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                  21                 Consumer Culture, Islam



                                     and the Politics of Lifestyle:

                                     Fashion for Veiling in

                                     Contemporary Turkey


                                     Baris¸ Kiliçba y and
                                     Mutlu Binark





                  Introduction: the Turkish modernization project and the
                  construction of a collective identity


                  Since the late 1980s, Turkey’s economic structure has been reformed in parallel
                  with the integration process into the global market economy. The adoption of
                  the principles of a market economy has influenced individuals and their ways
                  of self-definition within everyday life. Simultaneously, as a consequence of a
                  homogenized national culture and national identity – two projects of Kemalist
                  ideology, which the nation-state has been based on since the establishment of the
                  Turkish Republic in 1923 – the problem of the representation of ‘the others’ has
                  come about. Two tensions have arisen from discussions on the representation of
                  the marginalized ‘others’. The necessity to define the centre and the periphery
                  has stimulated the first tension, while the second tension is a result of seeking
                  control mechanisms to strengthen the nation-state ideology, which conceives
                  secularism as one of its founding principles. Turkish secularism is not an equiv-
                  alent of the Anglo-Saxon conceptualization of secularism, which includes ‘the
                  separation of the church and the state’. In Turkey, secularism is rather inter-
                  preted as the regulation and the administration of religious practices and insti-
                  tutions by the nation-state and its agent, the General Directorate of Religious
                  Affairs. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, this interpretation of secu-
                  larism has been called in the Turkish Constitution laicism, following the French
                  model, but also differing from it (Göle, 1997: 64–5). We refer to the Turkish
                  Republic’s interpretation of secularism as ‘didactic secularism’, and define it as
                  moralistic and pedagogical, and also as a controlling and teaching mechanism,
                  which conceives secularism as a western lifestyle.
                    We also argue that Turkish modernization, conceptualized as a project of
                  social engineering, resulted both in the homogenization and the absorption of
                  different identities within the monocultural identity. Only the use of the Turkish
                  language was allowed in public institutions, and there was to be only one single

                  Source: EJC (2002), vol. 17, no. 4: 495–511.
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