GTOT awards 2018
for Outstanding Theses and Dissertations in the Fields of Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Laudations for dissertations, Bamberg, 19 September 2018
presented by the commission’s chairwoman Catharina Dufft, member of GTOT board
I am very happy to present two PhD theses, which each are so excellent that we decided to honor them both, even though just one award was planned. As you will see, they are not only exceptionally good, but also demonstrate once more how manifold and dynamic our field of Turkish Studies is indeed.
Keeping on following the alphabetic order of the family names, let me start with
Dr Barbara Henning and her PhD thesis on
Narratives of the History of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family in Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Continuities and Changes
Submitted at Otto-Friedrich-Universität-Bamberg in 2017 and published at University of Bamberg Press, in Bamberger Orientstudien this year.
Barbara Henning has quite an impressive background so far; in short, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Islamic Studies and Social Anthropology from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and obtained a master’s degree in Turkish Studies from the Department for Oriental Studies here at Bamberg University in 2012. Her studies and her career were accompanied by scholarly stays at Université Sorbonne Paris IV in 2010/11, University of Washington in 2012/13, and at the Arabic Language Institute Fez, Marocco in 2017. Also, she was consultant to the Federal Foreign Office in 2017/18, before she took her current position at the Department of Turkology here in Bamberg on a project called “Concepts of Boundaries and the Construction of Sociocultural Difference in (Trans)Ottoman Contexts: Circulation of Knowledge, Conceptual Changes and Transfers, 16th-19th Centuries”. The project is funded by DFG, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
This said, let us come to the work itself, which we would like to praise here tonight.
Barbara Henning’s dissertation titled Narratives of the History of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani Family in Imperial and Post-Imperial Contexts: Continuities and Changes was written under the direction of Christoph Herzog. With more than 750 pages it comes close to an opus magnum – but let me assure you that it reads as enthralling as a really good novel, highly interesting, illuminating, original and, keeping in mind that it is of course not a novel but a scholarly piece of work, just excellent in all of these terms, too.
The thesis falls into eight parts; and that it is so voluminous simply owes to the sujet it deals with, which is the reconstruction of the life stories of the members of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani family from late Ottoman times until mid 20th century.
Barbara Henning approaches the family members’ life stories by analyzing ego-documents and other written sources from the family’s surroundings, some of which are better known and some are less known or not known at all. In addition, she looks into changing narratives about family history and network structures, family members operated in.
She argues “that the study of the history of the Bedirhani family, while not necessarily representative for late Ottoman and post-imperial processes of identity formation as such, can still serve as a prism to understand the larger context of transition and transformation between imperial and post-imperial life worlds and the challenges which accompanied these processes.”
This is remarkable by itself, since the family so far was scholarly mainly referred to with regards to their impact on Kurdish nationalist history.
The Bedirhani family was in fact an influential Kurdish dynasty located in the region of Botan (today’s Şırnak). Following the disempowerment of emir Bedirhan in 1847, the family was sent into exile, before – though with some interruptions – taken over into civil service and thus becoming part of the Ottoman bureaucratic and intellectual elite.
What makes Barbara Henning’s work so special is, that she significantly widens the perspective, leaving the angle predominantly relevant for Kurdish nationalist historiography behind (without denying its relevance), and turning to a more complex, multilayered point of view.
With this view she shows how different members of one, large family, men and women, perceived radical changes of their time – primarily of course the challenges of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, founded in 1923 – and how they each positioned themselves within these changes.
She concludes that members of the Bedirhani family emerged as “skilled code-switchers”, and as “able to tailor their demands to different discourses and audiences, depending on whether they were negotiating with colonial powers, with their Kurdish tribal clients and followers or with fellow members of the former imperial elites.”
Thus, she perceives “moments of both astonishing continuity and of profound changes in the family’s history” – and it is mainly the former, the continuities, that so far haven’t been seen or shown.
It is impossible to fully praise this outstanding, praiseworthy dissertation in short here; it reads like a large panorama and at the same time sensibilises for the process in which narratives can be constructed, cemented and again deconstructed, while not claiming to present final answers.
