ABSTRACT
Focusing on the days and weeks following the 15 July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey and based on informal discussions and participant observation, this chapter tries to make sense of the overwhelming mood of my interlocutors and myself, by describing the trajectory of their emotions from denial to uncertainty and anxiety and finally denial again. In doing this, my aim as an anthropologist focusing on living social actors who are trying to cope with such an overwhelming state is to stress that a coup d’état (even a failed one) feels exactly like what the term describes in its language of origin, that is, a ‘coup’, a blow, a hit, like a punch in the face that affects every possible expression of public and private life. This is what I will try to describe, albeit inevitably only partly, by engaging in an auto-ethnographic style insofar as I found myself in an affective state to a certain extent very similar to that of my informants, concluding that the affective response of my interlocutors functioned as a mechanism for remaining sovereign over oneself but also as a way of reproducing the state.
