Contemporary Turkish Research Articles

A Just Economy? Unifying and Dividing the Islamic Intellectual Field in Neoliberal Turkey

Abstract In this paper, I argue that the relationship between religion and neoliberalism in non-Western contexts cannot be understood without paying attention to the contested, dynamic, and fluid production of local knowledge. In order to substantiate this argument, I trace debates about development, equality, class, labor, and wealth that circulate in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. Specifically, I analyze the viewpoints of three contemporary Turkish Muslim intellectuals who make different claims about Islam’s economic teachings. Mustafa Özel proposes “entrepreneurial Islam” as an alternative to state-regulated capitalism, Ihsan Eliaçık argues that “social Islam” ordains Muslims to redistribute wealth, whereas Lütfi Bergen suggests that “pastoral Islam” precedes Western capitalist modernity. I find that the disputed notion of a just economy is what unifies and divides this intellectual field as a constitutive question that is disagreed upon. This article thus calls for a recognition of the contingency, multiplicity, and indeterminacy of Islamic-neoliberal assemblages.

Contemporary Turkish Mevlevi Mysticism. Organisation, spirituality and relations with secular sphere

SOMMARIO: 1. Introduction - 2. The organisational structure of Mevlevi Islamic mysticism - 3. Mevlevi spirituality and religiosity - 4. The secular sphere and the laws of the market - 5. Conclusions.
 Abstract: This article aims to provide as comprehensive a reading as possible of the organisation of socio-religious aggregation of contemporary Islamic mevlevism in Turkey. Starting from some classical notions of religion and spirituality (Simmel, Weber, Troeltsch) we examine the type of organisational structure of the Mevlevi order, the modus operandi, the internal relations between the followers, the role of the master taking into consideration the criterion of compromise, inclusiveness/exclusiveness and the transmission of charisma. Furthermore, the nature of Mevlevi spirituality, its organisational and moral principles, and the ecstatic practice of the sema is analysed. Finally, we analyse the relations of the Mevlevi orders with the population, some kinds of financing mechanisms, some forms of mediatisation and the marketing of some Mevlevi products. Finally, the order's interest and need to become part of religious tourism is analysed, encountering, however, conflicts, internal divisions and the non-legitimation needs of specific groups of believers.

Özbekçede Kullanılan Türkçe Kökenli Hastalık Terimleri (Baş Bölgesi)

Terms are the biggest indicator of the development of a language and that it has a strong root.Instead of accepting foreign terms as they are, the fact that languages find an equivalent in their own language and can derive terms in their own language shows the immortality of that language.The words that meet the concepts related to science, art and profession with a special meaning are called terms. The term, which is supposed to come from the root ter-“to compile” in Turkish, is met with the concept of termin in Contemporary Turkish dialects.Uzbek Turkish is also a dialect that uses the possibilities of its own language while doing term studies. It can derive Turkish terms as origin, as well as deriving terms in derivative and compound structure. Turkish medical terms in Uzbek Turkish were also made with these methods. Disease terms consisting of a single word can be derived, as well as many disease terms in derived and compound structure. Generally, derived and compound terms have been determined in medical terms formed in the head region in Uzbek Turkish. In addition to this, there are also disease terms that are rooted, form abbreviation groups and are formed with gerundial. Disease terms determined to be of Turkish origin are also a great indicator of the stage at which Uzbek Turkish is on the way to becoming a scientific language.

Perceptions of English Language Students on the Relevance of ‘EFL’, ‘ESL’ and Other Such Terms in Contemporary Turkish Contexts

Over the years, there has been an ongoing debate on the relevance of certain terms like ESL, EFL. Several linguists have argued that these terms do not represent a wide range of language users under varying circumstances, given their various proficient language competence levels. In a bid to unveil the extent to which this presupposition applies to the use of ESL and EFL terms. A group of 36 participants from a school in North Cyprus was purposively chosen for this quantitative study. Four research questions were to be investigated. Questionnaires were used to collect vital data from the participants on their perceptions on terms like ESL and EFL. After analysis, results were collected, analysed and used to make cases for redefining the concepts of ESL and EFL terms, especially within the Turkish-Cypriot setting. A notable finding of this study was that the participants believed that terms like EFL ESL do not adequately define their language status. They further suggested that more appropriate terms should be used. The study suggested using English as an international and intranational language instead of the former terms, among other suggestions. This study adds to the corpus of research showing that while acronyms like EFL and ESL are relevant in English language education, more emphasis should focus on improving learner's four language skills which directly impacts their performance and production of the target language.

