Arzu Öztürkmen

Boğaziçi University · Department of History

Since the 1980s, the second wave of the feminist movement in Turkey contributed a great deal to the launching of important academic research on women’s history, established activist associations, and continued to be vocal and visible in different aspects of women’s issues. While academic research focused on a critical review of the women’s movement...

Ottoman-Turkish Interest in FolkloreFrom Turkish Hearths to People's Houses: The Making of “Turkish Folklore”Putting Folklore on Trial: The Revival of Turkism and its Impact on Folklore StudiesFolklore as Popular Culture: The Years Dominated by Folk DancingReferences

The purpose of this essay is to look in depth at a selected part of that corpus produced within the particularly chaotic political context of late medieval Asia Minor (Anatolia), where different languages, scripts, and genres competed with one another. In search of signs of orality and references to oral performances in written texts, the essay wil...

The study of women and history stands at the crossroad of a variety of directions. Writing the "history of women" in a particular country vis-à-vis their relation to state and society is one genre. Constructing the history of how women's studies emerged is another. There may also be feminist attempts to rewrite national historiographies in order to...

From a folkloristic point of view, memory is a repertoire, a potential knowledge that we store, only to perform when we choose. The selective process that defines what to tell is in folklore a function of the performance context. Why we choose to tell a particular story depends on who listens to it and how it is situated within the performative eve...

In 1946, Pertev Naili Boratav established the first Department of Folk Literature in Turkey. In 1947 he was charged with discouraging nationalism and promoting leftism in his classroom. His trial, which took place the next year, marked a turning point in the development of Turkish folklore studies. He had hoped that his academic unit could systemat...

In 1946, Pertev Naili Boratav established the first Department of Folk Literature in Turkey. In 1947 he was charged with discouraging nationalism and promoting leftism in his classroom. His trial, which took place the next year, marked a turning point in the development of Turkish folklore studies. He had hoped that his academic unit could systemat...

Anthony Shay's Choreographic Politics fills an important gap in the research of the history of folk dancing, a gap opened by the controversial status of “state folk dance ensembles,” whose performances have often been neglected or despised by folklorists and dance scholars. Staged folk dances have always charmed audiences with the energy they embed...

This essay looks at the works of Selma Selim Sırrı (b. 1906) and her father Selim Sırrı Tarcan (1874–1956), who wrote on dance in the 1920s, a period that marked the transition from the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey. The Ottoman Empire ruled across the Mediterranean world between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, collapsing after World War...

This article looks at the interaction between narratives and material culture in Tirebolu, a Turkish Black Sea town. The focus here is on developing a methodology, going from material culture to narrative and from material culture back to narrative, rather than on rewriting the history of ethnic relations in that part of Anatolia. In a context wher...

The childhood memories of most Turkish citizens are full of images of national holiday celebrations. Loudly recited heroic poems, enthusiastic folk dance performances, costume parades and school shows, anxious teachers, and involuntary laughter during the long, silent moments of commemoration-all are part of these images. A few years ago (in 1998),...

International Council of Traditional Music's Joint Meeting on Dance Iconography: Myth and Reality in Dance Pictures - Volume 28 Issue 2 - Arzu Öztürkmen

Scholars engaged in the study of nationalism have often stressed an analytical distinction between the rise of nationalism and the growth of nations since nationalism, by its very nature, has always preceded the nation (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). In the case of Turkey, the rise of nationalist movements rooted in Ot...

This study explores the changing nature of the relation between folklore and nationalism by examining three phases of Turkish folkloristics. The first phase begins in the mid-nineteenth century and ends in 1923 with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. It marks the Romantic Nationalist period in which Ottom...