
New Books in Anthropology
Zeynep K. Korkman, "Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey" (Duke UP, 2023)
Episode guests
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Fortune-telling cafés in Turkey provide a space for marginalized individuals to navigate gender pressures and build intimate feminized publics.
- Divination practices in Turkey help individuals process their affective experiences and navigate neoliberal precarity.
Deep dives
Gendered Fortunes and Divination in Post-Secular Turkey
In this podcast episode, Zaneb Korkman discusses her book 'Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Post-Secular Turkey.' Korkman shares her personal experience with fortune-telling coffee shops in Istanbul and explores the broader implications of these commercial divination practices in a post-secular context. She highlights how fortune-telling creates a landscape of femininity and serves as a genre that circulates gendered anxieties and hopes. Korkman also examines the intersectionality of gender and sexuality within the divination economy, and how affective labor plays a central role in these practices. Additionally, she delves into the relationship between divination, neoliberalism, and the ways in which divination helps individuals navigate neoliberal precarity and process their affective experiences.