The Turkish Review of Anthropology and the Racist Face of Turkish Nationalism

Abstract

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.

Neoliberal Transformation of Education in Turkey

“…These ideas were not entirely original: Eugenics was quite popular in the West. Under the nation-building frenzy, a collectivist and authoritarian discourse emerged, producing an ultranationalist ideology that bordered on racism (Maksudyan 2005).…”

Narrating ethnicity and diversity in Middle Eastern national genome projects

“…Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father and first president of the post-Ottoman state, stacked new academic institutions with nationalists committed to building a Turkish scientific community, which could supply empirical evidence for Atatürk’s own theories on Turkish history, language and culture. The Turkish Anthropology Institute, founded at Istanbul University in 1925 and relocated to Ankara ten years later, developed a strong program of anthropometric research to catalog the hereditary traits of the Turks and to mark all non-Turkish populations in the country (especially Armenians and Greeks) as biologically inferior (Maksudyan, 2005a). Meanwhile, the state-proposed Turkish History Thesis argued that Turks descended from the same racial stock as Anatolia’s autochthonous ancient Hittites, and that Kurds were not a distinct ethnicity but simply mongrelized Turks who needed re-education on their original language and culture (Çağaptay, 2006).…”

Racist Aspects of Modern Turkish Nationalism

“…The official state approval and support of the journal makes it a kind of think tank of the Republic. 44 The published contributions elaborated a theoretical ground upon which the racist component of Turkish nationalism flourished. 45 The goal of the anthropological research was twofold.…”