Welfare as Gift

Front matter

Hilal Alkan Welfare as Gift

ZMO-Studien

Studien des Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Preface

I am writing this preface in the aftermath of the earthquakes of 6 and 20 February 2023, which turned whole towns in southern Turkey and northern Syria to rubble, claiming more than 50,000 lives and displacing millions. Thousands of individuals and groups did everything they could to reach the disaster zone, completely unprompted, as soon as they heard the news. They pulled people from under the concrete, cooked meals, washed clothes, erected tents, and distributed whatever they brought along and whatever other people sent. Loose, ad-hoc networks mobilised volunteers, as much as established NGOs did. Pleas for help echoed and were magnified on social media, as did the responses to organise, deliver, and sustain. The state fell short of fulfilling its role to provide for those affected with catastrophic incapacity, ineptness, corruption, and inability to deal with the magnitude of the disaster. The question, “where is the state?” echoed everywhere. Once they were finally and belatedly in the field, state actors of all ranks proved quick to employ a paternalist, benevolent language. What I had observed in a medium-sized town more than a decade ago unfolded on a grand scale once again: gift-giving with its capacity to heal, console, and mend, as well as to humiliate, select, and exclude; with its reliance on informal networks and bridging/demolishing the distinctions between public and private property; through entitlements that go beyond citizenship rights, and interpellations that go beyond civic duties.

This book focuses on the provision of welfare by religiously informed local non-state agents to alleviate the effects of poverty. It identifies the mechanism that makes circulation of goods, services, and affects possible within that field as gift-giving and traces the vocabulary that smoothens tensions and enables shortcuts within those gift circles. It employs a close-up view of the intimate, embodied encounters between the workers/volunteers and beneficiaries of several aid institutions, as well as of the processes of resource creation. It is based on ethnographic research conducted within charitable organisations in the central Anatolian town of Kayseri between 2008-2009, which led to my doctoral dissertation “An Enchanted Welfare: Islamic Imaginary and Giving to Strangers in Turkey”, appearing in 2013.

Although it was only just over a decade ago, my time in Kayseri feels like a whole different age. It was before the Syrian exodus and the settlement of 3.5 million Syrian migrants in Turkey. After 2013-2014, when the Syrians were left to their own fate in cities all around the country, a large proportion of non-state welfare provision was redirected to Syrian migrants. In my postdoctoral studies, I also shifted my focus and started working with informal neighbourhood initiatives aiding Syrian migrants in two Istanbul neighbourhoods. Although the context

3 Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https: //doi.org/10.1515/9783111156552-203

XII — Preface and the recipients were different, the circulation of gifts and care was the defining characteristic of that field, too.

It also feels like a different time because of the drastic changes in the Turkish (and global) political climate. Unlike today’s overwhelming view of the country as authoritarian, in 2009 Turkey was considered a successful example of bringing moderate Islam and capitalist modernization together, and its European Union membership was still on the table. Not much later came some key political turning points: the Gezi uprisings of 2013, military operations in majority- Kurdish cities, an attempted coup against the government, and the great purge of the opposition, which also changed the course of my life and pushed me into exile in Germany.

While I was conducting my research and writing my dissertation, I was intrigued by the complexity of gift-giving, with its multiple facets and moral undertones that refer to several registers at once, although with oscillations and ambiguities. But, most importantly, I was attracted by the immediacy of the aid that was offered; its plain direction towards easing the suffering of a stranger here and now. What I observed was different from the neoliberal micro-credit schemes, job-trainings, and development programmes that pushed the poor to be productive and market-savvy under impossible conditions. The people I worked with were realistic enough to dismiss such visions. Poverty was real and immediate. Food had to be put on the table then and there, not in some uncertain future. I developed respect for what my interlocutors did and how they did it. I appreciated their moral determination, ethical dilemmas, and keen understanding of their own acts’ insufficiency. What I observed in Kayseri was complex, potent, and plurivocal.

However, scale is always important. What happens between some volunteers and philanthropists in a small city becomes a different monster at the national level. On the dark side of “welfare as gift”, one finds massive corruption, clientelism, and authoritarianism, all of which go against what my interlocutors believed and practised. Yet, similar mechanisms and networks were easily identifiable in both levels. As these darker aspects have become more visible at the national level every day, it has become increasingly hard to come back to the book (and of course, life, children, and migration came in-between, too). While it was buried in a folder for many years, the book was becoming too hot for me to touch.

