Faces of the State

Secularism and Public Life in Turkey

Yael Navaro-Yashin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691088457, 9780691088440
• eBook ISBN: 9780691214283
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Faces of the State is a penetrating study of the production of a state-revering political culture in the public life of 1990s Turkey. In this new contribution to the anthropology of the state, Yael Navaro-Yashin brings recent poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory to bear on the study of the political. Delving deeper than studies of nationalist discourse that would focus on consciously articulated narratives of political identity, the author explores sites of "fantasy" in the public-political domain of Istanbul.


The book focuses on the conflict over secularism in the aftermath of an Islamist victory in the city's municipalities. In contrast with studies that would problematize and objectify religious movements, the author examines the agency of secularists under a state widely known for its "secularist" policies. The complexity and dynamism of the context studied moves well beyond scholarly distinctions between "secularity" and "religion," as well as "state" and "society." Here, secularism and Islamism emerge as different guises for a culture of statism where people from "society" compete to claim "Turkish culture" for themselves and their life practices. With this work that stretches the boundaries of regionalism, the author situates her anthropological study of Turkey not only in scholarship on the Middle East, but also in the broader problem of thinking "Europe" anew.

Part I

CULTURAL POLITICS

1

Prophecies of Culture: Rumor, Humor, and Secularist Projections about “Islamic Public Life”

“The Native”

On an afternoon in March 1994, two Turkish women, one veiled, the other not, encountered one another in front of the Ayasofya museum in the old quarter of Istanbul.¹ The short-haired woman, dressed in a skirt to her knees, a trimly fit blouse, and a short coat, asked the other woman who was wearing a black veil, whether this was the line for tickets to the museum. The veiled woman was surprised. “You speak Turkish?” she asked in amazement. “Yes, I am Turkish!” asserted the short-haired woman, put off by the question. “Oh! You don’t look Turkish. You look like a Westerner,” said the veiled woman. “You don’t look Turkish either,” said the other. “I thought you were an Arab.” “Oh!” said the veiled woman, “thanks to God, we are Turkish and Muslim.” “Well, we are too,” said the short-haired woman. Both these women were claiming exclusive “nativeness” through their own respective manners of dress and public comportment, mutually ascribing “foreignness” to one another, each wanting to dissociate the other’s appearance from her respective notions of “Turkey.”

In the course of the mid-1990s, this sort of verbalized disagreement about the content of “Turkishness” had become extremely commonplace in Istanbul’s public life.² The debates centered especially around the question of women’s dress. What was the form of public appearance that best fitted “the Turkish woman”? Should she veil herself, as demanded of Muslim women by Islamic law? If so, was it sufficient to cover one’s head with a scarf, no matter what the color or style, or did she have to practice abstention to the point of wearing only a black veil? Focusing on such discussions, this chapter explores the implication of politics of gender in competing discourses about nativeness to Turkey.

In the formative stages of the republic, Kemal Ataturk had advocated for women to present themselves in western clothes. His Hat Law ( Şapka Devrimi) of 1925 prohibited the wearing of the fez, a symbol of “Orient” in the eyes of Westerners, and decried its associated Ottoman social rankings. The bowler hat to be donned by men was to symbolize the association of the new republic with Western as opposed to Islamic civilization. With the Hat Law, Ataturk also encouraged men to be tolerant of their wives’ and daughters’ dressing habits. Women in Turkey had started to take up Westernized forms of dress, making themselves up according to an image of the proper Turkish woman, as institutionalized through disciplinary state practices in the early Republican period (the 1920s and 1930s). In the 1990s, Turkish women dressed in a whole range of outfits and styles, much determined by class, position, and rural or urban context. And women who used forms of Western gear began to argue, against Islamists, that this was the proper way for Turkish women to dress.

There was also heightened interest, in the 1990s, in the Turkish term for “nativeness” (yerellik). The meaning and components of nativeness were at the heart of public discussions and debates. What constituted Turkish nativeness? There was no consensus about this question. The content of “Turkishess” was picked apart, contested, and unfolded as the Islamist movement rose to popularity and power. What was Turkey going to look like? What was the country’s image going to be in the eyes of Westerners? These were the issues framed and expressed by secularists. All took to mapping, constructing, and debating the appearance of the proper Turkish native.

The Turkish word for nativeness (yerellik) contains an implicit reference to place, signifying “locality” or ingrainment to the land. Also, in contemporary Turkish it signifies “local culture.” In the contemporary context of a reframed and rekindled nationalism, the term yerellik has had extra symbolic resonance, implying primordial connections with the national motherland (vatan). In the 1990s, yerellik was used as antonym for yabancılık, standing for foreignness or external origin.³ Yet there was no consensus about the content (the reference) of these notions. Instead there was a proliferation of arguments over the meaning of nativeness in Turkey. There was intense public discord over what being native to Turkey or acting like a native meant. The debate was especially acute on the axis of secularist / Islamist politics of culture.

