GEZI PARK AS SPONTANEOUS DEVELOPMENT: RE-IMAGINING THE TURKISH PUBLIC
Article Sidebar
Published
Dec 22, 2022
Main Article Content
Abstract
The subject of this paper is the Gezi Park movement that took place in the summer of 2013 in Turkey. Despite starting out as a peaceful protest to stop the demolition of Gezi Park for the purposes of the “Taksim Pedestrianization Project”, the gatherings quickly became one of the biggest social movements to take place in Turkish history. People from all ages, classes and social groups came together in support, after government attempts to suppress the protest through brutal police actions garnered widespread criticism. Although the movement did not generate any immediate or drastic political change, it did leave a lasting effect on the Turkish public, especially because of the immense solidarity and social cohesion demonstrated by the participants. Hence, in this paper, I will argue that Gezi Park could be treated as an example of ‘spontaneous development’, an informal process through which the citizens of Turkey re-imagined the Turkish public and possibilities of modes of life within the state. Instrumental in this process was the long-lasting stratification of the Turkish public between the laicist, Kemalist ‘modernists’ and the Islamic, Erdoğan ‘conservatives’. I argue that in the context of a historical and current repressive and silencing state, Turkish people constructed a Gezi community in direct opposition, in which social hierarchies were disbanded and freedom of speech was maintained as one of the highest values. By taking anthropological and developmental studies of the informal/formal sector dichotomy and their interrelation, I apply these understandings to the human development sector. Thus, I argue that informal modes of organization and maintenance of social cohesion can be treated as informal development, directly affecting people’s imaginations and actions, as well as a potential source of knowledge and inspiration for formal-sector development. In this sense, I employ Amartya Sen’s freedom-approach to development to demonstrate that freedom of expression played an instrumental role in the construction of this imagining. Further, I argue that despite theoretical limitations in social theory, ethnographic research and anthropological studies can be useful in the application of informal sector knowledge to formal development strategies.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Article Details
How to Cite
Starova Tahir, Eda. 2022. “GEZI PARK AS SPONTANEOUS DEVELOPMENT: RE-IMAGINING THE TURKISH PUBLIC”. EthnoAnthropoZoom/ЕтноАнтропоЗум 22 (December), 11-57. https://doi.org/10.37620/EAZ2222011st.
Issue
Section
Articles / Статии
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Известување за авторски права
Авторите ги задржуваат авторските права и го даваат правото на првото објавување на списанието кое истовремено е лиценцирано Creative Commons Attribution License што на другите им овозможува да го споделат делото со потврда за авторството на делото и првичното објавување во ова списание.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References
Abbas, Tahir. 2013. Political Culture and National Identity in Conceptualising the Gezi Park Movement. Insight Turkey, vol. 15, no. 4: 19-27.
Abbas, Tahir and Yigit, Ismail Hakki. 2014. Scenes from Gezi Park: Localisation, Nationalism and Globalisation in Turkey, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, vol. 19, issue 1: 61-76.
Andersen, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Aran, Meltam A. 2013. How Turkey’s AK Party lost the median voter: A Social and Distributional Analysis of AKP policies under Erdoğan. Development Analytics Discussion Note No. 1301.
Arendt, Hannah. 2004. From On Violence. In Violence in war and peace, P. Bourgois, N. Scheper-Hughes (ed). Malden: Blackwell.
Batuman, Elif. 2013. The view from the stands: life among Istanbul’s soccer fanatics. Soccer & Society vol. 13, no. 5-6: 687-700.
Bakıner, Onur. 2014. Can the “Spirit of Gezi” Transform Progressive Politics in Turkey?. In The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi U. Özkırımlı (ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
Baran, Zeyno. 2010. Torn country: Turkey between secularism and Islamism. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University.
Butler, Judith. 2014. Foreword. In The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi U. Özkırımlı (ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Diken, Bülent. 2014. The emancipated city: notes on Gezi Revolts, Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 18, no. 4: 315-328.
Easterly, William. 2013. The Tyranny of Experts. Basic Books: New York.
Engle Merry, Sally. 2003. “Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way)”. Political and Legal Anthropology Review vol. 26, issue 1: 55-76.
Erhart, Itir. 2013. Biopolitics and the Gezi Protests, International Conference on the Modern Development of Humanities and Social Science: 301-303.
Erhart, Itir. 2014. United in Protest: From ‘Living and Dying with Our Colours’ to ‘Let All the Colours of the World Unite’, History of Sport vol. 31, issue 14: 1724-1738.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Farro, Antimo L., and Demirhisar, Deniz Günce. 2014. The Gezi Park movement: a Turkish experience of the twenty-first-century collective movements. International Review of Sociology, vol. 24, issue 1: 176-189.
Ferguson, James. and Gupta, Akhil. Spatializing States: Toward and Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality. In Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics J. Inda (ed). Malden: Blackwell.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Social Capital and Development: The Coming Agenda. SAIS Review of International Affairs vol. 22, no. 1: 23-37.
