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A geopolitics of drinking: debating the place of alcohol in early republican Turkey (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | Political Geography (2015 / doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.06.006)
Abstract: Following contemporary shifts in geopolitical scholarship that interrogate perspectives on identity, culture, and everyday life, this article confronts contestations over the place of alcohol in early republican Turkey. Debated today in terms that mirror the headscarf question, our study establishes a basis for scrutinizing this topic by focusing on the nation-state’s initial deliberations over prohibition, transpiring in the first session of the Grand National Assembly. Like the current push to intensify regulation of alcohol, 1920s prohibitionism brought together an array of narratives that included but also exceeded Islamism. In particular, progressive public health advocates provided crucial support for the narrow passage of a prohibition law that lasted until Kemalists consolidated their rule. Amid this discourse, competing players interpreted differently the ongoing American prohibition experience and deployed conflicting narratives to bolster their positions. Relying on proceedings from the early parliament and other primary sources, this article about the place of alcohol contributes both to analyses of ongoing affairs within Turkey and to progressive geopolitical engagements with matters of governance and public space, regulation and prohibition, public health, and secular-religious rivalries. From rakı to ayran: regulating the place and practice of drinking in Turkey (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | Space and Polity (2015 / doi: 10.1080/13562576.2015.1057003) Abstract: Despite religious proscriptions and practices, the flow of alcohol has never been impeded wholly in either Ottoman or republican Turkey. Rather, alcohol’s enduring place in Anatolian history is replete with examples of regulated consumption—and some futile schemes to compel prohibition. In recent years, a discourse of “prohibition” returned amid contemporary regulatory initiatives and in ways that reify the country’s secular-Islamist divides. Integral to permutations in such policies’ implementation, there have even arisen schemes of socio-spatial control that entailed regimes of zoning and separation for alcohol trade and consumption. Accounting for present narratives of regulationism and prohibitionism from a vantage acknowledging the republic’s past, this article maps today’s dynamic and ongoing shifts in Turkey’s regulatory and discursive engagements regarding the place and practice of drinking. Regulating the practice and the place of prostitution in early republican Turkey (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography (2013 / 20:7:839-857) Abstract: In the formative years of the Turkish Republic, the regulation of prostitution was geared toward biopolitical ends: safeguarding public health and eliminating syphilis. Viewing sexually transmitted diseases as a threat to the nation’s population and economy, the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance played a crucial role in the identification and definition of prostitution as a public health risk. Out of this medicalized framing of the disease and of prostitution, the republic adopted legislative remedies for both. Prostitution was legislatively regulated to achieve comprehensive surveillance and policing--sometimes amid debate between state interests promoting regulation and those concerned with matters of morality. A modernist nation-state, otherwise characterized as progressive with regard to the status of women, instituted a regulatory regime to define appropriate sexual practices and places and mandate the licensing and medical examination of some of its most marginalized female citizens. Sex and the capital city: the political framing of syphilis and prostitution in early republican Ankara (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (2013 / 68:2:266-299) Abstract: In its initial years, the nascent Turkish republic established the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance in order to promote public health. Beyond simply facilitating its modernizing agenda for the emergent nation-state as it sought to define itself against an Ottoman past, this institution was also geared toward remedying a self-defined population crisis by prioritizing and confronting particular diseases and health conditions. One of the maladies of utmost concern was syphilis. Based upon an analysis of official primary sources, this article engages with how the developing republic distinguished and consequently politically constructed—or framed—the syphilis problem from the vantage of its new forward capital, Ankara. Integral to this project of confronting this sexually transmitted disease, public health officials projected upon both this ailment and their understanding of the suitable means for its treatment their own views of what constituted appropriate sexual practices and relations. In doing so, certain subgroups of the population, especially prostitutes, were particularized as targets for surveillance and policing through regimes of licensing and compulsory medical examinations. Stemming from the state’s framing of the disease—and its definition of appropriate sexual practices—this article also examines the subsequent legislative and public health education projects that followed. Syphilis and prostitution in the socio-medical geographies of Turkey’s early republican provinces (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | Health and Place (2012 / 18:3:528-535) Abstract: During and after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, Turkey’s fledgling public health and social services ministry sought to deal with the increasing prevalence of syphilis—especially in its rural communities. This article examines the emergence of state-led information collection in Turkey during the 1920s and early 1930s and the anti-syphilis campaigns that resulted, and thus explores how the state created a new medical and moral order surrounding its citizens’ sexualities that came to focus its gaze upon prostitution. Utilizing information from official primary sources, we analyze this transformation as part of a broader process of medicalization and state expansion that made syphilis a subject for state regulation. Within this context, moral pronouncements regarding the disease, traditional medicine, and prostitution and the potential benefits of regulated brothels were reframed, represented, and dispersed as directives for public health policy. Through this research, we assess how field-based surveys contributed ultimately to republican regimes of regulating sex work that still persist. State, peasant, mosquito: The biopolitics of public health education and malaria in early