Elizabeth Angell, (Independent Scholar)
“Inventing Hatay: Diversity and History in the Sanjak of Alexandretta”
This paper examines the post-Ottoman transformation of the Sanjak of Alexandretta from part of Mandate Syria into the short-lived independent republic of Hatay, and then the eighty-second province of the Republic of Turkey. When the region's status came before the League of Nations as a matter of dispute in 1936, local Turkish nationalists and the Turkish state embarked upon a political-ideological project designed redefine the Sanjak as part of a Turkish Anatolian homeland. Drawing on Turkish sources and the diplomatic papers of colonial powers, I analyze the process by which Turkish nationalists (as well as European colonial officials) sought to map the extremely heterogeneous population of the Sanjak into new categories defined by the nation-state ideal and the concept of "minorities." I argue that their rhetoric reflected the early Kemalist state's contradictory attitude towards diversity, both in the creation of different categories of belonging, and in the paradoxical insistence on (forced) assimilation as a viable route into the national community. The academic establishment of the new Turkish Republic played a key role in this process. Scholars and politicians strove to make the Sanjak's population legible to the Kemalist state by renaming it "Hatay," and declaring its inhabitants--in particular, the Arabic-speaking Alawite or Nusayri community--to be "Hittite Turks." I suggest that the invention of Hatay was part of the broader process of defining and negotiating the terms of membership in the Turkish nation in this period. I will also briefly discuss post-1939 developments in Hatay, in the context of the Turkish state's fraught relationships with diversity and national historiography.
Kabir Tambar (University of Chicago)
“Politics, Theology, Alevism”
One common manner of distinguishing the Ottoman empire from the Turkish republic is by reference to the constitutional doctrine of secularism. As one of the six arrows of Kemalism, secularism is often thought to be a product of the republican revolution. Recent scholarship argues against this historical narrative, both because it fails to acknowledge the continuities of governance that cut across this transition (Meeker 2002) and because it fails to acknowledge that secularism only became a constitutional principle in 1937 rather than in the first years of the republic (Davison 1998). Secularism thus points to both a longer and a shorter trajectory than the Empire-to-Nation narrative would suggest. Nonetheless, this narrative of the rupture between an Islamic Ottoman empire and a secular Turkish republic continues to find political currency, and no where so strongly as among Turkey's largest religious minority, the Alevi. The narrative of secular rupture grounds Alevi criticism of their past oppression and their continued discrimination. Secularism, in other words, not only functions as a crucial if inaccurate crux of Turkish national historiography; it also functions as a language of criticism through which Alevis can make demands on the state. At the intersection of national historiography and political criticism, secularism operates as an organizing trope in the production of an Alevi politics of difference. This paper explores how narratives of a secular rupturing of imperial governance mediate ideas of oppression and liberation that shape contemporary Alevi identity. I argue that the politics of secularism comes to be entangled in efforts to define a theology of Alevism. Through the concept of secularism, Alevis inscribe themselves into the narratives of the nation, as they make claims to religious difference. Secularism, I suggest, contributes not merely to an ideological distortion of Turkish history, but also to the political and theological limits of Alevi self-understanding.
İlker Cörüt (Boğaziçi University)
“A Critical Survey of Recent Literature on Non-Muslim Minorities in Ottoman-Turkish Historiography”
The decline of nation-states and of the teleology of the modern with the rise of globalization has made it possible to conceive of the past as a source of alternative historical trajectories rather than merely as a route to the present. In accordance with this new conceptualization of past and present, nation-state and nationalism are no longer seen as the results of the natural-rational evolution of macro political-social organizations but more as historical accidents that have led to many tragic ethnic confrontations and massacres. In such a context, there is a growing literature based on the critique of nation-states’ discriminatory politics towards minority groups. Concomitantly, the empires that preceded many of today’s nation-states draw the attention of many historians as alternatives to nation-states, and are assumed to have been capable of providing multi-cultural settings in which different ethnic-religious groups tolerated each other and co-existed peacefully. We can find the reflections of this general tendency in Ottoman-Turkish historiography, which tells about the tragic experiences of minority groups (Greeks, Armenians, Jews) after the emergence of Turkish nationalism and the foundation of theTurkish Republic.
This literature contributes to the critique of Turkish nationalism by giving voice to the oppressed experiences of minority groups and historicizing the nationalist ideology, it cannot radicalize its critique since it is characterized by multiculturalism that desocializes the process of the formation of ethnic identities and the nationalist ideology.
This paper aims to make a critical analysis of recent literature on non-Muslim minorities in Ottoman-Turkish historiography by emphasizing the political implications of the multiculturalist epistemology of these studies in the recent political climate of Turkey that witnesses a rising aggressive racist-fascist movement.
Ozan Aksoy (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Blindspots in Music Scholarship of the Ottoman Era and Turkish Republic”
This paper is going to discuss changes in the definition of what constitutes "our" music in the course of the transition period from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic (TR). I will demonstrate that there has not been a substantial transformation even though the official cultural policy of TR and the Turanists pursued an aggressive homogenization policy. The first scholars who visited Turkey, like Bartok, Reinhard, and Melikoff, were made to believe that the Republic had “modernized” and thus improved in the musical life of Turkey based on a musical reformation (i.e. Westernization). Those scholars were led astray by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Turkish Radio and Television (TRT), both of which aimed to guide them to visit only the Turkish or Turkmen villages, limiting the recordings only to them, excluding Kurds, Armenians, Alevis, and so on.
