Maternal Colonialism and Turkish Woman’s Burden in Dersim: Educating the “Mountain Flowers” of Dersim

Turkyilmaz, Zeynep

doi:10.1353/jowh.2016.0029

Cited by 49 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Revisited evidence through historical, cultural and political analysis show that the westernisation ideal adopted by the Turkish Republic as a part of broader Turkish modernisation corresponds to an internalised notion of progress as expected by domestic colonialist governance (Arneil, 2017). Even though the abovementioned evidence was mostly gathered relative to the Kurds, colonial practices were not limited to them (see Gültekin & Suvari, 2021;Pinguet, 2019;Turkyilmaz, 2016). The superiority of the colonial agent was also evident in the Turkish case through scientific racism documented in various disciplines such as anthropology (Maksudyan, 2005), history (Sivrioğlu, 2015) and linguistics (Cagaptay, 2002).…”

Section: Some Psychologists Have Previously Engaged In Denaturalisati...mentioning

confidence: 99%

How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy

Bayad,

Şen

2023

Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology

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Apart from a few studies after 2000, Kurds and Kurdishness are almost absent in psychology studies in Turkey. In this chapter, we argue that a domestic colonial mentality lies behind such a systematic denial that has eventually led psychology in Turkey to transform into a 'Turkish' psychology by systematically excluding various groups (i.e., Others) for the sake of the national progress principle of Turkish modernisation. We employ a decolonial approach (i.e., denaturalisation) to reveal the ruptures and continuities of colonial dichotomies via representations of Self (i.e., in-group) and Others (i.e., out-group) in psychology texts across the 20 th century by subjecting selected works of influential psychologists to discourse analysis.We found that while the 'Turkish' Self was re-constructed via Dominant, Progressive and Modern, various Others were re-constructed via Masses and Outdated interpretative repertoires across selected materials and time. As a first attempt to show a domestic colonial mentality pierced into various stages of psychological knowledge production in Turkey, our findings contribute to the critical psychology literature and open doors for further research on the scope and manifestation of coloniality in 'Turkish' psychology.

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Section: Some Psychologists Have Previously Engaged In Denaturalisati...mentioning

confidence: 99%

How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy

Bayad,

Şen

2023

Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology

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“…As Zeynep Türkyılmaz contends, 'after the military operation, schools became the major mechanism, officials believed, that would transform the troubling Dersim into an orderly, hygienic, modern, and most importantly, Turkish region, thereby an ordinary site of the national homeland.' 76 Because the Republican elite did not explicitly accept the existence of Kurds as a separate distinct group and, thus, their language, their stance was one that perceived an inherent and irreconcilable contradiction between the Kurdish and Turkish languages. The infamous Sun Language Theory developed by the Kemalist regime dictated that all languages descended from a proto-Turkic language spoken in central Asia, and the Kurdish language was no exception.…”

Section: Linguistic Homogenization and Turkification Policies Through...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatic coexistence: local responses to the state intrusion in Dersim during the early Republican period of Turkey (1938–1950)

Basaranlar

2022

Middle Eastern Studies

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This article examines state building in Dersim with reference to local demands and the state capacity. It first analyzes how the Turkish nationalists aimed to transform the Dersim region. The focus then shifts to the local responses towards the state policies following the military operations of 1937 and 1938. I posit that the Kurds' relation with the state relied on pragmatism and negotiation rather than outright hostility. Moreover, I demonstrate that the locals' expectations from the state overlapped with the Turkish state's pre-operation agenda for the most part. Despite the local endorsement, the limited state capacity constituted a major obstacle in implementing land redistribution policy and expanding road networks with limited progress. The opening of schools, however, produced somewhat mixed results in the sense that the enrollment rates did not correspond to the increase in the number of schools.

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“…Alternatively, the transformation of political pain into narratives demonstrates how raced communities are turned into a communion of shared predicament and injury while also seeding into communities a shared understanding of histories of violence and suffering (Ralph 2013). In the specific context of Kurdistan, narratives could expose the violence of colonial programs where Kurdish mothers and their daughters have long been targeted to be civilized through the severing of ties of the mothers from their children and the assimilation of the latter into Turkishness via education by the Turkish elite (Türkyılmaz 2016). They could furthermore document settings and practices of "necropolitical violence" (Bargu 2016) that directly target the Kurdish dead, while reducing marginalized Kurds to "the status of living dead" (Mbembe 2003;Özsoy 2010:40).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaced-Out States

Yıldırım¹

2021

Current Anthropology

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Against anthropological notions of "illness narratives" and "social suffering" as the responsible reception of trauma, this article formulates possible directions in which to expand trauma's conceptual framework so as to respond ethnographically to affective ways of understanding memory, critical agency, and political belonging. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with militarily displaced Kurdish communities in Diyarbakır, in Kurdistan, in Turkey, this article addresses the psychological and political states of spatiotemporal displacement. Taking the encounter of two bereaved Kurdish mothers with antidepressants and antipsychotics as its object of inquiry, the article analyzes the affective state of feeling gej ("spaced-out," in Kurdish), making the case that in this colonial setting of necropolitical destruction and displacement, feeling spaced-out is an assertion of political critique. Such fugitive manifestations of colonial wounding reveal not only the constitution of a medical space of informal economic traffic and diagnostic intervention but also transient states through which bereaved Kurdish mothers actively undertake their own constitution and engage with decolonial imaginaries to sustain mental health. These noncathartic states need not be organized, collective, or even resistant in any standard sense to be considered as a form of outrage at colonial oppression and as expressions of dissent.

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Maternal Colonialism and Turkish Woman’s Burden in Dersim: Educating the “Mountain Flowers” of Dersim

Cited by 49 publications

References 14 publications

How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy

How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy

Pragmatic coexistence: local responses to the state intrusion in Dersim during the early Republican period of Turkey (1938–1950)

Spaced-Out States

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