republican Turkey (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | Political Geography (2012 / 31:5:311-323) Abstract: State officials in early republican Turkey framed malaria as both a medical and a political issue. In doing so, they engaged in public health education campaigns not only to resolve medical concerns but also to better govern the country’s population and promote a broader modernist agenda. This article employs primary sources from Turkish archives and other collections in order to examine the governmental and the biopolitical implications of this experience. We thus scrutinize the civilizational discourse employed by politicians and physicians as they dealt with this “village disease,” the peoples who they encountered--and taught, and the obstacles that they perceived to exist within the traditional curative beliefs and practices found throughout rural Anatolia. Emphasizing modernist ideals in their medicine as much as in their politics, we conclude that health officials’ lessons for waging an effective “war” on malaria targeted not just the disease but also its perceived societal sources of origin and--hence--the very populace it presumably sought to protect. An Ottoman representation of Wahhabism: Ahmed Cevdet Paşa’s imperial history as alternative narrative | Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2012 / 31:3:622-632) Abstract: Critical theory enables us to engage with historic power relations of colonizer and colonized, but the inclination to do so should not obfuscate the fact that many narratives that were once in opposition to the empires of the past are now the dominant—and often rewritten—narratives of particular authoritative nation-states. Amid ongoing efforts to author singular meta-narratives of the history of the Wahhabi movement of Arabia, alternative histories from the Ottoman perspective are often overlooked or simply dismissed. While the result tends to be the sort of linear history that favors the modern nation-state of Saudi Arabia, it is also a product that omits not only the Ottoman imperial voice but also the many voices and collective memories of those who might be said to have been marginalized and/or victimized by the early Wahhabi movement as it attacked Shiites and others in Karbala and elsewhere. Focusing on the Ottoman histories of Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, my article summarizes and analyzes the first efforts to depict the movement in Ottoman historiography. In doing so, it also considers how imperial histories may be read today as alternative narratives in the modern nation-state era. Governing population, public health, and malaria in the early Turkish republic (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | Journal of Historical Geography (2011 / 37:4:470-482) Abstract: In the early Turkish republic of the 1920s, population was a central question of concern for the leadership of the Kemalist state. This article focuses on how a demographic discourse concerning population--in terms both numerical and medical--provided a basis for emerging programs in public health, confronting the very real threats posed by disease. Employing the example of the nascent republic’s anti-malarial campaigns, this study thus examines the discursive, cartographic, and legislative measures employed in combating this widespread disease in the wider contexts of nation-building. In doing so, it traces one vital trajectory of the development of modern governmentality (i.e., that of public health) in the case of Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the wartime slowing of state investments (due to national defense priorities), the post-World War II infusions of foreign aid and the incorporation of DDT in confronting malaria. Decolonization through secularization: a geopolitical reframing of Turkey’s 1924 abolition of the Caliphate (co-authored with Kyle T. Evered) | The Arab World Geographer (2010 / 13:1:1-19) Abstract: Following World War I, answers to the Eastern Question emerged amid the Great Powers’ occupation of former Ottoman territories. In this context of “decolonization,” there were numerous contending perspectives on matters relating to both religious and political institutions. Breaking from traditional and contemporary scholarly works that narrowly depict the abolition of the caliphate in terms of secularization, this article situates the experience in terms of contemporary geopolitical realities (i.e., the recent conclusion of an almost five-year European occupation of Istanbul and the emergent nation-state based in Ankara since 1920). Employing unique primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, the authors thus critically assess the abolition not as a matter of callous and universal secularization but, rather, as an experience of decolonization. In doing so, they contend that the elimination of the caliphate resulted from an emerging nation-state’s attempts both to assert sovereignty and to decolonize from within amid Western powers’ endeavors to institute neo-colonial hegemonies over former Ottoman territories while simultaneously extolling the virtues of decolonization and seeking to co-opt the caliphate as an indigenous instrument for the subjugation of Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia. An educational prescription for the Sultan: Hüseyin Hilmi Paşa’s advice for the maladies of empire | Middle Eastern Studies (2007 / 43:3:439-459) Abstract: Depicted in word and in caricature as the ‘sick man of Europe’ throughout much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the Ottoman Empire was commonly portrayed in the West as being about to expire. Although the dynamics of imperial decline (e.g., political, fiscal, institutional, technological, martial, and territorial) still constitute matters of scholarly debate and variously inform current attempts at a periodization of Ottoman history, there can be little disagreement that the empire was under considerable pressure--both internal and external--in these final decades. Among the better histories written on this period of the empire are those that have gone beyond linear narratives of decline and that have instead examined dynamics within Ottoman politics and society that were geared toward inhibiting--and sometimes even toward accelerating--the eventual dissolution of the empire. Just as the Ottoman state was not passive amid processes promoting its demise, however, neither were local populations devoid of agency or voice as the state sought to implement policies aimed at creating a cohesive citizenry and a stronger imperial state. This study critically examines a vital example in Ottoman histories of education with respect to state policy formulation and implementation on the one hand, and local communities responding and finding voice on the other. Kadın Hakları | Atatürk ve Çağdaşlaşma Seminerleri (1990 / 1:109-130) Title's English translation: "Women's rights" |