For these reasons, I felt the urge to rewrite almost everything while preparing this book for publication. Not to change it substantively, but to shift the axis and adjust the tone. Also, of course to incorporate recent debates and literature. While I was at that task, the earthquakes happened. And I became paralysed, for several months. The grief was huge; being far away and unable to do anything except send money was excruciating. Not being able to give was a torment in

Preface —— XIII itself. I once again saw that giving and caring are hardly volitional, that they are as much primal needs as learned duties. Reflecting on my own decade-old writing, which somehow addresses these questions, in the end, I decided to keep the ethnographic parts intact with light editorial touches, in order to keep this as an authentic picture of the time and place as possible. Yet, I wrote the introduction and the epilogue from scratch to engage with the academic and public discussions that have developed during the decade since, with a retrospective and critical eye on the conclusions I had once drawn. The outcome is an attempt to do justice to the people I worked with, and to their beliefs, dilemmas, and uneasy solutions, without overlooking the processes that have brought Turkey and its diverse peoples to where we are: a country with a state that masterfully employs the language of the gift while hollowing out generosity, trust, social bonds, and societal cohesion — the promises of the gift as critique — through violence, corruption, and polarisation.

Introduction

A warm spring day in 2008. I am given a tour of Kayseri’s charity scene. My guides, Neriman and Beyaz are excited, even enthusiastic.’ They have promised to introduce me to countless people. Yet both of them are extremely busy, often with work that has nothing to do with the organisations they are employed by. So, we lag behind at every step, and every step teaches me something new. This is my second day in the city and my first in the field.

Earlier in the afternoon, I found Neriman at an informal branch of a private school where she had placed two orphan girls as interns. The girls lived in the state care home, but according to Neriman and her social worker contacts, the girls’ serious psychological problems required special help. Neriman found a psychiatrist and a donor to pay for the sessions. She also found somebody to pay for the girls’ internship, though the girls believe that the school pays them for the work they do. Neriman coordinates between state employed social workers, health care professionals, the head of the informal school, several donors, and the girls. I am slightly at a loss about the web of relations and wonder if any of this has anything to do with her job as the director of a charitable foundation. This foundation provides healthcare to the poor at its own private hospital and does not employ a psychiatrist; however, we do not have time for questions. Once Neriman has received an oral account of the girls’ improvement, we take our leave to shortly stop by her office.

In her office, although we are only there to pick something up, Neriman ends up listening to a brother and a sister, both in their late thirties, who have showed up at her door unannounced. They work together at a soup kitchen. The man is officially employed there. However, his sister works “voluntarily”, despite being a widow with several young children and barely having any income. Neriman is perplexed; the patron of the soup kitchen must be unaware of the situation, she says. Otherwise, he would never let this happen. The woman should be properly employed. She knows the patron, a wealthy industrialist, quite well and he always responds to her requests. She promises to call him. The man and the woman thank Neriman and leave.

After a short car ride, we meet Beyaz at a clothing shop. The owner had left a short while ago but apparently Beyaz received the donations he was expecting. He is cheerful as his van is full of new clothes. Neriman and Beyaz make small talk seasoned with several religious phrases and we leave. When I ask who the

1 All the names of people and organisations are pseudonyms.

@ Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. JBA] This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https: //doi.org/10.1515/9783111156552-001 owner was, Beyaz says he was a friend of God (Allah dostu) who would never say no to their appeals for donations.

Our next stop is a historical Turkish bath that provides free laundry and bath services to impoverished women and children. The bath is run by the association Beyaz works for and maintained by one volunteer and two salaried women. The bath receives electricity and water for free thanks to an arrangement that was worked out some years ago. One of the salaried workers welcomes us. She was once a beneficiary of the association. She shows us around and apologises for the mess. They have been busy washing the party’s curtains. “What party?” asks Neriman. “Our AK Party (Justice and Development Party, AKP)”, says the woman with a big smile. Neriman is visibly disturbed, she snaps, “Can they not pay to wash their own curtains?” The smile freezes, the woman falls quiet. It is only the bathing women’s chatter that interrupts the silence.