In sorting out their differences, secularist and Islamist women found that they had to justify their lifestyles by claiming organic unity with Turkey. In doing so, women often wrote their opponents’ ways of life out of their own respective narratives of nativeness to Turkey. In the 1980s, Islamist women legitimized their resumption of the veil through a version of a nationalist discourse, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis.⁴ They argued that they were reviving what was “Turkey’s local culture,” which they said “had been repressed through years of Westernization.” Those who did not veil, Islamists argued, were, in their words “not being true to themselves,” were “copying the West,” were no longer “behaving like natives.”

In political and moral struggles with Islamists, secularist women did not at first realize that they had to justify their lifestyles through a competing discourse of “being native to Turkey.” For many secularist women, Westernization, as instituted by Ataturk, signified women’s liberation, freedom from the constraints of religion. Yet, as they interacted with and lost ground to Islamists in the political arena, secularist women realized that they had to claim an “organic unity with Turkey,” as well, in order to be convincing. They had to create their own discourse of Turkey’s local culture. To do this, many of them returned to early Republican sources dealing with Turkey’s national culture. Through a reified version of the early Republican period (or Ataturk’s lifetime), they found what they wanted to see: a validation for their struggle to survive with their lifestyles in the context of present-day Turkey. According to early nationalist discourses on Turkey’s culture, it was secularist and not Islamist women’s practices and clothes that were properly Turkish and local. In the course of public contestation, it became unclear through whose discourse (women’s or men’s, civil society or the state) women were writing their stories of belonging in Turkey. Women found that their concerns about their rights and freedoms had to be articulated through narratives of nativeness to Turkey. Their life practices had to be legitimized in the terms of alternative nationalist discourses, Islamist or secularist. Secularist and Islamist women spoke through seemingly conflictual narratives of an underlying nationalist structure.

If we were to attempt a social history of the concept of culture in the Turkish domain, in the manner that Raymond Williams did for England (1958; 1985, 11–20), we would be able to isolate certain historical periods when contestation of the concept of culture became public. At certain points in the history of Turkey, culture was transformed from tacit knowledge into an abstracted concept to be discussed, dissected, analyzed, and theorized.⁵ The mid-1990s was one such important period, when the rise to local administrative power of a significant branch of the Islamist movement reproblematized the issue of Turkey’s local culture in public debates. The foundational years of the republic, the 1920s and 1930s, were an important period for debating the question “What is Turkey’s culture?” So too were the 1990s, with the success of the Islamist Welfare Party in securing an electoral majority in Turkey’s version of democracy. Once again, people across class, gender, and ideologically based differences, became anthropologists of themselves, arguing over what nativeness signifies, what sort of everyday comportment—manner of walking in the streets, dressing, or talking to strangers—Turkish authenticity requires, or what sort of world-view, belief, or loyalty to the state Turkish local culture calls for. The conflict between secularists and Islamists was a central arena for the production of such fantasies for Turkey’s local culture. On the axis of this politics of identity, women’s practices of everyday life were the central focus of arguments over the meaning of Turkish culture.⁶

Because change occurs swiftly in the volatile climate of contemporary Turkey’s public life, the ethnographic material I present in this chapter should be understood to concern a particular historical contingency: on March 27, 1994 the Islamist Welfare Party won the municipal elections in Istanbul and a majority of other cities throughout Turkey. This chapter is an account of a dominant public discourse on local culture in the month before and the month after these elections in Istanbul.⁷

The appropriate ethnographic question here is not what is (or was) culturally local to Turkey given its history of state enforced Westernization and secularization. This, by implication, is the question posed by scholarly critiques of modernity in anthropology and other disciplines. I rather prefer to ask what is being reformulated as “local” in a history that has been construed as a process of modernization or Westernization? I do not, in other words, take for granted the framework of Westernization, so dominant in the social science of Turkey as well as in the scholarly study of modernity generally. In this account, both Islamists and secularists imagine the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as a story of Westernization. Secularists and Islamists position themselves differently, as characters in this story. Here, I position my analysis not in critique of modernity but against the grain of the framework of Westernization itself, which has so dominated both public-political and scholarly discourses. The point is to displace the narrative of westernization, not to re-reify modernity through a critique.

Tales of Nightmare

The municipal elections of March 1994 did not merely consist of a competition between political parties each of which promised better management of the city’s infrastructure. The campaign was a contest in cultural politics. As the winning potential of the Islamist Welfare Party became obvious in early 1994, all the other political parties claimed to be the sole guarantee for the future of secularism in Turkey. It was one of the first times that an Islamist group was going to assume significant official power in the history of republican Turkey. And a certain kind of secularism was so much taken for granted up to that point in the public unconscious, that upon awareness of a real Islamist threat, the other political parties put all other issues aside to promise the maintenance of a cultural status quo. According to its political rivals, the Welfare Party threatened the meaning and unity of “Ataturk’s state” as founded in 1923 and instituted through decades of secularist and modernist practices.

