Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 DOI 10.1007/s12108-012-9163-4 The “Turkish Model” of Sociology: East–West Science, State Formation, and the Post-Secular Susan C. Pearce Published online: 28 September 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Abstract The field of sociology in Turkey has a history that is perhaps unique to Europe (and the “West”) in its co-founding with a modern nation-state, and yet its story is more central to the discipline’s general development than that of a marginal “outlier.” Positioned at an East–west crossroads, Turkey, and its sociological tradi- tion, have been in an ongoing conversation between the two cultural poles. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism, this article traces the discipline’s history through the lens of an East–west gaze. Touching on the lived public social questions that this story invokes, regarding ethnic relations, gender, migration, democracy-building, religion, and international relations, this article surveys the growth and present state of the discipline, including methodological trends and current issues. Keywords Turkish sociology . Turkey . Orientalism . History of sociology . Post-secular . Gender The opening scene for this article is taken from one of the author’s experiences as a sociology summer instructor for international graduate students for the scholarship program of Open Society Foundations. It is early July of 2007, in an Istanbul, Turkey university auditorium. Approximately 80 graduate students from the predominantly Muslim societies of Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Palestine, and other Central Asian and Middle Eastern abodes are gathered to begin an orientation course for their study-abroad scholarships. “Imustannouncethat you are not allowed to pray on campus,” I apologetically explain to these social science and law students. This stricture and others—emanating from the Turkish government, not from this private, progressive university that hosted the course—follow us into our 4-week experience. I use this vignette to introduce one of the key bifurcations in Turkish society, setting the stage for understanding the history of the field of sociology in Turkey. The story above continues: Midway through our summer school courses, two Indonesian students who wear head coverings (hijabs) to class are informed that this practice too, S. C. Pearce (*) Department of Sociology, East Carolina University, Brewster 402-A, E. Fifth Street, Greenville, NC 27858, USA e-mail: [email protected] Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 407 violates Turkish law. These students are offered the option of continuing to wear their attire on campus if they identify themselves as visitors with a metal identification tag on achain“necklace.” Although the students agree to comply, a heated discussion among the larger summer school cohort ensues, many offering to wear the same visitor tags in comradery. To these students, the tag is more than an identification to protect them, but is beginning to take on the status of what Erving Goffman called a “stigma symbol” (Goffman 1963, pp. 33–34). Students are confused on several counts: first, the subject of human rights is a key theme of their summer curriculum. Second, the students do not understand the absence of this simple freedom of expression in a relatively open, democratic, and—perhaps more ironically—historically Muslim country such as Turkey. They receive this directive while standing in a building located on the side of the Bosphorus River that is literally on the continent of Europe, and in a city that performs its Muslim identity through the proud displays of more than 1,000 mosques. We can turn to a page in the history of the field of sociology to gain some perspective on this and the other public controversies in Turkey that have made international headlines in recent years, including the summer of 2011, when the upper echelon of the military resigned en masse, and the winter of 2011–2012, when France’s Parliament voted to outlaw genocide-denial with the 1915 deportations and slaughter of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in mind. In fact, Turkish sociology has, in part, given the nation-state its structural and ideational base, as well as some of its more controversial critics. The following overview of the field of sociology in Turkey uses a particular frame: the relationship of the development of Turkish sociology and the Turkish nation-state using concepts of the construction of “moder- nity” and an East–west “gaze.” I then build on this overview to profile the field of sociology as practiced in Turkey today. Finally, I interrogate the relevance of the field’s history to current questions that face the field. I demonstrate how sociology in Turkey is inextricably intertwined with the broader public issues that confront the nation-state as it straddles modernity and tradition, Asia and Europe, local and global, . and the tensions between those poles. Founding Ideas and Sociology: West Looks East, East Looks West The country of Turkey makes an appearance at the very inception of the field