After the bath house, we stop by at the supermarket where Beyaz spends most of his days. Although it looks like a supermarket and is named so, it is actually a food bank where the registered poor spend their bi-monthly allowances on food and cleaning items. At this hour of the day, it is empty, clean, neat. I cannot imagine how it will be bursting with life in the year to come, when I will spend several days of the week there, filling shelves, talking with the beneficiaries, and observing their interactions with the workers.

By dusk we head to the graveyard and visit the modest grave of a leading figure in the city’s beneficence scene, the late Nevin Akyurt. Her headstone is simple, engraved only with her name and dates of birth and death. It stands in contrast with the conspicuously large and well-decorated neighbouring headstones. Beyaz and Neriman do not comment. They crouch silently and recite the Quran. I send my silent prayers.

This is how my research on non-state welfare provision in the central Anatolian town of Kayseri began: with visits to several unlikely places, where people from different walks of life came together and orchestrated a seamless mixing of public and private resources, driven by religious, political, and civic motivations, to provide assistance to those in need. I assumed that we owed this intensity to Neriman and Beyaz’s enthusiasm to give mea full tour in a few hours. I was wrong. It was how their days ordinarily unfolded. Every day, they were approached by people struck by poverty and its consequences, and they tried to solve their problems with a very personal approach. To do this they would connect people, collect donations, direct the flow of money and materials, remember and remind each other of their role models, and travel within and around the city. All in all, their work seemed to be primarily about connecting dots, mediating between people, and pulling things from wherever they could find them. What constituted their work was radically different from what they told me when I asked them about it — official criteria, existing institutional resources, well defined processes, and clear-cut goals. What they lived through and mastered was impromptu gift-exchange — in the form of favours, money, objects, phone calls, bodily labour, prayer, and care. Their gifts and the gifts they instigated had consequences that went beyond the alleviation of the immediate suffering of the poor. They created relations, which also carried ambivalent potentials.

In this book, I explore the potentials of gift-giving in the realm of non-state welfare provision at two levels, which together make up the notion of “welfare as gift”. The first level employs “gift” as a conceptual and analytical tool to examine non-state welfare provision. Approaching beneficence as a gift makes it possible to trace the circulation of resources, meanings, affects, discourses, as well as worldly and other-worldly gains between spheres that are often approached as separate, if not juxtaposed: public and private, state and market, formal and informal. The gift as an analytical tool creates the rare capacity to look at the exchange of the material (money and goods) and the immaterial (discourse, affects, prayers) simultaneously and within the same framework. Welfare is thus analysed through the perspective of the gift in this work.

On the second level, I take up the political task of questioning the social powers that gifts carry in the context of poverty alleviation, when welfare provision is realised and/or presented as a gift. I illustrate the wide spectrum of these potentials, ranging from solidaristic to antagonistic actions, from embodied ethical transformations to massive state-level corruption. Building on these findings, I move back again to the theoretical level and reiterate Marcel Mauss: gift is a total social phenomenon.” We cannot understand poverty alleviation only by looking at redistributive mechanisms, nor would analysing the interplays between redistribution and commodity exchange - often understood as states and markets — be enough. We must take reciprocity, a primary mode of exchange, seriously and treat it not as a private, negligible phenomenon but as broad, far-reaching, powerful, multi-scalar, and multi-faceted as it is. As much as reciprocal relations are readily found in families, patronage networks, and between peers, they can also seep into market relations, political formations, and government schemes. They serve as the bedrock of intimacy in some of these spheres, all the while producing dangerous dynamics in others.

Within this framework, I do not approach reciprocity as a dyadic and circular phenomenon. As will be shown in detail throughout the book, reciprocity often involves more than two parties, either as active participants or by implication. It also resists closure — the completion of the give-and-take circle. Reciprocity is temporally extended and resembles more a spiral than a circle, if sticking to geometrical metaphors. And here lies its various powers: the powers to transform people as well as political regimes, not always in similar directions.

