Seasonal agricultural workers in Manisa: materialization of labor, bodies and places through everyday encounters

Abstract

When it comes to seasonal agricultural workers, the only language to talk about them follows: “They are carried at the back of trucks, packed like sardines, they live in plastic tents deprived of hygiene and in inhuman conditions, and they work twelve hours a day under the sun, for awfully low wages, be them women, children or elderly. Their bodies are the bodies of poor and lacking bodies of victims in destitution. But they are also excessive bodies, they have too many children, they steal, they cause disturbance in the regions they migrate and they are dangerous. Their bodies are turned into such objects through these discourses and squeezed into the category of “seasonal agricultural worker”, which is a term its referents never use. The differences among the referents of this category are ignored and they are turned into a monolithic “other”. But how do the “objects” mentioned as such experience this labor practice and how do they relate to their bodies? How are these bodies materially and discursively constructed and rendered meaningful? How do they materialize within the social, economic and political relations surrounding this labor practice? Within these power relations how are the bodies and the social space in which they take place formed? Who encounters whom in this social field? Who learns what from these encounters? In this thesis, I will be looking for the answers to these questions by elaborating upon the results of the fieldwork which I conducted as a participant observer in the districts of Soma, Akhisar and Alaşehir of Manisa in the summer of 2009 and by analyzing the moments of the labor process through bodies, places and encounters.