The Never Ending Dance
Islamism, Kemalism and the Power of Self‐institution in Turkey
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18976324 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C Houston (0000-0003-1398-0100, Macquarie University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 161-178 |
| Publication date | 2006-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Australian Journal of Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1035-8811 • E-ISSN: 1757-6547 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1835-9310.2006.tb00055.x |
| OpenAlex | W2015117599 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 26 |
Kemalism in Turkey is often presented as an exemplary case of paternalistic and authoritarian modernisation from above, and lauded or condemned for that very reason. Represented in these terms, certain analytic and political binaries are also activated: state versus society; world‐view versus life‐world; universality versus particularity; inauthenticity versus indigeneity; homogeneity versus heterogeneity/resistance. By contrast, in this paper I seek to sidestep these organising categories to focus on Kemalism and Islamism as rival forms of the same social imaginary signification, and not as shorthand for these polarities. Using a number of representative texts, I argue that the extravagance of Islamist resistance in Turkey post‐1980 brings to light the fantastical power of Kemalism itself, exposed as a project of the triumph of the will. This being the case, what has been written in anthropology about acts of ‘self‐institution’? The work of Nigel Rapport and Cornelius Castoriadis emphasises, in different ways, the arbitrariness and gratuity of social creation out of nothing or self‐institution. Pierre Bourdieu's work, on the other hand, is radically contrary to Rapport's in its structuralist elaboration of agency as guided action. My analysis of processes of change within both the Islamist and Republican social movements in Turkey from the early 1990s to the present seeks a temporary rapprochement, at least in this case, between Rapport's methodological individualism and Bourdieu's methodological holism
Aesthetics · Democracy · Epistemology · Individualism · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Turkey's Politics and Society
The Failure of Political Islam
The modernist city
World in Fragments
Faces of the State
A Nation of Empire
Between Two Worlds
Outline of a Theory of Practice
Violence and Subjectivity
Turkish Social Anthropology Since the 1970s
Random Mind
Formations of the Secular
Transcendent Individual
Institution of Society and Religion
Seeing Like a State
Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology
Miniaturizing Atatürk Privatization of state imagery and ideology in Turkey
Mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the Palestinian intifada
The Romance of Resistance
Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others
Making the Economic Habitus
The Brewing of Islamist Modernity
They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery
Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,18 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2015 (7) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |