Jenny White, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University to speak.

Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks

Monday, April 15, 2013

4:30-6:00pm, 001 Rockefeller Center  

To all appearances, Turkey is caught in a fierce battle between secularist and Muslim sectors of the population, with one side accusing the other of heavy-handed imposition of it’s own values and practices.  What is clear is that since the 1980s a new “self-consciously” Muslim elite has mounted a powerful political and economic challenges to the traditional secular elite. In doing so, it has developed an alternative unorthodox definition of the nation based on a nostalgic revival of Turkey’s Ottoman past, pushing aside the Republican model. The outcome has been revolutionary in its transformation of Turkish society and politics, but this transformation does not map neatly onto our expectations of what “secular” and “Muslim” mean.

Sponsored by the Dickey Center, Rockefeller Center, and the Departments of Anthropology, and Asian and Middle East Studies