Abstracts (İngilizce Özetler)

Learning from Weimar, thinking of Turkey
DİNÇER DEMİRKENT
Seeking to understand the crisis of republican constitutions in the first quarter of the twenty-first century through the lessons of the experiences of a hundred years ago, this study argues that the relationship between the state of emergency as a violation of limits and modern constitutionalism as an attempt to limit the state of emergency has reached a new impasse. In order to identify the new impasse, in which the state of emergency is transformed from the existence of crises justifying the state of emergency into a crisis itself, it is necessary to focus on the crisis atmosphere and the uses of the concept of crisis in the early twentieth century and, in particular, to analyze the transformations of the concept of crisis in its political context. In this respect, the constitutive debates on the suspension of the constitution and its limits are important for understanding the state of contemporary republics and for developing foresight for the future. In this context, Turkey’s current constitutional regime will be analyzed with reference to the Weimar experience.
Keywords: Weimar Constitution, state of emergency, crisis.

“What a powerful state I have”: Past, domination, and deception in the courthouses
ELİF CAN ÇALICI
When labeling something as “ideological”, it is possible to get help from many conceptual frameworks. The Frankfurt School’s conceptualization of ideology by drawing attention to the gap between appearance and reality gives us Critical Theory. For example, looking at the “past” with Benjamin shows that remembering can be both nostalgic and revolutionary. Looking at “domination” through Marcuse allows us not to be surprised that a number of contradictory cultural contents can easily coexist. Looking at “deception” through Löwenthal reminds us that agitation is the ability to reflect the tendencies of the target audience. Inspired by this framework, the paper asks what kind of meaning the architectural features referencing the Ottoman or Seljuk periods in the courthouses built in Turkey since the 2000s might have. Looking at the transformation of courthouses into palaces of justice through Critical Theory enables us to see that the path of courthouses does not pass through an idea of justice, but rather through the mediation of historicism, a form of emotional politics.
Keywords: Courthouses, emotional politics, historicism, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal.

The birth of the legal profession and bar associations: Antiquity-Medieval Age
HALUK İNANICI
Two views have emerged regarding the origins of the legal profession. The first suggests that the profession of law was born in Ancient Athens under the identity of the logographos, then took on the identity of advocatus in Ancient Rome, and through historical development in the Middle Ages and the Modern Era, evolved into its present form. The second view, however, rejects this continuity thesis, arguing that the legal profession emerged in the Middle Ages within the guild structure, parallel to the development of cities and long-distance trade. It further claims that with the development of the bourgeois class, which required a different legal and judicial system, the profession evolved into a self-employement with a modern identity, independent from state (guild) law, with a legal intermediary inserted between political power and the state. This article, which adopts the second view, examines the legal profession in parallel with the societal changes it arose from and aims to substantiate the view that a legal profession could not be spoken of in ancient times.
Keywords: Lawyer, logograph, advocatus, ancient era, middle ages, city, long-distance trade, modern era.

Ressentiment and masculinity: Politics of emotion and body in the novels of Peyami Safa
ESRA NUR AKBULAK
The male characters in Peyami Safa’s novels feel ressentiment towards the woman they desire but cannot get. The ressentiment towards the woman who are in search of autonomy and in the opposite position compared to the idealised women image of the male characters appears exactly like Nietzsche’s ressentiment mechanism which is connected to power relations and also appears with the same sorting as Nietzsche formulates. First, male characters make the woman they desire but cannot have the object of their ressentiment, and then they present their abandonment of this woman as a virtue. As a result, men try to devalue and discredit the women who cannot be dominated by men. At the end of the novel, it can be seen that these women are punished and face the bad end. The ressentiment in Peyami Safa’s novels expresses the male characters’ failures of desire, but this cannot be explained only by singular experience. That’s because women’s agency, which rejects the body and the gender politics and also objects to the patriarchal order, national boundaries and ideals, is the main operative force of the mentioned mechanism of ressentiment. The intense emotional feelings of the male characters are caused by the failure to determine and order the gender politics and their failure to make the woman dominated by the mentioned body and gender politics. This study focuses on the political background that determines and produces the gender ideology of ressentiment that appears in the male characters of the Peyami Safa novels called Bir Tereddüdün Romanı (1933), Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (1949) and Yalnızız (1950).
Keywords: Peyami Safa, ressentiment, masculinity, Bir Tereddüdün Romanı, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu, Yalnızız.

