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

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 toEurope (and the “West”) in its co-founding with a modern nation-state, and yet itsstory 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 tradi-tion, have been in an ongoing conversation between the two cultural poles. Drawingon Edward Said’s Orientalism, this article traces the discipline’s history through thelens of an East–west gaze. Touching on the lived public social questions that thisstory invokes, regarding ethnic relations, gender, migration, democracy-building,religion, and international relations, this article surveys the growth and present stateof 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 asociology summer instructor for international graduate students for the scholarshipprogram of Open Society Foundations.

It is early July of 2007, in an Istanbul, Turkey university auditorium. Approximately80 graduate students from the predominantly Muslim societies of Indonesia,Kazakhstan, Palestine, and other Central Asian and Middle Eastern abodes are gatheredto begin an orientation course for their study-abroad scholarships. “I must announce thatyou are not allowed to pray on campus,” I apologetically explain to these social scienceand law students. This stricture and others—emanating from the Turkish government,not from this private, progressive university that hosted the course—follow us into our4-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. Thestory above continues: Midway through our summer school courses, two Indonesianstudents who wear head coverings (hijabs) to class are informed that this practice too,

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

S. C. Pearce (*)Department of Sociology, East Carolina University, Brewster 402-A, E. Fifth Street, Greenville, NC27858, USAe-mail: pearces@ecu.edu

violates Turkish law. These students are offered the option of continuing to wear theirattire on campus if they identify themselves as visitors with a metal identification tag ona chain “necklace.” Although the students agree to comply, a heated discussion amongthe larger summer school cohort ensues, many offering to wear the same visitor tags incomradery. To these students, the tag is more than an identification to protect them, but isbeginning 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 subjectof human rights is a key theme of their summer curriculum. Second, the students donot understand the absence of this simple freedom of expression in a relatively open,democratic, and—perhaps more ironically—historically Muslim country such asTurkey. They receive this directive while standing in a building located on the sideof the Bosphorus River that is literally on the continent of Europe, and in a city thatperforms 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 someperspective on this and the other public controversies in Turkey that have madeinternational headlines in recent years, including the summer of 2011, when the upperechelon of the military resigned en masse, and the winter of 2011–2012, whenFrance’s Parliament voted to outlaw genocide-denial with the 1915 deportationsand slaughter of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in mind. In fact, Turkish sociologyhas, in part, given the nation-state its structural and ideational base, as well as some ofits more controversial critics. The following overview of the field of sociology inTurkey uses a particular frame: the relationship of the development of Turkishsociology and the Turkish nation-state using concepts of the construction of “moder-nity” and an East–west “gaze.” I then build on this overview to profile the field ofsociology as practiced in Turkey today. Finally, I interrogate the relevance of thefield’s history to current questions that face the field. I demonstrate how sociology inTurkey is inextricably intertwined with the broader public issues that confront thenation-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 ofsociology in Europe; in the nineteenth century, the man who gave us the word “sociol-ogy,” Auguste Comte, expressed his interest in Turkey because of the bridge that thecountry (at that time, the Ottoman Empire) represented between the poles of Europe andAsia (Çelebi 2002, p. 253). The distance between these two poles was not onlyspatial, or geographical, but metaphorical and cultural, since the West was rapidlybecoming 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 growingeastward gaze that characterized the modernizing Europe of the nineteenth century(Said 1978). That gaze, which “orientalized” (exoticized) the East as a foil againstwhich Europe defined its progress, entered into the political and cultural self-imaginations of European nation-states. “Civilization” (read: “Western”) becamecontrasted with “culture” (read: “Eastern”) (Sezer 1988, p. 3). There was a larger,

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and volatile, international political context of this late-nineteenth century gaze towardthe West: the Ottoman Empire was losing strength, was no longer expanding, and hadsuffered military defeat at the hands of the Russians.1 One outcome was an 1856charter called the Tanzimat, which was passed to allow more liberal reform, thusexposing Turkish intellectuals to the broader range of European thought.

During the time that the “West” was defining itself against the orient—even as itromanticized Eastern culture—the Ottoman Empire was simultaneously gazing west-ward, and among the targets of that gaze was the emerging discipline of Europeansociology. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, a number of prominent Turkishphilosophers and political exiles lived in London and Paris, and began to embrace thegrowing canon of modern philosophical and scientific literature emanating fromthose European abodes. Political volatility extended to the realm of ideas, however,as these Turkish exiles began to promote the idea of a constitutional government, andreformers from within began to promote change, neither of which sat well with theOttoman rulers (Berkes 1936, p. 240). There were alternative perspectives bubblingin this cauldron of new ideas. One of those was that Islam was a flexible religion thathad 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 alsotaken with the positivism of Comte (Çelebi 2002) and with other English and FrenchEnlightenment thinkers (Berkes 1936, p. 240). The influence of Comte on Turkishsociology dated back to at least 1883, when Turkish political resister Ahmed Rizatraveled 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 firstTurk who was a professional sociologist to import these ideas back to Turkey (whileit was under Ottoman rule) was named Prince Sabahhadin. As a leader of a Turkishpolitical opposition in exile in Paris from 1904 to 1906, he studied the work of Frenchscholar Le Play, which convinced him that Turkey must move toward an individualistmodel of private property ownership. Upon his return in 1906, he founded the PrivateEnterprise and Decentralization Association (Berkes 1936, pp. 241–242). In contrastto many of his successors in Turkish sociology, Sabahhadin was a disciplinary puristin that he kept the scholarship of sociology distinct from the public political realm.His proposal for decentralization of the Turkish governmental capacities—thoughclearly 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 andwithin 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 andreforming Turkish institutions along the lines of a pan-Islamism—represented theintellectual divisions that characterized the era, as Ottoman and European politicaldevelopments 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 againstEuropean/Western imperialism—on the heels of the early Crusades, the Ottomans defeated the OrthodoxChristian empire, Byzantium, centered in Constantinople, and the great onion-domed cathedrals wereconverted to mosques.2 Sources vary on the date of this first chair, ranging from 1912 to 1915.