The alternative scholarship has been limited to an insistence on the theory that the emergence of an ill-guided transition from a multi-national empire into a modern republic resulted in an unfortunate deformation and degeneration in musics in Turkey. The tension between the Sacred & Secular, Ottoman & Turkish, Sark & Garb, Alaturka & Alafranga, Arabesk & Nonarabesk, NonTurkish & Turkish and the appropriation of the latter in all cases by official cultural policy, that was also shared by many scholars, have led to significant blind spots in music scholarship. Just as the lack of attention to the Armenian Ashugs (wandering minstrels) in the Alevi repertoire, there are many other blind spots in the music scholarship history of the Ottoman and Turkish Republic that this paper is going to address.
Öznur Akkuş (Independent Scholar)
“Strategies and memory in the aftermath of Genocide: The Armenians of Dersim”
This paper focuses on the case of survivors of the Armenian Genocide in Tunceli (formerly Dersim).
Deprived from their social and religious institutions which had enabled the Armenian language and religion to survive, they were instead given (and had to adopt) a "Turkish/Muslim" identity and consequently melted into the Kurdish Muslim population, which was the majority group in the region. Although the Armenians of Tunceli met the same fate as the Kurds in 1936, rural exodus, and particularly emigration to France, distinguished the Armenians from the locals, as many of theirs descendants used diverse strategies to reunite with their co-religionists in Turkey or France.
Based on testimonies gathered from that Armenian population, this papers aims to document various life trajectories and the conditions under which have they emerged by asking:
How can we understand the conversion or Turkification of those "forgotten" Armenians? What are the strategies used by those "anonymous Armenians" to join their co-religionists Armenians in other parts of Turkey or France? What is their assertion of being part of the Armenian community based on? How do they perceive themselves? How are they perceived? Is "collective memory" an appropriate expression to designate the memory of for those Armenians? And finally, who are the agents that transmit this memory?
Kadir Üstün (Columbia University)
“Rethinking the Origins of Ottoman and Turkish Modernization”
My proposed paper will attempt to reveal and challenge some of the common assumptions about Ottoman/Turkish modernization through a study of the changes that took place during the reign of Selim III, known as Nizam-ı Cedid (the New Order), 1789-1807. It will also try to offer an alternative conception of Nizam-ı Cedid in light of the recent revisionist studies.
Our understanding of Nizam-ı Cedid has been shaped by historians of various time periods (Ottoman, Republican, and contemporary) and of various convictions such as westernist, nationalist, republican, Marxist, religious etc. Interestingly, this variety is rarely reflected when one studies the history of Nizam-ı Cedid. The common thread in these studies is that they present Nizam-ı Cedid as the beginning of a long trajectory of modernization. According to the so-called modernization paradigm, a conflict between tradition and modernity became unavoidable in the Ottoman Empire thanks to the military, political, economic, and ideological advances of the Europeans accomplished in the 18th century and earlier. The struggle between the religious-minded conservative ulema with their janissary allies and the reform-minded enlightened bureaucratic elite would eventually yield a victory for the forces of progress and modernity with the birth of the new Turkish Republic.
The historiography as such suffers from eurocentricism in its emphasis of Western superiority, a teleological approach for imagining an unbroken chain of efforts at modernization, Orientalist dichotomies namely tradition versus modernity, and an elitist view for neglecting the significance of the popular resistance against the Nizam-ı Cedid by the community at large.
I will first try to present a picture of the “reality on the ground”; heavy toll of the Austro-Russian wars on the empire, burdening of the population with heavy taxes to finance Nizam-ı Cedid, the disturbance of the balance between military and social groups. Then, I will try to reach an alternative understanding of Nizam-ı Cedid through an analysis of the terms “order” and “discipline” which are widely used in the archival documents of the time. Such an analysis, I hope, will allow us to say more about the “rationale” of the new measures and to examine whether they amount to the “beginnings of modernization” or they reflect a different reality emancipated from the bounds of modernization paradigm.
Mehmet Döşemeci (Columbia University)
“Talking Turkey about Europe: The EEC and the Turkish Socio-imaginary”
In the past 15 years, Turkish-EU relations have served as the quintessential site for official, lay, and academic discussions on Turkey’s liminal engagement with Western modernity. Over this time, this site has been structured by a set of stipulations that must be fulfilled before Turks can ‘become fully European’. For this reason, Turkish integration with the EU has fostered, if not birthed, many of the assumptions over Turkey’s ‘backwardness’, ‘Easternness’, and ‘belated modernity’. Yet, despite the apparent complicity of Turkish-EU relations in disseminating such narratives the earlier history of Turkey’s integration into the then EEC stands as an overlooked platform; one redolent of a very different story.
This paper discusses how Turks spoke about integration with the EEC from 1968 to 1980 and how through this they understood themselves. The usual narrative of EEC-Turkish relations jumps over these dozen years, a period marked by a mutual souring of relations, seeing it as a thorn in the teleology of integration. Yet, for many Turks in the 1970’s, the EEC served as a sounding board through which they imagined Turkey, its state, its culture, and its people. I argue how these new understandings of Turkey were made possible by a correlative shift in Turkey’s experience of modernity: a shift from modernity truncated as modernization theory, where modernity itself was both spatially (Western world) and temporally (as Turkey’s future) external to Turkey, to an experience of modernity proper as the conscious capacity of society for radical self-alteration. I will examine how the various postures Turks took towards the EEC in this period (re)conceived the Turkish project in different ways. I argue that these new conceptualizations illuminated some of the contradictions in Ataturk’s vision for modern Turkey, contradictions that paralleled and underscored those of the project of modernity itself.
Zeynep Gönen (SUNY Binghamton)
“Punishment, policing and regulation in Turkey, from the late nineteenth century to the present.”
