How do farmers explain their engagement with commodity production and the market? This article describes the universe of cotton production and exchange in a Turkish village. Building on the scholarship concerning the anthropology of markets, I offer an account of the power relations concerning exchange in the countryside whereby a cluster of agents interact in multiple ways. Describing the microcosm of cotton production and exchange as it is perceived by farmers in the largest cotton-producing village of the Söke Plain in western Turkey, the essay documents how farmers mobilize resources, interact with agricultural workers, find credit, and finally sell their product. Farmers see the market and their fields as interconnected geographies of struggle between various actors. In contrast to the cotton field where they perceive themselves as active and formative agents in the rural political economic universe, cotton growers understand the market as a location of encounter dominated by traders and controlled by various mercantile tools that weaken their agency. The market is neither only a place where the price is set, nor merely a location of commodity exchange. It is a power field where farmers encounter the “production” of price as relatively passive agents of trade.

Much of the recent debate on the labor market issues of developing countries has revolved around the interaction of the labor market with stabilization and structural adjustment policies, introduced mostly in conjunction with the IMF and the World Bank. In particular, there is a growing body of literature on the interaction between structural adjustment policies and employment performance in these countries.

According to the dominant view in this literature, the favorable employment effects of these policies stem basically from the shift of industrial trade strategy from state-led import substitution towards market-based export orientation.

The characterization of agrarian structures in contemporary underdeveloped countries has been haunting social scientists for a long time. As in Latin America and India, from the late sixties onwards a strong controversy emerged among Marxists in Turkey concerning the question of why capitalism had not transformed rural structures in Turkey (J. Harris, 1982; R. L. Harris, 1978; Aydın 1986). The question of capitalist transformation of the countryside occupied the minds of classical Marxist thinkers like Kautsky, Lenin, Luxembourg at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

This essay focuses on economic hardship in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis and the impact of the resulting economic strain on individual and family distress (i.e., stress, emotional distress, physical health, and marital problems). Previous research on the impact of the economic crisis in Turkey has relied on small and non-representative samples or was limited to descriptive analyses. This research analyzes a nationally representative sample of 1,107 urban households using multivariate techniques. The OLS regression results show that, while the negative effects of the economic crisis were widely felt, those who lost their jobs, had a longer duration of unemployment, and who experienced higher levels of economic strain were affected most. Economic hardship and high and increasing levels of economic strain had a strong negative effect on perceived stress levels, emotional distress, physical health problems and marital problems. Renters were particularly hard hit by the crisis and report more strain and personal distress than non-renters.

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.

Over the past two years, the televised sermons of Fethullah Hocaefendi have thrust him into the public limelight, lending his name celebrity status as a prominent religious-cum-political figure. His long standing influence as the leader of one of the most powerful Islamic communities in contemporary Turkey, Nur Cemaati, is now common public knowledge. Currently, this group owns one of the largest mass circulating newspapers (Zaman), a TV channel (Samanyolu) and a vast network of hundreds of educational institutions extending all the way from Turkey to Central Asia. The teachings of Fethullah Gülen Hoca are widely disseminated through books as well as cassette recordings of his sermons, readily available for sale on counters of commercial bookstores. For the “secularized” public however, Fethullah Hoca's renown extends beyond his religious-cum-political prominence. He is famous for the fact that he weeps ecstatically during his sermons, contrary to what is expected of a man in Turkey today.

Every summer Wantijpark in Dordrecht, a small town in the western Netherlands, hosts a World Music festival called “Rainbowpark.” The performers of the 2002 season included Bun Sani from Surinam/The Netherlands, Ghalia Benali & Timnaa from Tunisia/ Belgium, Bayuba Cante from Cuba and Los de Abajo from Mexico. But the biggest star of the festival-that is, whose name was highlighted with the largest fonts in the posters and flyers-was Aziza A., presented as an artist from Turkey. In fact, this multi-faceted artist, whose real name is Alev Yıldırım, was born in Berlin in 1971 and has lived ever since. Her parents had lived in Germany as guest workers for 31 years and then returned to Turkey in 1999, but Aziza had stayed on in Berlin, which she now calls her home. I met her during the “Karneval der Kulturen” in Berlin (the Carnival of Cultures, which took place a month before the Rainbow festival) where she performed on the night of the grand parade.

