Article begins<\/h2>\n
In June 2022,\u00a0Istanbul\u2019s Yenisahra neighborhood\u00a0in the Ata\u015fehir district\u00a0erupted in violence<\/a>\u00a0when false rumours began to spread that a 15-year-old boy had been killed while fleeing a group of Afghan waste pickers. Within hours, hundreds of people flooded the streets, chanting \u201cWe don\u2019t want foreigners in our country!\u201d Vigilantes who went on a so-called \u201cAfghan hunt\u201d took their anger not toward the migrants themselves, many of whom had already gone into hiding or fled the area, but toward the Kurdish recyclers who had long employed and sheltered them in their depots.\u00a0Many recyclers were injured in the chaos while trying to defend their livelihoods.\u00a0Their recycling depots went up in flames, were stoned, and were looted during the attacks. What unfolded was not a spontaneous protest but rather a coordinated act of nationalist vengeance\u2014a violent pogrom disguised as civic outrage.\u00a0<\/p>\n The pogrom in Yenisahra marked a turning point in Istanbul\u2019s recycling industry. That summer, informal recycling depots across the city grew quieter by the week. The Afghan migrants who once sustained these operations, hundreds of thousands of workers who salvaged the city\u2019s waste, had seemingly disappeared. The hollow echo of an industry running without its essential workforce was louder than ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the time, I had just begun my ethnographic fieldwork, immersing myself into the unpredictable rhythms of Istanbul\u2019s waste worlds and tracing the growing violence recycling workers endured at the hands of the Turkish state. I visited countless depots tucked into the city\u2019s hidden corners, speaking with depot operators and waste pickers who labored through the night. Whenever I asked what had happened to the Afghan workers, recyclers gave the same answer, repeated with certainty: \u201cThey are all collected\u201d (hepsi toplat\u0131ld\u0131<\/em>). The phrase stayed with me.<\/p>\n The verb\u00a0toplamak<\/em>\u00a0means \u201cto collect.\u201d It describes what waste pickers do daily: gathering, sorting, and selling discarded materials. Yet during that summer of state-sanctioned violence and mass deportations, the same word took on a different meaning. Recyclers began using it not only to describe their daily work of collecting cardboard, paper, plastic, and scrap metal from the city\u2019s refuse, but also to describe how the police rounded up migrants from Afghanistan and sent them to removal centers.<\/p>\n To collect waste. To collect people. These two meanings flowed together, revealing how language itself becomes entangled in the infrastructures of waste labor, bordering regimes, and state power.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Turkish,\u00a0toplamak\u00a0<\/em>is a fluid, elastic word. It also means to gather, to tidy, to compile, and to accumulate. Add the suffix\u00a0\u2014y\u0131c\u0131<\/em>\u00a0and it becomes\u00a0toplay\u0131c\u0131<\/em>, \u201cthe collector.\u201d That term names nearly\u00a0half a million informal workers<\/a>\u00a0who keep urban waste management systems running in Turkey by collecting recyclable materials every day as a means of survival. Despite the relentless forms of violence they are met with by the state, these workers keep the city clean by collecting what others discard.\u00a0<\/p>\n During my fieldwork, I noticed how the word \u201cto collect\u201d shifted across contexts. \u201cThey collected Afghans from the streets,\u201d one recycling worker told me. \u201cThey collected them from the depots,\u201d said another. The phrase explained the sudden emptiness in the city\u2019s informal recycling depots following the mass displacement of Afghan migrants. Each repetition of the word tied together two realms: one of materials and one of humans. And the boundaries between them seemed to blur.<\/p>\n This fluid movement of meaning echoed what anthropologist Robin Nagle observed during her time with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY): \u201clanguage matters.\u201d\u00a0In her book\u00a0Picking Up<\/em>, Nagle<\/a>\u00a0shows how sanitation workers develop a \u201cDSNY lingo\u201d that mirrors the rhythm and texture of their labor. Learning to \u201cspeak sanitation,\u201d Nagle writes, is part of learning to inhabit the city\u2019s waste infrastructures. In Istanbul, I found a similar dynamic unfolding in the recycling industry. The same word that described the daily routine of recyclers also invoked the violence that dismantled their livelihoods.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Turkish, it is unusual to use the verb\u00a0toplamak<\/em>\u00a0in reference to people. Objects can be collected; human beings cannot. Yet when the government\u2019s treatment of migrants begins to resemble the handling of things, the language adapts. In everyday speech, the verb slips from one realm to another, blurring the distinction between materials and lives. Language, too, flows through these waste management infrastructures, absorbing their violence as it travels.<\/p>\n For the recyclers who used the phrase, \u201cThey are all collected\u201d was not meant to demean or dehumanize the migrants they had worked beside, but rather to describe the reality they had witnessed. This choice of words was pragmatic and even mournful. It conveniently exposed the inconsistent and violent realities of Turkey\u2019s border regimes that collectively punished their migrant employees because of their irregular entry into the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, these words circulated through the city with the same unstable flow as the waste itself, capturing the contradictions of material value and disposability. \u201cTo collect\u201d drifted across territorial boundaries, unevenly organized urban landscapes, and the shifting hierarchies that determine whose labor and whose lives are allowed to circulate. It connected people and objects, legality and illegality, belonging and exclusion. It exposed how language itself can carry the residues of violence, sedimented through repetition until it feels ordinary.