Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey by Salih Can Açıksöz (review)

I watch as a kid from the rear window of our car a part of Istanbul I never knew existed, as my father drives the family through a lower-class neighborhood one weekend, at the peak times of the Kurdish conflict in the mid-1990s. As our car struggles uphill and downhill along the edges of the Aydos Mountain, I ask my father, then an officer serving in the military judiciary, where we are going. He curtly replies that he has to see an acquaintance, whom I later learn from my mother is an ex-conscript who was injured during his service in the Southeast, the primary geography of war and political violence in Turkey. Our car comes to a stop, and my father disappears beyond the wooden door of a small hut with a puffing chimney. Left wondering what and who lies beyond the wooden door, we console ourselves with the tandir bread neighborhood women conjure from a mysterious fireplace nearby.

A product of fieldwork over twenty-nine months, Sacrificial Limbs is a riveting multi-sited ethnography that takes us beyond the proverbial wooden door, bringing into view the lives of disabled veterans—gazis—who were injured while fighting as mandatory conscripts in Turkey's protracted and ongoing war against the PKK. Meeting the disabled veterans in a gray zone where easy distinctions between victimhood and perpetration collapse under the weight of a drawn-out war that underlies the very social fabric we all weave and are caught up in, Açıksöz highlights the everyday lives of disabled veterans with great ethnographic thickness, theoretical command, and attention to the gendered, classed, political, and moral double binds they involve. As Açıksöz navigates across "the multiple physical, mediatized, and virtual spaces in which disabled veterans [are] embodied, represented, and governed" (p. xv), he steers clear from representing the disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict either as conduit perpetrators of sovereign violence or as ill-fated victims of war. Yet, Açıksöz also feigns no pretense of occupying a "neutral ethnographic position" (p. xxiii), for he stands opposed to his disabled veteran interlocutors along the political spectrum. Indeed, this generative tension between the author and his subjects marks one of the book's chief strengths, because rarely in the ethnographic literature on Turkey do we see an analytical engagement based on extensive participant observation with populations whose political allegiances and practices may seem unpalatable, if not openly hostile, to our political sensibilities and lifeworlds.

The book traces the lives of disabled veterans from their pre-injury soldiering experiences to their post-injury coalescing around a collective gazi identity and subsequent politicization, often along ultranationalist lines. Açıksöz starts with the most central facet of war: that war makes and unmakes bodies. He shows the military's attempts at inculcating in soldiers "a new embodiment and sensorium" (p. 26), in line with the exigencies of counterinsurgency. While detailing the cultivation of a new soldier body and sensorium for fighting on the mountains, Açıksöz refrains from treating the body as a mere repository of physical capacities or as a flat surface of human agency and experience. Instead, the book fleshes out the soldier's body as a living, breathing, hurting, and a potentially hurtful entity that is physically and sensorially malleable, technologically mediated, and affectively infused, often brewing with unruly attachments from war experiences on the mountains that follow people through their post-injury lives, structuring their desires and dispositions.

Then, Açıksöz moves to the post-injury lives of his interlocutors, detailing the ways that their embodied experiences as disabled veterans stand at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and class in a profoundly ableist society. His analysis hinges on a key diagnosis that gives disabled veteran lives in Turkey their distinctive character: That the heteropatriarchial contract binding the male citizenry to the state...