Gambetti, Zeynep. 2014. Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body. The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi. U. Özkırımlı (ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Germen, Murat. 2015. Istanbul Gezi Park Resistance Movement as Public Engagement in the Making of Place. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences vol. 184: 13-21.
Gough, Ian. 2004. Welfare regimes in development contexts: a global and regional analysis. In Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guha-Kashnobis, Basudeb, Kanbur, Ravi and Ostrom, Elinor. 2006. Beyond formality and informality. In Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hart, Keith. 2008. Between Bureaucracy and the People: A Political History of Informality. Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies. Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. The Use of Knowledge in Society, The American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4: 519-530.
PostVirtual. 2013. Historical Atlas of Gezi Park (available on-line: https://postvirtual.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/historical-atlas-of-gezi-park, accessed 22 August 2015).
Human Rights Watch, 2015. World Report 2015: Turkey (available on-line: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/turkey, accessed 22 August 2015).
Keesing, Roger M. 1987. Anthropology as an Interpretive Quest (and Comments and Reply), Current Anthropology vol. 28, no. 2: 161-176.
Kuper, Adam. 1996. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
Leach, Edmund. 2006. Introduction to Political Systems of Highland Burma. In Anthropology in Theory, Issues in Epistemology, H. L. Moore and T. Sanders (ed). Oxford: Blackwell.
Marglin, Frédérique Apffel and Marglin, Stephen A. 1990. Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Midgley, James. and Tang, Kwong-leung. 2001. “Introduction: social policy, economic growth and developmental welfare”. International Journal of Social Welfare, vol. 10, issue 4: 244-252.
Menkhaus, Ken. 2007. Governance without Government in Somalia Spoilers, State Building, and the Politics of Coping, International Security vol. 31, no. 3: 74-106.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Örs, Ilay Romain. 2014. Genie in the bottle: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, and the realignment of democracy and space in Turkey. Philosophy and Social Criticism.
Öztürkmen, Arzu. 2014. The Park, the Penguin, and the Gas: Performance in Progress in Gezi Park. TDR: The Drama Review vol. 58, no. 3: 39-68.
Rodrik, Dani. 2007. One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic growth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sawyer, Amos. 2006. Social Capital, Survival Strategies, and Their Potential for Post-Conflict Governance in Liberia. In Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil. 2006. Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization. In The Anthropology of the State: a Reader, A. Sharma and A. Gupta (ed). Blackwell Pub.
Sindzingre, Alice. 2006. The Relevance of the Concepts of Formality and Informality: A Theoretical Appraisal. In Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ul Haq, M. 1995. Reflections on Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Varnali, K. and V. Gorgulu. 2015. A social influence perspective on expressive political participation in Twitter: the case of #OccupyGezi. Information, Communication & Society, vol. 18, no. 1.
Walton, Jeremy F. 2013. Confessional pluralism and the civil society effect: Liberal mediations of Islam and secularism in contemporary Turkey. American Ethnologist vol. 40, issue 1: 182-200.
Weber, Max. 2006. Bureaucracy. In The Anthropology of the State: a Reader A. Sharma and A. Gupta. Blackwell Pub.
Worldbank.org, 2015. Turkey Overview (available on-line: http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/turkey/overview, accessed 22 August 2015).
Wright Mills, Charles and Gerth, Hans H. 1991. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Routledge: London.
Yıldırım, Umut. 2013. Editorial—an Uprising on the Verge of Comparison. Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online (available on-line: http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/410-editorial-an-uprising-on-the-verge-of-comparison, accessed 7 August, 2015.
Zengin, Aslı. 2013. What is Queer about Gezi?. Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, (available on-line http://production.culanth.org/fieldsights/407-what-is-queer-about-gezi. accessed 11 August, 2015)
Abbas, Tahir and Yigit, Ismail Hakki. 2014. Scenes from Gezi Park: Localisation, Nationalism and Globalisation in Turkey, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, vol. 19, issue 1: 61-76.
Andersen, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Aran, Meltam A. 2013. How Turkey’s AK Party lost the median voter: A Social and Distributional Analysis of AKP policies under Erdoğan. Development Analytics Discussion Note No. 1301.
Arendt, Hannah. 2004. From On Violence. In Violence in war and peace, P. Bourgois, N. Scheper-Hughes (ed). Malden: Blackwell.
Batuman, Elif. 2013. The view from the stands: life among Istanbul’s soccer fanatics. Soccer & Society vol. 13, no. 5-6: 687-700.
Bakıner, Onur. 2014. Can the “Spirit of Gezi” Transform Progressive Politics in Turkey?. In The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi U. Özkırımlı (ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
Baran, Zeyno. 2010. Torn country: Turkey between secularism and Islamism. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University.
Butler, Judith. 2014. Foreword. In The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi U. Özkırımlı (ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Diken, Bülent. 2014. The emancipated city: notes on Gezi Revolts, Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 18, no. 4: 315-328.
