Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in TurkeyDuke University Press, 2006 M08 30 - 240 pages As the twentieth century drew to a close, the unity and authority of the secularist Turkish state were challenged by the rise of political Islam and Kurdish separatism on the one hand and by the increasing demands of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank on the other. While the Turkish government had long limited Islam—the religion of the overwhelming majority of its citizens—to the private sphere, it burst into the public arena in the late 1990s, becoming part of party politics. As religion became political, symbols of Kemalism—the official ideology of the Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923—spread throughout the private sphere. In Nostalgia for the Modern, Esra Özyürek analyzes the ways that Turkish citizens began to express an attachment to—and nostalgia for—the secularist, modernist, and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic. Drawing on her ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara during the late 1990s, Özyürek describes how ordinary Turkish citizens demonstrated their affinity for Kemalism in the ways they organized their domestic space, decorated their walls, told their life stories, and interpreted political developments. She examines the recent interest in the private lives of the founding generation of the Republic, reflects on several privately organized museum exhibits about the early Republic, and considers the proliferation in homes and businesses of pictures of Atatürk, the most potent symbol of the secular Turkish state. She also explores the organization of the 1998 celebrations marking the Republic’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Özyürek’s insights into how state ideologies spread through private and personal realms of life have implications for all societies confronting the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism and politicized religion. |
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... first time during my undergraduate education at Bo ̆gaziçi University in Istanbul. Ye ̧sim Arat, Faruk Birtek, Belgin Tekçe, Nilüfer Göle, Leyla Neyzi, Nükhet Sirman, Ay ̧se Öncü, and Taha Parla put seeds of intellectual curiosity in my ...
... first place so that I could be close to my sister Aslı Özyürek. As a scholar, I strive for her ability to think big, never tire of asking new questions, and pursue them without relinquish. The greatest reward I received in my life as a ...
... curious things among all the items and images. What first attracted my attention was that Atatürk, the founding father of modern Turkey—literally father Turk—dead nearly sixty years by then, seemed to be Introduction.
... first century. Turkey o√ers a particularly interesting place to study the peculiar manifestations of neoliberalism since it has been one of the earlier and most steady testing grounds for the policies of deregulation and structural ...
... first century, I ask, the nostalgia coming after the utopias had vanished? How is recent nostalgia related to the neoliberal modernity in which it flourishes? Market-oriented modernization projects aim to carry every possible object or ...
Contents
1 | |
The Public History in the Private Story | 29 |
Displaying Transformations in Private Lives | 65 |
The Commodification of State Iconography | 93 |
Civilian Celebrations of the Turkish State | 125 |
Kemalist and Islamist Versions of the Early Republic | 151 |
Conclusion | 178 |
Notes | 183 |
References | 199 |
Index | 217 |