There is no more commonplace illustration of the need for ‘modernization’ of ‘traditional’ societal practices than the ‘archaic’ penal systems in the peripheral countries, such as Turkey. Arbitrary practices of the police, torture, and unhygienic and overcrowded institutions since the late Ottoman period to the present day Turkey have justified the narrative of Turkey’s ‘failed’ modernity and the need to ‘modernize’ its institutions. Similar readings of penal institutions and of nature of societies in the periphery are abundant. Especially with Foucault’s intervention, the inquiries of penal institutions almost inevitably reflected on the condition and the meaning of modernity. The elements of punishment delineated in the Western historiography were imprinted as the modern form, allowing for an investigation of those elements elsewhere. The problems of modernization paradigm thus were reincarnated in such formulations.
In this paper, through a conceptualization of modernity as a global phenomenon, I will argue those different modes of punishment (depicted as ‘humanitarian’ vs. ‘traditional’ methods) together constitute modern punishment situated within the world-historical relations. By concentrating on penal institutions and practices during late Ottoman Empire and neoliberal period in Turkey, I will argue that so-called ‘traditional’ practices were integral elements of global capitalist modernity and formative of modernization projects in peripheral societies. I will demonstrate how the ‘modernizing’ regimes in Ottoman-Turkey have in fact relied on and replenished those very ‘archaic’ and authoritarian forms of penalty for regulating and managing the populations. Such institutions and abuses are not simply signs of ‘failure’ of the peripheral societies, but the techniques employed in the constitution of modern capitalist order. A comparative reading with both Western and non-Western geographies, moreover, will help refute understanding Turkish penal system as an oddity in its violent techniques, but recognize similar experiences and practices elsewhere, in an effort to conceptualize modern punishment as a contradictory and relational category.
Nurçin İleri (Boğaziçi University)
“The Illumination of the Istanbul Streets at the Turn of the Century”
In the late nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire spent a particular effort in order to keep order in the streets and socialize and beautify the streets as well. This paper aims to underline the importance of the illumination of the streets in the context of socialization and regulation of the streets in Ottoman society and specifically in Istanbul. The purposes of street lighting may be introduced as protection from accidents, prevention of crime, increase of comfort and convenience, increase of attractiveness as well. However, taking into consideration modern governmental policies of the Ottoman state in the late nineteenth century, we should consider on the meanings of illumination from different historiographic perspectives. The Istanbul municipality spent a particular effort to keep the night hours under their control through the illumination of the streets. In the scope of keeping security and preventing crime rates, this control mechanism also strengthen the authority and legitimize the power of the government in the public life of Ottoman society.
This paper intends to scrutinize the institutional development of the illumination of the streets with coal gas and how the Istanbul government conveyed the necessity of the illumination of the streets, which is even today, constitute big problems and discussions. However, what is more important for this study is questioning how the Ottoman people reacted against the street lighting and what the illumination of the streets changed in daily lives of the Istanbul people.
“Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Confrontation or Accommodation?”
The ‘secularization thesis’ and much of the secularization literature involve the assumption of conflict between religion and state. Similarly, much of the literature on the Turkish modernization holds the assumption that secularism is based on the conflict between the (secular) state and Islam, seeing this process simply in dichotomous terms such as Enlightenment vs. obscurantism, progress vs. reaction (Berkes, Engin, Lewis, Tunaya etc.). However, recent studies have shown that the church-state separation is not so clear neither in the West nor in the non-Western world. The application in theory and practice of the concept of secularism the Muslim world in particular has also been widely criticized. Similarly, the most recent trend in the literature on Ottoman-Turkish modernization emphasizes ‘Islamization’ as well as secularization (Kara, Mardin etc.). Building on these latest trends, I examine the views of two leading figures -one intellectual, the other politician- in the secularization of Turkey: Ziya Gökalp, the prominent ideologue of secularism, and Ataturk, the champion of secularism and the most important political actor in Turkish modernization. By analyzing the views of the leading representatives of secularism, I aim to show that the relationship between Islam and secularism was, even for secularists, one of accommodation, rather than confrontation, in the first quarter of the 20th century. My method is the Foucauldian discourse analysis that conceptualizes discourse as constitutive and constructive of social relations and identities, and of the interdependency of discursive practices. The analysis of these texts from this perspective can give important clues about the nature of the secularization process in Turkey, which, I argue, was dominated by an Islamic discourse -widely employed, even by secularists- from 1839 up until 1924 –when various radical reforms started by Ataturk to further secularize the state. I contend that this discursive strategy -that was inclusive of Islam- was adopted for legitimation purposes in a Muslim society, because Islam was too powerful to challenge openly. Therefore, Turkey’s experience presents an alternative path to secularization, rather than simply being a variant of the secularism; for this process involves a re-definition of the role of Islam in the public sphere, rather than an open conflict with it in Turkey.
Nada Moumtaz (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Interrogating law and private property: the Ottoman Land Code (1858) and the Lebanese Real Estate Property Code (1930) in a comparative perspective.”
Unlike the Turkish Republic, which came into being (more or less) directly after the Ottoman empire, the Lebanese Republic first existed in 1922, and up to 1943, as the French Mandate of Greater Lebanon. The narratives of continuity with the Ottoman empire have hence been doubly-silenced, by national myths and the colonial encounter.
