The Reproduction of Clientelism in Regressing Rural Turkey or “Why I Became An ‘Erect Ear’1?”

Abstract

This article, based on a field research done in July–August 2002, attempts to explain the popularity of the Nationalistic Action Party (NAP) of conservative and ultra-nationalistic tendencies in the touristic and permissive rural sectors of Datca, a peninsula in southwestern Turkey, by the clientelistic networks it manipulates in the villages. It argues that clientelism, far from being repressed by the integrating structures of the market, is reproduced and even reinforced by the conditions that cause and deepen the rural impoverishment. It also demonstrates the realignment of the rural power structures on the model provided by the now eradicated land ownership system. Dr. Ozbudun is teaching History of Anthropological Thought in the Department of Anthropology, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. (clientelism, rural structures of power, rural politics).