This analysis is based on an ethnographic study of the local charitable organisations in the central Anatolian town of Kayseri, Turkey, conducted in 2008- 2009. At the time, Kayseri was an exemplary case of the industrial boom in the rural Anatolian hinterland. The civic pride of its denizens was matched by their right-wing conservative politics, showcased by the 70 percent support the municipal and parliamentary candidates from the governing AKP gained in several elections. Informed by and equipped with historical and religious references, the wealthy of Kayseri was conspicuous in their endowments to the city; to such an extent, in fact, that they even used to hold a major event called the Philanthropists Summit with the participation of prime ministers, ministers, and religious leaders, on an irregular basis. They had also established a large number of local charitable organisations that served, albeit much less visibly, the urban poor. Their operations ranged from running foodbanks to providing shelter for travelling hospital patients, from coal distribution to helping young couples marry. During my fieldwork, I worked with three of these organisations and conducted intensive participant observation. I also joined coordination meetings at the city and district levels and met with representatives of several other organisations. To complement the ethnographic findings I interviewed these representatives, as well as charitable organisation workers, municipal employees, and philanthropists.

The findings of this research do not support an analysis of welfare that focuses solely on where the resources originate: public or private money. They also do not comfortably fit into the widely circulating critical narrative that sees a dismantling of the welfare state in favour of markets. Instead, they illustrate local underpinnings, societal context, and the language of a transformation that is taking place in Turkey, as well as in many other places around the globe: a transformation that involves, rather than a withdrawal of welfare states, a change in their focus from employment-based social security to social assistance; a mixing of public resources with private ones, rather than a decrease in public funding; and an expansion of poverty alleviation schemes, often through means-tested direct transfers, on a par with growing income inequality and urban precarity; and, finally, an increasing participation of non-state actors in welfare provision.

The Turkish welfare regime began to achieve a greater coverage and substantial effect on the lives of the most disadvantaged at a time when the welfare states of northern Europe had gone into a crisis under the attack of neoliberal policies. In the literature, neoliberal policies are often equated with the retreat of the state and a weakening of states’ welfare facilities.* However, Turkey’s growing welfare expenditures have gone against the expectations of many critical scholars,“ similar to what has been happening in South Africa, Brazil, and China.’ The change has not been a retreat but a transformation towards a “social assistance state”® — an outcome of efforts to contain grassroots political movements’ and marking a particular moment in the history of the Polanyian double movement, which both entrenches and restricts the expansion of the power of capital over society.®

In Turkey, the main enactor of this change is the AKP, with its staunchly pro-market agenda and immense privatisation schemes. The AKP has been ruling the country single-handedly since 2002 and has radically changed the prevailing welfare regime.’ Previously, Turkey was considered among the southern European welfare regimes, with its heavy reliance on family and kinship systems to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable, and with a corporatist social security system for the formally employed.”° This social security system was very limited in its population coverage and highly hierarchical. In the 2000s, the system was changed in favour of the informal proletariat, while welfare expenditures have increased to unprecedented levels. The share of welfare expenditures amounted to 2.2 percent in 1980 and increased to 12.5 percent in 2016.1! In 2011, about 14 percent of the population received healthcare through a means-tested government scheme, while access to this scheme also became the pre-condition for the allocation of several other welfare benefits — disability and carer benefits, education support, cash transfers, and in-kind support funded by the central budget as well as by municipalities and non-state organisations.

Rather than retreating from welfare provision, the Turkish state morphed into a “populist welfare state”. As much as there is no singular neoliberalism,” there is also not a singular route to market liberalisation and financialisation of