In an attempt to examine continuities as well as discursive breaks between Ottoman and Republican Lebanon as to practices and conceptions of property, this paper brings together the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 (and its various addenda) and the Lebanese-under-French-Mandate Real-Estate Property Code of 1930, which still forms the backbone of the present code. Building on Maine and Hohfeld, this paper avoids the use of the distinction private/ public, and attempts to think of property as a bundle of rights, privileges, powers, immunities, duties and liabilities. With such an approach, the paper can examine in new light the work of the Ottoman and French codes in relation to the debate of privatization of miri land. It argues that, in both codes, the presence of a multiplicity of rights, that can be held by different hands, provides proof that the “exclusive and absolute private property” is more a hegemonic conception than a legal reality. It shows the presence of claims and restraints imposed on property owners by others. Finally, the paper brings out the changes in the underlying conceptions of the “good” on the basis of which the Ottoman and French states were making these claims and restrictions were made.
Faik Umut Őzsu (University of Toronto, Faculty of Law)
“‘Receiving’ the Swiss Civil Code: The Socio-Legal Reconfiguration of ‘Womankind’ in Early Republican Turkey”
It has long been recognized that Kemalist ideology adopted implicitly gendered models for the conceptualization of relations between state and society: while the former was generally associated with the positivistic progressivism of the “masculine” West, the latter was typically affiliated with the fatalistic parochialism of the “feminine” East. In addition to this, however, is a second, and far more invasive, sense in which gender can be said to have underpinned the normative infrastructure of Kemalism. This concerns the manner in which the competing claims of “modernity” and “tradition” were brought to bear upon the process of fashioning the “emancipated but respectable” woman of the Republic, the everyday embodiment of the intelligentsia’s vision of a territorially delimited, economically self-sufficient, and ethno-linguistically homogeneous nation-state that would be capable of retaining its hold on indigenous customs while securing its place in what Woodrow Wilson referred to as the “family of civilized nations”. After canvassing both modes of gendered identity, I will provide a brief discussion of the Turkish Civil Code of 1926, a contextually nuanced “translation” of the Swiss Civil Code of 1907. My principal objective here will be to demonstrate not only that the 1926 code, when considered as a totality, may be regarded as a carefully crafted hybrid of the Ottoman (or, more precisely, Hanafi Islamic) and Swiss (or, more broadly construed, Western) legal traditions, but that its most celebrated and operationally salient provisions may themselves be understood as rough-and-ready compromises between what Ziya Gökalp, chief theoretician of Turkish nationalism, called the opposing demands of “culture” (hars) and “civilization” (medeniyet). Tying the two components of the paper together, I will conclude by arguing that neither the existence of textual discrepancies between the Turkish and Swiss codes nor the presence of various lags and lacunae in the former’s implementation record can be explained in the absence of a broader account of the mechanisms through which gendered identities came to be reconfigured as part of the Kemalists’ drive to construct a re-galvanized nation on the back of a restructured state.
Saneta DeVuono Powell (University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law)
“Solutions in the Source”
The development of water law in western nations has been predicated on the notion of water being an infinite resource, allowing for it to be conceptualized as private property. However, as the scarcity of clean water has increased, western law has struggled over conceptualization of water as a commodity and a common good. This paper looks at the development of water law in the Middle East1 and suggests that many of the "new" conceptions of how to deal with the laws of water in "western" jurisprudence mimic the manner in which the jurisprudence of water developed in the Middle East starting in the 9th century B.C.
Charting the creation of a highly developed framework for water allocation formally codified by the Ottoman Empire, incorporated Bedouin practices, Talmudic law and shari'a in addition to other local customs, this paper suggests that recent developments in western water law (like equitable utilization and the public trust doctrine) are neither new nor necessarily secular. What is striking about this "new" legal conception of water in the west is that its only reference to the Middle East is to suggest that the region should consider adopting these western principles, ignoring the fact that the Middle East has a long and well documented history of regional water use based on common goods theories. These concepts were formally codified by the Ottoman Empire with the Mejelle code, which represented an administrative synthesis of local practices into one system lasting until the end of World War I (when the region was partitioned by the allies with little regard for natural water resources). Ultimately, this paper suggests that the realities of water problems worldwide require regional solutions that pre-date the modern notion of nation state and that current nation states are not equipped to solve on their own.
Ceren Özgül (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Legal Conversions: Thinking about Violence, Religion and Legal Reform in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire”
Taking as its historical point of departure the cases of conversion of Ottoman Armenians to Islam in the 19th Century, this paper addresses the implications of the modern Ottoman State's efforts to secularize the legal realm and redefine the terms of state's sovereignty over its subjects. It proposes that conversion, initiated by state violence,
was a tool to establish the terms of belonging and loyalty to the "modern" state. The unity of "modern community" is constructed through the means of both secular law and state violence by the emerging modern Ottoman State as a religiously homogeneous one even though the state is becoming "secular." This paper emphasizes the strong relationship between the legal reform and religion rather than (mis)recognizing the reform as a complete separation between religion and state. The seemingly "controversial" character of the act of conversion is not due to the failure of a modernizing state to secularize its laws but drives its force from the bureaucratic reform of the Ottoman Law. Violence and legal reform were two complementary tools that the modern state uses to create the loyal citizen and maintain its sovereignty. In this sense, a new importance was assigned to religion in establishing the "loyal majority."
“Bridging the Gulf: Creating a New Ottoman Historiography of the Emirates of the Persian Gulf: The Case of Qatar”
Perhaps among the biggest Ottoman historiographical “blind spots” is the Persian Gulf. Other than a brief focus on Ottoman connections to Kuwait after the 1990 Iraqi invasion, this hasn’t been an active field of inquiry in Arabic, English or Turkish. For over a century, English language Gulf historiography ascribed centrality to Britain and its steadily increasing interests in the region, with Gulf history being mapped through British archives. Arabic language Gulf historiography, which emerged in the last 30 years, followed this model. And revisiting an Ottoman Gulf has been all but ignored in the Turkish language historiography.
