As a new nation state founded in 1923 on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey faced the need to establish a new national identity and ideology. Recognizing the multiple faces of Turkish nationalism, this article explores how Kemalist conceptions of national identity were not limited to civic nationalist ideologies, but incorporated racist ascriptions of ethnic nationalism as well. Based on the research and publications of scholars associated with the Turkish Review of Anthropology from 1925 to 1939, this article analyzes a form of early Turkish nationalism that was shaped by a racist discourse supported by and purveyed through the disciplinary authority of anthropology. The author’s analysis reveals a dominating and exclusionary discourse of Turkish nationalism, in which the ‘Turkish race’ (posited as the dominant national group) had a sense of proprietary ownership of the nation and national identity.

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This paper addresses the complex and contradictory framing of youthful female sexuality, personified in the figure of foster-daughters (beslemes), in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Beslemes were both sexually exploited and attempted to be disciplined under the critical gaze of the upper classes and the state, since they disturbed the accepted rules and limits of sexual agency as sexually active unwed adolescent girls. They were marginalized as indecent and fallen girls, since sexual agency and chastity were considered to be incompatible. Though acknowledging the subordination of foster-daughters, this paper suggests that these young women were not completely subjected, silenced and helpless and that they were able to find ways of taking the initiative in resistive strategies.

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In the late nineteenth century, the religion, nationality, and citizenship of abandoned children became a contested terrain over which much effort was spent by local authorities, foreign missionaries, religious and civil leaders of the communities, municipalities, the police force, and the central state. Relying on Ottoman and French archival sources, together with periodicals and contemporary literature, this paper discerns the elevated political significance of abandoned children within such realms as demographic politics, politics of conversion, and national identities. The state's new preoccupation of properly registering new-born infants, in line with the new Regulation on Population Registration created controversy over the nationality and citizenship of abandoned children. As new administrative reforms challenged the customary jurisdiction and the autonomy of the communal authorities and as the power of the governmental bureaus, police departments, the municipality, and the foundling unit of the Dârü'l-aceze increased, non-Muslim leadership resisted these practices: they both submitted official appeals to the government and opened or strengthened their own foundling facilities. Furthermore, the child gathering efforts of Catholic missionaries created an atmosphere of self-defense on the part of the communities, as they felt threatened with losing prospective members of their newly conceived and idealized imagined communities. In this context, abandoned children attracted interest hardly due to pity, or disinterested charity. Institutional solutions, policies, and strategies of diverse and competing actors were closely related to the emergence of a modernized governmental structure and attempts to strengthen communities as its mirror image.