Street-level governing : negotiating the state in urban Turkey
Bibliographic Information
Street-level governing : negotiating the state in urban Turkey
Elise Massicard
（Stanford studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures）
Stanford University Press, c2022
- Other Title
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Gouverner par la proximité : une sociologie politique des maires de quartier en Turquie
Governing by proximity : a political sociology of neighborhood headmen in Turkey
Available at / 2 libraries
Note
"A version of this work was originally published in French in 2019 under the title Gouverner par la proximité: une sociologie politique des maires de quartier en Turquie (Governing by Proximity: A Political Sociology of Neighborhood Headmen in Turkey) c2019, Éditions Karthala, Paris."--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. [299]-313) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public officials, but local citizens do not always associate them with the central government. Street-Level Governing is the first book to investigate how muhtars carry out their role-not only what they are supposed to do, but how they actually operate-to provide an ethnographic study of the state as viewed from its margins. It starts from the premise that the seeming "margin" of state administration is not peripheral at all, but instructive as to how it functions.
As Elise Massicard shows, muhtars exist at the intersection of everyday life and the exercise of power. Their position offers a personalized point of contact between citizens and state institutions, enabling close oversight of the citizenry, yet simultaneously projecting the sense of an accessible state to individuals. Challenging common theories of the state, Massicard outlines how the position of the muhtar throws into question an assumed dichotomy between domination and social resistance, and suggests that considerations of circumvention and accommodation are normal attributes of state-society functioning.
Table of Contents
1. An Incompletely Formed Institution
2. How the Muhtarlik Fuels the Production of Notables
3. The Muhtars' Changing Role
4. The Residents' Champion
5. Ambivalent Interface with the Official Order
6. Enacting Context-Dependent Roles
7. Working within and Modulating Institutional Constraints
8. The Muhtarliks' Waning Autonomy
Conclusion
by "Nielsen BookData"
