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In pursuit of non-Western deep secularities: selfhood and the “Westphalia moment” in Turkish literary milieux

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2017

Barış Büyükokutan
Barış Büyükokutan*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Boğaziçi University, 34342, Bebek, İstanbul, Turkey, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article traces Charles Taylor’s “secularity three” outside the West, finding that it was present among poets but not among novelists in twentieth-century Turkey. It explains this contrast between these two very similar groups by using network analysis, highlighting the greater availability, in poetry networks, of nonpious gatekeepers to aspiring pious actors, following an initial long period of religious conflict. In order to benefit from association with these gatekeepers, pious actors learned to split their selves into two, committing themselves simultaneously to their absolutist faith and to its practical impossibility in a secular age. If and when the prospect of cross-fertilization waned, however, they would effortlessly switch back to their earlier subjectivity. Pious novelists, by contrast, underwent no such learning process. Based on these findings, I argue, first, that the study of the secular must pay greater attention to religious conflict and the ways in which it is resolved, and second, that it must consider balancing its longue-durée approach with an eventful focus.

Keywords

Art networksCharles Taylorfields of cultural productionIslamreligion
Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 56 , May 2017 , pp. 3 - 32
Copyright
© New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Author’s Note: A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in Baltimore. I would like to thank Jeff Guhin, Tuna Kuyucu, and the editors of New Perspectives on Turkey for their valuable comments.

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