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Uses and Abuses of “State and Civil Society” in Contemporary Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Yael Navaro-Yashin
Yael Navaro-Yashin*
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Social Anthropology, The University of Edinburgh
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Extract

The categories of “state” and “civil society” have too often been used as oppositional terms in the social sciences and in public discourse. This article aims to problematize the concepts of “state” and “civil society” when perceived as separate and distinct entities in the discourses of social scientists as well as of members of contemporary social movements in Turkey. Rather than readily using state and society as analytical categories referring to essential domains of sociality, the purpose is to transform these very categories into objects of ethnographic study. There has been a proliferation of discourse on “the state” and “the civil society” in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. This article emerges out of an observation of the peculiar coalescence of social scientific and public usages of these terms in this period. It aims to radically relativize and to historically contextualize these terms through a close ethnographic study of the various political domains in which they have been discursively employed.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 18 , Spring 1998 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1998

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