Turkey as a Simulated Country

Book excerpt: Turkey’s recent history is filled with stories of immigration. With the number of immigrants exceeding three million, the Syrians who came to Turkey after the civil war in their country could be considered Turkey’s largest experience with migration. This book provides a broad overview of the politics of urbanism within the “exceptional state”, looking at what cannot be sacrificed but can be killed, leaving biopolitics as an escape route, with original and authentic elements included. This book analyses the cultural meaning of individual life, presenting the results of a field survey. This study allows us to read belonging, and the possessive ties of the nostalgic identity within the present time, represented by photography as a rupture in the continuity of history, and provides a sociological and ontological reading of the image. Incorporating the meanings of visual images into the sociological field research, it reveals the tentative expressions of reality itself, with while coding the image of the external world.