Marcy Brink-Danan

My research focuses on the anthropology of the Sephardi Diaspora by merging social scientific and humanistic approaches to Judaic Studies. Following fourteen months of ethnographic study in Istanbul and a year of archival research at the Center for Jewish History in New York, I completed a dissertation entitled "Reference Points: Text, Context and Change in Definitions of Turkish-Jewish Identity." In this ethnography, I analyzed Turkish-Jewish communal practices in light of questions of multilingualism, minority politics and the ethics of representation. I received the Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University in September 2005 and am now Dorot Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor of anthropology at Brown University.

I am now preparing a manuscript tentatively entitled "Cosmopolitan Ethnography: Writing Difference in Istanbul." The manuscript maps the logic of Turkish-Jewish culture as it surfaces in speech, architecture and other symbolic domains. Through ethnographic description and text analysis, this account collects stories and images from the lives of Jews in Istanbul in the beginning of the 21st century. The fragments, when assembled together as ethnography, reveal a cosmopolitan collective whose survival relies on an ability to function within and between various frames of reference (Judaism, Islam, secular humanism, etc.) arranged through relations of intimacy and power.

The work asks, "In what reference book might we locate a definition of the Jews of Istanbul?" Given the history of heteroglossia exhibited by the Jewish community in this multitudinous city, this study proposes that its members have built an encyclopedic knowledge of culturally significant (and, at times, oppositional) references which allow them to negotiate social and political change. In essence, these Jews are cosmopolitan in language, knowledge and ideology.

In this manuscript, I have taken the example of Turkish Jews to explore what it means to be an urban, multilingual, diasporic minority. Thinking about this population as "cosmopolitan" allows my analysis to cover topics such as the local and global, diaspora and exile, identity and citizenship. In addition to creating an ethnographic account of a cosmopolitan community, this text details the ways in which individuals and collectives negotiate multiple ideologies through which they imagine themselves as Turks, Jews and humans (not necessarily in that order!).

Central to this work is the notion that anthropologists and Judaic Studies scholars need a set of methodological and theoretical tools with which to study cosmopolitan identities. Thus the title of the book, "Cosmopolitan Ethnography," refers not only to descriptions of a cosmopolitan subject, but to the ways through which this anthropologist engages in cosmopolitan intellectual practices, such as interdisciplinarity, translation and other comparative ways to study cultural materials.

The Turkish milieu provided me with a fascinating set of problems and insights relevant to Jews and other minorities; nonetheless, lessons learned in Istanbul are not limited in their application to this region alone. Indeed, the specifics of my research program dictated that certain concerns were downplayed (such as class and gender) while others immediately came to the fore (religion and secularism). I am further interested in comparing the situation of Jews in Turkey with those in other locales.

If my current work frames issues of contemporary Sephardic Jews in terms of their cosmopolitanism, I am now working toward the ways cosmopolitanism relates to boundary-making in the metaphor of cultural, linguistic and economic islands. As I embark on comparative research, my work explores cultural isolationism in Judaic practice and text.