Contemporary Turkey at a Glance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Local and Translocal Dynamics

202 Pages·2014·2.854 MB·English

by  Kristina Kamp, Ayhan Kaya, E. Fuat Keyman, Ozge Onursal Besgul (eds.)

Contemporary Turkey at a Glance
Kristina Kamp • Ayhan Kaya
E. Fuat Keyman • Özge Onursal Beşgül
(Eds.)
Contemporary Turkey
at a Glance
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Local and Translocal Dynamics
Editors
Kristina Kamp E. Fuat Keyman
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Sabancı University
Germany Istanbul, Turkey
Ayhan Kaya Özge Onursal Beşgül
Istanbul Bilgi University Istanbul Bilgi University
Istanbul, Turkey Istanbul, Turkey
ISBN 978-3-658-04915-7 ISBN 978-3-658-04916-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-04916-4
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Content
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
by Daniel Grütjen, Ayhan Kaya and E. Fuat Keyman
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
by Kristina Kamp, Ayhan Kaya, E. Fuat Keyman
and Özge Onursal Beşgül
Eray Çaylı
Architectural Memorialization at Turkey’s › Witness Sites ‹:
The Case of the Madimak Hotel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Caroline Tee
On The Path of Pir Sultan ? Engagement with Authority
in the Modern Alevi Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Belin Benezra
The Institutional History of Family Planning in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Laura Tocco
Civil Society in Turkey: A Reading of Kadin Gazetesi
through a Gramscian Lens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Doğu Durgun, Elif Kalaycıoğlu
New Turkish Citizenship ? Contestation of Muslim Women
and LGBT Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
6 Content
İpek Gencel Sezgin
Islamist Party Identity in Right-Wing Milieus: The Case
of the National Outlook Movement in Kayseri (1960 – 1980) . . . . . . . . 93
Feyda Sayan-Cengiz
Headscarf in the Context of Precarious Work:
A Critical Approach to the Headscarf Discussion in Turkey . . . . . . . . . 111
Anne Schluter
Competing or Compatible Language Identities
in Istanbul’s Kurdish Workplaces ? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Özlem Altan Olcay, Evren Balta Paker
Market Embedded Transnationalism:
Citizenship Practices of Turkish Elites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Çiğdem Bozdağ
The Digital Bridge Between Turkey and Germany:
Transnational Use of Digital Media in the Turkish Diaspora . . . . . . . . . 157
Nevin Şahin-Malkoç
» Homeland « in » Dreamland « ?
Space and Identity in Göçmen Konutlari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Doğuş Şimşek
› Inclusion ‹ and › Exclusion ‹: Transnational Experiences
of Turkish and Kurdish Youth in London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Preface
The series » Contemporary Turkey at a Glance « seeks to promote the work of
young researchers committed to the study of contemporary Turkey. As series
editors, we particularly wish to present interdisciplinary research that searches
for holistic perspectives on the political, social, and cultural transformations
of the country. This first volume of the series is based on the international con-
ference Contemporary Turkish Studies at a Glance – Topics, Institutions and Fu-
ture Perspectives, which took place at Istanbul Bilgi University on October 13 and
14, 2012.
The conference and this volume were realized thanks to a close cooperation
between the European Institute at Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul Policy Center,
and Network Turkey. Further partners included the British Institute, Ankara, the
French Institute of Anatolian Studies, the Netherlands Institute for Higher Edu-
cation, Ankara, and the Institute of Turkish Studies, Georgetown University. Our
special thanks go to our colleagues at Stiftung Mercator, who funded and sup-
ported the event and this publication through the project Network Turkey – Aca-
demic Community for Turkish Studies.
We would also like to thank the key note speakers and panel chairs, as well as
the researchers who presented their work, and of course, the attendees who con-
tributed with their critical questions and comments. We personally thank the co-
ordinator of the conference and co-editor of this volume, Kristina Kamp, for her
engagement. Furthermore, we are grateful for the support of co-editor Özge On-
ursal Beşgül, Aslı Aydın and Refika Saldere from Istanbul Bilgi University as well
as Susan Rottman and Kerem Öktem from Network Turkey, for their professional
support.
K. Kamp et al. (eds.), Contemporary Turkey at a Glance,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-04916-4_1, © The Author(s) 2014
8 Preface
We are grateful for the support of the institutions and individuals who have
cooperated with us in the last two years. Their efforts and engagement have made
this volume possible.
Daniel Grütjen, Network Turkey
Ayhan Kaya, Istanbul Bilgi University
E. Fuat Keyman, Istanbul Policy Center at Sabancı University
Open Access. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Introduction
