Abstract
In contemporary Turkey, populism goes hand in hand with neo-Ottoman nostalgia. They make a stigmatized duo, as nostalgia is interpreted as lingering in the past and populism is deemed as the opium of the uninformed, emotional masses. In this paper, I complicate this vision through an ethnographic discourse analysis of the 2016 Conquest of Constantinople Rally, organized by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). I show how nostalgia helps boost the authenticity claim that social performances seek to achieve. In a ritualistic setting, the rally portrays a Manichean worldview predating to Ottoman times, underlines the power of the “people” against nefarious others, and is organized around a leader who is posited as a savior. By relying on forty-five in-depth interviews in five cities, I investigate the extent to which this social performance convinces the audience. Three interpretative perspectives emerged from participants’ responses: Spectacle Seekers see the rallies as a necessity and as providing emotional uplift as the state’s duty; Appraising Skeptics approve the commemoration, yet are skeptical of the authenticity of the effort; and History Guardians deem the Ottoman past as sacred and regard the AKP’s use of it as emotional manipulation.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Anthropologist Esra Özyürek (2006) provides a compelling account on the nostalgia for Kemalist modernity of early Republican Turkey in her seminal ethnography. Focusing on the everyday life in 1990s Turkey, she observes the shift from state-led modernization to a “nostalgic modernity.”
For a discussion of cognition, emotion, and perception see Craig Calhoun (2001).
Conceptually, I differentiate the state-led (neo-Ottomanism) from popular (Ottomania) Ottoman nostalgia. This analytical separation allows for observing how over the years, the AKP has increasingly co-opted popular cultural articulations such as the TV series and nostalgic photo booths, which operated outside of state ideology. The shift to neo-Ottoman identity is best observed since 2011. In the preceding decade, the AKP’s social performance emphasized the tenets of the regime such as secularism and Westernization (Altınordu 2016).
I separate cognitive/rational and emotional/affective only analytically, and do not adhere to a Cartesian dualistic approach, acknowledging that they are interlinked in the processes of meaning making and perception.
Gowan (2010, pp. 24–25) looks at how competing discourses are taken up, reworked, and performed by people on the street through an ethnographic discourse analysis. This approach challenges the opposition between large-scale structural forces and cultures defined as small scale or local.
The electoral success of the AKP based on November 2015 general elections: 48.8% voted for the AKP in Ankara; 48.7% in Istanbul; 31% in Izmir (where 46.8% voted for the CHP); 65.6% in Kayseri; and 66.8% in Trabzon.
For a discussion of the celebration of the quincentenary of the capture of Constantinople in 1953, see Brockett (2014). In this piece, Brockett offers a historical account of the commemoration of the conquest, walking the reader through the late Ottoman perceptions of this event to the first attempt of memorializing it during the centennial. Even though this was an important first attempt, the fact that the prime minister and the president had declined to participate shows that the conquest still remained tangential to hegemonic history telling. To highlight this point, Brockett argues “For all that political parties began to manipulate the Ottoman legacy in accordance with their own ideologies after 1953, the formal political rehabilitation of the Ottoman Empire that has allowed Prime Minister Erdogan to capitalize on public memory associated with the conquest of Constantinople did not occur until after a military coup in 1980” (2014, p. 426).
See Berezin’s (2017) piece in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. She recounts how Trump is portrayed as a doer, a man of action during the 2016 campaign. The theme of construction is central to both Erdogan’s and Trump’s campaign platform.
Translated as “god willing.”
References
Alexander, J. 2006. Cultural Pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. J.C. Alexander, B. Giesen, and J.L. Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alexander, J., and P. Smith. 1993. The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies. Theory and Society 22 (2): 151–207.
Alexander, J.C. 2004. Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy. Sociological Theory 22 (4): 527–573.
Alexander, J.C. 2011. Performance and Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Alexander, J.C., B. Giesen, and J.L. Mast. 2006. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Altınordu, A. 2016. The Political Incorporation of Anti-System Religious Parties: The Case of Turkish Political Islam (1994–2011). Qualitative Sociology 39 (2): 147–171.
