Professor Yael Navaro FBA

Biography

Yael Navaro is a social anthropologist who specializes in the study of politics, the state, and political violence and its aftermaths. She has contributed to crafting a distinctively affective, spatial and material approach for the study of postwar environments, embedding social, political, and psychological anthropology through new methodologies. Regionally, her work has focused on social and political life in Turkey and Cyprus, and she has a dedicated ongoing interest in ethnographically studying politics and the aftermath of mass violence in the everyday of the region. She has conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in Istanbul, Cyprus and Antakya. Her publications, research collaborations, and teaching also explore the politics of ethnographic and archival research, dealing with issues of representation and erasure.

Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Professor Navaro studied at Brandeis University (BA in Sociology, 1991) and Princeton University (MA in Anthropology, 1993 and PhD in Anthropology, 1998). She was a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (1997-1999) and has been teaching at the University of Cambridge since 1999. She is currently Professor of Social, Political and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology at Newnham College.

Professor Navaro has given several named and keynote lectures including the Malinowski Memorial Lecture (London School of Economics, 2007), the Marett Memorial Lecture (Oxford, 2023), and the Berndt Lambert Memorial Lecture (Cornell, 2025), among others.

In 2025, Professor Navaro was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Research

Professor Navaro’s first book Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002) is a study of the production of a state-revering public culture in Turkey through ethnographic work on the interface between secularism and Islamism in Istanbul. This interest led her, in further research, to study the unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus and its administration. She conceptualised this space through a query about affect and materiality in a postwar environment. Her second book The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012), based on long-term fieldwork in Northern Cyprus, explores affect and the emotions retained in homes, spaces and personal objects expropriated and used in the aftermath of war, along a makeshift border, as well as in the documents, bureaucracy, and legal practices of an unrecognized state.

Between January 2012 and December 2016, Professor Navaro was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project entitled “Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey” (REMNANTS). The project addressed the aftermath of mass violence in the contemporary everyday of Turkey through the core concept of ‘remnants’ which was explored as the material, spatial and political legacy of past atrocities. A core co-edited volume based on this project has been published under the title Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). This book puts political violence studies in conversation with posthuman philosophy, making a distinctive contribution to the anthropology of violence.

Professor Navaro has been writing a book based on long-term fieldwork on inter-communal relations in post-2012 Antakya, Turkey. Her further current work explores more-than-human worlds in the aftermath of catastrophe, focusing especially on the earthquake that hit the city of Antakya in 2023, and connecting her research interests in the anthropology of politics with environmental anthropology.

Research interests

Anthropology of politics; ethnography of the state; political violence; political geography; borders and border practices; legal and documentary practices; bureaucracy and administration; postwar environments and ruination; affect, subjectivity, and the emotions; space and materiality; history and memory; minorities and minoritization practices; inter-communal relations; spiritual practices and relations with spiritual entities; secularism and Islamism; anthropological and social/political theory; the anthropology of the Middle East; the anthropology of Europe; Turkey, Cyprus, post-Ottoman societies.

Publications

Books

Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. (awarded the 2013 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology)

Kurmaca Mekan: Kuzey Kıbrıs’ın Duygu Coğrafyası. Istanbul: Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2016 (Translation: Cem Soydemir).

Devlet’in Suretleri: Türkiye’de Sekülarizm ve Kamusal Yasam. Istanbul: Heretik Yayınları, 2020. (Translation: Mukadder Okuyan & Isık Önal).

Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space. (co-edited with Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein and Seda Altuğ). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Edited Special Issues

“An Impromptu Uprising: Ethnographic Reflections on the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey.” Yildirim, Umut and Navaro-Yashin, Yael, ed. Fieldsights – Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, October 31, 2013.

Special Issue on “Phantasmatic Realities, Passionate States” (co-edited with Jane Cowan), Anthropological Theory 7: 1 (2007).

Journal Articles

"The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology." Annual Review of Anthropology 49 (2020), 161-73.