Easterly, William. 2013. The Tyranny of Experts. Basic Books: New York.
Engle Merry, Sally. 2003. “Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way)”. Political and Legal Anthropology Review vol. 26, issue 1: 55-76.
Erhart, Itir. 2013. Biopolitics and the Gezi Protests, International Conference on the Modern Development of Humanities and Social Science: 301-303.
Erhart, Itir. 2014. United in Protest: From ‘Living and Dying with Our Colours’ to ‘Let All the Colours of the World Unite’, History of Sport vol. 31, issue 14: 1724-1738.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Farro, Antimo L., and Demirhisar, Deniz Günce. 2014. The Gezi Park movement: a Turkish experience of the twenty-first-century collective movements. International Review of Sociology, vol. 24, issue 1: 176-189.
Ferguson, James. and Gupta, Akhil. Spatializing States: Toward and Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality. In Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics J. Inda (ed). Malden: Blackwell.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Social Capital and Development: The Coming Agenda. SAIS Review of International Affairs vol. 22, no. 1: 23-37.
Gambetti, Zeynep. 2014. Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body. The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi. U. Özkırımlı (ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Germen, Murat. 2015. Istanbul Gezi Park Resistance Movement as Public Engagement in the Making of Place. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences vol. 184: 13-21.
Gough, Ian. 2004. Welfare regimes in development contexts: a global and regional analysis. In Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guha-Kashnobis, Basudeb, Kanbur, Ravi and Ostrom, Elinor. 2006. Beyond formality and informality. In Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hart, Keith. 2008. Between Bureaucracy and the People: A Political History of Informality. Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies. Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. The Use of Knowledge in Society, The American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4: 519-530.
PostVirtual. 2013. Historical Atlas of Gezi Park (available on-line: https://postvirtual.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/historical-atlas-of-gezi-park, accessed 22 August 2015).
Human Rights Watch, 2015. World Report 2015: Turkey (available on-line: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/turkey, accessed 22 August 2015).
Keesing, Roger M. 1987. Anthropology as an Interpretive Quest (and Comments and Reply), Current Anthropology vol. 28, no. 2: 161-176.
Kuper, Adam. 1996. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
Leach, Edmund. 2006. Introduction to Political Systems of Highland Burma. In Anthropology in Theory, Issues in Epistemology, H. L. Moore and T. Sanders (ed). Oxford: Blackwell.
Marglin, Frédérique Apffel and Marglin, Stephen A. 1990. Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Midgley, James. and Tang, Kwong-leung. 2001. “Introduction: social policy, economic growth and developmental welfare”. International Journal of Social Welfare, vol. 10, issue 4: 244-252.
Menkhaus, Ken. 2007. Governance without Government in Somalia Spoilers, State Building, and the Politics of Coping, International Security vol. 31, no. 3: 74-106.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Örs, Ilay Romain. 2014. Genie in the bottle: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, and the realignment of democracy and space in Turkey. Philosophy and Social Criticism.
Öztürkmen, Arzu. 2014. The Park, the Penguin, and the Gas: Performance in Progress in Gezi Park. TDR: The Drama Review vol. 58, no. 3: 39-68.
Rodrik, Dani. 2007. One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic growth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sawyer, Amos. 2006. Social Capital, Survival Strategies, and Their Potential for Post-Conflict Governance in Liberia. In Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil. 2006. Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization. In The Anthropology of the State: a Reader, A. Sharma and A. Gupta (ed). Blackwell Pub.
Sindzingre, Alice. 2006. The Relevance of the Concepts of Formality and Informality: A Theoretical Appraisal. In Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, Guha-Kashnobis, Kanbur, Ostrom (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ul Haq, M. 1995. Reflections on Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Varnali, K. and V. Gorgulu. 2015. A social influence perspective on expressive political participation in Twitter: the case of #OccupyGezi. Information, Communication & Society, vol. 18, no. 1.
Walton, Jeremy F. 2013. Confessional pluralism and the civil society effect: Liberal mediations of Islam and secularism in contemporary Turkey. American Ethnologist vol. 40, issue 1: 182-200.
Weber, Max. 2006. Bureaucracy. In The Anthropology of the State: a Reader A. Sharma and A. Gupta. Blackwell Pub.
Worldbank.org, 2015. Turkey Overview (available on-line: http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/turkey/overview, accessed 22 August 2015).
Wright Mills, Charles and Gerth, Hans H. 1991. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Routledge: London.
Yıldırım, Umut. 2013. Editorial—an Uprising on the Verge of Comparison. Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online (available on-line: http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/410-editorial-an-uprising-on-the-verge-of-comparison, accessed 7 August, 2015.
Zengin, Aslı. 2013. What is Queer about Gezi?. Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, (available on-line http://production.culanth.org/fieldsights/407-what-is-queer-about-gezi. accessed 11 August, 2015)