The “Turkish Model” of Sociology: East–West Science, State Formation, and the Post-Secular

Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 DOI 10.1007/s12108-012-9163-4

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 tradition, 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 “modernity” 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 “sociology,” 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 westward, 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. As a modern republic, present-day Turkey is that Phoenix that arose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. With the Empire’s collapse, Turkish nationalist leader and World War-I general Mustafa Kemal, later known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, established a state on a portion of the former empire’s lands that would come to resemble Europe more closely than the Middle East. The new republic, founded in 1923, held a fraction of the territory that the Ottomans had commanded, but certain continuities remained. The crown cosmopolitan jewel of the former empire, the city of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), counted among them (although it was replaced as Turkey’s capital by the city of Ankara in 1923). At Atatürk’s insistence, a secular state was a centerpiece of the new republic, and a cornerstone of secular modernity. As the modern republic’s first president, Atatürk consulted the works of Western sociologists, including Durkheim—particularly The Division of Labor in Society—in modeling the secular Turkish nation state. Although Atatürk was not a sociologist, he leaned heavily on the scholarship of Ziya Gökalp, the first chair of the sociology department at Istanbul University (Davison 1995) (Fig 1). In fact, Gökalp had traveled to Paris in 1910 to study under Durkheim directly (Arjomand 1982, p. 95), and he taught the first sociology course in Turkey, in 1911, in a high school in the city of Selanik (Çelebi 2002, p. 266 fn 6). How did Professor Gökalp’s efforts help shape the direction of the newly forming Turkish state? What followed was a massive endeavor at social engineering. Gökalp was greatly influenced by the ideas that the French Revolution embraced. He was particularly interested in the French thinkers Comte, Tarde, LeBon, and Fouillé, as well as the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (Spencer 1958, p. 648). In a 1936

Fig. 1 Statue that graces the entrance to Istanbul University, featuring Atatürk in the center. Photo Credit: author 410 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 article published in the American Journal of Sociology, Niyazi Berkes explained that Gökalp’s ideas differed from those of his predecessors who pressed for a wholesale import of western ideas and institutions (p. 242). In a brief time as leader of a movement known as pan-Turanism (to unite all Turkish peoples in Asia), Gökalp and others of this school emphasized folklore, history, and linguistics, which promoted the preservation of cultural identities. Thus, Gökalp retooled Durkheim for the Turkish context (Berkes 1936, p. 243). Berkes states that “Gökalp. . . was the real founder of Turkish sociology, since he was not a mere translator or interpreter of foreign sociology. . . .” (p. 242). Durkheim’s theories, however, were central to Gökalp’s own approach, and would inform the direction of the new modern nation-state. More prominent in Gökalp’s thought was his commitment to Turkish nationalism, which he attempted to develop by importing Durkheim’s concepts of collective representations and social facts (Spencer: 1958, p. 649). Gökalp envisioned that the new nation would replace religion in the collective consciousness, but that the religion of Islam would be a partner in supporting that move toward national consciousness. Although scholars describe his heritage as Kurdish, he denied this background. Building on his nationalist ideology, coupled with his understanding of ethnic identities as socially constructed, he stated that “there is no such thing as the Kurdish people.” (Houston 2001,p.110)Gökalp’s influence would be wide- reaching. The anthropologist Robert Spencer noted in 1958 that “[e]very Turkish school child of today knows the work of Mehmet Ziya Gökalp, and he has come to be recognized by the Turks themselves as the foremost interpreter of the modern Turkish spirit and of Turkish nationalism” (Spencer 1958, p. 649). Other intellectuals and activists who were building the new state—known as the “Young Turks”— continued to consult Comte and other European ideas for models of these social institutions. Adopting the vision of organic solidarity that Durkheim described as characterizing modernity, and applying the distinction between sacred and profane that Durkheim had articulated to the emerging societal order, Turkey began to relegate religion and politics to separate realms. Islam would no longer be an official “state” religion. On the surface, this top-down reconstruction of society— particularly, in culture and politics—appears to mirror the same Western divisions of labor of a secular state that has withdrawn from its management of religion, with religious bodies that no longer meddle in affairs of the state. The situation in Turkey was distinct, however: the new order under Atatürk continued to view Turkish identity as rooted in Islam, and put the auspices of religious bodies under the control of state structures. The language of this new order/process was certainly French- inspired; the term laicisme in French is heard etymologically in the Turkish term, “laiklik” (Topal 2011). Yet, as Davison (1998) and Topal (2011) have described, this was not a secularization along the French or American models, given the multi- century history of Islamic government that Turkey inherited. The westward gaze remained paramount at this time, however. Certain Enlightenment precepts were a cornerstone of Atatürk’s futurist societal vision for Turkey. This was also the case for the burgeoning field of sociology, just as it was for its Western counterparts. Inspired by the European Enlightenment, the field of Turkish sociology embraced and embodied both the scientific method and a scientific application of Enlightenment ideals to society; Turkish higher education more generally would constitute a critical institution in which to house and espouse these Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 411 ideals. This legacy is far from buried. Today, Ankara University—located in the city of Ankara, capital of present-day Turkey—describes its history in the following way: The foundation of Ankara University was personally initiated by the great Atatürk, to form the basis of his principles and revolutionary ideas, to dissem- inate and to firmly establish these principles and ideas nationally, and to be the undaunted defender of these principles that express modernity, science and enlightenment (Ankara University 2012a). Embedded on this webpage, gazing straightforwardly at the viewer, is a posed, quite serious portrait of the university founders—all men—Atatürk in the center, and all sporting dark, Western-style suits with fashionable (for that era) neckties. Moving to the statement of the university’s vision, we see a reiteration of these same principles: Ankara University is locked on to the target of reaching the highest level of modern civilization under the guidance of reason and science (Ankara Univer- sity 2012b). Education was at the heart of the social engineering for the new nation-state in other ways as well. Among the social reforms that Atatürk oversaw in the burgeoning new Republic were the replacement of the Arabic with a Latin alphabet, the introduction of surnames, the change from customary and religious clothing to modern (western) clothing styles, and the abolition of a range of religious institutions and their integration in the legal and educational spheres. One can get a glimpse into how this re-education of society at mass levels had begun to take place through a surviving relic of a black-and-white photograph from the era; it shows a man who has stopped on a public street to study a poster that the government had erected to educate Turks in the alphabet change, each Arabic letter juxtaposed with its Latin equivalent. Notably, Atatürk’s modernization was not a bottom-up democratic process. Atatürk dictated the sweeping, radical social changes. Although he initially attempted to institute a European-inspired multi-party system by encouraging the development of a competing political party (other than his own), called the Liberal Republican Party, this opposing party was not successful in the national elections in 1930 (Spencer 1958, p. 645). And despite the radical, near overnight transformation in these social and cultural habits, Turkey’s changes were not embraced across all sectors of society, and were resisted by some religious conservatives and minority groups such as the Kurds. Even with this resistance, however, the reforms did move toward becoming the hegemonic norm for Turkey. Based on a recent close reading of Atatürk’s speeches and writings, Taha Parla and Andrew Davison argue that Kemalism as a political philosophy was more a form of corporatist ideology than Enlightenment-inspired liberalism or socialism—with a strong distaste for the indi- vidualism of liberal democratic traditions. They state, “. . . Kemalism is neither properly modern nor properly secular, and its commitment to rational education and governance must be questioned” (2004, p. viii). The Kemalist version of corporatism grew out of Gökalp’s adaptation of Durkheim’s theory of organic solidarity, which would be achieved through an interdependent division of labor across a society’s corporations as the counterweight to anomie, providing a buffer layer between individual and state. 412 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427