In the last twenty years, Turkey has witnessed significant social, cultural, and po-
litical change. This transformation has been visible in all walks of life and sec-
tors of society, from political ideologies to the institutional set up of the state. As
the country is changing, so is the academic literature, which has been expanding
in parallel to Turkey’s growing economy and differentiating society. In this col-
lection, 12 authors seek to elucidate the dynamics of this transformation from a
distinctively interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on innovative conceptual
approaches, and with the aim to introduce new methodologies to the study of
modern Turkey.
The volume deals with the most important fault lines of Turkey’s complex so-
ciety. The contributors focus on issues of citizenship, religion, politics, gender, mi-
nority rights, the dynamics of transnational movements, and the growing impor-
tance of the Turkish diaspora. Inspired by the debates on deliberative democracy
and by critical theory, the authors aim to revisit existing concepts, models, and
methodologies to overcome binary explanations of protest and contestation
against the state. The emphasis here is on the interactive nature of contestation in
heterogeneous multi-organizational fields and multi-national settings. Established
dichotomies of East and West, modernity and tradition, and secularism and Islam
are put to the test.
This collection has three aims. The first is to re-examine ethno-cultural and
ethno-religious relations in Turkey with a critical perspective on nation building.
Some authors suggest that Turkey has now entered a phase of coming to terms
with its troubled past and that this process provides some hope for a deepening
of the country’s democratic culture. The second aim is to shed light on social, po-
litical, and cultural movements, and to investigate the way these groups challenge
constructed notions of the public, by the Turkish state. We need only to remember
the Gezi protests of May – June, 2013 to see the extent to which some citizens of the
K. Kamp et al. (eds.), Contemporary Turkey at a Glance,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-04916-4_2, © The Author(s) 2014
10 Introduction
Turkish Republic wish to play a greater role in shaping this public space. Develop-
ments in the field of Kurdish and Alevi rights, the changing role of religion in the
public, and the increasingly visible presence of LGBT activists are all manifesta-
tions signifying how the ideology of the state and the ruling party is being chal-
lenged. Third, the authors emphasize that the debates on identity, citizenship, na-
tional belonging, ethnicity, religion, and culture are no longer territorialized, but
have taken on transnational and trans-local qualities.
The essays of the volume’s first section deal with efforts of Appropriating the
Past. They focus on distinct practices that actors employ in order to challenge es-
tablished official narratives.
Eray Çaylı discusses the role of architectural memorialization and particularly
the contested memory politics of the › Sivas Massacre ‹. Sites of massacres can be
pacified and controlled by techniques of › museumification ‹, and this is precisely
what state agencies have been doing with the museum they established in the for-
mer Madımak Hotel. The outcome of such state action is that rather than com-
memorating the victims, such museums become symbolic markers for the gov-
ernment’s rather shallow democratization discourse. Çaylı proposes the notion of
a › witness site ‹, where past events are not only remembered, but where evidence is
gathered and testimonies are narrated.
Caroline Tee explores the liminal space between conflict and incorporation
in her study on Alevi engagement with hegemonic majority discourses. Exploring
different positions within the contemporary Alevi Movement, her case study pres-
ents an Alevi group from Erzincan, which differs from other Alevi groups in that
they reveal their openness to negotiation with authorities.
Belin Benezra’s institutional history of family planning in Turkey traces the
roots of this policy back to the founding years of the Turkish Republic. She shows
how family policies have always been in the service of the state’s larger demo-
graphic and political needs. This trend, she remarks, is also reflected in the most
recent neo-liberal health reforms. With the aim to ensure the sustainability of
state pensions, family planning has now been almost dropped in the discourse
employed by leading AKP cadres.
The second section, Challenging Authority, explores the fields of public con-
testation and negotiation of identity. The authors reconstruct the ways whereby
authority is challenged in the public sphere and map emerging repertoires of so-
cial action.
Laura Tocco criticizes the concepts of civil society, which have dominated
the Turkish debate thus far, and proposes a perspective influenced by the work of
Marx and Gramsci, which have also been very widely used in the analysis of pol-
itics and society in Turkey. Tocco argues that the Turkish Republic was built as a
typical case of class hegemony. Her analysis of articles from the feminist weekly