Most public polls conducted by big mainstream newspapers and private research firms had not predicted that the Welfare Party would win the municipal elections.⁸ Even as the actual poll results were being announced, district by district on TV, many viewers had a hard time taking in what had happened. In metropolitan Istanbul, the Welfare Party came to power with 25 percent of the total votes (Çakır 1994, 222–24). In a system where winner-takes-all, most of the city’s district municipalities as well as the municipality of greater Istanbul were obtained by the Welfare Party. According to the reports, the party had gained most of its support from the shantytowns of Istanbul. The Welfare Party’s own constituency (its actual activists, rather than those who merely voted for it in the booths) were Islamists of various political and sufi affiliations.

Toward the end of March 1994, many of the city’s secularist inhabitants who had not seriously anticipated such an event imagined that they were in for a nightmare. There was an atmosphere of uncertainty, sometimes ridden by panic, depression, and serious anxiety. What would happen to life in Turkey now that an Islamist political party had gained municipal power? An older woman who grew up under the strictly secularist regime of the early republic complained of high blood pressure. A young university student said that she was walking around with “zero morale.” For a few days, many people were fearful of passing through places that were to be administered by the Islamist Welfare Party. No one was sure what awaited them on the streets of Istanbul.

Times of social hysteria create many imaginings. In the state of fearful suspense, many jokes and stories were invented and exchanged. Indeed, Welfare’s victory was largely and significantly received through the medium of black humor on the part of its opponents—the sort of humor that exaggerates an anticipated calamity to render it ridiculously funny, thereby relaxing the seriously anxious. It was in the domain of this informal production and sharing of humor and rumor that secularist discourse on Islam had its force.⁹ This orally produced popular fiction tells much about a certain secularist-Turkish discourse on Islam.¹⁰ The site of humorous and rumor-filled imagination about “the Islamic future of Istanbul” was one of the most effective arenas for the consumption and production of discourse on local culture.¹¹

The domain of humor and rumor reflects discursive knowledge in the form of “flashes,” in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term. The jokes and the gossip are like glimpses of “memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (1968, 255). Benjamin’s work is useful in identifying streams of consciousness, a concept that, I argue, ought to be important in anthropological analysis. More than in consciously formulated ideology or formalized conversation, humor and rumor reveal an unconscious precipitation of remembered discursive forms in the present. My ethnographic examples reveal that Islam was conceived, on the part of secularist joke-tellers and gossips, as a plea for the rejuvenation of local and native (yerel) against contemporary and civilized values (in Turkish the word çağdaş encompasses both the latter notions). The fleeting stream of references here were to the early republican period, which has been cultivated in discourses that circulate in contemporary Turkish social institutions. What I will now recount are examples of humorous secularist projections about Islamist mayors’ notions of locality and nativeness.

A day or so after the election results, a secularist businessman ironically said, “My attire is settled. I already have a beard. All I need are prayer beads and I am fine!” A small shop owner asked his employees, “Tell me what color veils you want, so I can order them wholesale for you to wear from now on!” Some joked with female acquaintances on the street suggesting that they would no longer be able to stroll around without proper Islamic cover. A writer said that he would volunteer to wear a turban: “At least no one will see the bald spot on my head!” Like this, many of the humorous comments produced by secularists had to do with dress and appearance. Indeed, one of the main things that secularists imagined Islamists would do would be to impose Islamic public attire in place of versions of European-style clothes now customarily worn by many of Turkey’s urbanites. In their discursive association, Islamic attire was mapped onto tradition, nativeness, or the past, in contrast to “Westernized attire,” which was linked with the modern and contemporary.

In the week that followed the elections, a young bus driver of Istanbul was making funny sarcastic remarks in reference to what he called “the Islamist takeover.” “From now on everyone goes to bed at twelve,” he said. And, “how nice, Turkey sleeps after midnight! No more fun in bars or drinking places!” “What are we going to do?” middle-class youth asked one another while laughing nervously. “Well, we’re sure to find some new ways to entertain ourselves. Perhaps we can learn to chant and whirl like dervishes!” Those who could partake in the social and cultural life of the metropolis were unsure of the future of their habits. They feared that they would be forced to resort to Islamic or local ways of socializing and entertaining themselves instead of enjoying the lifestyle available in the bars, restaurants, cafés, movie houses, theaters, and discotheques of Istanbul, which were said to match those of the world’s biggest metropolises.

Mostly, secularists speculated about possible restrictions on women’s lives through the enforcement of “Islamic ways.” An apartment tenant, associating “Islam” with polygamy, told his neighbors, “I will visit you with my four wives next time!” “Awful! Awful! Especially for us women,” a young bank employee complained with a grave-looking grin. “They won’t allow women to work, women will sit at home, will not vote, will have to wear the veil, et cetera.” She was sitting alone by the bar tender in an inexpensive bar. “This must be one of my last nights out like this!” she ironically gasped. Shocked by the election result, secular Istan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Semiconscious States: The Political and the Psychic in Urban Public Life
• Part I: Cultural Politics
• Part II: State Fantasies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index