Traveling Theories: The History of Anthropology in Turkey (1850-1950)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Hande A. Birkalan-Gedik, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424559400

The project offers a critical history of anthropology in Turkey, focusing on the period between 1850-1950. It argues that the anthropology in Turkey is eclectic: it combines evolutionist, nationalist, and modernist paradigms and forms a complex non-Western anthropological tradition. The project takes anthropology in Turkey as a short-hand for folklore, anthropology, and ethnology, forming a disciplinary landscape, whose intricacies were shaped by national agendas, specific intellectual settings and political environments. The eclecticism of anthropology in Turkey, among other things, owes to social and cultural shifts in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican Period and to the emergent political and cultural elites of these times.We argue that so far Turkish anthropologists have remained largely invisible within in the framework of the disciplinary history of social cultural anthropology. The Janus-face invisibility is partly due to the dominance of Western theory and praxis that neglected “other” anthropologies. Epistemologically, Turkey was considered only as an “anthropological field,” where ethnographic knowledge can be obtained and theorized; but not as a site where Turkish anthropologists are producing anthropological knowledge. Scholars in anthropology in Turkey contributed to this invisibility, failing to recognize the uniqueness of the disciplinary developments and to acknowledge its intricacies in a positive way. The project adopts the analytical perspective of the “world anthropologies” approach, which against the backdrop of postcolonial theory, underscores unequal power conditions that have been shaping the uneven development of anthropologies in different national contexts. Thereby, our project is able to assert the autonomy of research and teaching traditions of anthropology in Turkey. However, the project also posits that Turkish anthropology flourished by way of “traveling theory,” (Said 1982), negotiating several European ethnological traditions since the 1850s and creatively modifying them. Thereby, the project decenters the larger anthropological historiography by bringing a distinct focus to a dynamic anthropological tradition. Five signature cases enable the project to work on transitions and discontinuities of political and disciplinary moments as well as the shifting usages and meanings of disciplinary concepts, such as race, folk, and nation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Gisela Welz, Ph.D.