Parla (1985) argued that Professor Gökalp—Atatürk’s right-hand sociologist— was, however, more democratically minded in his vision than the dictatorial style that Atatürk represented. Although Gökalp praised the role of individuals “of genius” in society, for example, Parla insisted that Gökalp’s writings imply that those geniuses can exist outside the state, and can consist of sociologists who use individual reason and scientific thinking in their building of society among other leaders (1985, p. 93). There are competing assessments of Gökalp’s theories regarding multiple cultures and democracy. One version of his legacy is that he was particularly supportive of political parties that pressed for a more egalitarian society—across the sexes, nations, races, and classes (p. 96); he used the term “solidarism” for this social vision rather than “socialism.”3 Gökalp insisted that ethnic cultures do not stand still, but are always changing, adapting to their context and, in this case, integrating into the larger national ethos. In general, Gökalp’s thought merged two Turkish schools of thought that were at odds: the Westernists and pan-Islamists. He proposed that the country “Turkify, Islamicize, and Modernize” (Berkes 1936, p. 244). As the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, Gökalp gradually de-emphasized the “Islam” element, and after he died, the Kemalists would abandon the religious element of their mission to build a Turkish republic (Arjomand 1982). Notably, Gökalp has been read by later scholars in contrasting ways: some assigning anti-racism to his works and others emphasizing his ethnocentrism.4 It must be emphasized that Gökalp and the Young Turks have left a tarnished legacy in the eyes of those who blame them for orchestrating the mass deportation and slaughter of 1.5 million Armenian Christians on the way to achieving this tripartite goal, and, in particular, the first two elements of the formula. Taner Akçam, the first Turkish scholar to describe these events as a genocide explicitly, for example, writes that Gökalp contributed the ideological basis for carrying out the murders, through his theory of Turkish nationalism that included ending “the illusion of Muslim-Christian equality” (Akçam 2006, 88). Given Western and Eastern Europe’s twentieth-century legacies of genocides and ethnic cleansings, the example of the Armenian question is neither a contradiction nor anomaly to the point that Turks drew on Western social models—including the social construction of an ethnic or racial base for modern nation-state identities. Thus, Gökalp’s “contribution” to public sociology developed in dramatically contrasting directions. Certainly, early Turkish sociology borrowed a great deal of societal and sociological ideas emanating from the westward direction. Given Turkey’s close association with France, as well Gökalp’s importation of French ideas, the works a number of French scholars made their way into the developing canon, such as Le Bon and Le Play. From a sociology of knowledge perspective, the content of a body of knowledge is historically bounded in the geographic and institutional context in which the knowledge is located, and this is illustrated in the dynamics that influenced Turkish

3 Parla explains that the Turkish left has blamed and the right has praised Gökalp for his racism and totalitarianism, but Parla disagrees that this is not true to Gökalp’s ideas—which could be described as “pluralistic corporatism” (1985, p. 120). 4 Parla and Davison conclude that “. . . Kemalism offers a mixed discourse of equality and superiority wherein the Turkish nation is depicted as the progenitor of all humanity” (2004, p. 279) but that Gökalp “.. . envisioned ‘civilization’ as a shared sphere in which all nations participate in a common whole ....” (2004, p. 279). Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 413 sociology. Scholars of this history point out, however, that Turkish sociology and the burgeoning society should not be described as a wholesale, linear import of Western political culture and institutional structure—as if Turkey had been a tabula rasa regarding modern ideas. As Spencer observed,

Atatürk and his associates, urbanized and Westernized intellectuals, set out deliberately to “modernize” Turkish culture and to develop a Westernized Turkish state which could exist on a par with the nations of Europe. To do this, they were confronted with the necessity of defining a Turkish ethos and of making Western elements one with it. (Spencer 1958, p. 640)

