AN INTRODUCTION TO THE RESEARCH OF FARUK TABAK, SOCIOLOGIST

Extract

Faruk Tabak, who died of complications following a stroke on 15 February 2008 at age fifty-four, passed his youth in central Anatolia. A childhood in industrial Eskişehir—where, he once told me, the Porsuk River's color varied with the day's textile-dye batch—and college winters in smog-enveloped Ankara made him (“a man of the north”) dream of the pristine landscapes and bright tableaus of Turkey's Mediterranean shores. Trained as an architect and later as a planner at the Middle East Technical University, Tabak charted the currents of modern hegemony, capitalism, ecology, and the spatial dispersion of populations through the deep waters of the Mediterranean's past.