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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 ashesof the Ottoman Empire. With the Empire’s collapse, Turkish nationalist leader andWorld War-I general Mustafa Kemal, later known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, estab-lished a state on a portion of the former empire’s lands that would come to resembleEurope more closely than the Middle East. The new republic, founded in 1923, held afraction of the territory that the Ottomans had commanded, but certain continuitiesremained. The crown cosmopolitan jewel of the former empire, the city of Istanbul(formerly Constantinople), counted among them (although it was replaced asTurkey’s capital by the city of Ankara in 1923).

At Atatürk’s insistence, a secular state was a centerpiece of the newrepublic, and a cornerstone of secular modernity. As the modern republic’sfirst president, Atatürk consulted the works of Western sociologists, includingDurkheim—particularly The Division of Labor in Society—in modeling the secularTurkish nation state. Although Atatürk was not a sociologist, he leaned heavily on thescholarship of Ziya Gökalp, the first chair of the sociology department at IstanbulUniversity (Davison 1995) (Fig 1). In fact, Gökalp had traveled to Paris in 1910 tostudy under Durkheim directly (Arjomand 1982, p. 95), and he taught the firstsociology course in Turkey, in 1911, in a high school in the city of Selanik (Çelebi2002, p. 266 fn 6).

How did Professor Gökalp’s efforts help shape the direction of the newly formingTurkish state? What followed was a massive endeavor at social engineering. Gökalpwas greatly influenced by the ideas that the French Revolution embraced. He wasparticularly interested in the French thinkers Comte, Tarde, LeBon, and Fouillé, aswell 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

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article published in the American Journal of Sociology, Niyazi Berkes explained thatGökalp’s ideas differed from those of his predecessors who pressed for a wholesaleimport of western ideas and institutions (p. 242). In a brief time as leader of amovement known as pan-Turanism (to unite all Turkish peoples in Asia), Gökalpand others of this school emphasized folklore, history, and linguistics, which promotedthe preservation of cultural identities. Thus, Gökalp retooled Durkheim for the Turkishcontext (Berkes 1936, p. 243). Berkes states that “Gökalp. . . was the real founder ofTurkish sociology, since he was not a mere translator or interpreter of foreignsociology. . . .” (p. 242). Durkheim’s theories, however, were central to Gökalp’sown 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 collectiverepresentations and social facts (Spencer: 1958, p. 649). Gökalp envisioned that thenew nation would replace religion in the collective consciousness, but that thereligion of Islam would be a partner in supporting that move toward nationalconsciousness. Although scholars describe his heritage as Kurdish, he denied thisbackground. Building on his nationalist ideology, coupled with his understanding ofethnic identities as socially constructed, he stated that “there is no such thing as theKurdish people.” (Houston 2001, p. 110) Gökalp’s influence would be wide-reaching. The anthropologist Robert Spencer noted in 1958 that “[e]very Turkishschool child of today knows the work of Mehmet Ziya Gökalp, and he has come to berecognized by the Turks themselves as the foremost interpreter of the modern Turkishspirit 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 ofthese social institutions. Adopting the vision of organic solidarity that Durkheimdescribed as characterizing modernity, and applying the distinction between sacredand profane that Durkheim had articulated to the emerging societal order, Turkeybegan to relegate religion and politics to separate realms. Islam would no longer be anofficial “state” religion. On the surface, this top-down reconstruction of society—particularly, in culture and politics—appears to mirror the same Western divisions oflabor of a secular state that has withdrawn from its management of religion, withreligious bodies that no longer meddle in affairs of the state. The situation in Turkeywas distinct, however: the new order under Atatürk continued to view Turkishidentity as rooted in Islam, and put the auspices of religious bodies under the controlof 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, thiswas 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. CertainEnlightenment precepts were a cornerstone of Atatürk’s futurist societal vision forTurkey. This was also the case for the burgeoning field of sociology, just as it was forits Western counterparts. Inspired by the European Enlightenment, the field ofTurkish sociology embraced and embodied both the scientific method and a scientificapplication of Enlightenment ideals to society; Turkish higher education more gen-erally would constitute a critical institution in which to house and espouse these

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ideals. This legacy is far from buried. Today, Ankara University—located in the cityof Ankara, capital of present-day Turkey—describes its history in the following way:

The foundation of Ankara University was personally initiated by the greatAtatürk, 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 theundaunted defender of these principles that express modernity, science andenlightenment (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, andall sporting dark, Western-style suits with fashionable (for that era) neckties. Movingto the statement of the university’s vision, we see a reiteration of these sameprinciples:

