This paper explores the cultural history of military summer camps (askeri kamp) in Turkey. As part of the Turkish army’s efforts to establish itself as a distinct and self-sufficient social group, military summer camps began to emerge inside coastal military bases in the 1940s, offering 3-week-long vacations to military families via an annual lottery system and at a nominal fee. Initially designed as partitioned-off campsites inside military compounds with limited number of tents and social amenities, summer camps grew in size and number during the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into freestanding developments designed in the image of American military bases with semi-detached houses, pristine beaches, sports facilities, and dining, dancing, and entertainment halls by the 1980s. For decades, immediate families of active and retired military officials spent their summer holidays at these camps where they experienced an idealized and militarized version of a modern summer vacation in which nature, nation, and health coalesced in idyllic unity. While summer camps are still a defining feature of Turkish military families’ lifeworlds, due to the conservative changes that took place inside the army’s social institutions during the Justice and Development Party rule, they are also objects of nostalgia for generations of secularist military families who associate their camp memories with brighter days of Kemalism and a more virtuous and harmonious society. Based on long-form interviews with military families who spent multiple summer holidays at various summer camps between the 1950s and the 1990s and by drawing on their private archival materials, this paper examines the complex web of relationships between militarism, secularism, and the environment in Turkey and brings to light a long-ignored element of Turkey’s modernist experiment.

Although there has been scholarly interest in the alarmingly high rates of femicide in Turkey, the existing literature focuses mostly on the conceptualization of femicide and the media representations of the cases, paying little attention to the oppressive structures that have led to the recent increase in femicides. In this paper, I aim to explore the role of Turkey’s westernization and de-westernization processes on the upsurge in femicides, by analyzing the public statements made by the state executives on the issue, legislative steps taken by the government to prevent femicide, and the shifts in the political agendas that oscillate between western progressivism and religious neoconservativism. For my analysis, I use the data collected by We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a women’s organization in Turkey that work toward ending femicide, Anıtsayaç, a digital monument that documents the information of women murdered in Turkey, and Çatlakzemin, a feminist website that keeps records of the sexist discourses of the Turkish government. After observing the changes in the discourse of the state regarding femicide, I examine how both westernization policies and the non-western responses to such policies (re)produce a discursive category of “proper woman.” Following a materialist feminist methodology, I argue that the femicide rates increase, for the unsettling dynamics in Turkey between western colonialism and eastern neoconservatism challenge authoritarianism of the Turkish state, as a result of which “improper” women become more disposable to restore authority. I propose that the disposability of “improper” women in Turkey has its roots in the so-called scientific taxonomy of humans in the West, through which the lives of humans were categorized based on racism, orientalism, and sexism, in order of significance and value, which rendered certain bodies disposable. Such colonial methodology persists in many practices in Turkey, including data collection on femicide for preventive purposes. Correspondingly, the paper suggests that the failure to prevent femicide in Turkey has one foot in the colonial epistemologies of European countries, which have increased their influence through the westernization the country has undergone, especially after the beginning of the European Union membership negotiations.

In this presentation, I share the findings of my research project about the discourses of prominent Sunni-Muslim tariqas in Turkey on everyday life practices and politics in Turkey. With the support of the MESA Global Academy Scholarship, my research team and I conducted a content analysis this year to assess the material produced by major tariqas in Turkey during the 2010s. My focus in this project is the norms set by the tariqas for their followers about ordinary and ritualistic everyday life practices such as daily hygiene, worship practices, conduct of behavior in public spaces, and sartorial practices. I used the publications by the Directorate of Religious Affairs of the Turkish government and the literature on contemporary Sunni tariqas in Turkey to establish the list of major tariqas and focused on twenty Naqshbandi and Salafi groups out of forty-seven major Sunni tariqas as my sample. For the qualitative content analysis, we compiled the visual, audio, and print material produced by these tariqas such as their fatwah sessions on YouTube and publications. My two research assistants blind-coded the material. This initial reading was followed by the interrater consensus-building process that we finalized with my involvement as a tiebreaker in the cases of persistent disagreement between my assistants. My preliminary analysis substantiates four findings. First, tariqas with smaller follower groups produce more material on everyday life practices than larger tariqas. Second, guidelines by Salafi tariqas for their followers have a stricter tone about everyday life practices than the Naqshbandi tariqas’. Third, older tariqas produce less explicit messages about the connection between everyday life-related norms and party politics than newer tariqas. Last, tariqas in general work to differentiate their guidance about everyday life practices in order to draw symbolic borders with other tariqas and, thereby, to symbolically isolate their follower base from the potential influence by their competitors.