In fact, Gökalp’s vision was to wed Western institutional structures with a preservation of Turkish culture, maintaining an interdependent tension between gesellschaft and gemeinschaft (Spencer 1958,p.651).AnddespiteAtatürk’s insistence on Westernization and a science-based society, he stopped short of full praise for those countries that had condescended to the Ottoman Empire as a lesser civilization (Hanioğlu 2011). In the book, Social Theory and Later Modernities: The Turkish Experience (2004), Ibrahim Kaya provides details about that Turkish ethos in an argument that the West was not singularly responsible for modernization. He insists that Turkey’s “inventive modernization” had indigenous roots in the culture’s own history: Eastern Modernizations cannot simply be understood as Westernization, precisely because self-questioning in the East did not allow actors of modernization to imitate the Western model of modernity, even though the rise of the West played a part in the radicalization of this self- questioning. (Kaya 2004, p. 30) Kaya explains that the history of a culture always remains relevant and influential, even when forwarding such radical social change. According to Kaya’s account, the result is that Turks placed their own cultural stamp on both the religious and secular ideas. As he states it, A historical investigation indicates that the Turks imported both the idea of Islam and that of modernity, but added their own characteristics to them. Both Islam and modernity have been reinterpreted, and therefore, they have become “Turkified.” (Kaya 2004, pp. 43–44) The Arab world had its homegrown proto-sociologists that predated the discipline’s birth in the West. Prominent among these was the philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who wrote prolifically during the Middle Ages on society, politics, and economics. His work on the rise and fall of empires had a particular appeal to the Ottoman Turks. Turkish philosopher Farabi (870–950 CE) contributed scholarly treatises on the sociability of humans, and lionized the ideal city as one with interdependent parts —using the same organic metaphor of the human body that Durkheim and later functionalists would employ. These thinkers were among the influences on Gökalp’s thought (Berkes 1936, p. 244). Thus, although Turkish sociology and the corresponding new nation-state were grounded in a gaze to the West, they were augmented and localized. 414 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427

The prominent Turkish sociologist Şerif Mardin, working today, also offers an alternative analysis to the standard binaries of West-East and modernity/secularization versus “tradition.” Mardin is known for his contributions to sociological under- standings of religion and secularism in Turkish society, constructions of Turkish national identity, the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish Republic. Mardin locates the historical development of the Turkish Republic in multiple narratives of modernity as well as multiple strains of tradition—rather than a single transition from tradition to modernity (Mardin 2006).5 In a similar vein, International Relations scholar Nora Fisher Onar has recently mapped out the public sensibilities that one period of the Ottoman Empire represented, in the late nineteenth century; it was an era with its own version of cosmopolitanism that embraced a multiplicity of cultures (Onar 2009). In fact, as a general rule, prior to the First World War, the Ottoman Empire had allowed its internal ethnic and religious minorities relative independence and freedom from political control, under a system known as the millet that consisted of separate legal courts devoted to the affairs of these minority groups—although Islam remained in the more dominant and privileged position.

Staking Out a Turkish Sociological Identity

Alongside the new Republic, Turkish sociology began to institutionalize and take on an identity of its own. Gökalp was one of the founders of the first association of Turkish sociologists, the Turkish Knowledge Association, in 1913, which included was a cross-disciplinary group that included sociologists (Çelebi 2002, p. 256). Among the influences that Gökalp had on the eventual development of Turkish sociology was his insistence that “ideas”—theory and philosophy—belonged at the heart of sociology, even though he pressed for a polity to be built upon those ideas. For this reason, as Çelebi (2002) has explained, “The leading factor which permits the survival of this concept of sociology in our day is the fact that sociology chairs/ departments in the Turkish universities have almost always been a part of the Faculties of Letters rather than those of Law, Political Sciences or Economics” (p. 256). The implication here is that having a home in the humanities offered the discipline a safety net from the volatile realm of national politics. Nevertheless, across history, political developments have had their impact on the discipline of sociology in the country. Among these was the First World War. In 1919, the Allies arrested Gökalp and several hundred others for their political activities; Gökalp was imprisoned in Malta for 2 years; as a result, the Turkish Knowledge Association closed down. Following on its heels, the second association, “Profession of Sociology,” established in Istanbul in 1918, met the same fate: it was victim of the War of Independence in 1920 (Çelebi 2002, p. 257). This association had established a new academic journal and advanced the practice of field research in Turkey, drawing inspiration from French sociologist Le Play, author and practitioner of the case-study method. Despite these setbacks, the field of sociology was established in

5 It should be noted that there was no single tradition of modernity in the “West”: witness the critical tradition that began with Karl Marx—a strain of sociology that did not historically resonate within Turkish sociology as strongly as the work of Durkheim. Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 415 all colleges and normal schools in the country by 1924, within 1 year of the birth of the Turkish Republic. These were primarily modeled after French normal schools; translated French textbooks provided the curricula. In the span of 3 short years, however (by 1927), two new, original textbooks written by Turkish sociologists appeared (Berkes 1936, p. 245). Turkey was not the only country in its region that gravitated toward Durkheimian sociology. In his comparison of Turkish and Iranian sociology for The American Sociologist in 1982, Arjomand reported that Durkheim’s thought was also influential in Iran’s political modernization during the same era. Further, Arjomand, argued, it was Durkheim’s ideas that resonated with sociologists throughout the wider region of the Middle East, rather than those of Marx and Weber (Arjomand 1982). The Turkish sociological gaze did eventually begin to expand its sights toward Germany. This was largely due to the work of Turkish sociologist Mehmet İzzet, who gave centrality to Simmel and Weber in his writing and teachings, and who was widely read in French, German, English, and American sociology. On the faculty of Istanbul University, he was known for his textbook on sociology and his book, Theories of Nationality. He called for both a modernization of Islam and a commitment to the ideals of democracy, science, and progress. Despite his popularity and influence, İzzet’s career was cut short by an untimely death in 1930 (Berkes 1936, p. 245). The shift toward German thought was further entrenched by yet another war—the Second World War —which brought German scholars fleeing the Nazis to Istanbul University, where the works of Max Weber and other German sociologists began to integrate further into the Turkish canon. These German émigrés introduced and helped establish what Çelebi has described as “a society-centred and data-oriented sociology beside a polity-centered and idea-oriented one” (Çelebi 2002, p. 257), which appealed to younger Turkish sociologists in particular. As some Turkish sociologists began to earn their degrees in the United States, they also brought back this “data”-driven approach to sociology when they returned to Turkey.6 Interestingly, at the same time that Atatürk was dictating a Durkheimian-inspired reconstruction of Turkey, Stalin was simultaneously embarking on his own top-down modernization of Russian and Soviet societies on the Marxian model. While these two projects were ideologically at odds, one can notice stark, modern lines to the Turkish statuary from that era that bears some resemblance to that of socialist realist monuments of Eastern Europe, with the recognizable “cult of personality.”7 Clearly, where Turkish sociology has shown a particular passion for the realm of theory, that theory was pegged to actually lived Turkish historical developments—as if presaging the American sociologist Steven Seidman’s declaration of the end of [disengaged, dispassionate] sociological theory, to be replaced by [change-oriented] social theory (Seidman 1991). The case of sociologist Cavit Orhan Tütengil (born in 1921) exemplifies this. Trained in philosophy and on the sociology faculty of Istanbul University, he analyzed Turkey as a transitional society that should be rooted in