‘Here comes the (Turkish) bride’: American consumer culture and the Turkish bridal industry

This ethnographic study seeks to position Turkish women within the lucrative global bridal industry, which is today heavily influenced by the style, aesthetics and consumer values of the American wedding. It will add to the existing literature by examining Turkish brides’ participation in transnational networks that promote the commodification of weddings in Turkey – a country where, for many, weddings were until quite recently low-budget affairs designed to maximize newlywed profits. We will explore how such networks establish and reinforce bridal rules and codes through wedding props such as gowns, cakes, jewellery, flatware, china and honeymoons. By unpacking the complexities, symbolism and meaning of the contemporary Turkish bride, we will move beyond simple binaries to examine how tradition and modernity overlap and intersect and how modernity is an intrinsic part of the evolution of traditional Turkish wedding practices. This study will also critique processes of (American) cultural assimilation and reveal how Turkish brides are negotiating western trends, influences and the ‘weddingindustrial complex’. Through lifestyle marketing and other industry practices, these networks are prescribing how Turkish women – regardless of their socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, educational and class status and cultural and religious beliefs – should perform the bridal role. Moreover, because of its ties to aesthetics, style and fashion, the lavish American-style wedding has also become the ultimate platform for the display of purchasing power in Turkey – a way to replicate the conspicuous consumption of the wealthier, leisured classes that, for many Turks, has become synonymous with modernity and elevated social status.

How is the Origin of the Cold War Depicted in Turkish History Textbooks?

<p style="text-align:justify">The primary purpose of this article is to analyze how the origin of the Cold War is represented in Turkish history textbooks for general secondary school education for the twelfth grade. The author examined three history textbooks, which are only approved by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) for teaching the course of Contemporary Turkish and World History. This research applied content analysis, including narratives and visual interpretation of the origins of the Cold War, and also the events regarding the emergence of Soviet Bloc and Western Bloc in high school history textbooks in Turkey. Findings indicate that treatments of the origin of the Cold War in Turkish history textbooks are remarkably similar in many ways. The traditional approach of the origin of the Cold War, which depicts the Soviet Union as an aggressive power whose primary purpose was to expand Communism to the world, constitutes the dominant narrative in Turkish history textbooks. The representation of the United States is very positive. All textbooks underline that the United States played a crucial role in solving many problems in many different parts of the world to prevent the expansion of Communism.</p>

The Foundation of the Free Republican Party and Subsequent Developments According to the British Embassy Reports

The History of Turkish Democracy from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic is a striking topic for social scientists. They exert themselves to understand dynamics that changed or remained stable during the evolution from sultanate to democracy. One of the most studied topics of the History of Turkish Democracy is doubtless the experience of the Free Republican Party. Qualified as the second trial of a transition to the multiparty system against the early period of the Young Republic’s single-party system, the Free Republican Party is evaluated both as a private attempt to resolve the tension between Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and İsmet (İnönü) on behalf of Mustafa Kemal and as Turkey’s reaction to the Great Depression in 1929. Established as a guided opposition party, it had a profound influence on Turkish political life, despite its short 99-day lifespan. The party was intensely supported by the masses and pushed for power. In historiography, the party’s experience has only been written about with reference to the contemporary press, memoirs, and Turkish archival documents, overlooking the British Embassy Reports. This study aims to contribute to the historiography of the Free Republican Party by comparing different discourses and paradigms in the party’s historiography with the English documents on the foundation of the Free Republican Party and subsequent developments.

A Translation Criticism; Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry

This study intends to present the readers of Turkish Poetry in English a translation criticism of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry. The editor-translator, Murat Nemet-Nejat, positions the mystic Sufistic essence of Turkish literature, the legacy of Divan Poetry, to the core of contemporary Turkish poetry in the paratextual material. This claim is an overgeneralization because it underestimates other influences. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the source poems to the translations indicated that contrary to his overemphasis, the translator does not display close thematic or formative renderings of the poems that contain the Sufistic “essence” which he calls “eda”. Rather, the characteristic Sufistic elements are eliminated and poems are manipulated to such an extent that will not escape a postcolonial criticism. Shortly, the anthology offers the readers a rewriting that provides the readers with a distorted representation of Turkish poems in an orientalist alignment embellished with homoerotic images.

