? Understanding the contradictions through which citizens remember the past as a presentist act is crucial to responding to ambiguities in the present. As similar cases of deindustrialization afflict other places in Turkey and around the world, it is crucial to evoke Walter Benjamin's call to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”Footnote 93
