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
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... symbolism 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 ...
... symbolism of the market and privatization rapidly traveled to spheres of life outside the economy such as civil society, the domestic sphere, history writing, and emotional expression. Hence it radically transformed the political field ...
... symbolism of the market, of privacy, and of voluntarism as located outside the state are increasingly becoming hegemonic, the symbolic center of politics is not dismantling but shifting from public institutions to such things as civil ...
... symbolism in the political public sphere cannot simply be understood as a displacement of personal issues. Scholars who study the transformation of the public and private spheres in the United States and Europe explain the rise of new ...
... symbolism into the privacy of their foundations and homes in order to prevent it from being contaminated by corrupt state o≈cers who, they believed, no longer acted according to Kemalist principles. The timing of modernist nostalgia 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 |