Brian E Silverstein

Interests

Teaching

Cultural anthropology, political anthropology

Research

Culture, power, modernity

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Silverstein, B. E. (2020). The Social Lives of Numbers: Statistics, Reform and the Remaking of Rural Life in Turkey.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2011). Islam and Modernity in Turkey.
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  ;Full Citation: Silverstein, B. (2011). Islam and Modernity in Turkey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.;

Chapters

• Silverstein, B. E. (2014). Sufism and Everyday Ethics in Turkey. In Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, 3rd Edition.
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  in Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, 3rd Edition. Donna Lee Bowen, Evelyn A. Early, and Becky Schulthies, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014
• Silverstein, B. E. (2010). Islam and Modernity in Turkey: Power, Tradition and Historicity in the European Provinces of the Muslim World.
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  ;Full Citation: Reprint of B. Silverstein (2003), In Islam in the West: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies. Edited by David Westerlund and Ingvar Svanberg. London: Routledge, 2010.;Type of Publication: Reprint of Silverstein 2003;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2007). Sufism and Modernity in Turkey: From the Authenticity of Experience to the Practice of Discipline.
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  ;Full Citation: Silverstein, B. (2007) “Sufism and Modernity in Turkey: From the Authenticity of Experience to the Practice of Discipline,” in Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Howell, eds. Sufism and the Modern in Islam. London, New York: I.B. Tauris.: 39-60.;