There is, however, a small group of scholars who have emerged since 1997 and put the Gulf back into the Ottoman map. This development has important historiographic implications, not only because it introduces “balance” in the region, but also due to those who use Ottoman archival material on the Gulf, an extremely rich and untapped resource has been introduced. Yet the exploration of an Ottoman Gulf has brought a dynamic to the surface: nationalistic historiography. The Ottoman period and Ottoman records now serve as arenas for reinforcing preexisting historiographic trends or for reviving old claims. Those few Arabic works on the Ottoman period often serve the purpose of justifying the long-term leadership of ruling families or a national raison d'etre. The handful of Turkish works denounces the old British claims in the region, and British archive-based historiography, within the larger framework of proving Ottoman sovereignty.
While an overview of these Gulf historiographical developments will be addressed in the paper, the specific archival and nationalistic strategies will be demonstrated through an analysis of Qatari historiography. A disaggregation of issues of “sovereignty” and questions about local agency can be explored from within a critical view of the location of Qatar in the new Ottoman historiography.
Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı (SUNY Binghamton)
“Which State, Which Modernity? Specters of Nationalism in Turkish Historiography since the 1990s”
The main object of this paper is the recent scholarship on Ottoman Empire and Early Republican Turkey, which is formed from the late 1970s onwards. Discussions on how the Ottoman Empire modernized or westernized in nineteenth and twentieth centuries had dominated discussions of the earlier periods of 1950s, 60s and 70s. The novel element in the current scholarship is the diminished importance attributed to the Early Republican period as the culmination of modernity, and to the subsequent perception of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as the sole creator of that moment. Yet, the irony in this situation is that disenchantment with this particular historical moment did not result in a parallel demystification of the idea of state. In other words, questioning the foundations of the nation-state did not lead into leaving state-centered mentality behind. Despite its strong rejection, newly growing literature on the history of modernization is as much state-centered as its predecessors. This becomes apparent in its aim to locate the origin of modernization to nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, and change the primary actor from early Republican to Ottoman state elite. The specter of nationalism haunts the scholarship through the unproblematized perception of modernization, which simplifies the matter into a choice between a nostalgic idea of a multicultural Ottoman Empire, and the homogenous and monolithic nationhood of the Republican period.
Seçil Yılmaz (Boğaziçi University)
“Neo-Conservative Memory in Exhibition: Miniatürk”
“Miniatürk: Showcase of Turkey”, presents a clear model for the post-1980s exhibition projects in the sense of both its physical construction and the content of the narration. Both the former and latter served as the basis of experiences that were quite distinctive than museums in the modern sense. Basically, focused on the role of reviving the dead memories of the cultural and social geography where the initial modernization practices were bodily represented during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Miniaturk exhibition complex situated on the shore of the Golden Horn, as a tool of a nostalgic remembrance through the contents it covers with the aura of a fairy tale.
In this study, first of all, it is aimed to analyze the narration in the body of the Miniaturk as an “exhibitionary complex” as a recent example of a neo-conservative approach. The selected miniature pieces, the organization of the collection as well as the location of the exhibition area will be problematized in terms of uncovering the meaning of Ottoman heritage and its existence within the political context of post-1980s “neo-Ottomanism”. Second, the transformation of time and space notions will be matter of analysis in order to deconstruct the changing representation strategies of memory and geography in effect with the frames of a nation and the meaning of the borders. In this sense, the organizational strategies in the “exhibitionary complex” such as the narration extending beyond the walls and following a less linear narration as well as categories created through the marketing strategies of “togetherness” and “existence at the same time” will be analyzed so as to re-frame the approaches to representation of “Golden Age” of Ottoman Empire in the context of post-1980s.
Onur Özgöde (Columbia University)
“How to Put an Elephant into a Black Box: Problematization of the Past & Struggle over the Classification of 1915”
I am particularly interested in the ways in which historical expertise and production of historical discourse in the representation of Armenian Genocide. I believe an approach through expertise gets away from questions such as “Is the past repressed by nationalist historiography?" or "Should we face our past?" I would rather argue these questions represent a wide range of discursive strategies that can be named modes of historical discourses. By treating enunciation of such statements as discursive tactics, we can come to an understanding how the past is utilized, in the present, towards projects actors are engaged with. In this respect, I would like to analyze how different actors, in the struggle over the classification of the events of 1915, constructed alliances and produced discourses that made these alliances possible. I would like to situate Ottoman historiography within this framework of analysis.
I would suggest that such an approach, following Michel Foucault’s archeology, problematizes oppositions, such as truth versus falsity or recognition versus denial, through its recognition of the contingency of the present upon struggles over classification. This critical project of writing the history of the present can only be possible by trying to understand how the possibility of truth and falsehood emerges at the intersection of power and knowledge. I will investigate this juncture through tracing the history of the concept of “genocide” by discussing the very possibility of the categorization of the events of 1915 as a historical fact. Through a genealogical tracing of this field of historical expertise and the networks that transcends this field, I would like to show how “Armenian genocide”, as a discursive object, transformed into a signifier captious enough to open up new possibilities of future in Turkey.
