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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 41
... argue that the Kemalist political, intellectual, and army elite, as well as their citizen supporters, utilized market-oriented symbols of neoliberalism, along with powerfully authoritarian measures, in order to defend their ideology and ...
... organizations and private companies and to redefine the role of the state as a ''consumer state'' rather than a ''citizen state.'' In such states, Philip McMichael (1998, 95) argues, ''governance . . . has become 4 T introduction.
... argues, ''governance . . . has become evaluated according to how e√ectively states adopt market-oriented economic policies,'' even though this process leads governments to lose the freedom to pursue national redistributive and ...
... argues that the public sphere ''grew out of the audience-oriented subjectivity of the conjugal family's intimate domain'' (28), but he does not discuss how the public sphere in turn shaped and formed the private sphere again, especially ...
... argue that nostalgia and privatization are among the powerful driving forces behind neoliberal ideology, which turns objects, relations, and concepts into commodities and transforms political expression by converting it to an issue of ...
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 |