Ankara University is locked on to the target of reaching the highest level ofmodern 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 inother ways as well. Among the social reforms that Atatürk oversaw in the burgeoningnew Republic were the replacement of the Arabic with a Latin alphabet, the intro-duction of surnames, the change from customary and religious clothing to modern(western) clothing styles, and the abolition of a range of religious institutions andtheir integration in the legal and educational spheres. One can get a glimpse into howthis re-education of society at mass levels had begun to take place through a survivingrelic of a black-and-white photograph from the era; it shows a man who has stoppedon a public street to study a poster that the government had erected to educate Turksin 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 attemptedto institute a European-inspired multi-party system by encouraging the developmentof a competing political party (other than his own), called the Liberal RepublicanParty, this opposing party was not successful in the national elections in 1930(Spencer 1958, p. 645). And despite the radical, near overnight transformation inthese social and cultural habits, Turkey’s changes were not embraced across allsectors of society, and were resisted by some religious conservatives and minoritygroups such as the Kurds. Even with this resistance, however, the reforms did movetoward becoming the hegemonic norm for Turkey. Based on a recent close reading ofAtatürk’s speeches and writings, Taha Parla and Andrew Davison argue thatKemalism as a political philosophy was more a form of corporatist ideology thanEnlightenment-inspired liberalism or socialism—with a strong distaste for the indi-vidualism of liberal democratic traditions. They state, “. . . Kemalism is neitherproperly modern nor properly secular, and its commitment to rational educationand governance must be questioned” (2004, p. viii). The Kemalist version of corpo-ratism grew out of Gökalp’s adaptation of Durkheim’s theory of organic solidarity,which would be achieved through an interdependent division of labor across asociety’s corporations as the counterweight to anomie, providing a buffer layerbetween individual and state.

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Parla (1985) argued that Professor Gökalp—Atatürk’s right-hand sociologist—was, however, more democratically minded in his vision than the dictatorial style thatAtatürk represented. Although Gökalp praised the role of individuals “of genius” insociety, for example, Parla insisted that Gökalp’s writings imply that those geniusescan exist outside the state, and can consist of sociologists who use individual reasonand scientific thinking in their building of society among other leaders (1985, p. 93).There are competing assessments of Gökalp’s theories regarding multiple culturesand democracy. One version of his legacy is that he was particularly supportive ofpolitical 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 ratherthan “socialism.”3 Gökalp insisted that ethnic cultures do not stand still, but arealways changing, adapting to their context and, in this case, integrating into the largernational ethos. In general, Gökalp’s thought merged two Turkish schools of thoughtthat were at odds: the Westernists and pan-Islamists. He proposed that the country“Turkify, Islamicize, and Modernize” (Berkes 1936, p. 244). As the Ottoman Empiredisintegrated, Gökalp gradually de-emphasized the “Islam” element, and after hedied, the Kemalists would abandon the religious element of their mission to build aTurkish republic (Arjomand 1982). Notably, Gökalp has been read by later scholarsin contrasting ways: some assigning anti-racism to his works and others emphasizinghis ethnocentrism.4

It must be emphasized that Gökalp and the Young Turks have left a tarnishedlegacy in the eyes of those who blame them for orchestrating the mass deportationand slaughter of 1.5 million Armenian Christians on the way to achieving thistripartite goal, and, in particular, the first two elements of the formula. TanerAkçam, the first Turkish scholar to describe these events as a genocide explicitly,for example, writes that Gökalp contributed the ideological basis for carrying out themurders, through his theory of Turkish nationalism that included ending “the illusionof Muslim-Christian equality” (Akçam 2006, 88). Given Western and EasternEurope’s twentieth-century legacies of genocides and ethnic cleansings, the exampleof the Armenian question is neither a contradiction nor anomaly to the point thatTurks drew on Western social models—including the social construction of an ethnicor racial base for modern nation-state identities. Thus, Gökalp’s “contribution” topublic sociology developed in dramatically contrasting directions.

Certainly, early Turkish sociology borrowed a great deal of societal and sociolog-ical ideas emanating from the westward direction. Given Turkey’s close associationwith France, as well Gökalp’s importation of French ideas, the works a number ofFrench scholars made their way into the developing canon, such as Le Bon and LePlay. From a sociology of knowledge perspective, the content of a body of knowledgeis historically bounded in the geographic and institutional context in which theknowledge 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 andtotalitarianism, 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 superioritywherein 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).

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sociology. Scholars of this history point out, however, that Turkish sociology and theburgeoning society should not be described as a wholesale, linear import of Westernpolitical culture and institutional structure—as if Turkey had been a tabula rasaregarding modern ideas. As Spencer observed,

Atatürk and his associates, urbanized and Westernized intellectuals, set outdeliberately to “modernize” Turkish culture and to develop a WesternizedTurkish 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 ofmaking Western elements one with it. (Spencer 1958, p. 640)

In fact, Gökalp’s vision was to wed Western institutional structures with a preser-vation of Turkish culture, maintaining an interdependent tension between gesellschaftand gemeinschaft (Spencer 1958, p. 651). And despite Atatürk’s insistence onWesternization and a science-based society, he stopped short of full praise for thosecountries 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 Westwas not singularly responsible for modernization. He insists that Turkey’s “inventivemodernization” 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 ofmodernization to imitate the Western model of modernity, even thoughthe 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, theresult is that Turks placed their own cultural stamp on both the religious and secularideas. As he states it,

A historical investigation indicates that the Turks imported both the idea ofIslam and that of modernity, but added their own characteristics to them. BothIslam 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 disci-pline’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 thesociability of humans, and lionized the ideal city as one with interdependent parts—using the same organic metaphor of the human body that Durkheim and laterfunctionalists would employ. These thinkers were among the influences on Gökalp’sthought (Berkes 1936, p. 244). Thus, although Turkish sociology and thecorresponding new nation-state were grounded in a gaze to the West, they wereaugmented and localized.

