Turkey Between Nationalism and Globalization by Riva Kastoryano

Author:Riva Kastoryano [Kastoryano, Riva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138830288
Amazon: B00BEGC05C
Barnesnoble: B00BEGC05C
Goodreads: 19628542
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Occidentalism put on stage, and the “constitutive other” of Turkish modernism: Islam

This break between the center and the periphery continued after the formation of the Republic, when laïcité was instated. The project of secularism served to distance individuals from the old ties that linked them to the sources of legitimacy left over from the Empire. The project was confirmed in the construction of a public, republican sphere, a space that reveals identity changes. For the Republic, the public sphere was not merely a space for political participation or for public-opinion formation, but was actually a space where a Western, modern people was to be created. A public, didactic space was in question: a field for the identification and practice of Western behavioral modes. As laïcité came on to the scene, privileged positions were set aside for those who lived Western lives in the public sphere, who relegated the Islamic lifestyle to the periphery and retained for Muslims a specific, carefully surveyed visibility in the public space.31 According to Alev Cinar, in the project of secularization, Islam was to connote ignorance; underdevelopment; a lack of education; rural, traditional life; and the lower classes. Secular citizens, for their part, were, on the contrary, developed, well-educated, enlightened, urban, modern, universal, and upper class. The authority and privilege of laïcité were legitimate according to its own rules and via the dichotomies that continued to regard Islam as the marked “other,” whereas an individual religiosity was created and institutionalized in conformity with the Kemalist project. As we have shown on p.108, traditional Islam and its old institutions were rejected in the revolutionary process.

The construction and architecture of the republican public space housed a plan to civilize. If the new republican elite were the actors behind the project, then Ankara was its location. Instead of the old Ottoman center, Istanbul, Ankara was made the capital of the new nation, constructed around a small village in the Anatolian steppes. That this project should have its roots in Ankara suggested a break with the past. The public space in Ankara was home to new modes of life, new customs, new modes of dressing, behaving and gesticulating.32 A new habitus was adopted and diffused throughout the society on the back of the revolution. Bureaucrats and members of the new Muslim bourgeoisie came together in a coalition of bureaucrats and bourgeois, displaying novel ways of life in the economic and social center.33 Kemalist nationalism revealed these two classes’ domination through the staging of a new way of life and a new habitus.

In this spatial organization of the republican civilization, certain locations were more significant than others. Kizilay Square, occupied by a garden and a pool, became the theatre par excellence for displays of new modes of life. The pool's edge was a recreational space for elegantly dressed bourgeois men and women, who would meet and lounge, listening to the Western classical music played by the Riyaset-i Cumhur Mızıkası, or the President's Orchestra. The construction of this new city was carried

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