Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic by Özge Sezer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic by Özge Sezer
• Heinrich Hartmann (bio)

Forming the Modern Turkish Village: Nation Building and Modernization in Rural Turkey during the Early Republic By Özge Sezer. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2023. Pp. 212.

Few elements of the history of the Turkish Republic have received as much attention in recent years as the topic of rural and village modernization. This is because village culture held a prominent place in the identity politics of the young Turkish state. Turkey is undoubtedly part of a broader picture here, and Özge Sezer's book Forming the Modern Turkish Village does justice to the renaissance of village culture as more than [End Page 395] a national phenomenon. She describes how it was anchored in Western sociological thought and practices of internal colonization, before demonstrating how the Kemalist regime built new Turkish identity politics on the idea of "going towards Anatolian villages" (p. 37 and following). Tools of this republican practice included the popular taking of "village surveys" and the so-called "homeland excursions," meant to give urban intellectuals a new sense for the cultural cradle of Turkishness. One of the particularities in this Turkish mode of rural nation building was that it was not about showcasing the cultural diversity of the countryside. Instead, intellectuals tried to rebuild a homogenous, Turkified version of superior village culture, as opposed to the ethnically diverse Ottoman rural demographic realities. As such, the intellectual project of defining the village can never be detached from other, much more violent attempts of "Turkifying" the Anatolian population, especially the Armenian genocide, but also the forceful resettlement of Greek, Arabic, and Kurdish populations.

The biggest asset of this book is that Sezer systematically links resettlement politics with the well-known elements of village discourse in republican Turkey (she neglects however the works of Lamprou, Yilmaz, Adalet, and others on similar topics). Her particular emphasis on the program of model villages, which she develops primarily in the second part of her book, allows her to engage with a fairly technical and architectural discourse of engineering rural habitations. Sezer convincingly shows "the state's housing agenda, concentrated on rural planning within urbanist concepts" (p. 126), where villages and suburban neighborhoods differed by size but not by the guiding principles of their organization. Both addressed questions of the ideal housing facilities at affordable rates for the rural poor, including the provision of public services as well as hygienic and sanitation facilities, but also the question of how to "rationalize" a Turkic habitation culture, where the setup of rooms should influence social behavior and privilege the stem family. The book gains in intensity in the later parts of Sezer's analysis, reaching its climax with the analysis of two village housing projects in the Aegean Izmir region and in Eastern Anatolian Elazigǧ. Sezer analyzes the architectural plans, expert witnesses, legislation, and press coverage to reconstruct the way the Kemalist government instrumentalized these housing projects in the rural context. She shows to what extent the new settlements were catalyzed by the 1924 village law and the 1934 settlement law. These villages gave a new home both to the incoming Turkish population expelled from the Balkans and the resettled Kurdish population. However, she also shows that the basic shape of the villages was not altered fundamentally from one region to the other.

We also read about the materiality of these building projects, where the use of new materials (mostly concrete) competed with the use of allegedly vernacular materials (e.g., adobe). It would have been interesting to learn more about this part of the story, as it opens a possible avenue for a more social history of living in these planned villages. What did it mean and [End Page 396] how did it feel to live in these houses? It is only in the rather rudimentary concluding remarks that the author addresses the experience of people who lived in "Atatürk's villages." Sezer shows convincingly that model villages for incoming migrant populations were mostly built from scratch, without reviving older habitations of the former Christian or Kurdish populations. However, a focus on the daily...