Journals/Publications

• Silverstein, B. (2023). Economizing chemical compounds: The production of qualities in Turkish olive oil. Economy and Society, 52(4), 697-718. doi:10.1080/03085147.2023.2274223
• Silverstein, B. (2020). Bureaucratic intimacies: translating human rights in Turkey: by Elif Babül, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2017, 248 pp., $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781503601895, $26.00 (paper), ISBN 9781503603172. Turkish Studies, 21(5), 803-806. doi:10.1080/14683849.2019.1653761
• Silverstein, B. E. (2018). Commensuration, performativity, and the reform of statistics in Turkey. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, 45(3), 330-340.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2016). Modernity. Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology.
• Silverstein, B. (2014). Christopher Dole, Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey , Contemporary Ethnography (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Pp. 304. $69.95 cloth, $69.95 e-book.. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46(04), 811-813. doi:10.1017/s0020743814001159
• Silverstein, B. E. (2014). Statistics, Reform and Regimes of Expertise in Turkey. Turkish Studies.
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  Silverstein, B. (2014) “Statistics, Reform and Regimes of Expertise in Turkey,” Turkish Studies, 15(4): 638-654.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2013). A Tyranny of the Half? Protests, Democracy and the Ethos of Pluralism in Turkey.
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  http://www.sismec.org/2013/06/21/a-tyranny-of-the-half-protests-democracy-and-the-ethos-of-pluralism-in-turkey/;Full Citation: A Tyranny of the Half? Protests, Democracy and the Ethos of Pluralism in Turkey. Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts, "In Depth" article.;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2010). Reform in Turkey: Liberalization as Government and Critique.
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  ;Full Citation: Silverstein, B. (2010) “Reform in Turkey: Liberalization as Government and Critique,” Anthropology Today, 26(4): 22-25.;
• Silverstein, B. (2009). Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey by Esra Özyürek. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 32(2), 323-325. doi:10.1111/j.1555-2934.2009.01047.x
• Silverstein, B. E. (2009). Sufism and Governmentality in the Late Ottoman Empire. Duke Univ Press.
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  ;Full Citation: Silverstein, B. (2009) “Sufism and Governmentality in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 29(2):171-185.;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2008). Disciplines of Presence in Modern Turkey: Discourse, Companionship, and the Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice. Cultural Anthropology.
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  ;Full Citation: Silverstein, B. (2008) “Disciplines of Presence in Modern Turkey: Discourse, Companionship and the Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice,” Cultural Anthropology, 23(1): 118-153.;
• Silverstein, B. (2005). Islamist Critique in Modern Turkey: Hermeneutics, Tradition, Genealogy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47(1), 134-160. doi:10.1017/s001041750500006x
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  What is the status of Islamic traditions of discourse and practice in Turkey as it is ever more self-consciously heir to the Islamic heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and yet has seen such dramatic social, economic, and political transformation during the last two centuries? In recent years a considerable and ever-increasing proportion of scholarly and popular effort has been directed on the part of self-identifying Islamist ( Islâmci ) writers in Turkey toward addressing these issues by way of genealogies of contemporary social forms and practices—critical histories of the present. Simultaneously, methodological debates about the nature of sources and interpretation have begun to appear with increasing regularity in monographs, journals, and even dailies. These two concerns with the status of the present and correct method are not solely the concern of Islamist writers in Turkey; indeed, they are arguably the prevailing mode of history and social science writing in Turkey today. As we shall see, informing both of these currents is an interrogation of the grounds from which authoritative, normative discourses on Islamic practice can be elaborated in the wake of empire and sovereign reform on the near-margin of industrial capitalism. At stake are not only discourses, or ‘representations’ of Islamic tradition. Like other traditions, central to Islam is the discursive elaboration of normative judgments about correct practice; indeed, these discursive elaborations are important Islamic practices. The critical work currently flourishing in Turkey is thus conceived by its practitioners as an important form of contribution to the elaboration of Islamic traditions and entails important diagnoses of the status of enabling conditions for Islamic practice in the contemporary world. This article argues that attending to these interrogations indicates how the study of changes in Islamic discourse and practice in Turkey has profound implications for the issues of power and agency in modernity and Islam more broadly. Particularly in the context of Turkey's intensified juridical, economic, and political restructuring in dialogue with the European Community, an understanding of these currents in the Islamic discursive culture of Turkey offers insight into the oft-commented but poorly understood structure of the relationship between Turkey, Europe, and modernity.
• Silverstein, B. (2003). Islam and Modernity in Turkey: Power, Tradition and Historicity in the European Provinces of the Muslim World. Anthropological Quarterly, 76(3), 497-517. doi:10.1353/anq.2003.0044
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  Dis-enchanting the Orient In 1962 Michel Foucault delivered a paper entitled 'Le Desenchantment oriental' in Ankara, Turkey.1 It seems Foucault never published the paper (and it does not appear in the posthumous collection of his works), but the theme announced by its title is symptomatic of a certain diagnosis of the status of the present. Desenchantement, the inexorable process whereby 'society' is constituted as a distinct object separate and following different laws and temporalities from the cosmic or 'religious,' is central to the series of effects attributed to the proliferation of the Enlightenment mode of knowledge as critique.2 The connection between the Orient' and Enlightenment has recently been brought to the fore again in the context of Turkey by the elections of November 2002, in which the party that emerged victorious, brushing away the near totality of the country's political establishment in the process, was the justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, or AK) Party. The party's acronym 'ak' also means 'white' or 'clean,' while its emblem is a light bulb, connoting enlightenment ('aydinlatma').3 The fact that this party is led by figures formerly associated with the Islamist 'National View' (Milli Gorus) movement and its repeatedly banned and reincarnated parties only serves to heighten the sense that 'Oriental disenchantment' is a field about which we are still quite a bit in the dark. The AK Party finds itself in power at an extremely pivotal moment as the economy is haltingly emerging from its worst crisis since World War II; a U.S.-led war in neighboring Iraq has changed the regime there, after the Turkish parliament rejected U.S. troop movements through the country, leading to concerns that Turkish companies may not get a significant share of the contracts to rebuild Iraq; speculations have not abated that Turkish forces might increase their presence in Northern Iraq to defend Turkey's 'interests'; and relations with the European Union are coming down to concrete particulars and time tables, all linked to the urgency of major breakthroughs on Cyprus. It is clear that the current Turkish leadership did not calculate that they might better guarantee their future by the nature of their participation in events in Iraq; they have rather planned all along to do this through entry into the European Union. Meanwhile some prominent Western European politicians have declared publicly that the entry of Turkey into the Union "would mean the end of Europe."4 While questions of Turkey's relationship to Europe and of the status of Islam and modernity in Turkey have taken on even more of a sense of urgency than they normally command, there seems to be something more deeply troubling about Turkey, troubling to established and emerging frameworks for thinking about the relationship between Islam, Europe and modernity. What became the Republic of Turkey in 1923 was heir to the institutional structures and administrative experience and apparatus of the Ottoman Empire, the longest-lived and most powerful Muslim polity the world has seen.5 Today, with a population of over 65 million Turkey is one of the world's most populous Muslim-majority countries and also a NATO member. Those administrative elites who were instrumental in the establishment of this Republic had been born and launched their careers in the late Ottoman environment, i.e. the reign of Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) and the subsequent Young Turk regimes of the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP (1908-1918). What transpired in the transition from Empire to Republic, what does this entail for the status of the Turkish present, and what are the implications of the structure of this present for our understanding of Islam and modernity?6 In these pages I address these questions by outlining a genealogy of the Turkish present, tracing the historical context in which Turkish institutions have evolved and the relationship between cultural forms and the context of imperatives of power. …
• Silverstein, B. (2002). Discipline, knowledge and imperial power in Central Asia: 19th century notes for a genealogy of social forms. Central Asian Survey, 21(1), 91-105. doi:10.1080/02634930220127964

