Ghosts and Numbers. Directed by Alan Klima

ursel as a person and Turkey as a personified entity are seen as analogous to each other. Each is endowed with a self that is relational, divided, perpetually caught in the ambiguities of desires mixed with reticence or fear and usually misunderstood. And both hold fortunes that are ultimately unpredictable: ‘‘You reach out for this and you turn from it as if you both desire it and reject it,’’ ‘‘You feel misunderstood,’’ ‘‘When you get your wish, it will no longer be what you wished for.’’ The relationships by which such selves are produced and transformed are imaged after heterosexual romance. The ‘‘very, very good catch’’ and the ‘‘very well connected man’’ appearing in two cups may pertain to either G + ursel’s prospective husband or to Europe as Turkey’s prospective ‘‘husband.’’ Sometimes the marriage game is construed as one in which women have to measure up to men’s standards: ‘‘Even if he approves, he never says he approves a hundred percent. You never know where you stand.’’ Usually, however, it is portrayed as an exercise in egalitarian rivalry which must give place to cooperation: ‘‘You are constantly playing tug-of-war,’’ ‘‘You are waiting for him to make the first move, and he is waiting for you,’’ ‘‘To come together, lovers have to make an effort.’’ G + ursel’s prospects and those of Turkey are not only analogous, but also intertwined. Her fortune as well as that of the fortune tellers and the Turkish politicians is contingent on the nation’s fortune and more specifically, on the outcome of its relationship with Europe. In turn, however, the latter is contingent on the value people like those who appear in the film place on this relationship and on what economic and political reforms they are willing to bear to secure entry into the EU. Indeed, to the extent that the relationship between fortune telling and Turkey is metonymic, fortune telling is not only a means of prognosticating on the country’s future, but it is also a prognostication on the collective self. In one scene, a fortune teller looking into G + ursel’s cup says, ‘‘There is an image of you in their heads. A single category.’’ The comment may refer either to the complexity of her identity, which others fail to acknowledge, or to essentialist and Orientalist representations of Turkey as a homogeneous entity. The film itself contests such representations by emphasizing Turkey’s internal differences exemplified by the differences between its protagonists. Turkey’s diversity is also highlighted by the fact that the film’s exterior scenes clearly point to Istanbul, a dazzlingly diverse, complex, and very touristic city, connecting Asia and Europe. In contrast, the interiors may have been shot anywhere in Turkey. Clearly, however, the stories by which the film is constituted are similar. Interestingly, their similarity is due to their shared underlying assumption that sameness and difference do not preclude, but rather contain one another, and that the same holds for singularity and plurality, passivity and activity, elusiveness and clarity, tradition and modernity, identification with and distance from one’s nation, as well as for fortune telling and formal political discourse. The film effectively challenges Orientalizing views of Turkey or the Middle East, and especially stereotypes that construe women from this region as passive recipients of men’s actions, as lacking interest and knowledge in national and international politics, and as needy of Euro-American guidance toward liberation. Moreover, it is a fine example of recursive ethnography. Rather than engaging with fortune telling as an object of representation, it models itself after the fortune telling sessions by which the film is constituted, activating the viewer as interpreter of narratives against which her own assumptions about subjectivity, agency, and knowledge become visible and relativized. In the tradition of cinema verité or direct cinema, it constitutes itself as a mirror not of reality, but of the parables and metaphors through which people situate themselves in relationships, which enable or necessitate exploring the hidden aspects of reality and imagining the future. Coffee Futures has been screened at several film festivals as well as political, cultural, and academic institutions in the United States, Turkey, Europe, and Australia. It received the 2009 Special Jury EurActiv Award for Debating Europe Nationally. A great teaching tool, it is bound to enlighten the minds and lighten the hearts of those engaging with visual ethnographic discourse, but also a variety of other subjects, including politics, personhood and subjectivity, as well as gender relations and knowledge practices in Turkey and the Middle East cross-culturally.