Faces of the state: secularism and public life in Turkey

254 MESA Bulletin 38/2 (2004) The author's sympathies and concerns are—and he is clear on this point—with the Nadoris. He is uncomfortable with many of the changes wrought by cultural and economic globalization. Some of his most interesting insights are precisely in the realm of the role of Nador's and Nadoris' inexorable integration into foreign commodity circuits. That said, with the exception of his fascinating discussion of "theater at the border" (pp. 126-30), the role of the Moroccan state is largely ignored. Given that McMurray was working in the Rif, an area whose people were despised by Hassan II, during a period in which the beginnings of what ultimately became a political opening were barely visible, state coercion should have figured more centrally into a number of aspects of the analysis. To cite but one example, McMurray is dismayed at the sorry state of Nadoris' knowledge of Anoual, the famous 1921 battle against the Spanish, attributing it, in one of his least convincing passages, to globalization's overwhelming of the local with images, products and narratives from outside. He does not consider in any serious way the role that deliberate state coercion or re/suppression may have played in this—or in any of the other interactions he had with Moroccans. He does note in the conclusions the fact that Mohammed VI did make a trip to the Rif, hence opening a new chapter in Makhzen-Rifi relations, but the role of the long years of marginalization and repression in shaping the migration, the nature of the expatriates' relationship with Morocco, or the smuggling is not seriously considered. That said, this is an engaging book. I look forward to using it in an upper division or graduate class on international migration. It would also be a wonderful text for discussing field research methods and write-up strategies. Laurie A. Brand University of Southern California Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, by YAEL NAVARO-YASHIN. Princeton University Press, 2002. 247 pages. Index. US$55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 691-08844-6 The increased visibility and influence of Islam in Turkey has spurred a flurry of new books and articles. Navaro-Yashin's book is one of the latest additions to this burgeoning literature. An anthropologist by training, the author addresses a distinctly political question, namely, the role of the state in shaping Turkey's political culture and public life, particularly with respect to secularist ideologies, institutions, and lifestyles. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, Faces of the State examines "the production of the political in the public life of Turkey in the 1990s" (p. 2). The book covers some of the same ground that is a staple of recent studies on the social, political, and cultural causes and ramifications of the ascendancy of Islam in Turkey. These include such topics as the question of MESA Bulletin 38/2 (2004) 255 Turkey's identity, the headscarf or the veiling issue, and the growing commercialization of Islamist women's clothing as manifested through Islamist fashion shows. However, Faces of the State also offers new and original perspectives on several important issues regarding the secularist/Islamist divide in Turkey and the actions undertaken by the state to preserve the Republic's secular foundations. As the author rightly observes, the recent literature on the conflict between secularists and Islamists has largely tended to focus on the latter. Navaro-Yashin instead chooses to "problematize secularism itself since she believes that secularism represents "the most dominant discourse that forms the basis of public life in Turkey" (p. 7). The author's thesis, based on her observations of public responses in Istanbul to the electoral successes of the Welfare Party in the mid1990s, is that the behavior and ideas of the Islamists are largely shaped by the images, fears, and anxieties that the secularists project onto them. Navaro-Yashin maintains that some Islamists act in accordance with these images, thus confirming what she refers to as "secularist fantasies." Others, however, refuse to be "objectified" by the secularists and prefer, instead, to shape their lives and practices in their own terms and beliefs. In her attempt to analyze the responses of the state to the perceived challenge posed by the Islamists, the author adopts a similarly original perspective. Eschewing the traditional historical and institutional approaches, Navaro-Yashin instead uses the conceptual lenses of recent post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories. The book's second main thesis is that the extreme exaltation of the state through rituals, ceremonies, and symbols has reinforced what she refers to as "state fantasies" and "state fetishism" in Turkey. She contends that this has made the state an omnipotent force in every aspect of Turkish society and political life. Navaro-Yashin suggests that the extreme exaltation of the state has also fuelled widespread cynicism "which encapsulates both state fetishism and everyday public critiques of the state" (p. 159). Navaro-Yashin's book is a bold and ambitious effort, which offers interesting and original perspectives on a range of issues concerning Turkey's experience in maintaining the secular foundations of the Republic. The study can be simultaneously read as a radical critique of the policies pursued by the state in Turkey regarding the issue of secularism and, in broader terms, as a new theoretical effort to analyze the actions of a state through the use of psychoanalytic approaches. Written in the now all too familiar style and terminology of post-modernist social science scholarship, Faces of the State is divided into two parts, the first analyzing the cultural politics of the secular/Islamist divide and questions of identity, the second focusing on rituals and practices of the Turkish state. Despite a number of overarching themes, the study reads more like a series of essays than a tightly structured book—an 256 MESA Bulletin 38/2 (2004) impression that is strengthened by the absence of a concluding chapter that might have pulled together the main findings of the study. Although it makes for interesting and lively reading, the book has its share of questionable arguments and judgments. Can the concerns of the secularists be simply described as "fantasies" when, until very recently, many leading Islamist politicians and intellectuals openly and repeatedly declared their intention to replace the country's secular institutions with ones based on religious principles? Are manifestations of nationalism and patriotism in Turkey any more extreme than elsewhere in the world, including the U.S. and most of Europe? Do Turks feel more cynical about the actions of their state than, say, Greeks or Italians? The book also contains a number of statements, which are either factually or conceptually incorrect. For example, the author claims (p. 41) that the Welfare Party secured an electoral majority in the 1990s whereas it actually won slightly over one-fifth of the national vote, or only a plurality, in the 1995 elections. Similarly, Navaro-Yashin's characterization of the Turkish political system as a "totalitarian democracy" (p. 163) introduces a hitherto unknown concept to the political science literature—one that makes little sense either conceptually or empirically. The author's claim that segregation of men and women is not essential to Islamism and that it is something that the secularists project onto the Islamists (p. 41) flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary from most of the predominantly Islamic countries in the world. Although it comes from a prestigious university press, the book has a surprising number of inconsistencies in translation and referencing. For example, Ozgurluk ve Dayani$ma Partisi (ODP) receives two different translations as the "Freedom and Democracy Party" (p. 170) and "Freedom and Solidarity Party" (p. 178); Yiiksek Ogretim Kurulu (YOK) is translated as the "Institute of Higher Education" (p. 192) whereas it should be the "Higher Education Council," a book by Cenk Koray which is mentioned in the text is nowhere to be found in the bibliography; the proper listing of the editors of Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey should be Bozdogan and Kasaba (and not Kasaba and Bozdogan); Metin Heper is the editor (not the sole author) of Politics in the Third Turkish Republic, etc. Despite these weaknesses, critical and demanding readers will find much to debate and discuss in Faces of the State. Sabri Sayan Institute of Turkish Studies & Georgetown University