Issue 56 – Erdoğan Regime in Turkey and the “New” Culture

Sibel Özbudun

In this article, as an introduction for the “New Culture” issue of Praksis magazine, the following topics of the issue are addressed. The concept of “culture” (in anthropological context) is approached within the of the assumption of “ancient” ascribed to it. In particular, this assumption is discussed in the framework of its role of legitimizing the political power(s). The “locus” of the “cultural change” process(es) is examined within the framework of the concept of power. In political anthropology, the concept of culture which is taken up related to the power has been scrutinized within the framework of the efforts of the “lower classes” to turn their relations with the “upper ones” in their favor in a way following in James C Scott’s footsteps. In this study whose problematics is “AKP’s Turkey” and the consent process of the government, the formation of “resonance” between the power and nationalities will be problematized more than “the arts of resistance”.
Keywords: culture, power, cultural change, islamism, nationalism, anti intellectualism/, anti-elitism

Yasin Durak

The problem of this study is that the coercive power tries to put over on social existence, through specific political gambits targeting “culture”, its own discrete/external position as an inherent/identical position. In the structural historical transformation of culture, this gambit, which tends towards “changing meanings by staying the same”, -not dominant but like a payer- is marvelously effective in the absolutization of power(s) as the pioneer of the social journey, from the first stems in the classless-stateless days’ garden of Eden to the advanced capitalistic state formations. In this way, the rulers, who carries out their fractional goals as if they are the real requirements of the authentic existence of the society, presents their efforts to produce tradition and culture as an effort to rely on tradition and culture, while making the cultural sequence that signifies power dominant and thus making the cultural tendencies impossible to denounce the divisions. Within the framework of this problem, a political anthropological analysis and description of the formation and development process of coercive power is presented in the article, and the relationship between power and culture in the ongoing cultural transformation in a structuralhistorical context and the penetration of the power imagination to cultural moments are explained with empirical examples (which compiled from different ethnographies). From the symbols of the status quo to the discourse of power on the social journey, from the selection of values and taboos that affirm the power to the abolition of the imagination of alternative society, the “scientific” denounce of this gambit is imperative in terms of the development of cultural resistance mechanisms that can discern the difference between “dominant culture” and “culture itself” (and this time did not work with the assumptions of the power).
Keywords: Power, coercive power, asabiye, culture, dominant culture

Şükrü Aslan

The main characteristics of AKP governments’ cultural policies could be best seen in their discourses and practices against Alevism among other groups during the last twenty years. This sphere has been the main area where AKP not only constructed the historical other but also nourished its continuous attitudes towards Alevis. The cultural policies that developed within capitalist modernity had an immense influence on the societal, political, and religious domains in the 20th century. One can suggest that it has radically deprived these domains of their traditional roots and completely reconfigured their structures. In this regard, cultural policies whose point of reference was modern nationalism had a foundationalist/constitutive function.

The Turkish modernization process and cultural policies which accompanied it since the second half of the 19th century has likewise had a significant influence on the formation of Turkey’s modern cultural mapping. Certain ethnic identities and beliefs were shunned from this cultural map, and the reasons for this should be investigated within the ways modern political culture (which evolved into Turkish nationalism) operates.

This cultural policy that has been active almost until the end of 20th century has enforced Alevis to retreat into a zone of invisibility. Significantly, Alevis living in regions where hegemonic culture was dominant have experienced bitter and dramatic traumas. Their funerals took place in mosques despite it being against their beliefs and wishes and they were forced to fast or to appear as fasting during Ramadan. In brief, the strategy present in Turkey’s dominant political culture was to force Alevis into tepid acceptance of Sunni beliefs and rituals and to progressively assimilate their distinctiveness into a recognizable form. Within the Alevi sphere, this strategy has succeeded in the making of a number of coerced or voluntary supporters of the ruling political culture.

This article proposes to bridge past and present and to critically evaluate the last period of the Ottoman Empire and the formative state of the Turkish Republic with regards to policy decisions concerning Alevis and Alevism in terms of semantics, violence, effectiveness, and reflectivity. It will argue that the exclusion of Alevis essentially sought to publicly disown and erase the identity of Alevism from the cultural sphere, and that this policy is still effective in 21st century under new configurations and guises, although it is not technically possible under the given circumstances. It will examine the background against which Alevism, despite its visible legitimacy, consistently faces legal unrecognition. The study will make use of qualitative methods; significant amount of research will take place in the state archives with a particular focus on cultural and political attitudes. It will also discuss and make use the relevant and recent literature within the field.
Keywords: Modernization, political culture, identities, conservatism, Alevism

Erdem Çolak

Since the beginning of the 19th century, the issue of how Ottoman Empire and later Turkey should shape its state iconography has always been taken seriously. The neo-Ottomanist tendency in the state iconography and symbolic representations of the state, which has become more visible in recent periods, points to the need to deal with the dynamics of this issue in more detail. This study claims that although the development of the discourse on being “homegrown and national” put forward by the AKP in the context of the “New Turkey” in visual arts can be traced back to the last period of the Ottoman Empire, it derives its main momentum from the conflicts over the symbolic representation of the state since the 1990s and therefore should be analyzed within this historical context. To support this claim, the first part of the article discusses how the state iconography has transformed in the period from 1980s to the present. Then the article focuses on the problem of how the differentiation in state iconography and symbolic transformations of public spaces can be conceptualized. The last part of the article comparatively analyzes the different neo-Ottomanist representations produced in the last three decades of Turkey over three art exhibitions – The Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1987), Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600 exhibition (2005) and Yeditepe Biennial (2018).
Keywords: State Iconography, Neo-Ottomanism, Contemporary Art, Yeditepe Biennial, Homegrown and National Art

