This paper discusses rising tensions in Turkey through an analysis of heritage wars (between Islamists and secularists), urban renewal policies, and cultural performance. I begin with the symbolic and political-economic implications of Istanbul’s 2010 European Capital of Culture (ECOC) project. ECOC has spurred controversy over urban public space (and entitlement within that space), multiculturalism, and ethnic expression in the broader context of Turkey’s volatile EU trajectory. To analyze these tensions, I turn to recent fieldwork with arts executives and urban planners at the 2010 ECOC Agency, local NGOs, and cultural performers engaged in driving Istanbul to its “European” future. I also discuss the often-neglected significance of performative grassroots mobilization, particularly against the state gentrification of a historic, low-income, and ethnic (Roma) entertainment district: Sulukule. In the latter part of the paper, I turn to earlier ethnographic research on Istanbul’s nightlife to demonstrate how capitalist city redevelopment has become the stage for new class and gender distinctions with exclusionary consequences. Merging political anthropology with performance theory, my research also suggests how embodiment, or bodily intervention, as an alternative analytical frame, can provide fresh ethnographic insight on Turkish multiculturalism, Islamic-secular rifts, and everyday inequalities.

Due to changes in Turkey`s relationship to the external world and in the Evangelical Christianity movement hundreds of missionaries have come to Turkey since the 1980s. As a result about 1,500 Turks converted to Christianity and became part of a statedly Turkish Christian movement. As the group became more visible they have been subjected to a nationwide campaign against them supported by the Turkish army, mainstream media, and left and right-wing nationalist. The campaign had serious and deadly consequences for the community. This presentation explores the nature of the anti-missionary campaign and asks why the issue of Turkish converts to Christianity is such a sensitive and offensive one to Turkish nationalists when Turkish Christians are self-described nationalists? Why is being Turkish and Christian are seen as contradictory? What do nationalists understand by Christianization? And what does this anti-Christian sentiment reveal? Based on ethnographic research among Turkish Christians and discourse analysis of anti-missionary literature in Turkey, I discuss the political stance of the Turkish Christian movement and the nature of the nationalist resistance to it.

Sacred sites administered as museums by the Turkish state present a significant challenge both for museum officials of the "secular" Turkish Republic and for members of religious communities who carry out devotional practices at such sites. While official rules and regulations of "sacred museums" restrict religious practices to the discontent of practicing citizens, demands and pressures of pious visitors challenge the authority and judgment of museum staff on a daily basis. Sacred museums, therefore, emerge as the loci of competition and contestation not only between officials and citizens but also among citizens of different religious and political backgrounds. The conflict in Turkey becomes particularly visible and acute in the Haci Bektash Museum (Nev?ehir) where officials regulate the devotional use of the Sunni mosque and the Alevi worship hall in starkly contrasting ways. The differential treatment and "toleration" of different religious communities by the Turkish state, and the Alevi mobilization and campaign for the right to control and utilize the site, systematically bring this sacred museum into contemporary debates on religion, pluralism and secularism. Based on a decade-long study of the site between 2000 and 2010, this paper aims to present a thick-description of the encounter in and around the Haci Bektash Museum by the various sides of the conflict. The details of these everyday encounters have the potential to shed light on the hidden Sunni logic of the "secular" in the Turkish context.

As the recent financial crisis rippled through world economies, debates were reinvigorated about the immorality of global capitalism and the free market economy. While greedy financiers and inept economists were crucified in the media, the ideal of entrepreneurship arose as the moral panacea to rising extremism and poverty. Newsweek declared in “Economics versus Extremism” that overregulated economies that “stifled entrepreneurship” were to blame for Islamist extremism. In turn, charitable entrepreneurs were hailed as the panacea to the ills of poverty and underdevelopment with the decline of the welfare state; the April 2010 Obama summit with Middle Eastern entrepreneurs is a good example of this trend. Since the 1980s, Turkey has continuously witnessed the formation and rise of the Anatolia-based yet nationally and internationally well-connected entrepreneurs. Several research studies have traced this historical process that is closely intertwined with the developing power of a pious electoral base that expresses diverse and at times contradictory responses to the possibility of EU accession, economic transformations, JDP policies, and the changing tapestry of Turkish daily life as AVMs (shopping malls) and Turkish television serials become national pastimes. Understudied and underexamined in current research is the concomitant rise of charitable associations that are largely founded by conservative entrepreneurs and supported by this conservative electoral base. Charitable associations provide spaces where donors, volunteers, and donees increasingly rethink and reformulate the meanings and practices of charitable giving, Turkish state, daily life, piety, and Islamic practice. They also become places where the conservative entrepreneur and donors fulfill their religious obligations and form charitable communities. Based on ongoing ethnographic research in Turkey, this paper will examine the contours of charitable giving and nostalgia for an idealized Ottoman rule as both a response to, and a result of corrupt governance and the decline of the welfare state. Under the current Justice and Development Party (JDP) government, welfare provision and associations that spearheaded such provision became effective strategies to consolidate neoliberalism, globalization, and the JDP project of joining the European Union. Hence, if the state is taken to be a discursive, diffuse, and representational construct, then the delegation of poor relief to conservative entrepreneurs and civil society organizations increasingly support and enable both the representational and real existence of the neoliberal state. Ironically, though, charitable giving also provides a space where the neoliberal state is questioned, analyzed, and challenged.