6 Prince Sabahhadin influenced Turkish sociology by inspiring more empirical research traditions, alongside the more theoretical stream that followed Gökalp. 7 Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to U.S. President Carter, recently commented that two countries had a revolution from above in the past 100 years: Russia and Turkey; but Turkey, he added, was more successful (from the lecture “Putin’s Return and the U.S.–Russian Reset,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, May 23, 2012). 416 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427

Atatürk’s ideas. He wrote newspaper opinion columns in addition to scholarly works. In 1979, he was murdered at an Istanbul bus stop by assassins that were reportedly of a fascist orientation, though the crime was never solved. He is among three individuals about whom the short book, Unsolved Murders in Turkey (2010), was written. In 2012, his relatives were among those advocating for justice for victims of the 1980 military coup, as those aging generals were put on trial. The dramas of Turkish history help explain why there has been a series of six sociological associations in Turkey; the previous associations dissolved for various reasons in addition to war, including at least once due to disputes between teachers. Among the active founders and participants of these associations have been high- school teachers. This is due to the pervasive presence of sociology in high-school curricula. Between 1923 and 1980, sociology and philosophy were required courses in high school (Çelebi 2002, p. 258). The sixth and present-day association, the Turkish Sociology Association,8 was established in 1990, and is headquartered in Ankara. The themes of its congresses, held approximately every 3 years, generally address the relationship between the country of Turkey and the larger global society, with mid-term congresses on selected topics in addition, such as the 2008 conference entitled “Social Dynamics of the Global Terrorism and Disincentive Politics.” Turkish sociologists also participate at the larger regional and continental level, such as the Middle East Sociology Association, the European Sociological Society, and the International Sociological Association. At least five scholars from Turkish universities were on the program of the American Sociological Association annual meetings in 2011, as well as at least seven Turkish scholars affiliated with American universities as students or faculty members (ASA 2011). There are no subdivisions of the Turkish Sociology Association into regional sections. This Association positions itself as a regular contributor to the educational venture: it dedicates 10 % of its revenue to scholarships for lower-income sociology undergraduate and graduate students. A 2004 study found that of 80 universities in Turkey, 30 had sociology departments, although a number of universities without sociology departments do nevertheless have sociologists on their faculties (Çelebi et al. 2004,p.5).This number has expanded: In 2011, the Association listed 49 universities with sociology departments. Of these, 11 are in Istanbul, 4 in Ankara, and the remaining 34 distributed across other cities. While this growth in number of departments may be due to the establishment of new departments in existing universities, it is also likely a reflection of the spurt of new private universities opening across the country. This phenomenon could almost be predicted, as a result of the supply-and-demand dy- namic from Turkey’s burgeoning youth population and its national economic up- swing; during the summer quarter of 2011, the country led the world in GDP growth. As a candidate for the European Union, Turkish universities have integrated educational exchanges such as the Erasmus program, where other European students can study in Turkey, and Turkish students in other parts of Europe. What are the content areas of today’s Turkish sociology scholars? One review of Turkish sociology publications between 1985 and 2001 revealed a heavy concentra- tion on theory and methods—addressing the themes of post-modernism, positivism, and globalization, and the introduction of qualitative methods (Kasapoglu 2005). The