A Lexicological Approach to Look-up Frequency of Turkish Sign Language Dictionary Users

From the point of lexicography, the phenomenon of dictionary look-up frequencies can answer many critical questions on dictionary users’ needs and relationship between corpus data and look-up tendencies. Although there have been a number of studies on the theoretical and functional aspects of look-up frequencies in the field of spoken language to date, there remain relatively a few attempts to describe the characteristics of look-up behaviour in sign languages. This paper investigates the relationship between the frequency list of Turkish Sign Language Corpus and The Contemporary Turkish Sign Language look-up occurrences. By using an approach to the comparison of corpus data and log files, the results demonstrate that there is a very limited similarities between both of them and no positive relation for percentage of top ranked items. Moreover, this corpus-based lexicography study concludes that objective corpus based-frequency list is a comparatively poor predictor of the dictionary look-up frequency and this difference might be direct result of the morphological structure of words/signs in TİD (rather simultaneous realization) compared to Turkish (rather agglutinative morphology).

The Historical Journey of Opera Translation in Turkey and its Perception by Contemporary Turkish Opera Performers

Opera, evolving on the foundation of two art forms, theatre and music, is a multidisciplinary genre that has affected many countries and cultures profoundly over the centuries. Even though opera emerged and blossomed in Western societies in the early sixteenth century, it took four more centuries to pass so that opera could meet the Turkish audience. Translation from Western sources has been a substantial medium to Westernize and Europeanize the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey. The proclamation of Tanzimat was the beginning of transformation in the multicultural and multilingual Ottoman Empire to form a nation-state, and therefore the Westernization process started in all fields including literature and music. Opera was one of the new art forms that came into prominence apart from theatre and prose. Since the Republic gave much importance to polyphonic music and attempted to carry Turkish music into universal standards, works of art in the most paramount genre of music, the opera, were translated. Translations of operas were carried out by the Turkish composers of the time in order to achieve a singable and coherent translation in terms of prosody. In this context, this study aims to present both the historical journey of opera translation in Turkey and to introduce the remarks of some contemporary opera performers of Ankara State Opera and Ballet, who were interviewed so as to grasp their perception of translated opera.

The Word tabar >davar in The Historical Process of the Turkish Language and in Contemporary Turkish Dialects

Animal names have an important place in Turkish society. The word davar (cattle), known as the name of the animal today, is one of the words that have been used for a long time. In this study, the origin of the word davar and its use in the historical periods of the Turkish language were examined and its usage in contemporary Turkish dialects was examined through various dictionaries and literature, lexical and semantic analyzes were made over the obtained data. There are different ideas about the origin of the word davar. The verb "tap-", "phrase" (tab-ır), "the place where animals sleep, rest, drink water" or the name "tabar" are ideas about the origin. When the word davar is analyzed in terms of semantics, the periods when its meaning was goods and property word and the periods when its meaning was the name of the animal are given. It is also clarified whether the word has a meaning narrowing, specialization or expansion in the process. At same time, the reasons and processes of sound changes in the form of tabar > tawar, tıwar, twar > tavar > davar in the historical process are emphasized. In addition to these, the meanings of the word in different dialects and its idiomatic and stereotyped usage were also examined.

Norm Localization and Contestation: The Politics of Foster Children in Turkey

International norms do not diffuse linearly; they are localized, adapted and contested at every turn. Foster care systems have been enthusiastically promoted by international organizations to serve the best interests of children. This study explores the recent adaptation of foster care (Koruyucu Aile) in Turkey. This elite-driven norm change was institutionalized through comprehensive legislation, economic incentives and national campaigns, situated in the “politics of responsibility” arising from moral duty and national and religious ethics. These efforts faced early resistance, leading to slow cultivation of foster families, while over time, the foster system found unlikely allies among urban middle-class women. Using Zimmermann’s typologies of reinterpretation of norms through an analysis of narratives about foster parenting in 50 local and national TV productions, this article shows how the foster family system has evolved as a panacea for women’s empowerment in contemporary Turkish society. In parallel, Turkey has embarked on an intense criticism of the care of ethnic Turkish children in European foster care systems. However, this creative utilization of the foster system has come at the cost of the rights of biological parents and a permanency that has decoupled the Turkish foster care system from its counterparts around the world.

Question of Identity: Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle

Orhan Pamuk is a leading contemporary Turkish writer and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. In his novels he tackles certain universal themes, such as the search for a new identity, the conflict between East and West, the domination of Western culture and its impact on Turkish society, the spread of consumerism, feminism, the search for love and its vanity. Pamuk is influenced by the rich literary tradition of Turkey and at an equivalent time he is affected with the writers like Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Miller and plenty of others. As a postmodernist author, Orhan pamuk’s fiction echoes the priority for the identity of someone. This novel The White Castle is studied for the exploration of the Question of identity like what is real identity of the person. Pamuk himself has faced the perplexity of identity as he is suspect by media of revealing the national sentiment. The protagonist’s Hoja and the Venetian traveler are not happy with their gift identity and within the course of their life they assume a replacement identity.

