The Ottoman town in the Southern Balkans from 14th to 16th centuries: a morphological approach

This thesis discussed the morphological patterns of Ottomanization performed in the southern Balkans through the comparative study of four mainland cities, Dimetoka, Gümülcine, Siroz, Yenice-i Vardar spread along the multicultural Via Egnatia. Through the cross-disciplinary application of morphological and defterological concepts, we were able to trace existing and reconstructed forms back to their formative processes (as evident in a series of reconstructive maps) and to interpret them within the theoretical framework of structural rationalism. The advanced argument disproves the orientalistic reading of the Ottoman (Islamic) city as an irrational and chaotic morpheme and reconfirms Veinstein’s theory on the existence of a normative type for the Ottoman town that lays in the morphology of the Balkan cities. This thesis’ main contribution lies in defining that the identifier of ‘originality’ or ‘purity’ for this type derives from its particular geographical divisions. Accordingly, the coining of the type that we extended was reflective of these particular geographical divisions, as an obvious functional and formal analogy amongst the towns of this group. We thus concluded that the typological identification of the ‘original’ Ottoman town can be encapsulated in the Balkan-Anatolian type with a Byzantine kernel and an Ottoman fringe belt. This consists of a highly rationalized system of axes, with pivotal being that of the çarşıya, which functioned as the vehicle of infrastructural development

Constitutive ambiguities : subjectivity and memory in the case of Romeika-speaking communities of Trabzon, Turkey

Studies in social sciences and humanities on Turkey tend to focus on margins and resistances (such as, modernist and nationalist impositions on minorities) and how the state was engaged in the construction of Turkishness as a homogeneous national identity. Although these endeavours are undeniably necessary and helpful, how Turkish subjectivities are constituted out of a multitude of local socio-cultural distinctions in different geographies has rarely been a matter of scholarly inquiry. Addressing this largely overlooked aspect of Turkish studies, this dissertation highlights different modalities of subject formation through the analysis of Romeika-speaking communities of Trabzon, in northeastern Turkey. Staunchly (Turkish) nationalist communities of the province have been “discreetly” speaking Romeika, a local variant of Greek with archaic linguistic features, in a number of valley systems for centuries. Through an ethnographic study conducted in 2015 in the Trabzon area, I demonstrate how subjectivities and socialities of these communities are configured in relation to historical, political, gendered, and religious dynamics in Turkey. In addition to producing an account of socio-cultural implications of an unstudied sociocultural phenomenon, this dissertation helps us to go beyond monist and homogeneous representations of Turkish subjectivities to highlight their distinct, fragmented, and heterogeneous constitutions. I first discuss the private and discreet status of Romeika to trace it through locals’ nationalist imaginaries, gendered configurations, and approaches to the landscape. Then, I argue how local masculine subjectivities are produced through gendering of bodies across the Valley in close connection to the state and politics. Finally, I discuss religiosities in the area to highlight local patterns of piety in relation to Romeika, nationalism, the state, and local customs. Through these successive themes, I demonstrate the heterogeneous, fragmented, and performative constitution of subjectivities that approximate different registers of Turkishness. I conclude the analysis with the claim that the theme of Turkish subjectivity should be scrutinised further in order both to reveal distinct sociocultural heritages within this parochial understanding of Turkish subjectivities and to account for how non-resistant subjectivities are produced out of these distinctions through alignments with nationalist and statist discourses in these local contexts in particular forms