of sociology in Europe; in the nineteenth century, the man who gave us the word “sociol- ogy,” Auguste Comte, expressed his interest in Turkey because of the bridge that the country (at that time, the Ottoman Empire) represented between the poles of Europe and Asia (Çelebi 2002, p. 253). The distance between these two poles was not only spatial, or geographical, but metaphorical and cultural, since the West was rapidly becoming associated with the embrace of modernization and social/political change, while the East was presumed to be attached to inherited tradition and mysticism. In his book Orientalism, literary theorist Edward Said chronicled the growing eastward gaze that characterized the modernizing Europe of the nineteenth century (Said 1978). That gaze, which “orientalized” (exoticized) the East as a foil against which Europe defined its progress, entered into the political and cultural self- imaginations of European nation-states. “Civilization” (read: “Western”) became contrasted with “culture” (read: “Eastern”) (Sezer 1988, p. 3). There was a larger, 408 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 and volatile, international political context of this late-nineteenth century gaze toward the West: the Ottoman Empire was losing strength, was no longer expanding, and had suffered military defeat at the hands of the Russians.1 One outcome was an 1856 charter called the Tanzimat, which was passed to allow more liberal reform, thus exposing Turkish intellectuals to the broader range of European thought. During the time that the “West” was defining itself against the orient—even as it romanticized Eastern culture—the Ottoman Empire was simultaneously gazing west- ward, and among the targets of that gaze was the emerging discipline of European sociology. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, a number of prominent Turkish philosophers and political exiles lived in London and Paris, and began to embrace the growing canon of modern philosophical and scientific literature emanating from those European abodes. Political volatility extended to the realm of ideas, however, as these Turkish exiles began to promote the idea of a constitutional government, and reformers from within began to promote change, neither of which sat well with the Ottoman rulers (Berkes 1936, p. 240). There were alternative perspectives bubbling in this cauldron of new ideas. One of those was that Islam was a flexible religion that had the ability to adapt to modernity, which would protect the “East” from encroach- ing European imperialism (Berkes 1936, p. 241). Just as Comte was taken with Turkey, the budding Turkish sociologists were also taken with the positivism of Comte (Çelebi 2002) and with other English and French Enlightenment thinkers (Berkes 1936, p. 240). The influence of Comte on Turkish sociology dated back to at least 1883, when Turkish political resister Ahmed Riza traveled to Paris and became familiar with Comte’s philosophy of “order” and “progress.” Riza introduced these ideas on his return (Berkes 1936, p. 241). The first Turk who was a professional sociologist to import these ideas back to Turkey (while it was under Ottoman rule) was named Prince Sabahhadin. As a leader of a Turkish political opposition in exile in Paris from 1904 to 1906, he studied the work of French scholar Le Play, which convinced him that Turkey must move toward an individualist model of private property ownership. Upon his return in 1906, he founded the Private Enterprise and Decentralization Association (Berkes 1936, pp. 241–242). In contrast to many of his successors in Turkish sociology, Sabahhadin was a disciplinary purist in that he kept the scholarship of sociology distinct from the public political realm. His proposal for decentralization of the Turkish governmental capacities—though clearly a political proposal—was motivated by his insistence on a realm of the “socius,” a world of social actors outside of the polity (Çelebi 2002, p. 255). This burgeoning interest in the field both among these Turkish intellectuals and within Ottoman leadership led to the first university chair in sociology in 1912 (Davison 1995, p. 195).2 Tensions between two prevailing schools of thought, however—that of importing Western institutions to Turkey on the one hand and reforming Turkish institutions along the lines of a pan-Islamism—represented the intellectual divisions that characterized the era, as Ottoman and European political developments escalated toward the “Great War”—after which the Empire would be 1 It is important to remember that the Ottoman Empire was itself built on a defense of the region against European/Western imperialism—on the heels of the early Crusades, the Ottomans defeated the Orthodox Christian empire, Byzantium, centered in Constantinople, and the great onion-domed cathedrals were converted to mosques. 2 Sources vary on the date of this first chair, ranging from 1912 to 1915. Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 409 no more. With the death of the Empire, however, the new society would turn—in part —to the simultaneously developing new discipline of sociology for guidance.