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The prominent Turkish sociologist Şerif Mardin, working today, also offers analternative analysis to the standard binaries of West-East and modernity/seculariza-tion versus “tradition.” Mardin is known for his contributions to sociological under-standings of religion and secularism in Turkish society, constructions of Turkishnational identity, the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish Republic. Mardin locatesthe historical development of the Turkish Republic in multiple narratives of moder-nity as well as multiple strains of tradition—rather than a single transition fromtradition to modernity (Mardin 2006).5 In a similar vein, International Relationsscholar Nora Fisher Onar has recently mapped out the public sensibilities that oneperiod of the Ottoman Empire represented, in the late nineteenth century; it was an erawith 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 OttomanEmpire had allowed its internal ethnic and religious minorities relative independenceand freedom from political control, under a system known as the millet that consistedof separate legal courts devoted to the affairs of these minority groups—althoughIslam 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 onan identity of its own. Gökalp was one of the founders of the first association ofTurkish sociologists, the Turkish Knowledge Association, in 1913, which includedwas a cross-disciplinary group that included sociologists (Çelebi 2002, p. 256).Among the influences that Gökalp had on the eventual development of Turkishsociology was his insistence that “ideas”—theory and philosophy—belonged at theheart 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 thesurvival 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 theFaculties 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 thediscipline a safety net from the volatile realm of national politics.

Nevertheless, across history, political developments have had their impact on thediscipline 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 KnowledgeAssociation closed down. Following on its heels, the second association, “Professionof Sociology,” established in Istanbul in 1918, met the same fate: it was victim of theWar of Independence in 1920 (Çelebi 2002, p. 257). This association had establisheda new academic journal and advanced the practice of field research in Turkey,drawing inspiration from French sociologist Le Play, author and practitioner of thecase-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 criticaltradition that began with Karl Marx—a strain of sociology that did not historically resonate within Turkishsociology as strongly as the work of Durkheim.

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all colleges and normal schools in the country by 1924, within 1 year of the birth ofthe 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 sociologistsappeared (Berkes 1936, p. 245).

Turkey was not the only country in its region that gravitated toward Durkheimiansociology. In his comparison of Turkish and Iranian sociology for The AmericanSociologist in 1982, Arjomand reported that Durkheim’s thought was also influentialin Iran’s political modernization during the same era. Further, Arjomand, argued, itwas Durkheim’s ideas that resonated with sociologists throughout the wider region ofthe Middle East, rather than those of Marx and Weber (Arjomand 1982). The Turkishsociological gaze did eventually begin to expand its sights toward Germany. This waslargely due to the work of Turkish sociologist Mehmet İzzet, who gave centrality toSimmel 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, hewas known for his textbook on sociology and his book, Theories of Nationality. Hecalled for both a modernization of Islam and a commitment to the ideals of democ-racy, science, and progress. Despite his popularity and influence, İzzet’s career wascut short by an untimely death in 1930 (Berkes 1936, p. 245). The shift towardGerman thought was further entrenched by yet another war—the Second World War—which brought German scholars fleeing the Nazis to Istanbul University, where theworks of Max Weber and other German sociologists began to integrate further intothe Turkish canon. These German émigrés introduced and helped establish whatÇelebi has described as “a society-centred and data-oriented sociology beside apolity-centered and idea-oriented one” (Çelebi 2002, p. 257), which appealed toyounger Turkish sociologists in particular. As some Turkish sociologists began toearn their degrees in the United States, they also brought back this “data”-drivenapproach to sociology when they returned to Turkey.6

Interestingly, at the same time that Atatürk was dictating a Durkheimian-inspiredreconstruction of Turkey, Stalin was simultaneously embarking on his own top-downmodernization of Russian and Soviet societies on the Marxian model. While thesetwo projects were ideologically at odds, one can notice stark, modern lines to theTurkish statuary from that era that bears some resemblance to that of socialist realistmonuments of Eastern Europe, with the recognizable “cult of personality.”7

Clearly, where Turkish sociology has shown a particular passion for the realm oftheory, that theory was pegged to actually lived Turkish historical developments—asif 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 in1921) exemplifies this. Trained in philosophy and on the sociology faculty of IstanbulUniversity, he analyzed Turkey as a transitional society that should be rooted in

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

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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 ofa fascist orientation, though the crime was never solved. He is among three individ-uals about whom the short book, Unsolved Murders in Turkey (2010), was written. In2012, his relatives were among those advocating for justice for victims of the 1980military coup, as those aging generals were put on trial.