The Elements of Contemporary Turkish Composers’ Solo Piano Works Used in Piano Education

It is thought that to be successful in piano education it is important to understand how composers composed their solo piano works. In order to understand contemporary music, it is considered that the definition of today’s changing music understanding is possible with a closer examination of the ideas of contemporary composers about their artistic productions. For this reason, the qualitative research method was adopted in this study and the data obtained from the semi-structured interviews with 7 Turkish contemporary composers were analyzed by creating codes and themes with “Nvivo11 Qualitative Data Analysis Program”. The results obtained are musical elements of currents, styles, techniques, composers and genres that are influenced by contemporary Turkish composers’ solo piano works used in piano education. In total, 9 currents like Fluxus and New Complexity, 3 styles like Claudio Monteverdi, 5 techniques like Spectral Music and Polymodality, 5 composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Guillaume de Machaut and 9 genres like Turkish Folk Music and Traditional Greek are reached. It is thought that the results will contribute to the field because it will cause a better understanding in the artistic viewpoints of contemporary composers, as well as being a step for the piano and music educators and the students who have studied academic piano education in order for them to be able to understand the contemporary music.

A Study on Digital Literacy Skills of Faculty of Letters Students: Use of University Library

Digital literacy skills are important, for university students, who are qualified human resources of countries, to have the digital literacy skills to meet the needs of the current age. However, in university libraries where digital technology is used extensively, it is thought that users who do not have or have low digital lit-eracy skills will not benefit from these libraries in the maximum level possible. It is therefore recognized that the determination of the digital literacy levels of the users, to whom services are provided, is important in diversifying the services and training provided to the users. This study is conducted in order to determine the current awareness and skills of students in relation to digital literacy studying in the first grade of departments of Psychology, History, Turkish Language and Literature (TLL), and Contemporary Turkish Dialects and Literatures (CTDL) at Bartın University. Using quantitative research method, the data used in this study was obtained by using survey technique. Within the framework of the responses of 226 participants to the survey questions, the study investigated whether there were any differences between students' digital literacy skills and awareness on the basis of departments and technology usage habits. The study shows that students' skills and awareness about digital literacy vary according to the departments they study in and their technology usage habits. It is observed that the Psychology de-partment received the highest average for the information technology usage habits among the participants.

ТУРКИ ЗА ПРЕДЕЛАМИ РОДИНЫ : ИММИГРАЦИЯ, ЭТНИЧНОСТЬ И РЕЛИГИЯ

The review characterizes the publications of ten contemporary Turkish specialists analyzing the situation of Turkish migrants outside Turkey. Their experiences in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain, and the United States are described. Each section of the survey draws on field research on the lived religious experience of Turks in Europe and North America, shaped around religious and civic organizations dedicated to protecting the interests of the Turkish diaspora. The current situation of Turkish communities, which have become settled communities and have moved away from the goals of initial migration, is of importance to both host countries and Turkey itself. The studies characterized in this review purport to make an important contribution to understanding the culture of the contemporary West, which is undergoing enormous strain in its progression from liberal multiculturalism to conservatism.

Kemal Atuturk in the art of republican Turkey

The article analyzes how the personality of the first president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is reflected in contemporary Turkish art. This year marks exactly 140 years since his birth. To his achievements in the military and political arenas, cultural figures have dedicated many works in the visual arts, architecture, literature and cinema. The trace of the first president of the Republic of Turkey remained in the works of both his contemporaries and in the works of authors today. Creativity is multifaceted, inspiration has no boundaries, along with them, culture was freed from prohibitions with the beginning of a new page in the history of the country. Her achievements became available to more people, the opportunity to touch the spiritual life and create it opened up along with the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Pasha to wide layers of the population. Immortal works have preserved for posterity the image of the father of the Turkish nation, and a characteristic feature of these works is the author's personal admiration for the deeds of Gazi. This undoubtedly leaves its mark on the work and the way in which a person is shown in the context of history, who took fate and the entire people into his own hands, mired in political, economic, cultural crises. But before giving an answer to the question "Who are you, Father of the Turks?", it is important, in our opinion, briefly to draw attention to the historical retrospective of the development of Turkish culture under the influence of the policy of two states that appeared, flourished and fell into decay on the peninsula of Asia Minor. The article briefly examines some of the features of the cultural policy of the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the first years of the republic.