8 The website for the Turkish Sociological Association is http://www.sosyolojidernegi.org.tr/. Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 417 authors commented that such articles were primarily imports of Western ideas to the Turkish audience of sociologists—few of whom knew foreign languages or had access to the internet at the time.9 While on the surface this does appear to be another wave emanating from the West, the subject matter of some of the recent theoretical literature emanates from questions that are of central importance to Turkey in its global position, including postcolonialism, de-centering the subject, and identity politics. Öncü has pointed out that the social histories of Michel Foucault held particular resonance for Turkish scholars during the 1990s, given the extent of surveillance, imprisonment, and “capillaries of power” that 20th-century Turkish history has wrought (Öncü 1997). From Öncü’s report of the hot titles on bookstore shelves in the late 1990s, it was the translations of postmodern titles and books on ethnicity and religion in Turkey that dominated those shelves, although most were the work of “journalist-researchers-writers” than of sociologists. Öncü has commented that the popularity of Foucault and other poststructuralist scholars may have also been due to the fact that they were “radical” but not Marxist (Öncü 1997, p. 269). Has French social theory, therefore, returned in these new incarnations? Despite this trend, notably, the “grand narrative” of modernity borrowed from the French Enlightenment thinkers has far from waned in Turkish academia—or perhaps has re-asserted itself, as the texts from university websites cited above illustrate. Kasapoglu and colleagues did document strong trends toward anti-positivism on the rise in Turkey. Less popular was applied or policy-directed research, considered more technical than the more valued theoretical articles. Their tally found that the second most popular subfield in Turkish sociological publications (after the topics of theory and methods) was social problems; following down the list were art and culture, social stratification, political sociology, and economic sociology (p. 543). Further, the researchers found a correlation between the numbers of courses offered in these subfields in the seven universities and the distribution of publications across these subjects: theory and methods again had the largest share. At the time of their 2005 study, Kasapoglu and colleagues found relative gender equality across the sample departments, with five departments employing more female than male faculty, and two departments with just under 50 % female. There were, nevertheless, gender differences in status, as one might expect, as the male faculty tended to be more senior, and the females more junior (p. 542). Perhaps reflected in this changing demographic was the growing popularity of women’s studies, enveloped in the social problems courses, and representing 37.8 % of those courses. Women have made their marks on Turkish sociology, both historically and into the present. Behice Boran (1910–1987), for example, who received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan, was the first woman leader of a political party in Turkey. A Marxist, she was jailed for her communist activities but then later represented the Turkish Worker’s Party in Parliament. She was far from the follower of Comte and Durkheim that Gökalp was. In 1947, while she was on the faculty of the University of Ankara, she published an article in the American Journal of Sociology, entitled “Sociology in Retrospect,” (Boran 1947) where she took on Comte for his classist bias. Comte’s proposal to wait for a scientific body of knowledge to build

9 These researchers drew their observations after classifying 989 studies, which had been carried out by 75 sociologists across seven universities in Turkey. They grouped the results into 12 subfields. 418 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 from which to critique society, she charged, in effect excused any critique of the ills of the current society—as it would not be scientifically fact-based. She hurled a similar charge at Durkheim for his boundedness to the bourgeois class in his work. Further, taking American sociologists to task for their assumptions that sociology can be an independent variable in solving social ills, she pointed to the status of sociology as a dependent variable of existing social structures: “Pathological social systems do not simply die off, like the individual patients [who might rise up against medical scientists], while waiting for the social scientists to discover cures for their ills; they strangle science” (Boran 1947 pp. 318–319). An influential female sociologist working today is Nilgün Çelebi of Ankara University and Mulga University in Turkey, whose in-depth research on Turkish sociology and its associations was useful for the present article. Her books and articles are primarily published in Turkish, and her specializations include the history of sociology, the relationship between epistemology and ontology in sociology, culture, and gender. Ayşe Öncü, a professor with a PhD from Yale University, on the faculty of Sabancı University, provided another central source of information on Turkish sociology for this article. Most of her books and articles are published in English, in the areas of globalizing cities, Turkey’s relationship to the West, gender and culture, and the dynamics between secularism and Islam. By addressing questions of gender, these scholars are engaging with some of the central public concerns of Turkey today, as illustrated by the story that began this article. Turkish sociology has vacillated between the two poles of theory, or ideas, and policy/positivism across its lifetime. Writing in the journal Contemporary Sociology in 1997, Öncü argued that the latter has tended to drive the discipline more centrally across its history:

Of the two sensibilities out of which sociology has been historically molded, one intellectual, the other “lived” and made of social commitment, it is that latter that dominates the field in Turkey. We tend to be driven by the urge to diagnose “lived” events and propose solutions. The push to bring a particular social reality into daylight, rendering it “understandable” in public, to the public, for the public, and proposing brave solutions often takes precedence over “understanding,” analytical refinement, theoretical sophistication (Öncü 1997, p. 267).

The field of Turkish sociology, much like its host society, has been characterized by a series of dramatic changes over time: But the landmarks that signal shifts in the trajectory of the discipline are not “influential” books. It is the mesmerizing play of political events, wars, economic crises, military coups, liberalizations that usher in moments of intense anxiety and of reappraisal, imparting a sense of new departures and breaks with orthodoxy (Öncü 1997, p. 267). Thus, the trajectory of the discipline has not developed in a straight line of descent from Gökalp, and, as more recent sociologists quoted here illustrate, many have diverged from his ideas. Where Gökalp constructed nationalism as a solution, quite a few Turkish sociologists today would construe it as a problem. Marxist-oriented Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 419 sociology represented another of those divergences. A turn away from the Marxian branch of Turkish sociology was articulated by Şerif Mardin, who charged in a 1999 book review that a political leftism in a sector of Turkish social scientists had resulted in weak scholarship and, specifically, no attention to the autonomous role of religion in Turkish society (Mardin 1999)—which his own scholarship attempts to address. Currently, public issues continue to push Turkish sociological agendas into new directions, such as environmental sociology (Kasapoglu 2005, p. 546). A recent sociology graduate from an Istanbul university confirmed that this was the case in her own educational experience; she reported that nearly every Masters thesis in her program was devoted to one of the public questions facing Turkey. While American sociology debates whether or not it should insert itself into a more public, policy- oriented role—a dispute that is far from settled (Burawoy 2005)—it is the “public” that has been among the most defining aspects of Turkish sociology.

