“Why Is America Interested in Islam in Turkey?”: Fieldwork and Problems of Gaining Trust in a Low-Trust Society

Abstract

When researchers think of access disruptions, they tend to think of factors exogenous to a field site, those emerging from nationwide events or global crises. Especially in semiauthoritarian contexts, such as Turkey, where ongoing historical contestations (over human rights, minority rights, and freedom of expression) as well as current political polarizations have created a volatile institutional and social environment, ethnographers are more likely to find their fieldwork disrupted. In this essay, I draw attention to a different kind of disruption, one that arises from the endogenous character of the local field site. In particular, I discuss the impact of low interpersonal trust on fieldwork. While gaining access and establishing trust are universal challenges in ethnographic research, the issue is particularly a formidable one in Turkey.