Since the late 1990s, Fener and Balat, two adjacent historic neighborhoods on the shoreline of the Golden Horn (Haliç) in İstanbul, have been the stage of urban regeneration efforts. Following a process of de-industrialization in the mid-1980s, these efforts have aimed to revitalize the area through the promotion of tourism. Today, almost ten years after the initial attempts, regeneration remains incomplete. This essay explores the reasons underlying this “failure.” For this purpose, I focus on the key actors, their interests and power struggles within the context of the project. I argue that one needs to highlight the particularities of the institutional arrangements at the district, city and national levels in order to explain the situation in Fener and Balat. More specifically, due to the absence of relatively autonomous market mechanisms, the lack of the private sector's involvement, the gap between the public sector's interests and the demands of the market, and the effectiveness of electoral politics at the district level, the case of Fener and Balat has been shaped by district mayors and local communities reluctant to implement and participate in the project.

This article argues that it is fallacious to promote the Turkish democratic experience under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) as a model for the emerging Arab democracies. Despite the early political reformism of the AKP, an empirical analysis of the government’s recent crackdown on basic rights and freedoms demonstrates that the “Turkish model,” defined as a marriage of Islam and liberal democracy, cannot respond to the demands of Arab reformers. In this regard, the article falls into three sections. In the first section, assets of the “Turkish model” according to various actors are examined, which casts doubt on the emancipatory discourse underlying the promotion of the model. The second section proposes the term “leader democracy”—or, more specifically, “Erdoğanism”—as a way of denoting the governmental structure of Turkey as of early 2014. The final section depicts the current Turkish democracy in terms of the state of checks and balances and of basic political and social rights.

During the 1930s, in the upper circles of public life and the professions, the Kemalist excitement and energy for establishing a great new nation was strong. Leadership came from many individuals, each offering what he or she could do to involve younger persons in the process. The state was not yet a robust civil institution, as it lacked economic resources, especially during the 1920s and the depression years of the 1930s. It was only beginning to gain experience in dealing with and taking the lead in civil affairs.

Europe of the interwar years witnessed the rise of agrarian populism in several countries. In a sense, something in the “spirit of the age” paved the way for the rise of agrarian ideologies throughout the world. The impact of the Great Depression also played a role in the rise of this phenomenon, since urbanization, industrialization, and liberalism increasingly were seen as responsible for this global economic catastrophe. Turkey of the 1930s and afterward witnessed the rise of such a populism, with an emphasis on the cult of the peasant as one of the most important intellectual motifs of cultural and political discourse. As a matter of fact, agrarian populism, or the so-called köycülük (peasantism), as it was referred to in Turkish, was one of the most important constituent elements of Kemalist populism from the early 1930s through the end of World War II. In this period, the state devised cultural and practical projects for an ideological campaign emphasizing the significance of improving the social and economic conditions of the peasantry. For this reason, in the Turkish press, many wrote about köycülük, and official and semiofficial state institutions such as People’s Houses organized peasantist (köycü) activities throughout the country. The impact of such an intellectual campaign could be seen in some of the most important undertakings of the single-party regime, such as the establishment of the Village Institutes and the land-reform attempts.

The aim of this study is to explore the nature of Turkish literary utopias written in the early republican period. As a study in history and literature, it contextualizes the ideal social order envisioned in these works. My main argument is twofold: First, I claim that these works reflect Kemalism as an ideal system. They presuppose that the present regime has in itself the dynamics that enables an ideal social order and that this ideal social order can be attained by getting rid of the practical irregularities that prevent a full-fledged realization of the present regime. With these presuppositions, they serve the efforts to turn Kemalism into a hegemonic discourse. Secondly, through a detailed analysis of these texts, I argue that Kemalism has not been a monolithic discourse, but rather that it contained different and sometimes competing currents.

