Moral Thresholds of Outrage

Th is article analyses the social construction of moral outrage, interpreting it as both an extemporaneous feeling and an enduring process, objectifi ed in narratives and rituals and permeating public spaces as well as the intimate sphere of social actors’ lives. Based on ethnography carried out in Istanbul, this contribution focuses on the assassination of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. Th is provoked a moral shock and led to an annual commemoration in which thousands of people—distant in political, religious, ethnic positions—gather around a shared feeling of outrage. Th e article retraces the narratives of innocence and the moral frames that make Dink’s public fi gure diff erent from other victims of state violence, thus enabling a moral and emotional identifi cation of a large audience. Outrage over Dink’s murder has become a creative, mobilizing force that fosters new relationships between national history and subjectivity, and de-reifi es essentialized social boundaries and identity claims.