Resistant Breathing

In light of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Diyarbakır Hewsel Gardens, a UNESCO Heritage Site located in Kurdistan in Turkey, this article proposes the concept of “resistant breathing” as a way to theorize ecology both as the outcome of genocidal devastation and as radical praxis in the context of climate change. Inspired by the gardens’ historical association with “lungs,” I construct an intersectional conceptual encounter between recent abolitionist and decolonial feminist works on respiration, the sentient turn in anthropology, and the anthropology of ruination in the Middle East. Here, breathing carries material pertinence as the physiological respirational capacity of both humans and nonhumans who coexist. But it also has rich philosophical implications for understanding how the materially and affectively organized life force of breath is violently traversed and interrupted and choked off by colonial occupation, racial capitalism, and genocide denialism, only to be resuscitated by slow and small-scale eco-initiatives on the edge of the gardens. By noticing small ecological sites of struggle that so often fall outside the purview of contemporary anthropological accounts on radical alterity together with human’s ecological cohabitants, “resistant breathing” offers an intersectional analysis of the geographical disavowal of racially marked ecologies with a perspective from the Middle East.