Salih Can Açiksöz

I am an interdisciplinary-minded anthropologist working at the intersection of political violence, gender, health, and embodiment. My first book “Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey” (University of California Press, 2019) centers on disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war. Chronicling veteran’s post-injury lives and political activism, the book examines how veterans’ experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Sacrificial Limbs won the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, MES Book Award Honorable Mention from the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section, the Fatema Mernissi Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly Book Forum on Sacrificial Limbs

My new book project, “Humanitarian Borderlands,” explores the political contestations over medical humanitarian aid in the policed and militarized spaces of the contemporary Middle East. I analyze how new forms of medical care and ethics emerge in zones of political violence through a struggle over the meanings of health, humanitarianism, neutrality, human rights, and terrorism. In addition to these two long-term projects, I have a perennial interest in reproductive politics and fascist and populist movements. You can find the PDFs of some of my most recent work below.