So let me finish in recommending to read Barbara Henning’s book to all of you, since, as I said in the beginning, it is as much a pleasure to dive into her findings, as it is an highly interesting, innovative, light-shedding and in parts surprising journey back in time and space.
Let me now come to our second prize winner, which is
Dr Charlotte Joppien and her PhD thesis on
Culture of Everyday Politics – Politics of Everyday Culture. An Inquiry into Municipal Politics in Konya and Eskişehir (Turkey) submitted at Macquarie University Sydney, Australia in 2016 and published as Municipal Politics in Turkey. Local Government and Party Organisation at Routledge in 2018.
Charlotte Joppien is a political anthropologist; she is also managing co-director at Türkei Europa Zentrum at Hamburg University. Charlotte Joppien has published broadly, among other publications you will find a book on AKP ideology, published in 2011 based on her master thesis in Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin. She has also edited a book on ten years AKP in 2012 and co-edited Volume one of the proceedings of the Workshop Türkeiforschung in 2014. Her work focuses on Turkish domestic and municipal politics, as well as gender, political culture, political mobilisation, political Islam and cultural policy in Turkey and the MENA region. She regularly lectures on Turkish politics to both academic and non-academic audiences.
The research on Charlotte Joppien’s PhD thesis was supported by an International Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship, a TÜBİTAK research scholarship and a scholarship by Orient Institut Istanbul.
Charlotte Joppien’s thesis compares municipal politics in two Turkish cities, Konya and Eskişehir, which geographically are not very distant from one another. This choice is quite relevant, since Eskişehir has a reputation as being a “modern city” whose municipal governance has been under the control of the center-left, pro-secular CHP (Republican People’s Party). Konya, on the other hand, has been one of the prominent bastions of religious conservatism, where the pro-Islamist parties have scored decisive victories against their rivals in the national and municipal elections.
Consequently, a comparative study of these two cities offers significant new perspectives and insights.
Contrary to other works, this research does not focus solely on the political Islamic version of municipalism but provides a comparative and more general analysis.
It is very original, as local politics is an understudied field. Although there is now a large and growing literature on Turkish politics, local government and party organisation have been quite neglected topics.
Charlotte Joppien’s book gives a comprehensive vision of recent municipalism and its developments in contemporary Turkey. It convincingly shows the importance of the local level in order to understand political struggle and the symbolical and ideological embeddedness of municipal practices. In dealing with everyday municipal politics in practice, it also shows its hidden sides, especially clientelism, personalization and informality.
The thesis is based on a comprehensive empirical field research. Charlotte has lived for an extended period in the two cities and immersed herself on the lives of the people. She shows an excellent grasp of research methods, mixing extensive interviews and observation with a thorough use of published sources.
The different chapters discuss the roles of the mayors and local elites, and the influence of the national party leadership over local politics, as well as various areas of municipal activity such as welfare provision, urban planning, and cultural policies.
Charlotte Joppien argues that municipal politics have not acted as the nursery of democratisation, as often assumed. She also disputes the idea that civil society organisations in Turkey are weak, but points out that they are generally attached to particular political parties, and that at the local level their influence frequently depends on their closeness to the mayor. Equally, the mayors themselves depend on the support of the party’s national leadership and tend to be nominated by it – an effective illustration of the highly centralised political system.
Besides, the AKP’s local organizations are more successful than the CHP’s in adapting to the local context.
Charlotte Joppien suggests that this stems largely from the flexibility of the AKP’s ideology. She argues that municipalities in Turkey do not only provide services to their inhabitants but they also constantly seek to reshape the local social and political conditions in accordance with their ideological orientations and particular visions of what cities should be like. In this respect, what she defines as the practice of “conservative municipalism” under the AKP in Konya and the CHP’s “new municipalism” in Eskişehir, represent two different ideologically-based approaches that have strongly influenced the culture of politics at the local level.
In conclusion, this really is an original contribution that breaks new ground in terms of both the scope of its research and its findings, and – just as the work introduced to you before – is more than worth reading.
Thank you!