The dramas of Turkish history help explain why there has been a series of sixsociological associations in Turkey; the previous associations dissolved for variousreasons 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-schoolcurricula. Between 1923 and 1980, sociology and philosophy were required coursesin high school (Çelebi 2002, p. 258). The sixth and present-day association, theTurkish Sociology Association,8 was established in 1990, and is headquartered inAnkara. The themes of its congresses, held approximately every 3 years, generallyaddress 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 conferenceentitled “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 Turkishuniversities were on the program of the American Sociological Association annualmeetings in 2011, as well as at least seven Turkish scholars affiliated with Americanuniversities as students or faculty members (ASA 2011). There are no subdivisions ofthe Turkish Sociology Association into regional sections. This Association positionsitself as a regular contributor to the educational venture: it dedicates 10 % of itsrevenue to scholarships for lower-income sociology undergraduate and graduatestudents. A 2004 study found that of 80 universities in Turkey, 30 had sociologydepartments, although a number of universities without sociology departments donevertheless have sociologists on their faculties (Çelebi et al. 2004, p. 5). Thisnumber has expanded: In 2011, the Association listed 49 universities with sociologydepartments. Of these, 11 are in Istanbul, 4 in Ankara, and the remaining 34distributed across other cities. While this growth in number of departments may bedue to the establishment of new departments in existing universities, it is also likely areflection of the spurt of new private universities opening across the country. Thisphenomenon 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 educa-tional exchanges such as the Erasmus program, where other European students canstudy in Turkey, and Turkish students in other parts of Europe.

What are the content areas of today’s Turkish sociology scholars? One review ofTurkish 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/.

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authors commented that such articles were primarily imports of Western ideas to theTurkish audience of sociologists—few of whom knew foreign languages or hadaccess to the internet at the time.9 While on the surface this does appear to be anotherwave emanating from the West, the subject matter of some of the recent theoreticalliterature emanates from questions that are of central importance to Turkey in itsglobal position, including postcolonialism, de-centering the subject, and identitypolitics. Öncü has pointed out that the social histories of Michel Foucault heldparticular resonance for Turkish scholars during the 1990s, given the extent ofsurveillance, imprisonment, and “capillaries of power” that 20th-century Turkishhistory has wrought (Öncü 1997). From Öncü’s report of the hot titles on bookstoreshelves in the late 1990s, it was the translations of postmodern titles and books onethnicity and religion in Turkey that dominated those shelves, although most were thework of “journalist-researchers-writers” than of sociologists. Öncü has commentedthat the popularity of Foucault and other poststructuralist scholars may have also beendue to the fact that they were “radical” but not Marxist (Öncü 1997, p. 269). HasFrench social theory, therefore, returned in these new incarnations? Despite this trend,notably, the “grand narrative” of modernity borrowed from the French Enlightenmentthinkers 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 onthe rise in Turkey. Less popular was applied or policy-directed research, consideredmore technical than the more valued theoretical articles. Their tally found that thesecond most popular subfield in Turkish sociological publications (after the topics oftheory and methods) was social problems; following down the list were art andculture, social stratification, political sociology, and economic sociology (p. 543).Further, the researchers found a correlation between the numbers of courses offered inthese subfields in the seven universities and the distribution of publications acrossthese subjects: theory and methods again had the largest share.

At the time of their 2005 study, Kasapoglu and colleagues found relative genderequality across the sample departments, with five departments employing more femalethan male faculty, and two departments with just under 50 % female. There were,nevertheless, gender differences in status, as one might expect, as the male facultytended to be more senior, and the females more junior (p. 542). Perhaps reflected in thischanging demographic was the growing popularity of women’s studies, enveloped inthe social problems courses, and representing 37.8 % of those courses.

Women have made their marks on Turkish sociology, both historically and into thepresent. Behice Boran (1910–1987), for example, who received her PhD in Sociologyfrom the University of Michigan, was the first woman leader of a political party inTurkey. A Marxist, she was jailed for her communist activities but then later repre-sented the Turkish Worker’s Party in Parliament. She was far from the follower ofComte and Durkheim that Gökalp was. In 1947, while she was on the faculty of theUniversity of Ankara, she published an article in the American Journal of Sociology,entitled “Sociology in Retrospect,” (Boran 1947) where she took on Comte for hisclassist 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 75sociologists across seven universities in Turkey. They grouped the results into 12 subfields.

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from which to critique society, she charged, in effect excused any critique of the illsof the current society—as it would not be scientifically fact-based. She hurled asimilar charge at Durkheim for his boundedness to the bourgeois class in his work.Further, taking American sociologists to task for their assumptions that sociology canbe an independent variable in solving social ills, she pointed to the status of sociologyas a dependent variable of existing social structures: “Pathological social systems donot simply die off, like the individual patients [who might rise up against medicalscientists], while waiting for the social scientists to discover cures for their ills; theystrangle science” (Boran 1947 pp. 318–319).

An influential female sociologist working today is Nilgün Çelebi of AnkaraUniversity and Mulga University in Turkey, whose in-depth research on Turkishsociology and its associations was useful for the present article. Her books andarticles are primarily published in Turkish, and her specializations include the historyof sociology, the relationship between epistemology and ontology in sociology,culture, and gender. Ayşe Öncü, a professor with a PhD from Yale University, onthe faculty of Sabancı University, provided another central source of information onTurkish sociology for this article. Most of her books and articles are published inEnglish, in the areas of globalizing cities, Turkey’s relationship to the West, genderand culture, and the dynamics between secularism and Islam. By addressing ques-tions of gender, these scholars are engaging with some of the central public concernsof Turkey today, as illustrated by the story that began this article.

