Editor’s Letter

This issue presents a collection of essays that illustrate infrastructures, politics, affects, and structures of feeling that produce social life through the often-intertwined effects that pull people together while simultaneously pushing them apart.

In our Forum essay, Noah Arjomand begins the issue with a series of photos that follow a young Turkish man in the days before shipping out to fulfill his duty as a conscripted soldier. Complicated attitudes toward the military pervade this young man’s community in the shadow of Turkey’s most recent attempted coup, against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a conflict that pitted many civilians and civil servants against insurgents from the armed forces, often in very public displays of humiliation after the coup was put down. But, as Arjomand writes, for the community being depicted here, obligatory military service endures as a noble deed and is felt to create unity...