This text charts how Turkish people, both individually and collectively, attempt to personalize the impersonality of the state. The narratives and metaphors used in these constructions draw on resources close to hand such as the organization of the factory and the family structure.

This elegant, nuanced ethnography of modernity will cause scholars of state institutions across a broad range of disciplines radically to rethink what 'the state' actually is, and the relations that create it, thus taking understandings of the state to an entirely new level.