Racial anthropology in Turkey and transnational entanglements in the making of scientific knowledge: Seniha Tunakan’s academic trajectory, 1930s–1970s

This article situates the trajectory of the academic life of Seniha Tunakan (1908–2000) within the development of anthropology as a scientific discipline in Turkey and its transnational connections to Europe during the interwar period and up until the second half of the 20th century. Relying on the archives of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes in Germany, and the Prime Ministry's Republican Archives in Turkey, it focuses on the doctoral studies of Seniha Tunakan in Germany and her life as a female PhD researcher in the capital of the Third Reich, as well as her entire research career after her return to Turkey. Through Tunakan's career, the article also provides an analysis of the perpetuation of German race science in the Turkish context, shedding light upon the success of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics) and its transnational impact

Refuge in research: Walter Ruben’s exile and internment in Turkey

This paper follows the plight of Walter Ruben (1899-1982), an Indologist who had begun his career in Frankfurt am Main and later became one of the leading Indologists of the German Democratic Republic. In mid-1930s, he escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in Turkey. Relying on archival research in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Prime Ministry's Republican Archives (BCA) in Istanbul, the Turkish press, and oral historical sources, together with the publications of Ruben during his Ankara years, I bring to light Ruben's life trajectory during his exile and internment with a balanced analysis of his 'production of knowledge' as a scholar at risk. The scholarly pressure and difficulties Ruben faced as an endangered scholar hired by a single-party authoritarian state delineate the precariousness and vulnerabilities of life as an exile academic. His original research and writing during his forced internment in Kırşehir, on the other hand, marks another dimension of his exile years, namely his endless effort to look for a real refuge within his intellectual production

The fall of a city: Refugees, exodus and exile in Ernest Hemingway’s Istanbul, 1922

Ernest Hemingway arrived in Istanbul on 30 September 1922 to cover the end of the Greek–Turkish War for the Toronto Star. From late October to mid-November 1922, Hemingway wrote 20 articles about the last days of the war and the re-constellation of political legitimacy in the region. There are four distinguishing features of Hemingway’s reports from Constantinople. First, they provided an eloquent depiction of the city, suggesting the charm and squalor of old ‘Constan’ for the young writer. The second was a clear expectation of a ‘second disaster’, which was assumed to be a replica of Smyrna. Hemingway clearly observed the fears of non-Muslims and foreigners in the city, who were panicking over possible new massacres and pillage. Third, Hemingway quickly realized that the exodus of people – the desperate flight of Christian refugees – and Turkification of the country would be his main subject. His repeated emphasis on refugees permanent loss of a home is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s famous essay ‘We Refugees’, as well as a precursor to Agamben’s point that refugees are reduced to ‘bare life’. Lastly, his prose relied on irony and cynicism, as a cover for his disappointment and shame for humanity and modern civilization. Juxtaposing his writing with contemporary local accounts, I intend to situate his witnessing into the larger historiography of ‘Armistice Istanbul’ and the homogenization policies of the winning Turkish nationalist leadership. Hemingway’s critique of (homogeneous) nation-state formation after the war and the favourable involvement of the Allied countries and humanitarian agencies in the mass production of refugees was quite exceptional and ahead of his times

“Revolution is the Equality of Children and Adults”: Yaşar Kemal Interviews Street Children, 1975

In 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization

Hearing the voiceless-seeing the invisible: orphans and destitute children as actors of social, economic, and political history in the late Ottoman Empire

This dissertation is on the orphans and destitute children of the late Ottoman Empire and their role in various aspects of social, economic, and political history. The attempt is to see and hear these essentially invisible and voiceless actors, since the testimony of children provide an alternative gaze to different and unnoticed discourses and developments of Ottoman reform period. In the nineteenth century, unprotected children attracted the attention of the state, provincial governments and municipalities, the non-Muslim communities, and the missionaries. The motivation and discourse, on the one hand, was related to the desire to save children from the dangers to which they were prey, such as losing or being alienated to one's ethno-religious identity, being sold into slavery, sexual abuse and exploitation, juvenile criminality, prostitution, health problems, death, conversion, and apostasy. More importantly, these threats were targeting the public, political, and economic order of the society. The attention towards orphans and destitute children was also related to the opportunities they offered: these children were seen as candidates to become laborious workers, ardent nationalists/citizens, or staunch converts/believers. It was this hidden potential that placed the orphans at the center of significant social and political controversies of nineteenth century. The dissertation, taking a different group of destitute children as the protagonist in each chapter foundlings, foster daughters, inmates of industrial orphanages (ıslâhhanes), and orphans of an ethnic conflict elaborates upon various aspects of Ottoman modernization, such as urbanization, welfare policies, growth of urban child labor, imagined statehood and nationhood, from within the agency of children

"À la recherche de l’enfance perdue: Resistance du biographique et defense de l’espace public"

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"The Orphan Nation: Gendered Humanitarianism for Armenian Survivor Children in Istanbul, 1919-1922"

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“Boys Without a Country: Ottoman Orphan Apprentices in Germany During the First World War”

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“Centenary (Turkey)"

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The Armenian Genocide and Survival Narratives of Children

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