Jenny White is an associate professor of social anthropology at Boston University and author of the prize-winning Islamist Mobilization in Turkey (University of Washington) and Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey (Routledge). She also writes mystery/thrillers set in nineteenth-century Istanbul: The Sultan’s Seal (W. W. Norton, 2006), The Abyssinian Proof (2008), and The Winter Thief (2010). The Sultan’s Seal was translated into fourteen languages and shortlisted for the 2006 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. Jenny grew up in Germany and New York, spent eight years in Turkey, and now lives in the Boston area. She also writes a blog about contemporary Turkey: http://kamilpasha.com. Email: [email protected] Website: http://jennywhite.net
The great ambivalences of life are braided into legend to prove continuity, explain our crimes, and glorify our talents. The bare exigencies of birth and death are transmuted into moral lessons and life patterns shared by generations before and after in an endless, continually invented narrative chain.
by Jenny White At precisely 9:03 am on Friday, May 24, 1996, the attractive blonde woman on track thirteen at the Zurich station slipped into the gap between the platform and the moving train. Şafak Pavey was a nineteen-year-old Turkish art student. She had recently arrived in Zurich to study and to live with her…
By Jenny White I remain convinced, despite my anthropological training not to generalize, that every society has an aesthetic, a particular repetition of pattern, that informs its material manifestation. In contradiction to the anthropological view that you must delve under the surface to understand a place, I’m going to suggest that this aesthetic is most…
by Jenny White Gus Rancatori is a Renaissance man who owns an ice cream parlor. Cambridge-based Toscanini’s is a hangout where you’re as likely to run into a Nobel Laureate in chemistry and a molecular foodie as a furniture maker or novelist. One day I met a dapper man with gray hair who had been…
By Jenny White My grandmother’s kitchen had a single window that flung open in one great wing of glass. It looked out over the tiled roof of the apartment building in which she lived, down onto the slices of soil allotted to each resident, then into the valley beyond where a church steeple rose from…
Turkey has been bandied about this past week as a model to be emulated by the new nations being born like small supernovas across the Middle East. The country currently appears to have found a place for Islamic piety within its political system without jamming any of its democratic wheels, although the process has been noisy and contentious. Would the “Turkey Model” work in the Middle East?
by Jenny White I’m a faithful reader of the New York Times Science Section, cover to cover, because I want to know about things, not be caught flatfooted. Somehow it seems necessary for survival to know about quarks and bosons, the social structure of ants, scientific explanations of the smile, and the sexual life of…
By Jenny White December 31, 2010 — Today on the cusp of renewal, I read a singularly deflating article in The New York Times by Susan Jacoby who, on this sunny final day of the new year, took the opportunity to remind unsuspecting readers that we are going to get old and probably do so…
The day Tariq Ramadan came to the university to speak, I had just been teaching my social anthropology class about the contradictions between the ethical and pragmatic aspects of Islam. How can people claim Islam is egalitarian when Muslims around the world use religion to justify intolerance and patriarchy? I hadn’t been thinking about Ramadan,…