Internal migrants and everyday Islam in the Turkish context

This thesis explores the interplay between internal migration and religion. Specifically, it examines internal migrants’ reconfiguration of boundaries and spaces of belonging, as well as the impact that migration has on the religious lives of migrants and those who are left behind. These topics are investigated in relation to the historical and political environment in Turkey. The study focuses on migrants coming into the Gebze urban district from the provinces of Giresun and Erzurum, and it considers the experiences of both migrants and their family members who have remained in these provinces. A multi-sited ethnographic research model is used that incorporates a translocal analytical framework, which enables the relationship between internal migration and religion to be conceptualised. Using the ‘everyday lived religion’ approach and a translocal lens, life history interviews are analysed in order to elucidate the relationship between internal migration and religious life. The concept of ‘everyday lived religion’ permits a consideration of aspects of religion that are otherwise invisible, such as experiences and actions in migrants’ lives that are not necessarily seen as religious in nature. Furthermore, the examination of life histories enables the structural, individual and local factors behind migrants’ experiences (the continuation and reinvention of their religious lives, the remaking of homes, or the reconstruction of boundaries) to be revealed. In addition, the translocal lens facilitates scrutiny of the subjective experiences of both migrants and their relatives in the place of origin. The perceptions, emotions and practices of individuals and groups are studied here, with the importance of connections between and across spaces, places and locales being taken into account. The results demonstrate that migrants’ home- and boundary-making ideas and practices are reconfigured via the interactions, relationships and connections that occur both in the place of settlement and the place of origin. Moreover, institutional factors shape – and, indeed, are shaped by – religion and migration. The thesis makes empirical and conceptual contributions to the field of internal-migration research by arguing that religion in both the hometown and the destination is created, formed and influenced by the migration experience. As such, this study challenges the mainstream view that Islam is a product of the local setting, as well as indicating that the dichotomy between the rural and the urban is insufficient to explicate the complexity of the migration context. Further still, religion, with its transcendent aspect, translocalises migrants’ lives so that ‘here’ (the place of settlement), ‘there’ (the hometown) and ‘elsewhere’ (the spiritual world) become relevant to migrants’ definitions of the self and others, as well as their reconfiguration of spaces. Ultimately, a fusion of the ‘everyday lived religion’ and translocal approaches enables us to see that religion is used, articulated and performed in everyday places, being negotiated and contested by migrants and those who are left behind

Power struggles in the production of and changing perceptions over the contemporary public space : an insight toward experienced reality

PhD ThesisCities have been invaded by the tools of the capitalist systems which transform the built environment while leaving the scars of this transformation on the societies. The demands of market forces generate new life styles and social contexts reshaped via relations of power and expression of political and economic hegemony. The nature of urban landscape, particularly the condition of public spaces, has shifted towards most profitable use while private interests have taken over public spaces and contemporary public spaces have emerged such as shopping malls. This study contributes to the debates that explore the ‘veiled’ side of planning and hegemonic relations of power in decision making processes that actually in a strong relation with cultural structuring and traditional praxis of a community. In addition, the study has a comprehensive approach by exploring societal influences emerging through power relations and their reflections on contemporary public spaces via exploring perceptions. The study conducts an investigation using qualitative methods and adopting case study approach via three shopping malls from Ankara (Turkey) to answer how urban power relations are generated and become effective on planning and production of contemporary public spaces and how the perceptions upon these public spaces are being transformed? Therefore, the study is founded on two main themes as pillars: power relations and public spaces. In addition, the empirical chapters at the end are set in parallel with the research objectives and data is gathered via archive analysis of the municipalities and interviews conducted with key informants and users of the selected cases. The thesis concludes with contributions to the fields of policy and theory through the above mentioned themes. On one hand, it emphasise the urgent necessity for a comprehensive transformation in Turkish planning structure, on the other hand draws an attention to the inefficiency of ‘western’ literature to elucidate different cultures and power relations that shape the cities of those cultures. In addition, the study also highlighted that the nature of the public space is changing while engendering further change in the perception of public

Folds of Authoritarianism: Political Mobilization, Financial Capitalism, and Islamism in Turkey