Sociology and Today’s Turkey: An East–West Axis as a Circle

Reviewing the titles of sociological works available in the English language, it is clear that today’s Turkish sociologists are producing research on critical concerns regarding Turkish society to be consumed by interested scholars abroad. These concerns include the role of the Turkish state in a global world, the rights of the Turkish minority in Germany, Turkish-Kurdish relations, the incursion of the public sphere into the private sphere, and the role of religion in society. A number of scholars are positioning themselves boldly on the controversial cutting edge, proposing those “brave solutions” to which Öncü referred. Among the writings of sociologists on the faculty at Bilgi University in Istanbul are works about human rights violations in Turkey, racism, ultra-nationalism, honor crimes, forced Kurdish migration, and feminism.10 Sociologists are also tackling the east–west axis question in analyses of the politically controversial EU accession process. The European Journal of Turkish Studies, for example, which has been publishing on-line since 2004, is a cross- disciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences available in four languages. A special 2009 issue of the journal was devoted to sociological approaches to Turkish-EU relations. At the close of 2011, the contentious discussions between Turkey and the EU regarding Turkey’s application for accession had grown even more volatile, and in response, Turkey was widely perceived as beginning to turn its gaze more eastward (Aydıntaşbaş 2012, 58). (The worsening economic crisis in the Eurozone alongside a relatively healthy Turkish economy reinforced an already wary Turkey about its need to join the EU “club.”) There are several questions that haunt the possibility of EU membership that are steeped in the history of Turkish sociology as manifest in the Kemalist project. One of these implicates collective memory and transitional justice—in particular, the Armenian genocide question. Several sociologists count themselves among the growing public voices within Turkey entering a public discourse over the issue of whether Turkey should offer an apology to Armenians, and admit that this was an act

10 See, for example, the writings of Arus Yumul and Kenan Çayir. 420 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 of genocide. This issue is relevant to the history of Turkish sociology in more than one way—including the possible complicity by the Young Turks, Gökalp included, and the project of nationalism that was built on Durkheim’s idea of collective consciousness. In 2001, France had passed a bill to declare this history as genocide, as have several other Western countries. In 2012, the French Senate furthered this agenda by voting a measure into law declaring genocide-denial to be a crime punishable by jail terms and hefty fines, with the Turkish-Armenian history in mind (Vinocur and Hemming 2012). Following a pointed accusation from France’s President Sarkozy regarding this history, Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdoğan retaliated with his own charge that France had its own dark past for which it had yet to apologize: the occupation of Algeria and slaughter of millions of its citizens. Both men took defensive postures and French-Turkish diplomatic relations were quickly fraying. Tens of thousands of Turkish residents from across Europe traveled to Paris and took to the streets in angry defiance of the new bill. Within weeks, France's Constitutional Council overturned the law, as it violated the right of free expression.11 The Armenian question had been haunting Turkey’s EU accession process for some time, due to EU requirements that members meet human rights standards, including recognition of minority rights.12 There is a deeper, cultural aspect of this controversy as well; as Levy and Sznaider have described it, “nascent European identity seems to revolve around a negative foundational moment through commemorating universal lessons of the Holocaust” (Levy and Sznaider 2005, 290). In other words, one ticket for entrance into the European club is this process of historical reckoning with one country’s own genocides; such is also demanded of the European countries in the “former East.”13 Contrasting with the 2012 Turkish protests in Paris at this time, tens of thousands of angry Turks took to the streets of Istanbul waving striking circular white-on-black signs that declared “We are all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant Dink” on the fifth anniversary of the cold-blooded murder of the journalist Hrant Dink—who had been accused of insulting Turkishness by using the term “genocide” for the atrocities (“Hrant Dink…” 2012).14 Such displays demonstrate the intensity of bifurcations and fault-lines among various constituencies in the society and a growing boldness by those who sympathize with Armenians, even if they do not represent the Turkish majority.

11 As of this writing, Sarkozy had lost his re-election bid to the Socialist Party candidate, François Hollande. 12 In the meantime, controversy erupted in Algeria over the dispute. In January, 2012, Algerian Prime Minister Ouyahiya implored the Turkish prime minister to drop the references to Algeria. Other political voices, however, including some of Algeria’s oppositional political parties, criticized Ouyahiya’s statement, with one party calling for the government’s resignation over the issue (Kumova 2012). 13 While there are journalists in prison in 2012 for their work on such matters, there are also academics and other members of Turkish society who are addressing these questions in open, honest debate, with no criminal or academic consequences. When the Turkish government canceled an academic conference to confront the Armenian question in 2005, which was to be held at a public university in Istanbul, two private universities in the city came to the fore and co-sponsored the conference, including Bilgi University, the site of the opening anecdote in this article. 14 On the other sides of this controversy are officials, scholars, writers, and other Turks who do not deny the reality of the deaths, but claim either 1) comparable losses by Turkey, 2) the label of “civil war” rather than genocide, or 3) that this was a sin of the Ottoman Empire, not the current Republic of Turkey. Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 421

A second issue hailing from the history of the relationship between sociology and the Turkish Republic is that of the role of religion in (modern, democratic) society. Although this is one issue that on the surface appears to divide the (Western) European community from Turkey, in reality it has become a question that both share: Both are witnessing the rise of post-secular societies. This was a theme of the summer 2008 lecture by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas at Bilgi University in Istanbul.15 Turkish (Muslim) immigration to countries such as France, Germany, and the Netherlands and a backlash against these immigrants help fuel the vitriol of the debate and the growing laws against public wearing of the hijab in these countries and others (Casanova 2006). Sociologist of religion José Casanova has observed: “In its determination to join the EU, Turkey is adamantly staking its claim to be, or its right to become, a fully European country economically and politically, while simultaneously fashioning its own model of Muslim cultural modernity” (Casanova 2006, p. 237). This description is true to the characterization by Mardin and others of the “alternative modernity” of present-day Turkey. By May of 2012, signs were pointing toward a restart of the accession talks. Nevertheless, within Turkey, as we have seen, the secular and post-secular continue to clash. In 2000 and again in 2006, surveyed Turkish citizens were divided between a slim majority, whose primary identity was one as a “Turk” or “citizen of the Republic of Turkey” (54.1 %), and those who principally identified “as a “Muslim” (35.4 %). This division could largely be mapped along the lines of levels of urbanization and education (Çarkoğlu & Toprak 2000 and 2006, cited in Yilmaz 2007, p. 489, fn 28). As the society polarizes into two primary camps, each defining itself using the foil of the other, the modernity-tradition dualism does appear to reify the two camps, in contrast to the more nuanced vision that Şerif Mardin and others had described.16 Like Western Europe, the post-secular question has become crystallized in a gendered theme: that of the headscarf; and the Durkheimian-inspired secular model is at the heart of this controversy. In 1982, the Turkish government had banned the wearing of the headscarf in public institutions such as government offices, and in the classrooms of all public and private universities (Saktanber & Corbacioglu 2008, pp. 514, 534). Almost immediately, the law was contested in the courts. At the time of the headscarf incident that opened this article, the summer of 2007, the issues that these students confronted were front and center in the international media, Turkey included. The headscarf played a prominent role in Turkey’s controversial parliamentary and presidential elections, which pitted the Justice and Development Party (AKP), an Islam-based party whose growth in popularity worried the previously dominant secularist party whose popularity was waning (Vojdik 2010, p 671). Hayrunisa Gul, married to then presidential candidate Abdullah Gul of the AKP, proudly wore her headscarf in public, an act that had once resulted in her denied entrance to a university. Her public presence during the campaign sparked vehement secularist critiques. And yet among the voices that defend the practice are women—who make their case on the basis of individual rights—a cornerstone of modern principles—and

