During the early republican period, architectural interventions in rural Turkey took the form of social engineering as part of the state's modernization and nationalization policies. Özge Sezer demonstrates how the state's particular programs had a powerful effect on rural life in the countryside. She examines the regime's goals and strategies for controlling the rural people through development projects and demographic shaping to create a strong Turkish identity and a loyal citizenry. The book outlines the implementation of new rural settlements, particularly following the 1934 Settlement Law, with a geographic focus on two cities - Izmir and Elazig - with varied socio-economic and ethnic standing in the state program.

Essays presented are adapted papers read at the 7th Nordic New Testament Conference in Stavanger, Norway, June 14-18, 2003.

This book engages critically with mainstream accounts of ‘Anatolian Tigers’ in contemporary Turkey. Based on her fieldwork in Çorum, Deniz explores the dynamics of medium-size businesses with a dual optic of political economy and moral economy. She demonstrates that the formation of the entrepreneurial stratum is a multifaceted process and zooms into a range of workplaces to show the entanglements of market and non-market dynamics in everyday life. This innovative work sheds original light on the role of kinship, religion and social values in shaping the everyday politics of labour. Ceren Deniz taught 'Economic Anthropology' at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2020-2021.

From 1924 to 1946 the Republic of Turkey was in effect ruled as an authoritarian single-party regime. During these years the state embarked upon an extensive reform programme of modernization and nation-building. The Kemalist reform movement has been extensively studied in its institutional dimensions as a state project of top-down reform; however, Nation-Building in Modern Turkey offers a fresh look at these formative years of the Turkish state. It studies modernist nation-building and state-society relations from a novel perspective through the study of the People's House, an institution aiming at the propagation of the modernist reforms to Turkey's urban population in the 1930s and 1940s. Using previously unpublished archival material and provincial publications, this work offers an alternative understanding of social change and state-society relations. In shifting the focus from the state as the fulcrum of change to the population's participation in the process, this book offers a 'peripheral' perspective of social change as it fashions a view from provincial towns. Focusing on everyday people, it explores their participation in and experience of the new habits and mixed-gender socialization practices the modernist state was introducing in the People's Houses, such as theatre, concerts, sports, dancing balls and village excursions. By analysing hundreds of petitions and complaint letters from the provinces, Alexandros Lamprou is able to examine the multiple ways ordinary people experienced, negotiated and resisted the reforms and to consider the ramifi cations of this process for the shaping of social and collective identities. Nation-Building in Modern Turkey will be essential reading for not only students and scholars of nation-building, socio-cultural change and state society-relations in Turkey, but also of the history, sociology, political science and anthropology of Turkey and the modern Middle East.