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the steep streets of Dolapdere, two Kurdish brothers, Hikmet and Hasan, ran a small depot stacked high with recyclable waste. I met them that summer, not long after the violent pogrom in Yenisahra. \u201cOn the second day of Eid, they collected a lot of our men,\u201d Hasan told me. \u201cWe had thirty or forty workers; now, only five or six are left.\u201d Their business, like many others, had suffered deeply from the disappearance of migrant labor. Without the Afghan recyclers who kept the waste moving, the familiar rhythm of waste picking faded from the recycling industry. \u201cThe authorities deported all the Afghans they collected,\u201d Hasan said, recalling the raids he had witnessed.\u00a0<\/p>\n A few streets downhill, I met Osman, a depot operator from Aksaray, who echoed the same language. \u201cThere used to be ten Afghans here,\u201d he said. \u201cThey completely collected them. None are left.\u201d\u00a0Osman\u2019s business has also been negatively impacted by these \u201ccollections.\u201d\u00a0When I asked whether he supported the operations, he shook his head.\u00a0\u201cBut you can\u2019t really tell these\u00a0migrants,\u00a0\u2018Don\u2019t collect!\u2019\u201d he said with frustration, this time referring to the work of picking waste. Osman opposed these \u201ccollections\u201d not only because they hurt his business, but because migrants needed and wanted to work.\u00a0In his words, two forms of collection collided\u2014the economic and the violent, the material and the human. The word that once defined his livelihood had come to describe its downfall.<\/p>\n Months later, I visited K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fckpazar, one of Istanbul\u2019s oldest neighborhoods near the\u00a0S\u00fcleymaniye Mosque and Golden Horn. Once filled with recycling depots and migrant workers, the area was now caught between gentrification and deportation. There\u00a0I met Necati, a Kurdish depot operator, who pointed to an abandoned building and said, \u201cThere used to be a hundred Afghans here. But they are all gone with the last collection.\u201d The phrase sounded procedural, as if the deportations were simply part of the same municipal schedule that governed garbage pickup. The \u201clast collection\u201d carried a sense of both finality and routine. The deportations had become so frequent that they were spoken of like predictable and regular operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n Between 2022-23, the pushbacks and deportations of migrants and refugees continued unabated in Turkey.\u00a0Turkey\u2019s\u00a0Office of Migration Management reported record\u00a0numbers of deportations<\/a>\u00a0that year and celebrated them as a major \u201csuccess.\u201d In official statements, tackling irregular migration was framed as a crisis contained, a restored social order. By the spring of 2023, as Turkey prepared for a pivotal election, the government sought to restore its\u00a0damaged reputation after the catastrophic earthquakes of February 6<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n During this climate of vast uncertainty, many transnational migrants had vanished from Istanbul\u2019s recycling world. Some were deported, others fled to Europe or took up agricultural jobs in rural Anatolia. Those who remained lived in constant fear of being \u201ccollected\u201d again.\u00a0<\/p>\n In April 2023, I arranged a visit to Hakan\u2019s spacious warehouse in Bostanc\u0131. Hakan, a Kurdish depot operator, had employed and sheltered dozens of Afghan migrants before. I was curious to see whether the police raids on recycling depots had continued while the nation was still reeling from disaster. The pace of the raids had slowed, but they had not stopped. \u201cI still see teams running around chasing Afghans,\u201d Hakan told me. The government, it seemed, intended to maintain the visibility of its authoritarian control, deporting as many migrants as possible before the elections. \u201cThe police searched a few depots,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they found any Afghans, they would collect them and take them away.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the past year, Hakan\u2019s depot had been inspected several times, though less aggressively than before. One of his workers, serving us tea as we spoke, remarked quietly: \u201cThe police don\u2019t come here anymore because they know it\u2019s already over.\u201d\u00a0He was referring to the visible absence of migrant recycling workers across the industry. With no one left to chase or deport, the police saw no reason to organize further \u201ccollections.\u201d The raids had simply run their course; it was \u201cover.\u201d The Afghan migrants were gone.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lauren Woodard is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Article begins In June 2022,\u00a0Istanbul\u2019s Yenisahra neighborhood\u00a0in the Ata\u015fehir district\u00a0erupted in violence\u00a0when false rumours began to spread that a 15-year-old boy had been killed while fleeing a group of Afghan waste pickers. Within hours, hundreds of people flooded the streets, chanting \u201cWe don\u2019t want foreigners in our country!\u201d Vigilantes who went on a so-called \u201cAfghan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":329920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11767],"tags":[3735,15507,15704,15927,1820,3794,28310,13222,16837,156113],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-329919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anthropology","tag-anthropology","tag-collections","tag-deportation","tag-migration","tag-news","tag-people","tag-recycling","tag-turkey","tag-violence","tag-waste-picking"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Fluid Life of a Word<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The Collectors and the Collected<\/strong><\/h2>\n