15 See also the work of sociologist of religion José Casanova (1994) on the global move toward “depri- vatization” of religion. 16 Mardin has pointed out that a political party had arisen as early as 1945 displaying sympathies toward Islam and disaffection with laïcism, so the current party is not the first to challenge Turkish secularism (Mardin 2006, p. 280). 422 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 may choose the attire for the purpose of cultural identity as much as for religious principles (Vojdik 2010). In February of 2008, the Turkish parliament voted to allow students to wear headscarves to the universities; the vote was met by a massive outpouring of resistance in the streets by the country’s avowed secularists, waving large Turkish flags. Ankara protestors were heard taunting “Tayyip, take your headscarf and stuff it”;directedtoPrimeMinisterErdoğan, demonstrators called for his government to resign (“Turkish Parliament….” 2008). The symbolic image of the headscarved woman contentiously met the other symbol of secular Turkey: the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—which secularist adherents proudly display across public and private spaces. His visage has proliferated since the 1990s, adorning restaurants, shops, offices, universities, and homes, as Özyürek (2006)has documented. One can purchase a photo of his face on lapel pins, ties, scarves, postcards, and even iPhone cases. In 2012, the trend was to tattoo Atatürk’s characteristic signature on one’s arm. There has been a standoff between the Turkish military elite, which holds a self-understanding as a defender of Turkish (modern) secularism, and the current government, which led to the military resignations in the summer of 2011. On the other side of the pole is the ruling AKP party and its followers, who are pro-Islam but hold a self-understanding that is far from anti- modern, given the party’s openness to the European Union, and many adherents who include headscarved women pursuing higher education, independence, and nontradi- tional careers. Given the way that the headscarf has crystallized Turkish bifurcations between secularism and religion, one might presume that the field of sociology would stand uniformly behind the headscarf ban. While I do not have data on this particular question, it is interesting that at least one headscarved Turkish sociologist opposes the ban on headscarves in public institutions due to its interference with her own work as a sociologist. She charges that this law restricts access to government offices, where she will likely need to go to retrieve data or apply for grants. This is one indication that even within the field, something more nuanced than an East–west gaze is operating. Öncü’s (1997) interpretation of why Foucault’s ideas resonated with Turks more than Said’s Orientalism is confirmed by these developments: it is through these micro-level daily practices on which modernism was imposed, and through which modernism is being defended. Istanbul University’s self-description on its website, hailing its modernist mission, exudes quite the defensive posture in this regard:

In addition to its scientific impact, Istanbul University has also been a leader in the movement towards enlightenment and modernization that began with the Republic by acting as a bridge between science and life. It is aware of its role in the perpetuation of Atatürk's principles and reforms. Istanbul University will protect in line with this in all issues pertaining to public life with no concessions from its decisive stand [emphasis added]. (Istanbul University 2012) (Fig. 2)

This wording implies no conflict between the “pure,” value-free science of the positivism inherited from Comte and the mission of improving and modernizing Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 423

Fig. 2 Entrance to Istanbul University in 2011. Photo Credit: author society.17 As this illustrates, institutions of higher learning are key participants in drawing this line in the sand. Where does the field of sociology now stand regarding the East–West gaze? Today’s Turkey, and Turkish sociology, exist in a world where the very idea of a “border” is losing its prior meaning.18 Within the field of sociology, the East–West gaze appears to have evolved into more of a collaboration of mutual reciprocity: Turkish sociologists earning their degrees in the United States or Western Europe and returning to Turkey while maintaining research partnerships with the West. The sociology department at Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul describes its faculty the following way: The faculty shares a strong international orientation, reflecting their training in major American and Western European universities, their continued involve- ment in international professional associations, and their on-going collaborative research and writing colleagues outside of Turkey. In addition to the permanent faculty, the range of courses and scholarly exchange in the department is extended each year by part-time professors and visiting lecturers from other countries . . . . (Sociology, Boğaziçi University 2012) This verbiage that advertises the credibility of the faculty due to their “Western” affiliations may be related to the challenge that Turkish Sociology has faced in establishing itself as a discipline domestically: within the Turkish academy. Çelebi asserts that one reason for this credibility issue has been the push for sociology

