Suchergebnisse

Since the 1980s, the second wave of the feminist movement in Turkey contributed a great deal to the launching of important academic research on women's history, established activist associations, and continued to be vocal and visible in different aspects of women's issues. While academic research focused on a critical review of the women's movement during the late Ottoman era (the nineteenth century) and early Republican decades (1923–1950), activism focused primarily on a feminist critique of civil law, women's visibility in the political arena, socially traumatic issues like domestic violence and honor crimes, and on peace regarding the Kurdish issue. This article tries to conceptualize the turning points of this historical journey, which led us in new directions in Turkish women's history and its changing paradigms.

From a folkloristic point of view, memory is a repertoire, a potential knowledge that we store, only to perform when we choose. The selective process that defines what to tell is in folklore a function of the performance context. Why we choose to tell a particular story depends on who listens to it and how it is situated within the performative event. From an archeological-historical perspective, however, what we choose to preserve in our landscapes, archives and museums reflects choices made through historical-political processes. Within this framework, for an ethnographer in search of memory, there is an ongoing dialogue between narratives on what people remember and the material cultural context in which these narratives are produced. This essay is an attempt at writing an ethnography of memory in a small Black Sea town, Tirebolu/Tripoli, whose material culture and demographic structure radically changed since the 1900s through the effects of war, harsh climate, forces of modernization, and nationalism. To sum up very briefly, communities in Tirebolu—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—have been displaced at different times, temporarily or permanently since the First World War.

Anthony Shay's Choreographic Politics fills an important gap in the research of the history of folk dancing, a gap opened by the controversial status of "state folk dance ensembles," whose performances have often been neglected or despised by folklorists and dance scholars. Staged folk dances have always charmed audiences with the energy they embed in their performances but they have also puzzled them, because it is clear that they are more of a "representation" than a true reflection of a locality's reality. The analysis of "state folk dance ensembles," then, moves on the edges of folklore and "fake lore," the art of dance and the ethnography of dance. Choreographic Politics touches on this very sense of illusion and disillusion, focusing on the politics of state folk dance ensembles, a cultural product of the post-war era.

Anhand von zwischen 1994 und 2001 durchgeführten Interviews, versucht die Autorin ein Bild von Tirebolu, einer kleinen türkischen Stadt am Schwarzen Meer, einst bekannt als Tripoli, zu rekonstruieren, wie sie um die Jahrhundertwende existiert hat. Dabei orientiert sie sich v.a. an Erinnerungen, die sich an materieller Kultur festmachen. Das rekonstruierte Bild wirft Licht auf die Vergangenheit aber auch auf die Gegenwart. Die Präsenz von Nationalstaaten, schließt die Autorin, lässt Städte ähnlich erscheinen und verdeckt dabei den Blick auf ihre historischen Besonderheiten und den Wandel, den sie erfahren haben. (DÜI-Mjr)

The childhood memories of most Turkish citizens are full of images of national holiday celebrations. Loudly recited heroic poems, enthusiastic folk dance performances, costume parades and school shows, anxious teachers, and involuntary laughter during the long, silent moments of commemoration-all are part of these images. A few years ago (in 1998), Turkey celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic, giving us an opportunity to rethink these remembrances as both collective and personal experiences, with all their political and social implications. As in any other country with a state-controlled educational system, the structure of these celebrations had been well established and consolidated over the years, having "an accumulative effect upon successive generations" (Ben-Amos 1994, p. 54). The formalism and the overemphasized nationalism of the celebrations, repeated over and over for years, eventually created a sense of alienation. Nevertheless, when the Islamist Welfare Party assumed power over the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, the revival of the national holiday celebrations was remarkable. Thus began a new approach to celebrating national holidays, with rock concerts, extensive TV coverage, and public interviews. The seventh-fifth anniversary celebrations further revived the national holidays, with contributions from state as well as nongovernmental organizations. After the Welfare Party's assumption of power, the celebration of national holidays symbolized support for the Republic's reforms and secularism, in opposition to rising Islamic fundamentalism.

Scholars engaged in the study of nationalism have often stressed an analytical distinction between the rise of nationalism and the growth of nations since nationalism, by its very nature, has always preceded the nation (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). In the case of Turkey, the rise of nationalist movements rooted in Ottoman Turkism has been well-documented by studies focussing on their pioneering leaders, publications and institutions. Efforts aimed at the making of a Turkish nation, however, coincided with the period following the establishment of the Turkish nation-state. This new phase of Turkish nationalism differed from the preceding nationalist movements of the late Ottoman era, in its concern with the consolidation of a form of its own. It borrowed elements from, but also deviated from, the expansionist, pan-Turkist tendencies of the earlier era.