Turkish sociology has vacillated between the two poles of theory, or ideas, andpolicy/positivism across its lifetime. Writing in the journal Contemporary Sociologyin 1997, Öncü argued that the latter has tended to drive the discipline more centrallyacross 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 thatlatter that dominates the field in Turkey. We tend to be driven by the urge todiagnose “lived” events and propose solutions. The push to bring a particularsocial reality into daylight, rendering it “understandable” in public, to thepublic, for the public, and proposing brave solutions often takes precedenceover “understanding,” analytical refinement, theoretical sophistication (Öncü1997, p. 267).

The field of Turkish sociology, much like its host society, has been characterizedby 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, eco-nomic crises, military coups, liberalizations that usher in moments of intenseanxiety and of reappraisal, imparting a sense of new departures and breaks withorthodoxy (Öncü 1997, p. 267).

Thus, the trajectory of the discipline has not developed in a straight line of descentfrom Gökalp, and, as more recent sociologists quoted here illustrate, many havediverged from his ideas. Where Gökalp constructed nationalism as a solution, quite afew Turkish sociologists today would construe it as a problem. Marxist-oriented

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sociology represented another of those divergences. A turn away from the Marxianbranch of Turkish sociology was articulated by Şerif Mardin, who charged in a 1999book review that a political leftism in a sector of Turkish social scientists had resultedin weak scholarship and, specifically, no attention to the autonomous role of religionin Turkish society (Mardin 1999)—which his own scholarship attempts to address.

Currently, public issues continue to push Turkish sociological agendas into newdirections, such as environmental sociology (Kasapoglu 2005, p. 546). A recentsociology graduate from an Istanbul university confirmed that this was the case inher own educational experience; she reported that nearly every Masters thesis in herprogram was devoted to one of the public questions facing Turkey. While Americansociology 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 isclear that today’s Turkish sociologists are producing research on critical concernsregarding Turkish society to be consumed by interested scholars abroad. Theseconcerns include the role of the Turkish state in a global world, the rights of theTurkish minority in Germany, Turkish-Kurdish relations, the incursion of the publicsphere into the private sphere, and the role of religion in society. A number ofscholars are positioning themselves boldly on the controversial cutting edge, propos-ing those “brave solutions” to which Öncü referred. Among the writings of sociol-ogists on the faculty at Bilgi University in Istanbul are works about human rightsviolations in Turkey, racism, ultra-nationalism, honor crimes, forced Kurdish migra-tion, and feminism.10

Sociologists are also tackling the east–west axis question in analyses of thepolitically controversial EU accession process. The European Journal of TurkishStudies, 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 toTurkish-EU relations. At the close of 2011, the contentious discussions betweenTurkey and the EU regarding Turkey’s application for accession had grown evenmore volatile, and in response, Turkey was widely perceived as beginning to turn itsgaze more eastward (Aydıntaşbaş 2012, 58). (The worsening economic crisis in theEurozone alongside a relatively healthy Turkish economy reinforced an already waryTurkey about its need to join the EU “club.”)

There are several questions that haunt the possibility of EU membership that aresteeped in the history of Turkish sociology as manifest in the Kemalist project. One ofthese implicates collective memory and transitional justice—in particular, theArmenian genocide question. Several sociologists count themselves among thegrowing public voices within Turkey entering a public discourse over the issue ofwhether 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.

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of genocide. This issue is relevant to the history of Turkish sociology in more thanone way—including the possible complicity by the Young Turks, Gökalp included,and the project of nationalism that was built on Durkheim’s idea of collectiveconsciousness. 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 thisagenda by voting a measure into law declaring genocide-denial to be a crimepunishable by jail terms and hefty fines, with the Turkish-Armenian history in mind(Vinocur and Hemming 2012). Following a pointed accusation from France’sPresident Sarkozy regarding this history, Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdoğan retaliatedwith his own charge that France had its own dark past for which it had yet toapologize: the occupation of Algeria and slaughter of millions of its citizens. Bothmen took defensive postures and French-Turkish diplomatic relations were quicklyfraying. Tens of thousands of Turkish residents from across Europe traveled to Parisand took to the streets in angry defiance of the new bill. Within weeks, France'sConstitutional 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 sometime, due to EU requirements that members meet human rights standards, includingrecognition of minority rights.12

There is a deeper, cultural aspect of this controversy as well; as Levy and Sznaiderhave described it, “nascent European identity seems to revolve around a negativefoundational moment through commemorating universal lessons of the Holocaust”(Levy and Sznaider 2005, 290). In other words, one ticket for entrance into theEuropean club is this process of historical reckoning with one country’s own geno-cides; 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 thousandsof angry Turks took to the streets of Istanbul waving striking circular white-on-blacksigns that declared “We are all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant Dink” on the fifthanniversary of the cold-blooded murder of the journalist Hrant Dink—who had beenaccused of insulting Turkishness by using the term “genocide” for the atrocities(“Hrant Dink…” 2012).14 Such displays demonstrate the intensity of bifurcationsand fault-lines among various constituencies in the society and a growing boldness bythose who sympathize with Armenians, even if they do not represent the Turkishmajority.

