Abstract
Fortune-telling is one of the oldest forms of social practice. Curious to foresee what the future has in stock for them, human beings have developed myriad types of fortune‐telling modalities, as well as connected practices of divination. Seen as not being rooted in any rational or scientific basis, those practices were mostly dismissed as mere trifles of charlatanry by modern social sciences.
Zeynep K. Korkman's Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey is a fascinating book on fortune‐telling in twenty‐first‐century Istanbul. Based on impressive, extended (auto-)ethnographic fieldwork and archival/genealogical research, Korkman's study analyzes the fortune‐telling economy that has developed in Turkey since the early 2000s. This economy and its various components, including but not limited to fortune‐telling cafés that emerged in the central districts of Istanbul and then proliferated in the rest of the city and the country, serve as an “affective window onto the gendered contradictions of (post) secularism, Islamist authoritarianism, and neoliberalism” (p. 2).
Korkman’s feminist perspective is highly informative, shedding light on how various actors in this fortune‐telling economy—including secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals—experience “the anxieties of the postsecular condition” (p. 2) since the coming to power of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002. The author also charts how those individuals experience the “vulnerabilities of gendered marginalization,” as well as the “precarities of neoliberalization” (p. 2) since the early 1980s. Korkman's work is also highly critical of the western, colonial, [Orientalist] gaze (some of which is disguised as pseudofeminism) that employs patronizing approaches toward Muslim Middle Eastern societies and ignores the agency as well as the diversity and vitality of feminist and queer movements.
Korkman first takes us on a historical tour whereby the worldly and the heavenly (religious) spheres in the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey are dynamically and critically analyzed. Challenging the claim that in the classical Ottoman Empire those two spheres were binarily opposed, the author convincingly argues that they were not competing spheres, separate from and in conflict with one another. It is in this nuanced, historical context that Korkman locates divinatory practices that are gendered and indicative as well as constitutive of societal hierarchies and mechanisms of stratification.
Charting the emergence and increasing domination of the secular in national polity and mentalities, we learn about how divination was increasingly associated with backwardness since the nineteenth century and was later criminalized in the early Republican era. In this context, the pro‐western, reformist, secular, authoritarian new Republican regime at once increasingly put the religious sphere under tight state control, criminalizing the backward/masculine figure of the divinatory “hodja” who was portrayed as preying on vulnerable, impressionable women who had to be “saved” by the rational, secular, scientific masculinity of the Republic. It is very interesting also to note that the Turkish Republican regime at the same time ethnoracialized other population groups, such as the Kurds, who were also associated with backwardness and even savagery. While the late Ottoman period and the early Republican Orientalism are covered well, the reader could use a little more explanation as to why the increasingly dominant reformist Ottoman and later Turkish nationalist modernization projects are also “almost postcolonial” (pp. 23, 39, 51–53). This is potentially a very important and interesting point but remains less elaborated than other discussions in the book.
In the same context, women's divinatory practices were pushed further into the less‐problematic domestic sphere. We see the assignment of women's popular practices such as reading coffee grounds as tolerable and mundane, and supportive of the Republican regime's promotion of heteronormative domesticity. Here we see a historical continuity that stretched from the 1920s until the emergence of the fortune‐telling cafés in the 2000s that challenged the monopoly of the domestic sphere over coffee‐grounds‐reading and other feminized, divinatory practices.
By the mid-2000s, the hegemony of Kemalism is shaken and later is supplanted by Islamism of the AKP and then Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The AKP and conservatives consider such fortune‐telling practices outside of established standards of Sunni Islam. Korkman vividly describes the post‐secular anxieties of the more modern, urban, secular citizens of Turkey and shows that those populations are the main clientele of the rising fortune‐telling cafés. Those groups now brush off their former distaste for numerous forms of divination and increasingly engage in seeking shelter under the big tent made up of similar divinatory practices, including claiming to have seen revered late founder of the Republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s silhouette in coffee residues: “[o]n social media, in online divination platforms, and in fortune‐telling cafés, the secular and secularist citizens of twenty‐first‐century Turkey are turning to coffee cups to divine their individual and collective futures” (p. 90). This post‐secular interest in divination, Korkman argues, is in line with the new ethos of consumerism and neoliberalism.
The AKP and conservatives find such fortune‐telling practices outside of established standards of Sunni Islam. But somewhat paradoxically, AKP was also instrumental in the harmonization of laws to align better the Turkish occupational codes, formulations, and implementations, with the best practices in the European Union when Turkey was aiming to become a member, a feat no longer enthusiastically supported on either side. Those administrative changes and relaxation of limitations in turn allowed the legal ground for the opening and normalization of fortune‐telling cafés and other divinatory establishments as legitimate businesses. This new economy of fortune‐telling, Korkman convincingly argues, also includes other “traditional” (such as lead pouring) as well as “new age” practices (such as Reiki, NLP, and others).
Korkman discusses “affectivity of fortune‐telling as a window onto the coimbrications of femininity, intimacy, sociability, and space” (p. 112). Women and LGBTIQ individuals provide the main human resources of this new economy; they at once navigate their own gendered marginalization. The anonymity of the fortune‐telling café, in turn, provides a protective cover to those members of the secular Muslim clientele, generic enough to fit them into a generalized femininity, but intimate and personal enough for them to feel heard and special. Korkman's conceptualization of divination is based on Berlant's (2018) discussion of “women’s intimate publics as connected to the genre of ‘female complaint’” (p. 115).
Korkman discusses such forms within a more general “therapeutic ethic of neoliberalism . . . situated outside officially sanctioned biomedical and psychotherapeutic modalities of care” (p. 168). Within this setting, previously looked‐down‐on forms of fortune‐telling confirm scientific authority by offering their services only in a complementary or auxiliary capacity. The cup-reader-as-[folk] therapist resides within a general culture of the neoliberal market of consumerism that fortifies an ethos of “self-sufficiency” just as social security and other welfare state policies are progressively dismantled. Not only precarious employees, but also narcissistic‐sounding, self-defined “philosopher-king” wannabees and self‐made entrepreneurs populate this diverse and highly entangled field of what others may have called “laborscapes.” This work culture in turn is no longer only narrowly limited to the city or even to the country. Instead, it takes on a transnational character whereby its labor force is increasingly staffed by immigrants from Asia and Arab Gulf countries, bilingual translators, and others hailing from the global South. Korkman's book is an excellent feminist work that ends with a call for “affecting feminism” (p. 221) as part of an “intersubjective feeling labor that can foster feminist affective solidarities” (p. 223). One hopes that this call will be heeded by other scholars, laborers, and activists.