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 article aims to contribute to the understanding of post-conflict processes in Turkey by focusing on the discourses and practices following the city of Mardin's bid to become a World Heritage Site. It intends to show how cosmopolitanism becomes a contested and dominant discourse for the locals of the city (Kurds, Arabs, and Syriac Christians) to re-articulate the history of the inter-communal relationships and to create a negotiating ground with the state, in order to recover from the moral and economic injuries of the military conflict during the 1990s. In doing so, the article discusses the effects of the accumulated events of past and present on the production of different forms of power relations between the state and its subject-citizens in the post-conflict context of Mardin, Southeastern Turkey.

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.

The purpose of this article is to use the household as an analytical construct in order to examine how the process of labor transformation in the tourism industry is experienced within the immediate circumstances of workers in three coastal towns in Turkey. I argue that the recent growth of the tourism industry in Turkey absorbs a major portion of its labor force from agriculture, and factors such as the scale of operation, maintenance of links to the rural background, and the social composition of tourism workers yield different patterns of labor transformation. The best site for evaluating these patterns of labor transformation is the household, which provides access to social as well as economic aspects of labor transformation. Household analysis explains the complexity of labor transformation due to the coexistence of traditional forms of production and the market economy. The article is based on ethnographic evidence on household structures, household composition and division of labor in three coastal towns.

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.

Ottoman society and its medical system of the early modern period and the nineteenth-century demonstrate the marriage of medicine and power. I present the view from the imperial center and focus on the aims and wishes of the Ottoman elite and imperial authorities in İstanbul as they were embodied in state activities, such as formal decrees and policies meant to be implemented all over the empire. For the Ottoman elite, medicine was always a significant imperial tool, but it was neither the only tool of control, nor the most important one. The extent to which the Ottoman elite used medicine in its social policies changed over time. A comparison between the Ottoman use and distribution of health and food from the early modern period until the nineteenth century illustrates this point. It was especially during the nineteenth century that medicine was intentionally-and successfully-implemented as a mechanism of control in the Ottoman Empire.

When multi-party politics was initiated in Turkey in 1946, rival interpretations of Kemalism emerged to confront the challenge posed by the center-right's surmounting electoral victories. While the left-populist interpretation led by Ecevit gained considerable momentum, there was also a parallel yet less visible formation of a reaction against it—namely, conservative republicanism. From the mid-1960s onwards, left populists and conservative republicans waged a serious political rivalry which temporarily foreshadowed the important similarities they shared due to the legacy of Kemalism. Following the failure of left populism in the late 1970s, these similarities gradually resurfaced and the left populists have withdrawn to the reactionary position of conservative republicanism which fits the language of frustrated elites.