Semi Ertan (University of Michigan)
“An Armenian at the Parliament in the early Republican Period: Berç Türker-Keresteciyan (1870-1949)”
This study aims at contributing to an overview of the process of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state in the life story of an Armenian personality (Berç Türker-Keresteciyan). While his election as a deputy among the minorities in the single party era seemed to be already promising, the period he lived through consolidated the suggestion to study his life story. As an extension of the general and large questions for the conduct of this research, the major concern for me was to contribute to the limits and possibilities of different destinations for the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire in the process of transition to a nation state. This question was reduced in this study to a single spectacle of how the relationship or connection of an Armenian individual would be transformed to his community constituted by religious belongingness, to the state and to the society in general in his life story including serious ruptures in terms of these surroundings. The single spectacle of a life story may help us in understanding different aspects of the voyage of non-Muslims from the empire to the nation state.
Christian Sassmannshausen (Free University Berlin)
"Studying Urban Networks and Family Strategies in Late Ottoman Tripoli (Lebanon)"
Ottoman and Turkish studies have recently begun to challenge colonial discourses on the Ottoman Empire pivoting on ‘decline’, failed modernization, and linear historiographical narratives of its successor states. Despite these revisionist tendencies, the research agenda is still narrow in its scope; predominantly étatist, elite-biased, and focused on urban centres (Istanbul, Cairo etc.), it largely neglects the peripheries of the empire. The usage of terms such as “class” and “strata” have tended to obscure rather than illuminate the particular dynamics of Ottoman society.
In my research project on late Ottoman Tripoli (Lebanon), I attempt to offer new approaches for studying urban societies. My micro-historical study is primarily based on local sources (Islamic Court Records (sijillāt), a detailed quarter census (daftar al-mukhtār), family documents, and material culture). Studying a “provincial” society on a micro-level emphasizes the importance of local agency in the understanding of centre-periphery relations.
By focusing on social markers and social distinction within Tripolitanian society, I analyse social order beyond notions of class and strata. I adapt Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of differentiated forms of capital as well as his concepts of “field” and “habitus” and apply them to late Ottoman Tripoli. In doing so, I elucidate how social distinction and different forms of capital were used to accumulate and reproduce status and power. Consumption patterns thus play a major role in my analysis of social order. I examine how these forms of distinction were translated and used by social actors negotiating over power and resources within different networks (i.e. debt relationships, marriage patterns, sufi and educational networks, legal guardianship, alimony relations). I argue that the cohesion and self-perception of different social groups was shaped by consumption patterns and the networks in which they were embedded. Finally, I locate and display these networks within the urban space. To challenge dichotomies such as 'tradition and modernity', I argue that these networks remained after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Burak Gürel (Boğaziçi University/Yale University)
“Reassessing the suppressed alternatives: Antisystemic Political Movements in Iran and Turkey (1920-22)”
This paper criticizes the difference/gap between the historical accounts regarding the anti-systemic political movements in Iran and Turkey after the October Revolution of 1917 and those in Europe in the same period. While those social scientists dealing with European history emphasized the political crisis in Europe of 1920s as stemming from the working class radicalization as well as the rise of revolutionary political movements, the same era in the Middle East has been understood as a chain of consecutive events which inevitably led to the formation of nation states under the leadership of the national ruling elites. The paper argues that this gap arises from an evolutionist assumption which draws a parallelism between the degree of economic development and the possibility of anti-capitalist/anti-systemic upsurge. The paper aims to counter this teleology by appealing to the cases of anti-systemic political alternatives in Iran and Turkey in the early 1920s. By referring to the combined and uneven capitalist development in both countries, it follows the traces of permanent political instability which paved the way to constitutional revolutions in the first decade of 20th century and then foreign occupation and resistance in the second decade in Iran and Turkey. It addresses the communist parties in both countries which were founded in 1920, and their involvement in the wars of national liberation and the feeling of insecurity and panic among the political elites representing the ruling class in Iran and Turkey. Thus, the paper argues that relative consolidation of the ruling class power run by the national leaders like Reza Khan in Iran and Mustafa Kemal in Turkey became possible only at the expense of the suppression of the revolutionary coalition of Mirza Kuchik Khan and the Communist Party of Iran in Iran in 1921, as well as the destruction of the leadership of the Communist Party of Turkey in the same year, 1921.
Şahan Savaş Karataşlı (Johns Hopkins University)
“Two Faces of Anti-imperialism, Two faces of Kemalism: Anti-imperialist Social Movements in the Early Republican Period (1923-1945)”
One of the blind-spots in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republic historiography is unquestionably the Turkish Independence War. This war is widely recognized as an anti-imperialist war which resulted in the establishment of the “modern” Turkish Republic, which widely used “anti-imperialism” as one of its main ideological foundations. The discourse of “anti-imperialism” is reflected on almost every political action and reforms of the “modern” Kemalist state.
This paper questions this claim of “anti-imperialism” in the Turkish independence war and analyzes its effects during the early Republican Period. There is a dual hypothesis this paper puts forward. First of all, this paper argues that different classes and different segments of the society and state perceive and interpret anti-imperialism differently; which makes it very problematic to classify the Independence War and the post-independence processes as anti-imperialist. And secondly, this paper argues that a particular anti-imperialism discourse is used by the Turkish state to justify some of its aggressive policies against the minorities and other nations in the territory of the new state, i.e. Armenians, Greeks and Kurdish nation, against the communist uprising and against the Islamic insurgence in the early Republican Period.
In the course of this analysis, this paper utilizes archival data from historical American newspapers such as New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and Los Angeles Times between 1900 to 1945 for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. In addition a large spectrum of local journals and newspapers of the era is surveyed and contrasted with the foreign newspaper findings. The historical data is analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings urge the social scientists to make redefinitions and more critical analyses of concepts such as “anti-imperialism”, “sovereignty” and “independence” which are used uncritically especially in the Ottoman and early Republican historiography. Furthermore the analysis establishes critical links with the relations of social movements in the early republican period and the Kemalist state.
