Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Politics, History, and Culture) [Paperback]

Esra Ozyurek (Author)

Book Description

Series: Politics, History, and Culture | Publication Date: August 30, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Esra Özyürek equips us to see modernity as both an ongoing invention and an object of nostalgia. Her analysis, exceptional for its ethnographic richness and ideological nuance, shows how power struggles between secular and Islamist political movements are reconfiguring popular notions of citizenship and the sacred in Turkey. Few scholars have devised such a compelling framework for assessing the mutual transformations of nationalism, Islam, and the state. This is exciting, innovative work.”—Andrew Shryock, author of Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination

About the Author

Esra Özyürek is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She is the editor of Politics of Public Memory: Production and Consumption of the Past in Turkey.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (August 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822338955
• ISBN-13: 978-0822338956
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #720,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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