Master Thesis Defense: Bürge Abiral

Catastrophic Futures, Anxious Presents:

Lifestyle Activism and Hope in the Permaculture Movement in Turkey

Bürge Abiral
Cultural Studies, M.Sc. Thesis, 2015

Thesis Jury
Ayşe Parla(Thesis Advisor), Faik Kurtulmuş, Ozan Zeybek, Özlem Altan Olcay(Substitute Jury)

Date &Time: June,12th, 2015 – 10:00

Place: Karaköy Minerva Han

Abstract

This thesis presents a critical exploration of the permaculture movement in Turkey from various interlocking angles. An ecological landscape design system that functions with the ethical values of caring for people and for Earth as well as sharing the surplus, permaculture was put forth in Australia in the 1970s, and became a worldwide movement which refrains from using a political language, especially a leftist one, despite its ultimate desire to establish a “global alternative nation” that consists of ecological and self-sufficient communities. Through ethnographic fieldwork with permaculture groups in Turkey, I explore the reflections of this closet movement and its post-ideological language in the post-coup neoliberal context in Turkey. I ask why permaculture appeals particularly to educated, middle and upper-middle class urbanites. Exploring how their middle-class consumer habitus shifts to an ecological, or what I specify as a permaculturist habitus, I argue that this transformation is already enabled by the privileged positions occupied by permaculturists in society. I then evaluate the lifestyle strategies employed by permaculturists to enact change in the world. Moving beyond approaches that either uncritically appraise or unquestionably bash lifestyle activism, I claim that the conception of social change in permaculture heavily replicates Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Finally, I turn to the catastrophic scenarios that circulate among permaculturists about the future of the Earth, and reconciling utopian politics and apocalypticism, I argue that permaculturists produce two forms of hope, anxious hope and catastrophic hope, the interaction of which places hope both in the present and the future.