The green card scheme: an ethnography of 'the state' and its 'poor citizens' in Adıyaman

Abstract

This thesis is mainly about the everyday workings of the “Green Card Scheme” - a social assistance mechanism providing free health care services to “poor” citizens - in Adıyaman. Through a scrutiny of the everyday interactions around the Green Card, this thesis intends to explore the question of how the relationships between “the state” and citizens are produced, and how the categories of “state” and citizenship are substantiated at the everyday level in Adıyaman, by means of various discourses and practices and in the process of citizensμ interactions with the local bureaucracy and institutions in charge of implementing the Green Card Scheme. The main argument of this thesis is that both the ways in which the Green Card scheme is regulated by state officials, and the ways in which the recipients deal with the scheme in Adıyaman, occur in a context where hopes for overall development and recognition by modernization are increasingly giving way to a sense of marginality in the form of ‘disownment’ and loss and a desire to be re-owned and recognized by “the state”. As such, this thesis can also be read as an exploration of the material and discursive formations of marginality and a marginal locality (Adıyaman) in Turkey.