Emine Ö. Evered

Sex and the Capital City: The Political Framing of Syphilis and Prostitution in Early Republican Ankara

In its initial years, the nascent Turkish republic established the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance in order to promote public health. Beyond simply facilitating its modernizing agenda for the emergent nation-state as it sought to define itself against an Ottoman past, this institution was also geared toward remedying a self-defined population crisis by prioritizing and confronting particular diseases and health conditions. One of the maladies of utmost concern was syphilis. Based upon an analysis of official primary sources, this article engages with how the developing republic distinguished and consequently politically constructed—or framed—the syphilis problem from the vantage of its new forward capital, Ankara. Integral to this project of confronting this sexually transmitted disease, public health officials projected upon both this ailment and their understanding of the suitable means for its treatment their own views of what constituted appropriate sexual practices and relations. In doing so, certain subgroups of the population, especially prostitutes, were particularized as targets for surveillance and policing through regimes of licensing and compulsory medical examinations. Stemming from the states framing of the disease—and its definition of appropriate sexual practices—this article also examines the subsequent legislative and public health education projects that followed.

From rakı to ayran: regulating the place and practice of drinking in Turkey

Despite religious proscriptions and practices, currents of alcohol never wholly ceased in Ottoman or Republican Turkey. Rather, Anatolian history overflows with examples of regulated consumption – and futile schemes for prohibition. Recently, prohibitionist discourse returned amid regulatory initiatives and in ways reifying secular-Islamist divides. Integral to permutations in policy implementation, even schemes of socio-spatial control arose that entail regimes of zoning and separation for trade and consumption. Accounting for narratives of regulationism and prohibitionism from a vantage acknowledging the republic’s past, we map today’s dynamic and ongoing shifts in Turkey’s regulatory and discursive engagements with the place and practice of drinking.

‘Protecting the national body’: regulating the practice and the place of prostitution in early republican Turkey

In the formative years of the Turkish Republic, the regulation of prostitution was geared toward biopolitical ends: safeguarding public health and eliminating syphilis. Viewing sexually transmitted diseases as a threat to the nations population and economy, the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance played a crucial role in the identification and definition of prostitution as a public health risk. Out of this medicalized framing of the disease and of prostitution, the republic adopted legislative remedies for both. Prostitution was legislatively regulated to achieve comprehensive surveillance and policing – sometimes amid debate between state interests promoting regulation and those concerned with matters of morality. A modernist nation-state, otherwise characterized as progressive with regard to the status of women, instituted a regulatory regime to define appropriate sexual practices and places and mandate the licensing and medical examination of some of its most marginalized female citizens.

“Not just eliminating the mosquito but draining the swamp”: A critical geopolitics of Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Turkey's approach to illicit drugs

In the 1970s, Turkey ceased to be a significant producer state of illicit drugs, but it continued to serve as a key route for the trade of drugs between East and West. Over the past decade, however, authorities identified two concerns beyond its continued transit state status. These reported problems entail both new modes of production and a rising incidence of drug abuse within the nation-state - particularly among its youth. Amid these developments, new law enforcement institutions emerged and acquired European sponsorship, leading to the establishment of TUBİM (the Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction). Coordinating with and reporting to the European Union agency EMCDDA (the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction), TUBİMs primary assigned duties entail the collection and analysis of data on drug abuse, trafficking, and prevention, the geographic identification of sites of concern (e.g. consumption, drug-related crimes, and peoples undergoing treatment), and the production of annual national reports. In this article, we examine the geopolitical origins of TUBİM as Turkeys central apparatus for confronting drug problems and its role as a vehicle for policy development, interpretation, and enforcement. In doing so, we emphasize the political and spatial dimensions inherent to the countrys institutional and policy-driven approaches to contend with drug-related problems, and we assess how this line of attack reveals particular ambiguities in mission when evaluated from scales at world regional, national, and local levels. In sum, we assess how Turkeys new institutional and legislative landscapes condition the states engagements with drug use, matters of users health, and policy implementation at local scales and amid ongoing political developments.

Rereading Ottoman Accounts of Wahhabism as Alternative Narratives: Ahmed Cevdet Paşa's Historical Survey of the Movement

Critical theory enables us to engage with historic power relations of colonizer and colonized, but the inclination to do so should not obfuscate the fact that many narratives that were once in opposition to the empires of the past are now the dominant—and often rewritten—narratives of particular authoritative nation-states. Amid ongoing efforts to author singular metanarratives of the history of the Wahhabi movement of Arabia, alternative histories from the Ottoman perspective are often overlooked or simply dismissed. While the result tends to be the sort of linear history that favors the modern nation-state of Saudi Arabia, it is also a product that omits not only the Ottoman imperial voice but also the many voices and collective memories of those who might be said to have been marginalized and/or victimized by the early Wahhabi movement as it attacked Shiites and others in Karbala and elsewhere. Focusing on the Ottoman histories of Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Evereds article summarizes and analyzes the first efforts to depict the movement in Ottoman historiography. In doing so, it also considers how imperial histories may be read today as alternative narratives in the modern nation-state era.

Therapeutic landscapes and nationalism: Turkey and the curative waters of Kemalism

ABSTRACT Hypothesised as a promising research concern for medical geographers, the therapeutic landscape concept promised to bridge divides between methods and approaches in humanistic, structural, and critical geographies. Despite early reference to ideology and the topic’s potential, engagements with political ideas and identity politics remain underdeveloped. Analysing a range of historical sources, this article examines the therapeutic landscapes of early republican Turkey from the vantage of its guiding philosophy and identity construct, Kemalism. In doing so, it reveals the politicised and ideological nature of many therapeutic landscapes and their place in one of the major projects of the modern era: nation-building.