İlbey C. N. Özdemirci

This study aims to develop a critical perspective against the approaches that analyze the Presidency of Religious Affairs, in the context of AKP power which is becoming widespread in the literature today. In this direction, the historical roots of the establishment of the institution as a political tool will be revealed by examining the relations of the Presidency of Religious Affairs with the political authorities since the foundation of the Republic. Accordingly, it is aimed to develop an alternative approach to how Presidency of Religious Affairs can be discussed in the literature today.
Keywords: Presidency of Religious Affairs, JDP, secularity, hegemony, ideological
apparatuse

Barış Yıldırım

JDP’s theatre and cultural policies is imbued with censorship, prosecutions, and economic restrictions. Prohibited plays, theatre people pushed into living in exile because of political or economic reasons, and curtailed funds for dissident theatres are most pronounced parts of this picture. The national declarations penned each year for World Theatre Day is loaded with the inventory of attacks against art/ists. The political and economic oppression is among the relatively well-reported right violations. However, there is a more important problem preoccupying the staff officers of the government in the relation between culture and AKP: Despite being in power for 18 years and having usurped all sectors of life through coercion and “bribery”, they haven’t gone nowhere in acquiring – in their words – the “cultural hegemony.” Rightists have never been on good terms with culture but still, they left a trickle of works to the world’s cultural heritage fascist Italy was an example. What distresses the government so much as to take refuge in a Gramscian term is the fact that they cannot do anything about this although they have both the power and money. To consider Gramscian concepts hegemony and cultural hegemony from the perspective of counter-hegemony and struggle for hegemony is significant for understanding this discussion. Islamism is not on good terms with culture and art, either. It is not easy to make convincing propaganda for a “cause” being inspired from vested interests. But these “politico-cultural” premises miss something. As in the example of theatre, Turkey’s intelligentsia has always been connected to socialist movements dubbed as Turkey’s Revolutionary Movement. This is what lends the cultural domain a spontaneous firmness against AKP’s hegemony albeit in absence of a strong resistance. Undertaking production and organization activities is a more sustainable strategy rather than relying upon this fortification.
Keywords: cultural hegemony, cultural policies of AKP, theatre in Turkey, Turkey’s
Revolutionary Movement

Hacı Çevik

One of the important subjects of the transformation that “new” Turkey intends to create in the social sphere is immigrants and refugees. Turkey has become an important migration country with a population of refugees and migrants approaching 5 million. Despite this, migration management is an area of non systematic practices. This study examines how the ideological perspective of the “new” Turkey symbolically gets involved in migration management. In this context, the socio-cultural dimension will be traced within the integration policies, which are an important component of migration management. This monitoring will be carried out through policy documents and practices produced by the Directorate General of Migration Management. As a distinctive feature of the understanding of “new” Turkey, the position of “contradictions” in migration policies opens an important area of research. In this study, the contradictions between the mandatory “temporary protection” regime of Syrian refugees in Turkey and the integration policies that emphasize permanence will be discussed. In the path that these contradictions lead to, the meaning of socio-cultural integration on the political and economic sphere will be discussed.
Keywords: “new” Turkey, culture, integration, socio-cultural integration, Directorate General of Migration Management, migration policy

Deniz Parlak

This study focuses on the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a political symbol with different motives from the early Republican Turkey to present. By Islamist, nationalist-religious groups after the single-party rule, becoming the ‘national matter’ (millî dava) of Hagia Sophia, which was decided to be transformed into a museum in the laicization process in 1934, is the historical basis of the aspiration to reopen it as a mosque. Withal Hagia Sophia’s opening to the worship of Muslims under the AKP rule after eighty-six years, it has been desired to destroy both the “new” of the early Republic period and establish the “new” of today. Within this framework, the study discusses whether it is possible to consider Hagia Sophia as a founding or destructive symbol of laicization in both historical sections.
Keywords: Hagia Sophia, political symbol, AKP, early Republician Turkey, laicization

Errol Babacan

This article argues that the political transformation in Turkey is accompanied by a cultural transformation that is executed by a social agent, whose societal significance is yet to be defined. Conceptualized as “Islamic dynamic”, this transformation affects every sector of society through the exclusion and repression of dissident cultural practices. It comes to the fore as a Culture War. The executor of this process is identified as Sunni clerics, who fulfill hegemonic tasks in association with the ruling classes and reproduce themselves within state institutions and private organisations. On t he basis of having achieved a monopoly on religious practices, the clerics have obtained an institutionalized privileged status and a group interest that is constituted by the retention and extension of this status. The ulema affiliated with the Diyanet occur as an archetype of these clerics. The Islamic dynamic is driven by struggles based upon the reproduction of their status. The article tackles the question of defining the reproduction mechanisms of these clerics and argues that these mechanisms are constituted by the conversion of religiously articulated cultural and social practices into resources that grant access to political power and economic means.
Keywords: Political Islam, Sunni clerics, hegemony, intellectual function, capital and exchange theory

Yücel Demirer