Beginning with 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has mobilized millions of Turkish citizens from the most impoverished districts of Istanbul. Based on two years of ethnographic engagement in two districts of Istanbul (Esenler and Kucukcekmece), the party’s stronghold, this dissertation focuses on the conjunction of neoliberal economic transformations, mass mobilization and political Islam. By paying close attention to personal histories, daily capacities, emerging hopes and inter-generational grievances of the party members and sympathizers, it investigates how material and financial transformations facilitate and even promote a popular knowledge that authoritarian politics, embodied by the AKP in Turkey, are the only solution for the predicaments of late capitalism. The project aims to problematize some key presumptions of contemporary social scientific analyses, namely individualization, depoliticization, and economic rationality, and investigates the emergence of alternative practices in their steads: self-negation, authoritarian mobilization, and fundamentalist disposition. To this end, the dissertation intervenes in four current debates of social scientific and public significance. Firstly, against the long standing debates about the character and consequences of neoliberal transformation in the global south, in which the general consensus is that these new economic practices have resulted in depoliticization and apathy among the masses, the project demonstrates that the very same economic polices and practices result in the promotion of a form of mass mobilization that is authoritarian in its characteristics. Second, it intervenes in a related literature about depoliticization, which claims that the contemporary form of capitalism produces isolated individuals, i.e. individuation. The dissertation shows that neoliberal transformations have precipitated a wide range of political and social practices, like self-sacrifice of partisans, which produce alternative modes of political identification and new identities conditioned by economic vulnerability. Third, the research and analysis argues that the critique of bureaucracy and bureaucratic regulations, conceived as sources of unproductivity and institutional rigidities by neoliberal thought collectives, has been appropriated by the masses in Turkey as a part of anti-formalist policies that the AKP propagates. However, the popular critique of bureaucracy among the AKP partisans does not produce a version of liberal governance, in which transparency, flexibility, and accountability are dominant values, but a popular conviction that rules, regulations, and laws may be suspended for the interest of “the people,” thus legitimizing the violation of “bureaucratic” rights, be they human rights, freedom of speech, or fair trial principle. Lastly, this dissertation furthers a significant body of anthropological works on political Islam that complicates the relationships between secularism and religiosity by showing their co-constituted histories. However, it substantially diverges from the trajectory of this literature by shifting the focus from morality to efficacy, from cultural politics to political economy. Ultimately, the purpose of the dissertation is to understand how neoliberal economic transformations provided a suitable social, material and political context for religiously informed authoritarian practices without attributing any essentialized qualities to their religious characteristics

Constitutive ambiguities : subjectivity and memory in the case of Romeika-speaking communities of Trabzon, Turkey

Studies in social sciences and humanities on Turkey tend to focus on margins and resistances (such as, modernist and nationalist impositions on minorities) and how the state was engaged in the construction of Turkishness as a homogeneous national identity. Although these endeavours are undeniably necessary and helpful, how Turkish subjectivities are constituted out of a multitude of local socio-cultural distinctions in different geographies has rarely been a matter of scholarly inquiry. Addressing this largely overlooked aspect of Turkish studies, this dissertation highlights different modalities of subject formation through the analysis of Romeika-speaking communities of Trabzon, in northeastern Turkey. Staunchly (Turkish) nationalist communities of the province have been “discreetly” speaking Romeika, a local variant of Greek with archaic linguistic features, in a number of valley systems for centuries. Through an ethnographic study conducted in 2015 in the Trabzon area, I demonstrate how subjectivities and socialities of these communities are configured in relation to historical, political, gendered, and religious dynamics in Turkey. In addition to producing an account of socio-cultural implications of an unstudied sociocultural phenomenon, this dissertation helps us to go beyond monist and homogeneous representations of Turkish subjectivities to highlight their distinct, fragmented, and heterogeneous constitutions. I first discuss the private and discreet status of Romeika to trace it through locals’ nationalist imaginaries, gendered configurations, and approaches to the landscape. Then, I argue how local masculine subjectivities are produced through gendering of bodies across the Valley in close connection to the state and politics. Finally, I discuss religiosities in the area to highlight local patterns of piety in relation to Romeika, nationalism, the state, and local customs. Through these successive themes, I demonstrate the heterogeneous, fragmented, and performative constitution of subjectivities that approximate different registers of Turkishness. I conclude the analysis with the claim that the theme of Turkish subjectivity should be scrutinised further in order both to reveal distinct sociocultural heritages within this parochial understanding of Turkish subjectivities and to account for how non-resistant subjectivities are produced out of these distinctions through alignments with nationalist and statist discourses in these local contexts in particular forms

Public Istanbul: Spaces and Spheres of the Urban

Istanbul is one of the largest and most dynamic metropolises on the European continent. In the context of processes of globalization and local urban planning projects urban space is continously contested. In this anthology forms, meanings and images of these urban spaces are discussed by architects, historians, and social scientists. Through interdisciplinary approaches of theory and case studies the book delivers a deep insight into the construction and constitution of public spaces and spheres in contemporary Istanbul