Project Coordinator: Recep Şentürk, Ramazan Aras
Researchers: Emin Yaşar Demirci, Önder Küçükural, Ekrem Çelikiz
Research Assistants: Hale Nur Çebi, Elif Naime Arslanoğlu, Elif Haliloğlu, İhsan Altıntaş, Osman Doğan, Musa Kökçen, Halil Uyanık
Project Duration: 12 months (August 2017 – August 2018)
Project Aims and Outputs
Books, articles, conference proceedings
Workshop
Documentary
Audio-visual Exhibition
Establishment of the first archive collection of Ibn Haldun University Center for Oral History and Social Memory
About Project
The new nation-state structures that emerged after the First World War, which was also defined as the post-empires period, brought new ethnic, religious, political and cultural policies in many geographies. In fact, it formed the basis of the political, social and cultural crises that would erupt in the following periods.
The new state policies (secularization, nationalism, imagined new identities, new political boundaries) that disrupted social, cultural, ethnic and religious structures and divided them into multiple parts. In order to achieve its objective of the nation-state project, the new government activated all the institutions and tools of the state (politics, discourse, law, economy, army, education and media) at local and national level and often resorted to different forms of violence. However, despite the devastation and fragmentation caused by all the violent sanctions and political, cultural and secular policies and of the ruling party, the marginalized religious and ethnic people, groups and social structures strived to survive through certain social institutions and tactics.
In this research, it is aimed to find out what kind of resistance mechanisms they have developed against the practices and policies (secularization, modernization / westernization, Turkification) imposed during the construction process of the new nation-state by functionalizing the different forms of violence through physical and psychological devices of the state.
This study aims to reveal the voices and history of religious people who were marginalized and oppressed between 1923-1950. Beyond formal history and discourse (ideology), the effects of state policies and sanctions on individual and social religious practices, structures, space, belonging, everyday life, individual and social memory and identity will be analyzed through the experience, stories and life witnesses of the local ordinary people (women and men).
Many religious and cultural communities of Turkish society discussed historiography between 1923 and 1950 for its biased approach. Many of these communities viewed these sources as questionable. In terms of providing a critical assessment of this biased behaviour of the founding period of the Turkish Republic, this work has an original value with an anthropological and sociological perspective based on the narration of witnesses.
The important questions in this research are as follows: how was the state defined in individual, local and social memory? How did people perceived the state’s different policies and sanctions? What was the place and meaning of being religious in the first years of Turkish Republic? How did religious people comment on the new secular and modern / Western institutions and practices in which the state and its apparatus sought to spread to every sphere of life? What was the impact of new secular and modern laws, institutions and practices have on marginalized community (lodge and sect), groups and family histories that were intended to disappear over time? What were the gender differences between religious men and women who suffered the trauma and violence of the new nation-state project?