THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MAKING KURDISH PUBLIC(S): LANGUAGE POLITICS AND PRACTICE IN TURKEY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY BY KELDA ANN JAMISON CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2015 Copyright © 2015 Kelda Ann Jamison All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. v ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1 Research Design and Ethnographic Context................................................................................... 7 The Conundrum of Kurdish Literacy: or, Who Gets to Have an Illiteracy Problem? ............... 12 “We Are Frankly Nationalist”: Creating the Modern Turkish Nation-State .............................. 19 “A Sacred Treasure”: Turkish Language Reforms and Policies across the 20th Century .......... 30 Chapter Summaries ........................................................................................................................ 43 CHAPTER TWO ................................................................................................................................ 56 “Did They Tell You Why They’re Here?” ........................................................................................ 56 The Communicative Logics of Literacy in Turkey .......................................................................... 56 What Literacy ‘Does’: Inscription, Its Features and Consequences............................................ 62 “Herkes İçin Okuma Yazma”: Literacy for Everyone ................................................................. 66 “Come On, Girls, Let’s Go To School!" ....................................................................................... 69 The Mother-Child Education Foundation ..................................................................................... 75 The Bağlar Women’s Center ......................................................................................................... 78 Inside the Literacy Classroom ....................................................................................................... 82 To Move Around the City: Literacy as Liberating, Literacy as Emancipatory .......................... 86 The Communicative Logic of Literacy in Turkey ........................................................................ 92 CHAPTER THREE .......................................................................................................................... 100 “They don’t know where to put learning Kurdish in their lives”: Pedagogies of Kurdish in Transition. ......................................................................................................................................... 100 ‘They Don’t Know Where to Put Learning Kurdish in Their Lives’: Community centers, group lessons, and new encounters with pedagogical Kurdish ............................................................ 107 ‘We came here for solidarity’: learning Kurdish in the university setting................................ 121 “I always saw myself as lacking”: self-cultivation and the individual learner. ........................ 131 Ambivalence, resentment, and resistance in new contexts of Kurdish ..................................... 140 CHAPTER FOUR ............................................................................................................................ 149 Hefty Dictionaries in Incomprehensible Tongues: Commensurating Code and Language Community in Turkey ...................................................................................................................... 149 Speech Communities, Language Community ............................................................................ 154 iii On Not-Reading, and Other Practices of Print ........................................................................... 159 “Em Bixwînin! Em Binivîsin!”[Let’s Read! Let’s Write!]: Textures and Types of Kurdish in Print ............................................................................................................................................... 161 “I don’t know Book Kurdish”: Anxiety and Authority in a Kurdish Language Community .. 167 Commensurating Codes in/and Context...................................................................................... 173 “Same-ness” in Language, Community, and Polity: The Stakes of (Triple) Commensuration ....................................................................................................................................................... 177 CHAPTER FIVE .............................................................................................................................. 181 Public Kurdish and the Politics of Legitimate Language in Turkey ............................................. 181 Authority and Expectation: official language in policy and practice ........................................ 185 Illegitimate language and the Limits of Legitimate Politics ...................................................... 190 Switching and the Politics of Public language in Turkey .......................................................... 200 CHAPTER SIX ................................................................................................................................. 211 Conclusion: The Moral Dimensions and Political Limits of a “Mother Tongue.”....................... 211 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................................. 237 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a vast debt to those who have helped make it possible to conceive, undertake, and complete this dissertation. The well-worn clichés all apply: I could not have done it without this sprawling community of support, scholarship, friendship, and engagement from many, many people in many different places and settings. I thank my patient and brilliant committee members for supporting this project across the many years and peripatetic turns that its writing has taken. To my chair, Susan Gal, especially, I owe not only tremendous gratitude but also vast respect. She is a model of the very best kind of academic, one who makes scholarly rigor and analytic clarity appear deceptively easy, and whose mentoring and advice is gracious, professional, and always spot-on. The way I think about language is inextricably indebted to a field of scholarship that she not only pioneered but for which she continues to be one of the clearest, most persuasive, and most influential voices. Joe Masco has gently and ably guided me along a very winding path, always able to offer insight and advice that was not only apt but also creative and unexpected. Mamoste Victor Friedman provided a warm welcome to Chicago from the first days of graduate school, and did me the honor of visiting me in Diyarbakir for several memorable days. His feedback on my writing is much like he is himself: acutely perceptive and deeply knowledgeable. To John Kelly, Adam Smith, and Martin Stokes I also offer my sincere gratitude for assistance and guidance of all sorts along the way. Michel-Rolph Trouillot taught Systems I at the University of Chicago when I was a first year graduate student. He was one of the most inspiring teachers I have ever had, and his v influence over how I think about anthropology, and the world at large, is hard to quantify. As anyone who has ever passed through Haskell Hall knows deeply and well, Anne Chi’en is the heart, soul, and unshakable foundation of Chicago anthropology. Who knows where any of us would be without her? The mind quails at the thought. I owe her immeasurable thanks for years of institutional, intellectual, and emotional support. Hakan Özoğlu and Nükhet Varlık introduced me to the Turkish language at the University of Chicago; they were also my introduction to just how uniquely warm and generous Türkiyeli folks can be. I first encountered the academic discipline of anthropology in the classrooms of Carrie Douglass and Susie McKinnon many years ago; they have been waiting for me to get to this point with patient good humor for quite some time. The research and writing of this project was generously supported by a number of institutions; these include the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Fund, the Institute for Turkish Studies, the University of Chicago Anthropology Department, and the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education. To my friends, teachers, and interlocutors in Turkey, ez gelek, gelek spas dikim. No number of teşekkür can do justice to the debt I owe them. I thank them for taking me into their homes, classrooms, offices, rallies, and lives, for entrusting me with their perspectives and their histories. There are many more of them to thank than I can do here, for reasons of both quantity and privacy. To C.D. and F.D., most of all, my deepest gratitude. For everything – they know what all that includes. I also especially thank Veysel