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 52
... I received from scholars based in Turkey became one of my main sources of motivation. This project allowed me to connect with my parents Sünter and Mustafa Özyürek in new ways since many of my questions and x T acknowledgments.
... became part of party politics (Gülalp 2001; Tu ̆gal 2002; White 2002). Concurrently, Kemalism, the publicly o≈cial ideology of the secularist, modernist, and developmentalist Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 2 T ...
... became ''public'' (Casanova 1994), secular state ideology underwent privatization. In this study I trace the much neglected second set of changes. I analyze how secular state ideology, politics, and symbolism found a new life and ...
... became ''privatized'' in multiple meanings of the word. Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) reminds us that liberalism travels well and gives way to novel meanings and practices when in diaspora. Be it multi- culturalism in Australia ...
... became possible only by concentrating on a future that had yet to arrive. Boym provides a perceptive account of the development of nostalgia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But what about the recent explosion of nostalgia at ...
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 |