Altınordu, A. 2017. A Midsummer Night’s Coup: Performance and Power in Turkey’s July 15 Coup Attempt. Qualitative Sociology 40 (2): 139–164.
Auyero, J. 1999. Re-Membering Peronism: An Ethnographic Account of the Relational Character of Political Memory. Qualitative Sociology 22: 331–351.
Aytaç, S.E., and Z. Onis. 2014. Varieties of Populism in a Changing Global Context: The Divergent Paths of Erdoğan and Kirchnerismo. Comparative Politics 47 (1): 41–59.
Berezin, M. 1994. Cultural Form and Political Meaning: State-Subsidized Theater, Ideology, and the Language of Style in Fascist Italy. American Journal of Sociology 99 (5): 1237–1286.
Berezin, M. 1997. Politics and Culture: A Less Fissured Terrain. Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1): 361–383.
Berezin, M. 2002. Secure States: Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion. The Sociological Review 50 (2 suppl): 33–52.
Berezin, M. 2005. Emotions and the Economy. The Handbook of Economic Sociology 2: 109–127.
Berezin, M. 2017. On the Construction Sites of History: Where Did Donald Trump Come From? American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (3): 322–337.
Blee, K., and A. McDowell. 2012. Social Movement Audiences. Sociological Forum 27 (1): 1–20.
Bonikowski, B. 2016. Three Lessons of Contemporary Populism in Europe and the United States. The Brown Journal of World Affairs 23 (1): 9–24.
Bonikowski, B., and N. Gidron. 2016. The Populist Style in American Politics: Presidential Campaign Discourse, 1952–1996. Social Forces 94 (4): 1593–1621.
Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Brockett, G.D. 2014. When Ottomans Become Turks: Commemorating the Conquest of Constantinople and Its Contribution to World History. The American Historical Review 119 (2): 399–433.
Buğra, A. 2014. New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relationship Between Politics, Religion and Business. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Calhoun, C.J. 2001. Putting emotions in their place. In: Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements eds. J. Goodwin, J.M. Jasper, F. Poletta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Çinar, A. 2005. Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, and Time. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Çinar, A., and H. Taş. 2017. Politics of Nationhood and the Displacement of the Founding Moment: Contending Histories of the Turkish Nation. Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (3): 657–689.
Collins, R. 1985. Three Sociological Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press.
de la Torre, C. 2000. Populist Seduction in Latin America: The Ecuadorian Experience. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies.
Debord, G. 2012. Society of the Spectacle. London: Bread and Circuses Publishing.
Durkheim, E. 2001. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Emirbayer, M., and J. Goodwin. 1996. Symbols, Positions, Objects: Toward a New Theory of Revolutions and Collective Action. History and Theory 35 (3): 358–374.
Emirbayer, M., and A. Mische. 1998. What is Agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4): 962–1023.
Ergin, M., and Y. Karakaya. 2017. Between Neo-Ottomanism and Ottomania: Navigating State-Led and Popular Cultural Representations of the Past. New Perspectives on Turkey 56: 33–59.
Eyerman, R. 2004. Jeffrey Alexander and the Cultural Turn in Social Theory. Thesis Eleven 79 (1): 25–30.
Eyerman, R., and A. Jamison. 1991. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Fisher Onar, N. 2011. Constructing Turkey Inc.: The Discursive Anatomy of a Domestic and Foreign Policy Agenda. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 19 (4): 463–473.
Gauna, A.F. 2018. Populism, heroism, and revolution. Chávez’s cultural performances in Venezuela, 1999–2012. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 6 (4): 37–59.
Germani, G. 1978. Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Giesen, B., (2006). Performing the sacred: A Durkheimian perspective on the performative turn in the social sciences. In Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, eds. J.C. Alexander, B. Giesen, and J. Mast. Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. 2005. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction.
Goodwin, J., J.M. Jasper, and F. Poletta. 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gorski, P. 2017. Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump: A Critical Cultural Sociology. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (3): 338–354.
Gowan, T. 2010. Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Göçek, F.M. 2011. The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era, Library of Modern Middle East Studies; 103. New York: IBTauris, London.
