Doctoral Dissertation Research: Earthquake Anticipation in Istanbul

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Doctoral student Elizabeth Angell (Columbia University), supervised by Dr. Brinkley Messick, will investigate how the expectation of a major natural disaster affects human-landscape interactions. The research will be conducted through a case study of Istanbul, Turkey, a megacity located in an active fault zone with a history of devastating earthquakes. The research will examine the experience and effects of earthquake anticipation in Istanbul, both as a technopolitical project that seeks to mold landscapes, buildings, and bodies into a state of preparedness, and as an affective relationship to time and space generated through dwelling in a seismically active landscape.The researcher will conduct thirteen months of ethnographic research in Istanbul, employing participant-observation research and semi-structured interviews in both expert and non-expert settings, gathering published and archival documentary material, and surveying selected buildings and areas. The research will ask how earthquake risk is produced as an object of knowledge by experts like seismologists, engineers, and actuaries, but also through rumor, superstition, and religious faith; document how anticipation is translated into action; and explore how the social imagination of disaster affects everyday experiences of life in Istanbul's seismic cityscape. The research will expand the anthropological study of disaster by focusing specifically on anticipation and its generative effects, and contributing to theoretical conversations about anticipation, risk, and preparedness. The study of urban life in an earthquake zone foregrounds the co-constitution of people and landscape, by which is meant the role of different kinds of information and practices in shaping social perception and experience of place. The project will therefore integrate theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches from landscape archaeology and geography, exploring their potential for the interdisciplinary study of human-landscape interaction. Finally, the project will contribute specifically to the anthropology of contemporary Turkey by focusing attention on the topics of science, disaster, and the environment. Supporting this research also contributes to the education of a social scientist.