17 While the Enlightenment thinkers were also harbingers of societal change, the field of sociology since that era has worked to demonstrate its scientism in many countries by distancing itself from a direct practical or policy role, most notably influenced by Weber’s call for value-free social science. 18 See Helvacıoğlu (2000), who uses Turkey as a case study of globalization. 424 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 graduates to teach in high schools, siphoning them away from building the discipline at the postsecondary level (Çelebi 2002, p. 264). Çelebi has also called for sociologists to shift their emphasis toward more micro-scale as well as policy-oriented studies and away from the macro focus that has been their primary tendency—a direction of which would be in line with the approaches of some of these Western— especially, American—affiliations.19 A growing number of Turkish academic voices with a post-colonial bent, in fact, are reappraising the narrative of an East–West division in the increasingly transnational world and post-Westphalian (nation-state) Europe. Sociologist Çağlar Keyder exemplifies this reality through his transnational affiliations: he is on the faculties of both Bogaziçi University in Istanbul and SUNY-Binghamton. A more direct example of this is his contribution to an initiative with the title “Former West.” This international “art and theory” project based in Utrecht, Netherlands adopts this neologism as its own way of reversing the gaze: on itself. With the collapse of the Iron Curtain beginning in 1989, we can no longer speak of a “West” as a cohesive entity or an alien “East” that is so far away politically, economically, or culturally. This project’s title contains a wordplay. Countries on the east side of that curtain came to be called the “former East” after 1989. Embedded in that phrase is the assumption that the West is the default or the norm, implying yet another colonization; the “former West” is also going through its own transition after the continent reunified, however. Both of these—“East” and “West”—are social constructions. An anecdote about a recent act of whimsy provides a comment on the Turkish context here. A small group of friends, Turkish residents with a post-colonial intellection orientation, orchestrated a resistant “happening” to protest the reification of a continental divide within the country of Turkey and the city of Istanbul. En route across that supposed border, they playfully emerged from their car and took a photograph holding three large letters: “E,”“U,” and “R,” temporarily transforming the “Welcome to Asia” sign to say “Welcome to Eurasia.”

Conclusion

The maturation of Turkish sociology can be mapped, at least partially, along various points of an axis between a West-East, East-East, and East–West gaze that seems to be reformulating itself as a circle. If the characteristic of Turkish sociology that we have described as the “East–West gaze” has been either tempered, broken, or reversed, what do Turkish sociology, and sociologists, have to teach the “former West”? We might begin with the original fascination that Comte had for the country: it has the potential to communicate to us the meaning—however contentious—of a cultural and intellectual bridge between East and West. If the current phase of globalization is not expected to subside anytime soon, the notion of “bridge” is necessarily going to be on the agenda (Fig. 3). In 2011 and 2012, quite a few references to Turkey as a bridge surfaced in international public discussions, related to complex

19 While there appears to be some discrepancy between scholars quoted here on whether Turkish sociology is more theoretical versus more pragmatic, the consistent thread appears to be that even within the macro, theoretical works, the subject of those treatises is often decided by the workings in the public sphere at the particular time in history (e.g., theories of revolution, colonialism, etc.). Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 425 international relations issues in the region: between Israel and Iran, to name one. Pundits and scholars have begun to refer to the “Turkish model” as a possible, preferred future path for the countries moving through the upheavals of the 2011– 2012 “Arab Spring.” The Turkish foreign minister has been reaching out to the revolutionaries in these countries to offer aid in transitioning to democracy (Benhabib 2012). Secondly, the former “West,” particularly in Europe, is charting new territory as it learns the meaning of post-secular society vis-à-vis a commitment to modern, democratic regimes and scientific methods. This is occurring as the global center of power is shifting eastward. And although Turkey is currently embroiled in a gridlock between the secularist and Islamic cultures, the society certainly brings to the table a history of attempts to incorporate secular practices and ideas as it maintains the viability of religious institutions. This review of the relationship between the history of Turkish sociology and the present-day bifurcations within Turkey and between Turkey and other countries in Europe by no means is meant to be an argument of causality; sociology in and of itself is not to blame. Rather, the point is that the discipline has become a player in Turkish political developments on more than one level, while continuing to maintain and defend its autonomy at this time in history. Unquestionably, just as public, political developments have entangled Turkish sociology throughout its history, the present-day vigor and uncertainty of public developments in the Middle East, Europe, and the globe make this a particularly lively time for Turkish sociology. I close with an anecdote that illustrates yet another example of a continuing bifurcation in Turkish society with which sociologists have continued to grapple since the days of Gökalp: the place of minority cultures. Behind much of the violence in Turkish society today is the insistence on self-determination by Kurds. In July 2011, one of the highlighted performances within the annual International Jazz Festival in Istanbul was entitled “Mujeres de Agua,” and featured

Fig. 3 Turkish airlines construction fence billboard advertisement, 2011. Photo Credit: author 426 Am Soc (2012) 43:406–427 the voices of selected female vocalists from countries that border the Mediterranean, from Spain to Israel, and with an explicit cross-cultural purpose. The outdoor stadium was packed for this celebration of ethnic diversity with a shared geography. And yet, when the singer who represented Turkey opened her mouth and began her melodic lyrics in the Kurdish language, crowds of Turkish audience members reacted viscer- ally: shouting protests and “boos,” they suddenly darted up the aisles toward the exits. This event begs a question. If he were still alive, how might Professor Gökalp react? Would the Turkish nationalist, denier of Kurdish heritage, in him join the exodus? Or would he remain seated with the majority of the predominantly Turkish audience that refused to partake in this spectacle, and with them, laud the singer with applause?

Acknowledgments The author would like to extend her appreciation to the following individuals who provided invaluable assistance through their suggestions and the provision of critical information: Kristen Biehl, Serife Genis, Tülay Kaya, Nora Fisher Onar, Anoush Terjanian, Antoine Terjanian, the anonymous reviewers from The American Sociologist, and editor Larry Nichols. Thank you to the members of the sociology department at Bilgi University. And I am also indebted to the Open Society Foundations for the opportunity to contribute to their Istanbul-based summer school, with particular appreciation to Rasjit Basi and Alex Irwin.

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