Hell, J., and G. Steinmetz. 2017. A Period of ‘Wild and Fierce Fanaticism’: Populism, Theo-Political Militarism, and the Crisis of US Hegemony. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (3): 373–391.
Illouz, E. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Iğsız, A. 2015. Palimpsests of Multiculturalism and Museumization of Culture Greco-Turkish Population Exchange Museum as an Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Project. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (2): 324.
Ionescu, G., and E. Gellner. 1969. Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics. New York: Macmillan.
Jansen, R.S. 2011. Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism. Sociological Theory 29 (2): 75–96.
Kaltwasser, R., P.A. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, and P. Ostiguy. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kemper, T.D. 2011. Status, power and ritual interaction: a relational reading of Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins. Farnham: Ashgate Pub.
Kemper, T.D., and R. Collins. 1990. Dimensions of Microinteraction. American Journal of Sociology 96 (1): 32–68.
Kenny, M. 2017. Back to the Populist Future?: Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse. Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (3): 256–273.
Laclau, E. 1977. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: NLB.
Löwy, M. 2004. The Concept of Elective Affinity According to Max Weber. Archives de sciences sociales des religions 127 (3): 6.
Mast, J.L. 2017. Legitimacy Troubles and the Performance of Power in the 2016 US Presidential Election. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (3): 460–480.
McCormick, L. 2015. Performing Civility: International Competitions in Classical Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McQuarrie, M. 2017. The Revolt of the Rust Belt: Place and Politics in the Age of Anger 68 (1): 120–152.
Mills, A. 2010. Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Moffitt, B. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Müller, J.-W. 2016. What is Populism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Murinson, A. 2006. The Strategic Depth Doctrine of Turkish Foreign Policy. Middle Eastern Studies 42 (6): 945–964.
Niemeyer, K. 2014. Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Norton, M. 2014. Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System 1. American Journal of Sociology 119: 1537–1575.
Olick, J.K. 1999. Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory 17 (3): 333–348.
Ostiguy, P. 2017. Populism: A socio-cultural approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, eds. R. Kaltwasser, P.A. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, P. Ostiguy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Olick, J.K. 2016. The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.
Olick, J.K., and D. Levy. 1997. Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics. American Sociological Review 62 (6): 921–936.
Özyürek, E. 2006. Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey, Politics, History, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Reed, I.A. 2013. Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions. Sociological Theory 31: 193–218.
Schwartz, B. 1997. Collective Memory and History: How Abraham Lincoln Became a Symbol of Racial Equality. The Sociological Quarterly 38 (3): 469–496.
Selçuk, O. 2016. Strong Presidents and Weak Institutions: Populism in Turkey, Venezuela and Ecuador. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (4): 571–589.
Sewell, W.H. 1992. A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. American Journal of Sociology 98 (1): 1–29.
Taylor, V., Whittier, N. 2013. Analytical approaches to social movement culture: The culture of the women’s movement. In Social Movements and Culture, ed. H. Johnston. Routledge.
Tuğal, C. 2009. Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Tuğal, C. 2016. The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism. London, New York: Verso.
Turner, V.W. 1977. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, V.W. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York, NY: PAJ Publications.
Wagner-Pacifici, R. 1986. The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wagner-Pacifici, R. 1994. Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia Versus MOVE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wagner-Pacifici, R. 2000. Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, W. 2005. Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Pub.
White, J.B. 2013. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Acknowledgements
I thank Ron Aminzade, Alejandro Baer, Giancarlo Casale, Jack Delehanty, Penny Edgell, Teresa Gowan, Patricia Lorcin, Alex Manning, MJ Maynes, Victoria Piehowski, Joachim Savelsberg, Evan Stewart, Caty Taborda-Whitt, and J. Siguru Wahutu for their constructive feedback. I also thank AJCS Editor Jeffrey Alexander, Managing Editor Anne Marie Champagne, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and advice on earlier versions of the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Karakaya, Y. The conquest of hearts: the central role of Ottoman nostalgia within contemporary Turkish populism. Am J Cult Sociol 8, 125–157 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-018-0065-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-018-0065-y