Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey, 1923–1945, by Hale Yılmaz

Autor: James C. Helicke
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Zdroj: Canadian Journal of History. 50:192-193
ISSN: 2292-8502
0008-4107
DOI: 10.3138/cjh.50.1.192
Popis: Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey, 1923-1945, by Hale Yilmaz. Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2013. xv, 328 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). In November 1925, the newly-established Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) mandated that all men wear European style hats, but officials soon faced the reality that some men continued to wear fezzes, kalpaks, or kerchiefs on their heads, in contrast to the "civilized" image that the new regime sought to project. Along the Syrian border, peasants sometimes shared a single collective hat, which they individually wore when they had business in the provincial capital, while reverting to local dress upon their return to the countryside. Some Kurdish villagers simply rolled up their traditional headgear (kulahs) to make them appear more like European caps. Hale Yilmaz recounts these incidents and a rich variety of others to add new context and nuance to the implementation of Turkey's ambitious reform agenda during the two decades following its independence in 1923. Her account draws on archival research (including rare access to the archive of Turkey's Interior Ministry), oral histories, and an impressive range of other primary and secondary sources. Yilmaz finds that diverse or incomplete implementation of the reforms did not mean that far-reaching Kemalist reforms did not affect the lives at the village level, nor did it mean a simplistic religious-based reaction to a secular regime, as scholars have sometimes suggested. Instead, Yilmaz shows that uneven implementation of reforms reflected the state's continuing negotiation with society. Yilmaz also challenges the assumption of a unitary state and describes occasional divergence of views between the government in Ankara and the local administrators, judges, and police who provided many Turks' main point of contact with the state. Yilmaz does not simply rehash the well-known story of the state-led reforms, which aimed at forging a new Turkish nation and citizenry, but instead limits her study to four thematic chapters on the hat reform, women's dress, language reform, and celebrations of national holidays. Attempts to regulate men's dress and require the hat, covered in the first chapter, were part of broader efforts to forge a secular, modern, and homogenous citizenry from an ethnically and linguistically diverse population. Religious authorities, the press, schools, police, and other officials each played distinct roles in promulgating the newly decreed men's fashion to the public. The second chapter similarly shows that the Turkish state sought to change women's dress as it promoted an image of the new woman. However, lack of consensus among state officials about women's dress resulted in the delegation of responsibility for promoting European-style women's dress or limiting the veil (pece) or chador (carsaf) to provincial authorities. …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
načítá se...