Nostalgia for the Modern

State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey

Autor: Özyürek, Esra; Steinmetz, George; Adams, Julia
Editor: Duke University Press
Col·lecció: Politics, History, and Culture
ISBN: 9780822338796
eISBN Pdf: 9780822388463
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2006
Mes: Agost
Pàgines: 240
DDC: 956.1/02
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

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.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One. The Elderly Children of the Republic:The Public History in the Private Story
Two. Wedded to the Republic:Displaying Transformations in Private Lives
Three. Miniaturizing Atatürk:The Commodification of State Iconography
Four. Hand in Hand with the Republic:Civilian Celebrations of the Turkish State
Five. Public Memory as Political Battleground:Kemalist and Islamist Versions of the Early Republic
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index