11 As of this writing, Sarkozy had lost his re-election bid to the Socialist Party candidate, FrançoisHollande.12 In the meantime, controversy erupted in Algeria over the dispute. In January, 2012, Algerian PrimeMinister Ouyahiya implored the Turkish prime minister to drop the references to Algeria. Other politicalvoices, 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 andother members of Turkish society who are addressing these questions in open, honest debate, with nocriminal or academic consequences. When the Turkish government canceled an academic conference toconfront the Armenian question in 2005, which was to be held at a public university in Istanbul, two privateuniversities in the city came to the fore and co-sponsored the conference, including Bilgi University, the siteof 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 thereality of the deaths, but claim either 1) comparable losses by Turkey, 2) the label of “civil war” rather thangenocide, or 3) that this was a sin of the Ottoman Empire, not the current Republic of Turkey.

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A second issue hailing from the history of the relationship between sociology andthe 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 bothshare: Both are witnessing the rise of post-secular societies. This was a theme of thesummer 2008 lecture by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas at BilgiUniversity in Istanbul.15 Turkish (Muslim) immigration to countries such as France,Germany, and the Netherlands and a backlash against these immigrants help fuel thevitriol of the debate and the growing laws against public wearing of the hijab in thesecountries and others (Casanova 2006). Sociologist of religion José Casanova hasobserved: “In its determination to join the EU, Turkey is adamantly staking its claimto 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 Mardinand 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 continueto clash. In 2000 and again in 2006, surveyed Turkish citizens were divided between aslim majority, whose primary identity was one as a “Turk” or “citizen of the Republic ofTurkey” (54.1 %), and those who principally identified “as a “Muslim” (35.4 %). Thisdivision 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 thesociety polarizes into two primary camps, each defining itself using the foil of theother, the modernity-tradition dualism does appear to reify the two camps, in contrastto the more nuanced vision that Şerif Mardin and others had described.16

Like Western Europe, the post-secular question has become crystallized in agendered theme: that of the headscarf; and the Durkheimian-inspired secular modelis at the heart of this controversy. In 1982, the Turkish government had banned thewearing of the headscarf in public institutions such as government offices, and in theclassrooms 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 theheadscarf incident that opened this article, the summer of 2007, the issues that thesestudents confronted were front and center in the international media, Turkey included.The headscarf played a prominent role in Turkey’s controversial parliamentary andpresidential elections, which pitted the Justice and Development Party (AKP), anIslam-based party whose growth in popularity worried the previously dominantsecularist party whose popularity was waning (Vojdik 2010, p 671). Hayrunisa Gul,married to then presidential candidate Abdullah Gul of the AKP, proudly wore herheadscarf in public, an act that had once resulted in her denied entrance to auniversity. Her public presence during the campaign sparked vehement secularistcritiques. And yet among the voices that defend the practice are women—who maketheir 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 towardIslam and disaffection with laïcism, so the current party is not the first to challenge Turkish secularism(Mardin 2006, p. 280).

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may choose the attire for the purpose of cultural identity as much as for religiousprinciples (Vojdik 2010).

In February of 2008, the Turkish parliament voted to allow students to wearheadscarves to the universities; the vote was met by a massive outpouring ofresistance in the streets by the country’s avowed secularists, waving largeTurkish flags. Ankara protestors were heard taunting “Tayyip, take your head-scarf and stuff it”; directed to Prime Minister Erdoğan, demonstrators called forhis government to resign (“Turkish Parliament….” 2008). The symbolic image ofthe headscarved woman contentiously met the other symbol of secular Turkey: theimage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—which secularist adherents proudly display acrosspublic and private spaces. His visage has proliferated since the 1990s, adorningrestaurants, shops, offices, universities, and homes, as Özyürek (2006) hasdocumented. 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 charac-teristic signature on one’s arm. There has been a standoff between the Turkishmilitary elite, which holds a self-understanding as a defender of Turkish (modern)secularism, and the current government, which led to the military resignations in thesummer of 2011. On the other side of the pole is the ruling AKP party and itsfollowers, 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 whoinclude headscarved women pursuing higher education, independence, and nontradi-tional careers.

Given the way that the headscarf has crystallized Turkish bifurcations be-tween secularism and religion, one might presume that the field of sociologywould stand uniformly behind the headscarf ban. While I do not have data onthis particular question, it is interesting that at least one headscarved Turkishsociologist opposes the ban on headscarves in public institutions due to itsinterference with her own work as a sociologist. She charges that this lawrestricts access to government offices, where she will likely need to go toretrieve data or apply for grants. This is one indication that even within thefield, 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’sOrientalism is confirmed by these developments: it is through these micro-level dailypractices on which modernism was imposed, and through which modernism is beingdefended.

