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“Culture Committees,” or Hars Komitalar?: Acculturation and Assimilation as a Population Politics in the Early Republican Turkey
Abstract
This paper analyzes a less-known institution of the single party regime: Hars Komitalar?, which might literally be translated as “Culture Committees,” established in the early 1930s as a party unit attached to the General Secretariat of the Republican People’s Party (CHP). While the early republican politics of culture, acculturation, and Turkification have been investigated to a great extent within the context of such single-party institutions as People’s Houses, and Village Institutes, the Cultural Committees have not been studied yet in any way. Like similar institution and party units, these committees were intended to acculturate ‘a nation in the making’ and shape the peripheral population in accordance with a set of social and cultural norms promoted by a modernizing state. Devoted to disseminating the cultural projects of the state, the main task of the Committees in question was exclusively oriented to ‘teach’ the Nusayri Arab population of Çukurova so-called their real identity: Hittite Turks, or Eti Türkleri, therefore, to assimilate them into Turkishness, an effort which exemplifies the obsession of the single-party regime, like all modern political entities, with ethnic and religious origins and differences, which became undesirable and something to be copied with. For the single-party regime, which fictionalized an official Turkish history at the time in the service of nation-construction, the Nusayri Arabs were in essence the Turks who adapted to speak Arabic because of the lack of national consciousness and unity, as an integral ideal of the regime. To assimilate them to Turkishness and to modernity, the Culture Committees deployed various methods including construction of primary schools, Turkish language campaigns, adult education, village visits, encouragement of marriage between Turks and Nusayris, solidarity festivals (tesanüd bayramlar?), and similar kinds of propaganda for “national consciousness.” Exploring the goal and activities of the committees through their interactions with the Arab population, this paper also aims to investigate the use and implications of the concept of culture in the early Republican politics, and discuss how culture is a medium in and through which power relations are constituted. Based on the research conducted in the Republican archives in Ankara, it links the Culture Committees to the broader context of the population politics and process of making-citizen in the single-party era. However, indicating the failure of the committees, this paper will also seek to discuss how the capacity of single-party regime and the complex nature of societal and cultural projects can be reconsidered.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Turkish Studies