Borrowed Elements Research Articles

IN THE Middle and Near East, as elsewhere in the changing world, local forms of nationalism have their origins in culture and culture history. Two major cultural domains have existed in the area, the Arab and the Turkish. These two, differing from each other largely in language rather than in basic pattern, were once loosely unified under the aegis of the caliphate, but political events, particularly after World War I, have drawn them increasingly apart. The respective Arab nations have gone their separate ways, each to develop its own volatile brand of nationalist aspirations, aims which became particularly explosive after the founding of Israel. But the Turks underwent their social and nationalist revolution somewhat earlier. Increasingly indifferent to its historical ties with the Islamic world, Turkey began to think of itself as a wholly autonomous nation-culture. The Turkish quest for self-assertion was fostered by Kemal Atattirk, who provided a special kind of rationale. What this was and how it developed reflect a culture process of particular significance. Atattirk and his associates, urbanized and Westernized intellectuals, set out deliberately to modernize Turkish culture and to develop a Westernized Turkish 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 of making Western elements one with it. Hence, as a basis for their actions, they were obliged to commit themselves to a system of social and political thought, a set of ground rules for the cultural modifications they sought to make. Obviously, there is an organic relationship, especially on the level of the literate cultures, between social system and philosophical premise. A constitutional type of government, for example, whether that of the United States, Britain, or the Soviet Union, reflects a system of conceptual values and in turn provides a rationale for behavior. The Turks borrowed elements of Western culture widely and intensively. As a result of the Kemalist revolution they took over Western material traits, designed a European-type government, and engaged in a wholesale importation of Western legal systems. But more than this, the party of Atatiirk found rational justification in an ideology which, although imported, permitted a course of nationalist action. Interested in culture change, in the processes of diffusion and integration, the anthropologist can find a classic example of culture building in the creation of the modern state and the modified society among the Turks. But further, that the rationale for Turkish national action should lie in the work of Emile Durkheim lends an anthropological interest of another kind.