How does a protest last? rituals of visibility, disappearances under custody, and the Saturday Mothers in Turkey

Abstract

Organizing weekly silent sit-in protests since the mid-1990s, the families of the disappeared created Turkey's longest-lasting civil disobedience movement, known as the Saturday Mothers. Ritualizing their resistance, the group maintained the feeling of solidarity among its participants, attracted spectators, and ensured public visibility. Yet, as this protest form became popular, the participants felt uncomfortable with how they were represented in the wider public, especially how they were reduced to the spectacle of suffering in official and popular discourses. Thus, they often found themselves grappling with the tension between their desire to become visible and their refusal to be represented as a public spectacle of mothers' suffering. Rather than solely focusing on material and spiritual resources of the movement, activists' meaning-making processes, or the state's tactics to end the movement, this article introduces the analytics of ritual and spectacle to highlight the ongoing negotiations between protestors' subjectivity, collective action, popular representations of the protest, and state violence. The productive tension between ritualized protest and its spectacularized lives suggests a need to revise anthropological theories about progressive social movements that juxtapose the hidden versus public, the individual versus collective, and the institutionalized versus spontaneous forms of resistance.