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 inthe movement towards enlightenment and modernization that began with theRepublic by acting as a bridge between science and life. It is aware of its role inthe perpetuation of Atatürk's principles and reforms. Istanbul University willprotect in line with this in all issues pertaining to public life with no concessionsfrom its decisive stand [emphasis added]. (Istanbul University 2012) (Fig. 2)

This wording implies no conflict between the “pure,” value-free science of thepositivism inherited from Comte and the mission of improving and modernizing

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society.17 As this illustrates, institutions of higher learning are key participants indrawing 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–Westgaze appears to have evolved into more of a collaboration of mutual reciprocity:Turkish sociologists earning their degrees in the United States or Western Europe andreturning to Turkey while maintaining research partnerships with the West. Thesociology department at Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul describes itsfaculty the following way:

The faculty shares a strong international orientation, reflecting their training inmajor American and Western European universities, their continued involve-ment in international professional associations, and their on-going collaborativeresearch and writing colleagues outside of Turkey. In addition to the permanentfaculty, the range of courses and scholarly exchange in the department isextended each year by part-time professors and visiting lecturers from othercountries . . . . (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 inestablishing itself as a discipline domestically: within the Turkish academy. Çelebiasserts 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 sincethat era has worked to demonstrate its scientism in many countries by distancing itself from a directpractical 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.

Fig. 2 Entrance to Istanbul University in 2011. Photo Credit: author

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graduates to teach in high schools, siphoning them away from building the disciplineat the postsecondary level (Çelebi 2002, p. 264). Çelebi has also called for sociolo-gists to shift their emphasis toward more micro-scale as well as policy-orientedstudies and away from the macro focus that has been their primary tendency—adirection 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 transna-tional world and post-Westphalian (nation-state) Europe. Sociologist Çağlar Keyderexemplifies this reality through his transnational affiliations: he is on the faculties ofboth Bogaziçi University in Istanbul and SUNY-Binghamton. A more direct exampleof this is his contribution to an initiative with the title “Former West.” This interna-tional “art and theory” project based in Utrecht, Netherlands adopts this neologism asits own way of reversing the gaze: on itself. With the collapse of the Iron Curtainbeginning in 1989, we can no longer speak of a “West” as a cohesive entity or analien “East” that is so far away politically, economically, or culturally. This project’stitle contains a wordplay. Countries on the east side of that curtain came to be calledthe “former East” after 1989. Embedded in that phrase is the assumption that the Westis the default or the norm, implying yet another colonization; the “former West” isalso going through its own transition after the continent reunified, however. Both ofthese—“East” and “West”—are social constructions. An anecdote about a recent actof 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 ofTurkey and the city of Istanbul. En route across that supposed border, they playfullyemerged from their car and took a photograph holding three large letters: “E,” “U,” and“R,” temporarily transforming the “Welcome toAsia” sign to say “Welcome to Eurasia.”

Conclusion

The maturation of Turkish sociology can be mapped, at least partially, along variouspoints of an axis between a West-East, East-East, and East–West gaze that seems tobe reformulating itself as a circle. If the characteristic of Turkish sociology that wehave described as the “East–West gaze” has been either tempered, broken, orreversed, what do Turkish sociology, and sociologists, have to teach the “formerWest”? 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 acultural and intellectual bridge between East and West. If the current phase ofglobalization is not expected to subside anytime soon, the notion of “bridge” isnecessarily going to be on the agenda (Fig. 3). In 2011 and 2012, quite a few referencesto 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 sociologyis 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 theparticular time in history (e.g., theories of revolution, colonialism, etc.).

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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 therevolutionaries in these countries to offer aid in transitioning to democracy(Benhabib 2012).

Secondly, the former “West,” particularly in Europe, is charting new territory as itlearns 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 ofpower is shifting eastward. And although Turkey is currently embroiled in a gridlockbetween the secularist and Islamic cultures, the society certainly brings to the table ahistory of attempts to incorporate secular practices and ideas as it maintains theviability of religious institutions. This review of the relationship between the historyof Turkish sociology and the present-day bifurcations within Turkey and betweenTurkey and other countries in Europe by no means is meant to be an argument ofcausality; sociology in and of itself is not to blame. Rather, the point is that thediscipline has become a player in Turkish political developments on more than onelevel, while continuing to maintain and defend its autonomy at this time in history.

Unquestionably, just as public, political developments have entangled Turkishsociology throughout its history, the present-day vigor and uncertainty of publicdevelopments in the Middle East, Europe, and the globe make this a particularlylively time for Turkish sociology. I close with an anecdote that illustrates yet anotherexample of a continuing bifurcation in Turkish society with which sociologists havecontinued to grapple since the days of Gökalp: the place of minority cultures. Behindmuch of the violence in Turkish society today is the insistence on self-determinationby Kurds. In July 2011, one of the highlighted performances within the annualInternational Jazz Festival in Istanbul was entitled “Mujeres de Agua,” and featured

Fig. 3 Turkish airlines construction fence billboard advertisement, 2011. Photo Credit: author

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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 stadiumwas 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 melodiclyrics 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? Orwould he remain seated with the majority of the predominantly Turkish audience thatrefused 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 whoprovided invaluable assistance through their suggestions and the provision of critical information: KristenBiehl, Serife Genis, Tülay Kaya, Nora Fisher Onar, Anoush Terjanian, Antoine Terjanian, the anonymousreviewers from The American Sociologist, and editor Larry Nichols. Thank you to the members of thesociology department at Bilgi University. And I am also indebted to the Open Society Foundations for theopportunity to contribute to their Istanbul-based summer school, with particular appreciation to Rasjit Basiand Alex Irwin.

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