428 Resisting Publics
public spheres in a restrictive political context. Tunceli, the case study, is
a mountainous Kurdish Alevi province in eastern Turkey.^4 In the Turkish
political imaginary, Tunceli is a subversive territory, successively stigma-
tized as heretical and a communist or Kurdish nationalist stronghold.
Many years of war between the Turkish army and the Kurdish nationalist
guerrilla of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) have turned the prov-
ince into an overregulated space of surveillance where any appearance in
public is under close watch and where attempts to contest the political
order are more often than not forbidden or repressed. In this context, the
reconstruction of space enables people, as we shall see, to practically rene-
gotiate both the power balance, the rules of coexistence and social roles
and categories.
s Craig Calhoun argues, “the term ‘public sphere’A ... is a spatial
metaphor for an only partly spatial phenomenon. To be sure, public
spaces from the Greek agora to early modern marketplaces, theatres, and
parliaments all give support and setting to public life. But public events
also transform spaces normally claimed for private transactions—as
parades transform streets.”^5 Consequently, the public sphere will not be
considered here as a positive reality that can be located, but rather as a
reality that appears through social practices. Following Louis Quéré, I will
refer to the public sphere as a phenomenon, that is as a form and an event:
“As a form, it structures coexistence, configures social relations and serves
to apprehend events. As an event, it becomes visible through the practices
and relations it structures and through the same events it serves to appre-
hend.”^6 The public sphere is thus a principle of social organization that
produces behaviors and contributes to give shape to social interactions
or copresence. It depends on these same behaviors and interactions to
appear: “The public sphere is the product of the very practices it calls for,
enables and conditions.”^7 In this perspective, a space is not public per se. It
becomes public through the type of behaviors or interactions taking place,
in accordance with specific codes and rituals, procedures and knowledge.
hat kind of procedures and operations enable the emergence of W
the “ordered environment” that guides behaviors, discourses and actions
and confers upon them a public character?^8 Different currents of thought
on this matter have already been explored in urban sociology. Erving
Goffman in particular has observed how “civil inattention”—an elaborate