“Pacifist Devices: the Human/Technology Interface in the Field of Conflict Resolution.” Cambridge Anthropology, Special Issue on ‘Bureaucratic Knowledge Practices,’ 28: 3 (2008/2009), 91-112.

“Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” (Malinowski Memorial Lecture). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) 15: 1 (2009), 1-18.

“Make-Believe Papers, Legal Forms, and the Counterfeit: Affective Interactions Between Documents and People in Britain and Cyprus.” Anthropological Theory 7:1 (2007), 79-96.

“Introduction: Fantasy and the Real in the Work of Begona Aretxaga.” Anthropological Theory 7:1 (2007), 5-8.

“Affect in the Civil Service: A Study of a Modern State -System.” Postcolonial Studies 9:3 (2006), 281-294.

“‘Life is Dead Here': Sensing the Political in ‘No Man’s Land’.” Anthropological Theory 3: 1 (2003), 107-125. (re-published in Neni Panourgia and George E. Marcus, eds. Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, 168-187.)

“Uses and Abuses of ‘State and Society’ in Contemporary Turkey.” New Perspectives on Turkey 18 (1998), 1-22.

“Entrapped Between Categories: ‘East,’ ‘West,’ and the Practices of Consumption of Turkish-Islamists.’ Sociologus: Journal for Empirical Ethnosociology and Ethnopsychology 48:1 (1998), 1-16.

“Evde Taylorizm: Cumhuriyet’in ilk Yıllarında Evisinin Rasyonellesmesi.” (“Taylorism in the House: The Rationalization of Housewifery in the Early Republic”). Toplum ve Bilim 84 (2000), 51-74. (in Turkish)

“Bir İktidar Söylemi Olarak ‘Sivil Toplum’.” (“Civil Society as a Discourse of Power”). Birikim 105-106 (1998), 57-62. (in Turkish)

Book Chapters

“Introduction: Reverberations of Violence,” (co- authored) in Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein and Seda Altuğ, ed., Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

“Violence and Spirituality: Khidr Cosmography at the Turkish/Syrian Interface,” in Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein and Seda Altuğ, ed., Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

“Benjamin on the Trail of the Armenian Genocide,” in Nils Bubandt and Thomas Schwartz Wenzer, ed., Philosophy on Fieldwork: Case Studies in Anthropological Analysis. London: Routledge. 2022.

“Knowing the City: Migrants Negotiating the Built Environment in Istanbul”, in Helmut Anheier, Yudishtir Raj Isar, and Dacia Viejo-Rose, ed. Heritage, Memory and Identity (The Cultures and Globalization Series, Volume 4). London: Sage, 2011, 231-38.

“The Materiality of Sovereignty: Geographical Expertise and Changing Place Names in Northern Cyprus”, in P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, and Caglar Keyder ed. Spatial Conceptions of the Nation: Modernizing Geographies in Greece and Turkey. London: I.B.Tauris, 2010, 127-43.

“De-Ethnicizing the Ethnography of Cyprus: Political and Social Conflict Between Turkish-Cypriots and Settlers from Turkey”, in Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz, eds, Divided Cyprus: Modernity and an Island in Conflict. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, 84-99.

“Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State”, in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat, eds, Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 103-119.

“Legal/Illegal Counterpoints: Subjecthood and Subjectivity in an Unrecognized State”, in Richard Ashby Wilson and Jon P. Mitchell, eds. Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements. London: Routledge, 2003, 71-92.

“The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities”, in Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, eds. Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002, 221-253. (re-published in Turkish, 2003).

“The Historical Construction of Local Culture: Gender and Identity in the Politics of Secularism Versus Islam”, in Caglar Keyder, ed. Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999. (re-published in Turkish, 2000).

Online Articles

“Shadows of the 1980 Coup and the Syrian War: Resisting in Antakya.” Fieldsights – Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, October 31, 2013.

“Editorial-Breaking Memory, Spoiling Memorization: The Taksim Protests in Istanbul.” Fieldsights – Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, October 31, 2013.