Ferda Nur Demirci Eryat

University of Toronto, Department of Anthropology

2025 Honorable Mention (Social Sciences)

Rescaling Family and Intimacy via Indebtedness in the Soma Coal Basin

Ferda Nur Demirci Eryat’s dissertation, “Rescaling Family and Intimacy via Indebtedness in the Soma Coal Basin,” offers an ethnographically rich and theoretically ambitious account of how states and miners construct and conceptualize monetary indebtedness as both moral and protective. In clear and engaging prose, Eryat demonstrates deep expertise in Turkish political economy, extractivism, and the anthropology of finance and gender. Situating Soma within Ottoman debt legacies, republican development, and neoliberal financialization, she highlights gendered dimensions of wage and household finance to reveal how indebtedness creates collectivities among miners. By skillfully interweaving archival research, theoretical analysis, and archival interviews and observations, Demerci reveals how the Turkish financial policies have produced economic value from gendered intimacies in Soma’s mining community. This dissertation inspires new approaches for cross-disciplinary social science research that places gender and morality at the center of class and financial systems.

This dissertation was completed at the University of Toronto in the Department of Anthropology under the supervision of Andrea Muehlebach and Fırat Bozçalı.

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