An elite and alternative Republican child in 1950s Istanbul: Guidance, responsibility, and fortitude in Sâmiha Ayverdi’s Sinan’s Diary
AHMED NURİ
Sinan’ın Günlüğü (Sinan’s Diary), composed of the daily notes that Sâmiha Ayverdi kept between 1953 and 1961 for her grandson Sinan Uluant, is a work where personal history intersects with the sociocultural, and even political, history of Turkey. This book, with its visual, historical, and personal content, can also be seen as an elite portrayal of a child and childhood in the 1950s. Sinan’s Diary therefore can be regarded as a semi-autobiographical work of Ayverdi, intertwined with the reflections of an accomplished writer and intellectual on her grandson Sinan’s childhood and the experience of being a child in the 1950s. This article examines Ayverdi’s Sinan’s Diary in the context of Ayverdi’s observations on her grandson, who was raised in a refined and intellectual environment within an elite family in Istanbul. It also delves into Ayverdi’s thoughts and discourses on children, childhood, and education within the sociocultural context of 1950s Turkey and her complex relationship with the Republican values. Additionally, this article discusses Ayverdi’s worldview, her perspectives on Turkishness, Islam, and events such as the 1960 coup, through the lens of Sinan’s childhood and the sociocultural environment in which he was raised.
Keywords: Sâmiha Ayverdi, Sinan’s Diary, Turkish modernity, childhood, Islam.

The group identity of Turkish migrants from Bulgaria: Education, skills, and gender
GÜL ÖZSAN
Based upon a research project encompassing 40 in-depth interviews conducted with people who migrated from Bulgaria to Istanbul during the 1978 and 1989 migration waves, this paper examines what meanings the discourses formed around the terms “well-educated” and “highly-skilled” actually take on, how these discourses are employed, and how they intertwine with the issue of gender. Scholarly studies on immigration to Turkey have thus far explored a great variety of aspects of the subject, yet they have often failed to problematize the construction of group identities. It is essential to view the construction of group identities with a lens as far removed as possible from the reductionist approaches of “naturalism” and “culturalism,” while treating it as part of power struggles. Group identities, including migrant group identities, do not have an absolute, unchanging form independent from historical processes. Researchers should be painstakingly careful to detect what characteristics, when, and how actors deploy in the creation of identity. This study aims to contribute to the literature by exploring the diverse layers of the particular visions of education, qualification, and “gender equality” within the context of the group identity of the Turkish migrants from Bulgaria. One of the main findings of the study is how interviewees underline the significance of (especially pre-school) education they were provided in Bulgaria. Another important point raised by the interviewees is the fact that nearly everyone had received a vocational/occupational education, enabling them to be equipped with the technical knowledge and skills. They tend to frame their education from pre-schools to vocational high schools and higher education as a key process whereby they have become “highly qualified individuals.” Scholars have long drawn attention to the fact that social, cultural, and economic transformation in Bulgaria since the 1940s gave rise to some significant changes in women’s life, particularly in their levels of education, employment, and status to such an extent that the case of the nation is often characterized as unique in this respect. Similarly, the participants in the research tend to regard their “high-quality” education, their vocational/occupational qualifications, and more importantly women’s “equal status” as the positive outcomes of the abovementioned societal transformations. The findings of the study demonstrate the degree of agency exercised by actors to be more significant than generally assumed as well as the structural underpinnings of the construction of group identity.
Keywords: Turkish migrants from Bulgaria, group identity, education, skills, gender.

Criticisims of pure Turkish in “our living Turkish” articles in Tercüman
ŞERİFE ŞİMŞEK
At the end of 1979, Tercüman published many articles by various writers in the page titled Our Living Turkish (Yaşayan Türkçemiz). In this article, the articles published in the Newspaper are analyzed holistically based on the compilation publication in which the articles were later collected and published under the same name. The underlying idea in these articles is that word elimination and new word production, which has become an institutionalized approach under the guidance of pure Turkishism (öz Türkçecilik), has some weaknesses and mistakes. The defense of the living language is based not only on linguistic criteria but also on the relation/lack of relation of purism with culture, history and tradition. The Turkish Language Institute (TDK) is often targeted on the grounds that it is often the main source of cultural habits or impositions that destroy the language. The structural flaws of purism, especially TDK, stem from academic illiteracy and incompetence. Aesthetic, psychological and moral motives, especially those related to history and the nationalist principle, play a reinforcing role that increases the legitimacy of the determination of scientific incompetence. The cultural political references, allusions and explanations that underpin the theses on Living Turkish constitute the focus and subject of this article.
Keywords: Living Turkishism, pure Turkishism, Tercüman, language, culture, politics.