Bedross Der Matossian (Columbia University)
“The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of the 'Armenian Capital' in the End of the Ottoman Empire."
One of the marginalized topics in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire in general and that of the Armenian Genocide in particular is the fate of the “Armenian economy” during World War I. Historians always intend to highlight the great achievements that Armenians had made in the field of economy in the Ottoman Empire as sarrafs, bankers, merchants and industrialists. However, when a scholar starts examining or questioning the fate of the “Armenian capital” in the Empire, his intentions immediately become suspect or labeled as nationalistic in nature with a sharp political agenda. During World War I, a systematic confiscation of the Armenian private, ecclesiastical and community property took place that involved the Ottoman government with its various ministries as well as provincial and local authorities. This confiscation process ended with the appropriation of the “Armenian capital” during the republican period.
The paper is a preliminary attempt to discuss the mechanism of this confiscation/appropriation continuum from the historical perspective, and will provide some answers regarding the fate of “Armenian capital” as an important component of the economic dimension in the extermination process of the Armenians. It will mainly concentrate on legality and the confiscation process. In addition, the movement of “Armenian capital” from the Ottoman Empire to the Republican era does not only demonstrate a historical continuity, but also sheds light on capital movements during different political regimes and the role that this capital plays in the creation of new economic classes.
Sabrina Peric (Harvard University)
“Subterranean encounters: geological landscapes and the political life of the Western Balkans”
This story begins beneath the soil where bones and metals meet: Omarska. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Omarska was the site of the largest concentration camp during the war in the 1990s. Thousands of men were killed at the camp, which was built on the site of an iron mine. After the war, the Omarska mines remained inactive until 2004 when the state
sold its steel industry to Arcelor Mittal, the world’s largest steel conglomerate. When Mittal restarted extraction, Omarska camp survivors demanded a stop to mining activity so that mass graves could be located.
Those opposed to these protests insisted that the region would suffer economic collapse if Mittal stopped the extraction processes. Arguments over the uncovering of mass graves have fallen squarely along ‘ethnic’ lines with Mittal’s mainly Serb-identified management squaring off against the mostly Bosniak and Croat-identified camp survivors.
If bones and metals have come to acquire a particular meaning in Bosnia today, it is that bones are linked to the past, to new and old graves, to ancestors and to ethnoterritorial claims; metals, on the other hand, are linked to the future, to ‘development’ and to ‘European’ belonging. These things under the soil however are more than icons of a contemporary tension over the past(s) and future(s). They also index a particular history of things meeting under the soil. Since the discovery of silver in the Balkans, political arrangements negotiated over the extraction of metals (and the protection of graves) have invoked particular socio-religious reconfigurations—from the Mehmed II’s ahd-nama for Franciscan Friars, curators of Bosnia’s mines, to today’s corporate takeover of Omarska, firmly based in a particular ethnoreligious politics.
As a researcher interested in the issues of sovereignty over Bosnian soil and the world of meaning surrounding resource extraction, how can I incorporate a historical perspective into this complex problem, which understands subterranean objects to be both at the center of contemporary debates and belonging to a geological temporality? Is examination of the longue durée crucial to understanding things under the soil, the people that circulate around them historically and current ethnographic moments? In a region where ‘history’ itself is hotly contested and appropriated for violent purposes (archives themselves being a primary target during the recent war), ‘geologic’ temporalities appear to have much in common with the nationalist conception of ‘origins’—can anthropological tools be applied to untangling histories rife with ideological tensions? In my paper, I will discuss one aspect of my project that attempts to a.) discuss Islamic-Catholic encounters from the early Ottoman empire onwards by following Bosnian Franciscan texts—which claim to be both ethnography and history—through Bosnia’s primary resource landscape and b.) through these texts, invite Balkan anthropology to reflect critically on its relationship to the field site and the archive.
Mary N. Taylor (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Silences and Amplifications on the Turkic Past in Hungary”
This paper explores the questions of silences and amplifications in the recognition of Ottoman and Turkic “cultural elements” in the northernmost reaches of the former Ottoman Empire. Using the Hungarian case as a starting point, the paper explores the tendencies to amplify the presence of Turkic elements in expressive culture, while silencing those in the social and political realms. The Hungarian case cannot be used easily toward generalization, as the central part of the country was only under Ottoman control for 150 years, and was the last frontier and borderland with the Habsburg Empire. Yet, there is no question that this situation itself produced lasting results on the political economy and expressive culture of this region (effecting both the ‘second serfdom as well as the rise of the “new style” of Hungarian folk art). While Hungarians share with Bulgarians, for example, a national mythology emphasizing (at some times more than others) a nomadic horseman past shared with Turkic groups, some other features Hungary may share with formerly Ottoman territories, for example the evolution of patterns of religious/ethnic/national distinction, may be features of the bureaucratic technologies of both empires. Using the Hungarian case as a point of comparison, the paper explores these issues.