3 Goldberg and Rosenthal 2002.

4 Koray 2005; Dedeoglu 2009, Celik and Koray 2015; Elveren 2008.

5 Barrientos 2013; Ferguson 2007; Ferguson 2015; Lutz and Barrientos 2013. 6 Eder 2010.

7 Yörük 2012a, Yörük 2022.

9 Buğra 2007; Bugra and Candas 2011; Ozdemir and Yiicesan-Ozdemir 2008; Aybars and Tsarouhas 2010.

10 Bugra and Keyder 2003.

12 Yörük, Oker and Tafoya 2022.

13 Ferguson 2010.

public services. Turkey’s shift towards a social assistance state” goes hand in hand with massive privatisation, but not with a decrease in public expenditures on social protection and poverty alleviation.’° While this book is situated within this context, its primary focus is not on welfare provision by the state. It also does not look into marketisation and privatisation trends. Its focus is on non-state, non-market agents, who, however, operate within a moral universe marked by a shared discourse with state and market actors, and cooperate with them. Within this language of benefaction, both non-state welfare provision and public services are framed in terms of care and gift-giving. While enlarging the realm of intervention and expanding its array of services and expenditures, the Turkish state under the rule of the AKP has refashioned social citizenship with a vocabulary of religious compassion and benevolence.” However, what is shared is not only a discourse. The non-state actors are so greatly entangled with state bureaucracy and commercial enterprises that they often share and re-direct resources between fields via formal and informal routes. In order to understand this phenomenon in its entirety, I propose not to limit the view to the agents, which are often (but not rightly) positioned in exclusive and binary opposition, but to rather focus on the modality of exchange that connects all these realms: reciprocity.

Situating Reciprocity in Welfare Provision

Anthropological traditions delineate three distinct forms of circulation of goods: reciprocity, redistribution, and commodity exchange.’® All three forms often co-exist in societies, serving different needs, and having distinct cultural significance. The predominance of one system or another in a particular society

14 See Read and Thelen 2007 for a discussion of this process in the post-socialist eastern European countries in comparison to western European transformations.

16 Buğra and Adar 2008; Buğra 2020; Yörük 2022.

17 Ina sense, this is reminiscent of “compassionate conservatism” in the USA (Kutchins 2001; Carlson-Thies 2001; Cnaan and Boddie 2002; Morgan and Campbell 2011) and “moral neoliberalism” in Italy (Muehlebach 2019).

18 Reciprocal relations include exchange of gifts, collective labour, household activities, and the like. Redistribution is the pooling of resources and their return to members of the society at different rates. It often goes together with a relative centralisation of power, whether in the form of bureaucratic states or less complex chiefdoms. Finally, commodity exchange is the exchange of goods or services with immediate return or with the promise of a definite return. See Polanyi 1957; Dalton 1965; Lomnitz 1988.

Situating Reciprocity in Welfare Provision —— 7 varies greatly; there are societies in which markets are mostly unimportant,” and there are others in which the accumulation of power through redistribution is kept under strict control.*° In most contemporary societies around the globe, as in Turkey, markets have achieved unprecedented importance and reach, but the other two modalities still play vital roles. In the scholarly literature on advanced capitalist societies, there is a tendency to limit the analysis of redistribution to states and reciprocity to the private sphere, which, as will be illustrated throughout the book, does not reflect the reality on the ground.

Mature welfare states are a particular case in point on the problems associated with exclusively matching modes of exchange with certain social actors. While welfare states are primarily agents of redistribution, this function is both historically and empirically entangled with the expansion of the markets. Modern citizenship, as a system of political and social equality, and capitalism, as asystem of inequality, have flourished simultaneously over the last 250 years of Western history, although they are seemingly in opposition. As capitalism was raging, social rights and the redistributive faculties of the state emerged as a means of protecting the social order from the threat of the working classes, while keeping the capitalist organisation of the economy intact.” Hence, in this context, redistributive states both controlled and enabled the expansion of markets.”

More important for the discussion here is the significance of reciprocity in welfare state formations. Reciprocity is based on mutual dependence and obligation among members of a group, rather than freely entered contractual agreements. Therefore, at the largest scale, it forms the basis of non-legalised obligations towards fellow citizens and the imagined community of the nation in modern societies.” Reciprocity makes possible the circulation of goods and services in patterns that are not solely determined by profit, but by social norms and values. Hence, a reciprocal mode of exchange potentially limits the brutal powers of market exchange, especially within capitalist constellations, with varying implications.“ Yet, reciprocal relations may very well be incorporated into market relations, by way of shaping the decisions about whom to engage with in contractual exchange.

