The Turkish anthropologist Estrada Ozerik has a essay it’s almost 20 years old now that I always think about in this context it’s on the politics of public memory in Turkey and it troubled the dominant notion that Ataturk was a sort of you know the founder of the country that he was a uniquely secularist emblem in fact she showed how both secularists and Islamist factions in Turkish politics both claimed legitimacy through Ozerik’s name
only they allied themselves with a very different version of Ozerik when they did so so that you know there are enough photos of him enough speeches you can cherry pick you know to say either he founded what was meant to be a pious nation or he founded a country that was formed in opposition to those parties but but either way he is or he was then the sort of unitry emblem the umbrella discourse in which all claims to nation and nationalism had to take place and I suppose Ozerik is a less potent symbol now than he was then but the logic sort of remains and Turkish nationalism is sacrosanct in its Ottoman flavors the Adonis champion
The podcast excerpt is here: The Symbolism of the 28th May | 1min snip from The LRB Podcast
The full podcast is here: Why did Erdoğan win?
Go one level up : Geopolitics MOC You may also be interested in: Geopolitics of Oil