Presentations

• Silverstein, B. E. (2024). MESA panel.. MESA.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2023). Invited discussant, "Public Policies of Numbers". Sociopolitical Implications of Quantification in Turkey. Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes, Istanbul: Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes, Istanbul.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2022).  "The Production and Economization of Quality in Turkish Olive Oil". U of AZ Center for Middle East Studies.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2019, Sept). “Statistical Reform and the Remaking of Agriculture in Turkey". Society for Social Studies of Science.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2017, April). Fieldwork in the "New" Turkey. American Ethnological Society meeting. Stanford U.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2017, February). Technologies of Commensuration: Performativity and the Reform of Statistics in Turkey. Invited talk. Ohio State University.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2016, April). "Civilizational" Discourses in AK Party Turkey. The Idea of Culture and Civilization in Contemporary Turkish Politics. Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2016, July). Technologies of Commensuration: Performativity and the Reform of Statistics in Turkey. Emergent Regimes of Truth in the New Turkey. Istanbul.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2016, May). Keynote Address. Annual Conference of Turkish Studies. Ipek University, Ankara.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2016, Oct). Turkey Before and After the July 15 Coup Attempt. ACTS lecture. U of A.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2015, November). Environmental Assemblages. AAA meeting. Denver.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2014, May). Sociotechnical Assemblages, Statistics and Reform in Turkey. Turkish Studies from an Interdisciplinary Perspective.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2012, 2012-10-01). Technical Assemblages and the Political Lives of Numbers in Turkey. Humboldt Univ, Berlin.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2012, 2012-11-01). Statistics, Reform and the Political Lives of Numbers in Turkey.
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  POLS Talks, Political Science, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2011, 2011-02-01). Political Society and Liberal Religiosity in Turkey. Univ of Copenhagen, Denmark.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2011, 2011-02-01). The Discipline of Others: Making Islam a Religion in Turkey. Dept of Anthropology, Univ of Bergen, Norway.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: Invited/Plenary Speaker;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2011, 2011-06-01). Technologies of Commensuration: Statistics, Reform and Society in Turkey. Istanbul, Turkey.
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  ;Refereed: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2010, 2010-03-01). The Security of the Social in Turkey. Copenhagen.
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  ;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2010, 2010-07-01). Governing Freedom and the Security of the Social in Turkey. Barcelona.
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  ;Submitted: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2010, 2011-11-01). Islamic Genealogies of Turkish Secularism. AAA.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2009, 2009-03-01). The Abolition of the Caliphate and Debates about Islamic Governance in the Early Turkish Republic. Dept of Near Eastern Studies, UA.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Type of Presentation: University;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2008, 2008-09-01). Temporal Heterogeneity and the Status of the Present in Istanbul. Orienting Istanbul. UC Berkeley.
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  ;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2008, 2008-10-01). Political Modernity and Difference in EU-Turkey Relations. Rocky Mountain European Scholars Consortium. Univ of Arizona.
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  ;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2008, 2008-11-01). Liberalization and the Religious Sphere in Turkey. American Anthropological Association.
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  ;Invited: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2007, 2007-06-01). Islam and Political Society in Turkey. Univ of Cambridge, UK.
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  “Islam and Political Society in Turkey” at seminar Rethinking the Political in Turkey, University of Cambridge, UK, 6/07.;Invited: Yes;Refereed: Yes;Interdisciplinary: Yes;Type of Presentation: Academic Conference/Workshop;

Reviews

• Silverstein, B. E. (2024. External examiner on Macquarie University PhD dissertation..
• Silverstein, B. E. (2024. Tenure case review for U Toronto.
• Silverstein, B. E. (2012. Review of Amit Bein, "Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic".
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  ;Full Citation: Silverstein, B. Review of Amit Bein, "Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic: Agents of Change and Guardians of Tradition." Stanford University Press, 2011. In New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 47, Fall 2012.;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2009. Review of Ă–zyĂĽrek, Nostalgia for the Modern.
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  ;Full Citation: Silverstein, B. (2009) Review of Esra Ă–zyĂĽrek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Modern Turkey, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) in Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 32(2).;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2007. Review of Stolen Honor, by Katherine Pratt Ewing.
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  ;Full Citation: Review of Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin. Stanford University Press, 2008. In Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies, v. 18, 2007.;

Others

• Silverstein, B. E. (2013). Turkey Protests Reflect Deeper Tensions.
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  http://www.uanews.org/blog/ua-prof-turkey-protests-reflect-deeper-tensions;Full Citation: Turkey Protests Reflect Deeper Tensions;Type of Publication: UA News;
• Silverstein, B. E. (2011). Book review of Amit Bein, Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic.
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  ;Full Citation: Review of Amit Bein, Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic: Agents of Change and Guardians of Tradition. Stanford U Press, 2011. For journal New Perspectives on Turkey.;Status: Paper in Preparation;