20 Graeber 2004.

22 Polanyi 1957.

23 Karatani 2008.

24 Polanyi 1957; Sahlins 1972; Gouldner 1960; Komter 2005; Servet 2007.

Reciprocity is also imminent to welfare provision by states. Families lie at the heart of social reproduction and states rarely shy away from relying on the non-commercialised caring labour provided in family settings, especially by women.” Southern European welfare states and the welfare regimes of the Global South are particularly highly dependent on familial care,”° as is also the case with Turkey. Yet, the role reciprocal relations play in welfare provision is not limited to family-provided care of children, the elderly, or the infirm. Non-state actors (dubbed as the voluntary sector, charitable sector, or the third sector in different policy approaches) hold a significant place in welfare provision around the world, through both transnational humanitarian organisations and more localised, even individualised and informal forms of giving to the needy.” There is also a strong trend towards bringing public resources together with private ones in relief efforts, as exemplified by the World Health Organization or UNICEF. In national contexts, government-voluntary sector cooperation is also hardly the exception.”®

This phenomenon is most immediately observable in the realm of poverty alleviation. Unlike the premium-based social security regimes of western Europe, emerging welfare policies in the Global South prioritise poverty relief and social assistance, often in the form of conditional cash transfers that incorporate family relations.” The World Bank and International Labour Organization show strong support and preference for such schemes and now favour them over micro-credit and in-kind assistance. International development agencies, large philanthropic organisations, and local humanitarian agencies join forces with governments in creating resources and guaranteeing delivery. With these cash transfers, greater numbers of citizens are incorporated into welfare systems, and states are expanding their horizontal and vertical encompassing capacities.*°

At a time when quite a significant portion of the world population is no longer needed in the workforce, life-long employment is not readily available even for the most educated. Production capacities now rely more on technological advancement than manpower, and the traditional northern European safety net type of welfare schemes have become unattainable for these growing redundant populations. The astounding increase in social assistance schemes attest to

25 Katz 2001; Bhattacharya 2017; Read and Thelen 2007.

26 Esping-Andersen 1990; Roumpakis 2020. Moreover Read and Thelen 2007 details how family and kinship relations became vital in social protection in the post-socialist states.

27 Cammett and MacLean 2014.

29 Ferguson 2015.

30 Ferguson and Gupta 2002.

Situating Reciprocity in Welfare Provision —— 9 states’ recognition of the changing political economy and their attempt to find an answer to the pressing question of political legitimacy when full employment has become no more than a dream.**

Yet, within these general trends, each state has its own unique institutional history and cultural tools to build its claims to legitimacy through a reformulation of social citizenship. For some, this history involves the church-based logic of poor relief, for others it builds on religious gift-giving.” These logics, referring as they do to the histories of provision for needy members of society, involve mechanisms of reciprocity as much as redistribution of national wealth through bureaucratic formations. Therefore, both in its constitution as a historical continuity, as well as its current workings in the neoliberal era, social assistance is seen as a joint state-society endeavour, which brings reciprocal and redistributive modes of exchange together in a new constellation.

In Turkey, a similar trend has been observable. The increase in public social expenditure, especially in the realm of social assistance, has been paralleled by an increase in the span of beneficence and a valorisation of it. These two trends are not independent, either. Charitable giving and public social assistance coalesce both institutionally and at the imaginary level. For those operating in the field as providers, this coalescence takes shape as collaborations, either informally, as in the case of Neriman cooperating with state-employed social workers to provide support to young girls living in state custody, or formally, as in the case of the bath house receiving electricity and water free of charge thanks to cooperation agreements. At a larger scale, it means a massive redirection of state resources to government-friendly foundations for the provision of basic services. At the level of beneficiaries, differences between state-provided welfare and humanitarian/ philanthropic aid are even more opaque. Receivers of support often do not know, and do not show interest in knowing, where the aid comes from.”

In the Turkish context, this non-differentiation is neither arbitrary nor inconsequential. It is indicative of a transformation from a premium-based corporatist welfare regime to a social assistance regime that deliberately incorporates civic elements of choice to further a particular political agenda. This incorporation has strong religious undertones. Islamic instruments of charity are positioned on the

31 Ferguson 2015.

32 See van Kersbergen and Manow 2009 for western Europe and North America; Bornstein 2012 for India; Jawad 2009 for Lebanon; Jawad and Yakut-Cakar 2010 for a Middle Eastern comparison.