The idea of a universal doctrine of human rights is currently under attack in the name of cultural particularism and difference. Political leaders in China, Indonesia and Singapore have rejected Western expressions of concern about violations of human rights by their governments, with the argument that Western conceptions of human rights are not universal but culturally specific to the West, and the effort to impose these ideas on others is no less than arrogant cultural imperialism and interference in the affairs of sovereign states. In the Muslim world, too, we hear rejections of Western notions of human rights as culturally specific and the assertion that Islam has its own concepts of rights (which, for a believer, are universal). In this essay I shall explore some of the issues raised in this regard, with examples drawn mainly from Egypt and the Arab world, but which have obvious implications for current concerns in Turkey. I should make it clear at the outset that there is no one Islamic position on this issue, but many. In the Arab world, but more specially in Turkey, there are many Muslim thinkers and activists who have produced Muslim formulations of rights which are not different from the universal ideals.

The past fifteen years have witnessed a veritable explosion of mass media productions aimed at immigrant populations in Germany. Facilitated by new communication technologies, television channels and radio stations from former “home countries” and elsewhere have become available to immigrants via satellite and the internet. Daily newspapers produced in Ankara, Belgrade, or Warsaw can be bought at German newspaper stands. There has also been a proliferation of mass media venues created locally, by and for immigrants themselves, and nowhere is this landscape of immigrant media more evolved than in the case of Turkish-language media in Berlin.

The place of Jews was highly ambiguous in the newly founded Turkish Republic: In 1928 an assimilationist campaign was launched against Turkish Jews, while only a few years later, in 1933, German scholars—many of them Jewish—were taken in so as to help Europeanize the nation. Turkish authorities regarded the emigrants as representatives of European civilization and appointed scholars like Erich Auerbach to prestigious academic positions that were vital for redefining the humanities in Turkey. This article explores the country's twofold assimilationist policies. On the one hand, Turkey required of its citizens—regardless of ethnic or religious origins—that they conform to a unified Turkish culture; on the other hand, an equally assimilationist modernization project was designed to achieve cultural recognition from the heart of Europe. By linking historical and contemporary discourses, this article shows how tropes of Jewishness have played—and continue to play—a critical role in the conception of Turkish nationhood. The status of Erich Auerbach, Chair of the Faculty for Western Languages and Literatures at İstanbul University from 1936 to 1947, is central to this investigation into the place of Turkish and German Jews in modern Turkey.

This paper discusses two issues, the first being whether “feminization of poverty” in Turkey exists at all, and the second the reasons behind the feminization of poverty. The Household Budget Survey (HBS) for the years 2004 and 2006 serves as data to investigate similarities and contrasts between men and women in terms of poverty and other socioeconomic and demographic factors. Furthermore, econometric estimation techniques (logit and probit) have been employed to find out the determinants of poverty for men and women separately and together. Findings indicate that feminization of poverty does indeed exist in Turkey; however, a number of social, economic and demographic factors are universal determinants of poverty indifferent to sex.

This article investigates Alevi youth subjectivities in a neighborhood of İstanbul, Okmeydanı, in which mainly Alevi people live, through the youth’s self-positionings in revolutionary groups, which has deeply marked the highly politicized history of the district. The grievances of Okmeydanlı Alevi youth have grown increasingly complex, stemming from experiences of violence, family legacies of victimhood, and, in recent years, new forms of exclusion. Coupled with generational ruptures between youth and their families in experiencing Alevi identity, Alevi youth have created a political identity and collectivity in the sphere of revolutionary politics. In this politicization, Okmeydanı becomes a spatialization of resistance which gives the youth a sense of power to achieve solidarity and find intimacy to defend themselves and their rights. Moreover, for the youth, engaging in a revolutionary political identity enables them to define themselves and redefine Alevi identity in contrast with, and sometimes against, the perceptions of their families. I argue that it is through this performativity that Okmeydanlı Alevi youth achieve self-empowerment and identity construction; and through this performativity in street politics that the youth render their agencies and self-representations visible on public space.