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 57
... defined the civic and private spheres as the latest exalted centers of power. More specifically, I explore how and why the symbolism of neoliberalism, which aims to substitute the market for both society and the state, is being ...
... define as the privatization of state ideology is far from unique to Turkey, although it takes a particular form there. Scholars of contemporary societies agree that the definition, practice, and location of politics have changed around ...
... defining political relations in terms of self-interest. Others have even termed the West's contemporary moment as ''post political'' because the decision-making process is delegated to technocrats (ˇZiˇzek 1999, 198), or as ''anti ...
... definition belong to the latter area. To the contrary, my analysis of the shifts between what is considered private and public are inspired by feminist scholars who have successfully demonstrated that the line between the two spheres ...
... defined public simply growing out of a preconstituted private. the role of nostalgia In this study I focus on the ''structure of feeling'' (Williams 1977) of nostalgia as one way in which what used to be considered public and political ...
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 |