Місце перських запозичень у сучасній турецькій мові

This article is dedicated to the problem of loanwords from Persian in the contemporary Turkish language. The list of Persian loanwords in Turkish that was created by Turkish Language Association was closely examined. In order to make valid conclusions 250 most frequent loanwords had been analyzed by their frequency, part of speech that they represent and semantic meaning of those words. To begin with, loanwords are important evidences of historic communication between nations. Turkish language, like any other language in the world, has a noticeable amount of borrowings in its vocabulary. Such European languages as English, French, Italian, Greek, German and such Middle Eastern languages as Arabic, Persian and Kurdish languages influenced Turkish in terms of borrowed lexemes. Furthermore, loanwords of world languages conceive a system and allocate into two categories according to the reason of their borrowing. Those are interlingual (the necessity of naming new objects; the will to avoid polysemy; etc.) and extralingual (historical interactions between peoples; superiority of one nation in a specific field; etc.) reasons. Besides pure linguistic systems, during the period of the Ottoman Empire the Turkish language borrowed massive amount of lexemes, and not only them, grammatical forms too, from Persian. Nomadic lifestyle that was natural for Turks from the beginning of their existence in the Göktürk Empire couldn’t bring their gathered tribes to the level of civilization. Thus, Turks when changing their lifestyle to a settled one with the goal of building strong and civilized country borrowed many words from the advanced Persian people. Persian became a leading language in government, literature and art for many centuries and appearance of hundreds of loanwords in Turkish vocabulary was unavoidable. Moreover, massive practical research also took place. The list of the Persian loanwords in the Turkish language that was constructed by the Turkish Language Association was taken as the main material of the research. The Turkish National Corpus which was chosen according to its relevance (the corpus was updated in 2013; the texts it uses were written between 1990 and 2013; 2 % of its texts are transcribed conversations) was the main instrument of the held research. Using corpus, 1082 words from the list were evaluated in terms of the frequency variable. Next step was choosing 250 most used words to run a deeper study over them. Each word was translated and separated to categories according to the part of the speech and its semantic meaning. After calculating the data, it turned out that in terms of the number of words “noun” was at the first place, yet according to the average frequency “conjunctions” had highest numbers. In terms of meaning such categories as “Government, economics”, “Religion” and “Time, measures” were influenced the most by the Persian loanwords. To sum up, taking Persian people as an example of creating a civilized settled country, Turks borrowed many words from them. Nevertheless, Atatürk’s reforms against Persian and Arabic words that were implemented at the beginning of the 20th century influenced language a lot, loanwords still remain there until now. Such parts of speech as “conjunctions” and “adverbs” lead in terms of frequency. However, when talking about fields of usage such categories as “Government, economics”, “Religion” and “Time, measures” were the ones Turks learned about or improved at the most with the help of Persian people and that are still used today actively.

Қазақ тілінде сөз басындағы «ж» дыбысының даму тарихы

One of the most emphasized issues of the Turkish language, which also causes differences of opinion among Turcologists,is the state of the sound / y- / at the beginning of the words.This sound varies in terms of both historical Turkish dialects and contemporary Turkish dialects and is met with a different sound. For those who accept the Altaic hypothesis, it is known that the Proto-Turkic language, which developed as an independent language after the era of the Proto- Altaic language, was divided into two branches as Oghur languages (West Old Turkish) and Common Turkic (East Old Turkish). In Turcology, the terms Lir Turkic for Oghur languages and Shaz Turkic for Common Turkic are also used. In order to classify the Turkic languages, the sounds /l, /ş/ and /r/, /z/ sounds, and also the / y- / sound at the beginning ofthe words were used as criteria. This article will focus on thedevelopment of the / y- / sound at the beginning of the words in Turkic languages, which corresponds to the / j- / sound at the beginning of the words in the Modern Kazakh language through diachronic and synchronic comparisons. It will be mentioned that whether the /y-/ sound can be seen since the Orkhon Turkic, which is one of the historic periods of the East Old Turkic, or the /j-/ sound in the Kazakh language is more archaic.

Everyday gendered performances at home: Masculine domesticity?

This article explores how men living in Istanbul talk about the sociality of house and care work – vacuuming the house, cooking, doing the laundry – in their everyday lives. It shows how these tasks are crucial for understanding contemporary Turkish men and how they are intertwined with notions of masculinity. This research is part of a larger study conducted between 2008 and 2010 across Turkey exploring the negotiation of masculine subjectivities by married men. Overall, the men’s narratives indicated a relationship in transition with both their children and their wives, where dilemmas and contradictions were presented with the emerging modernist discourse of egalitarianism (Boratav, Fişek, Eslen-Ziya 2017 and 2014). In this paper, such dilemmas reflected in the egalitarianism discourse between the genders are studied in relation to the division of labour within the household. While the data were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe that the existing trends in so-called ordinary days will enable us to understand the extent to which gender roles are either challenged or re-constructed at home during extraordinary times.