Leyla Amzi (Columbia University)
“Identity and Migration in the Late Ottoman Period: The Case of Bosnian Muslims 1878 – 1914”
The war in Bosnia Herzegovina from 1992-95 brought international attention to the Balkans, often defined as the crossroads of religions and fault line of civilizations. The conflict itself is blamed on tensions that come with ethnic and religious diversity, together with the history of Ottoman rule that stifled development and enlightenment. Indigenous Muslim population in the heart of Europe, seen as an anomaly, was rendered a nation-less identity rooted in the Ottoman millet system: to this day, the Muslims in Bosnia are a religious group, while others are defined as belonging to ethic-based nations. In the context of European history, however, the occurring conflicts can be seen as a continuity, rather than rupture, of the nation-state building project that started in the nineteenth century. This paper expands on contemporary critical studies of nationalism through the study of the Bosnian Muslims and their relationship with the Ottoman Empire in the period of the Austro-Hungarian occupation and annexation, from 1878 to WWI. As the Austrian administration upheld the social status quo, the relationship of the population, both Muslim and Orthodox, with the Ottoman Empire remained uninterrupted on many levels. In spite of that, the main consequence of the Habsburg occupation was migration of Muslims to the Ottoman Empire. The population that remained in Bosnia negotiated their status between the two empires, affecting the image they projected of themselves while getting caught in the processes of ethnic and national differentiation occurring in central and southern Europe at the time. While the Bosnian religious authorities advocated against emigration, having in mind the importance of the territorial dimension of the community; their Ottoman counterparts insisted that Muslims from the lost Ottoman lands should migrate and settle in the Ottoman Empire. The difference in these positions that affected policies and actions of the Ottoman government is examined in the context of particular political, social and demographic circumstances in the Ottoman Empire.
“Demystifying state formation, Facing the Past in Israel and Turkey: Reconfigurations of Nakba and Medz Yeghern”
When Israeli high school students started class in September 1999, they
would realize that their textbooks regarding 20th Century History has been considerably revised to include competing narratives, some questioning the myth of Israeli state formation. Such textbook revision never occurred in Turkey indeed, if anything, textbooks and supplements became even more radical in their defense of the pre-formative and formative years. The opening of the Israeli state archives in late 80s and the fact that all "New Historians" have been trained abroad contributed to such paradigmatic shift.
What does indeed a partial change in historical approach -or the lack thereof- mean in the Israeli and Turkish contexts? Why such narratives were able to penetrate the public discourse much earlier in Israel? Does a paradigm change in state formation narratives tell anything about the depth of civil society in a given setting? This paper will try to be a comparative precursor to answer these questions. I will revisit Post-Zionism and Post-Nationalism debate in Israel and Turkey problematizing the lack of certain modes of thinking in the rather limited Turkish experience.
Banu Karaca (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Aestheticizing Reconciliation: Between Empathy and Responsibility”
In the last few years a growing number scholars and public intellectuals from Turkey have advocated in different shapes and forms the recognition of the Armenian genocide. Given the resistances within Turkey to address this issue politically (apart from denial), many of them have proposed an empathetic approach; one that – to use a widely employed phrase – allows to recognize and mourn together the human suffering surrounding the events of 1915. At the heart of this call for highlighting ‘the human element’ is the notion that an empathetic engagement with the genocide – in this case expressed through collective mourning – will pave the way first for an emotional and then a political understanding thereof and thus presents an important step towards reconciliation.
Interestingly, this call for empathy exhibits many structural and discursive parallels to recent developments in the presentation of the past and present ‘cultural diversity’ (i.e. multiculturalism) of Anatolia. Although diametrically opposed in intention to the state-sanctioned version of a pristine “cultural mosaic” the discussion around different notions of reconciling with the past have similarly focused on aesthetic and cultural production as a preferred vehicle to address otherwise difficult political issues.
In this paper I would like to raise the question if this transfer from the realm of individual and the aesthetic experience to the political is indeed and necessarily the case. I would like to point to some of the paradoxes and pitfalls that these propositions might entail by asking: How is the relationship between empathy and responsibility actually framed in these discourses? What is the correlation between the aesthetic (or the aestheticized) and the political? What does the notion of reconciliation imply when put forward by different sets of actors? And finally, how can art act as a critical force in a reconciliation process when it is ultimately framed in a way that cements and stabilizes existing power differentials and thus might ultimately lead to gross divergences between intention and perception?
“Selective Reconciliation: Where do the Istanbul Armenians fit in?”
The way the minorities are treated in Turkey in the aftermath of 1915 and throughout the republican era is a well documented history and has only found its way to Turkish intellectual circles starting from 1990s. However, it is impossible to say that these mis-treatements have a general recognition in Turkish society. But is it in any way possible to talk about the reconciliation of 1915 when the latter events still stay unrecognized? How are the Istanbul Armenians used and abused for reconciliation efforts?
This paper argues that without a discussion of the more recent events that happened during the Republic, a political discussion of the Armenian genocide is not sincere. In relation to this, it also tries to explain how and why some of the Armenians are labeled as "good" and thus are being involved in this reconciliation process while others are labeled "bad" and are systematically excluded from it.
Khatchig Mouradian (Haigazian University, Beirut/Editor, The Armenian Weekly, Boston)
An Earth Shaking Storm’ in Spring: A Review of Armenian Genocide Memorial Day Editorials in Armenian-Language Political Newspapers
What terminology have Armenians used to describe the greatest tragedy in their millennial history? Has there been any noticeable change in this regard from the 1920s to the present? What are the factors behind these changes? How was the term tseghaspanutyun (genocide, in Armenian) incorporated into this discourse? To what extent was there a uniformity at any given moment in the way the official newspapers of the various Armenian political factions - Dashnaks, Hunchakians, Ramkavars and Communists - made sense of this calamity and interpreted its significance to their respective readership? How should we account for the differences in the terminology and the tone of their editorials published every year on April 24, the Armenian Martyrs' Commemoration Day?
This paper will attempt to answer these question by making a chronological and cross-sectional comparison of the editorials marking April 24 annually in four Armenian-language political newspapers published in Beirut and Boston—two of the most vibrant Armenian Diasporan communities—from 1915 to the present.