Kaçak | qaçax | قاچاق : fugitive forms of bureaucracy and economy across Southwest Asia

ABSTRACT

Electricity and petroleum stolen from grids of distribution. Livestock, tea, and tobacco traded as contraband goods across national borders. An apartment building built without permits. A defendant who refuses to show up to his trial. What unites these seemingly disparate situations in Turkey, Kurdistan and Iran is that they are all described with the qualifier kaçak. Although conventionally translated into English as the equivalent of ‘smuggled good,' the semantic domain of kaçak in Turkish (loaned into Kurdish and Persian) is more capacious than ‘smuggled’ signifies: Derived from the Turkish verb kaçmak - to run away, flee, or be a fugitive - kaçak helps us recover the act of breaching the obligations of a social or legal contract as a constitutive field of politics, framed by the socio-cultural constructions of modern bureaucracy and economy. Each participant tracks kaçak as a good, as a tapped resource or a legally sanctioned person, and shows the many forms kaçak takes in the hands of concrete social actors under historically specific material conditions. Further, kaçak provides a historically and geographically more expansive windows into the politically instituted process that is the making of states and economies in cross-regional and cross-disciplinary ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Contraband commerce
• informality
• fugitivity

Acknowledgements

Conference grants from Northwestern’s Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, Department of Anthropology and Program in Middle East and North African Studies as well as an international workshop grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation funded the two gatherings that made this special issue possible. For their generous comments and support on this project in its various iterations, I am grateful to Ayfer Bartu Candan, Koray Çalışkan, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Fırat Bozçalı, Seçil Dağtaş, Haydar Darıcı, Julia Elyachar, Sinan Erensü, Daniella Gandolfo, Ipek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu, Yael Navaro, Zeynep Oğuz, Cihan Tekay, and Nazan Üstündağ. The generous comments of the anonymous Journal of Cultural Economy reviewers markedly improved this editorial. Philip Roscoe and Liz McFall have generously guided the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation.