More than a sovereign symbol? The public reception of the early monumental statues of Atatürk in Turkey

Abstract

The early monumental statues of Atatürk in Turkey have so far been studied from the perspective of the state and its ambition to disseminate a national consciousness. While this state‐centric approach has been helpful to understand the role of symbolism in nation‐building, it ends up reducing people to a passive recipient of symbolic indoctrination. We, in contrast, approach public perception as an active component in the discursive construction of these monuments over time. We first analyse the period until the death of Atatürk in 1938 during which the democratic possibility of conflicting with the official narrative remained quite minimal. We then look at the aftermath of Atatürk's death, which coincides with the introduction of the multiparty democracy in Turkey where there were more critical engagements with these monuments, particularly by the right‐wing constituents and politicians. We conclude that such resistance was still discursively bound by the nationalist context within which it operated. Our analysis of the politics of symbolism in Turkey taps into the theoretical works of Hanna Pitkin and Warren Breckman.

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

“…Second, it demonstrates that, in the creation of national symbols, meaning making and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent before and after the monument has been created. This connects and builds on literature that views national monuments as outcomes of ideological agendas of the elite (Cummings, 2013) or as sites through which non-elites participate in an active discursive construction (Güçler & Gür, 2021;Kosmarskaya et al, 2017) by illustrating how meaning making and materiality are intimately linked. Finally, it suggests that a critical aspect of these material symbols is that they are necessarily incomplete representations and that it is the particularity and 'imperfection' of the material representation that provide a context for the nation as a category of discourse to emerge.…”

“…Studying the efforts of elites, scholars have understood national symbols as reflective of national narratives and ideologies, demonstrating how changing urban landscapes and national rituals reflect new and sometimes competing conceptions of national culture and identity (Adams, 2010; Cummings, 2013; Diener & Hagen, 2013a, 2013b; de Freitas & Carvalho, 2022). Another line of scholarship has argued for the necessity of understanding the nation ‘from below’, illustrating the myriad ways the nation and its symbols are understood and contested (Güçler & Gür, 2021; Kosmarskaya et al, 2017; Liu, 2012; Rohava, 2020). While scholars have sought to bridge this epistemological divide by studying how national symbols are discursively constructed from above and below (e.g., Fox & Miller‐Idriss, 2008; Fox & Van Ginderachter, 2018; Liu, 2012; Nora, 1989; Sakki & Hakoköngäs, 2020), the processes that go into the production of national symbols are often left obscured.…”