Ne zaman? Bo-zaman! Photos from Bozeman

Monday, June 4, 2012 Up here at the Borderlands Lodge, the weather is still gorgeous. This is the latest I've stayed in Bozeman during the summer. It's a damn shame I haven't spent more of the warm-weather part of the year here because I live in an incredibly gorgeous part of the world. But it's not always ideal for someone working on the Russian-Turkic borderlands to get away in the winter--especially if you want to work someplace like Georgia or the Crimea, where it's not only cold but also very dark in the archives and everywhere else.

Erdogan and abortion, part deux

Friday, June 1, 2012 Regarding my post from a couple of days ago, another point regarding this issue that I wish I'd made above: Erdogan is also speaking out against caesarean births. This strikes me as an attempt to discuss a cultural/class issue, rather than a strictly religious one. Caesarean births also seem quite common in Turkey. The attitude among the middle class people I knew--men and women--struck me as interesting when I first started living in Istanbul. Having a c-section, whether it was medically necessary or not, appeared to be a lot more accepted and normal-seeming than it was in the US. That's the way it seemed, at any rate, based on the attitudes of the people I knew. I taught private lessons to practically an entire (and entirely male) test-tube baby team at the German Hospital back in the 1990s, and it was interesting hearing their attitudes regarding c-sections. As was the case with the moms and single women I knew, the doctors talked about scheduling c-sections in terms of their predictability. In a city with Istanbul's traffic, people tell me, it would be too dangerous to leave things to chance. What if you got caught in rush hour traffic?