September 25, 2018
All Day
Hagerty 306
NELC Department Lecture Series: The Near East and Beyond: New Discoveries and Approaches.
Title: Theorizing Contemporary Turkey with Village-Life Nostalgia
Speaker: NELC Doctoral Candidate – Nathan Young
Brief Description: Turkey is often understood according to state-sponsored narratives of development, urbanization and secularization. However, persistent affinities forsmall-scale lifeways challenge the primacy and affective range of these "official" discourses. Instances of village-life nostalgia present in the Turkish imaginary thus provide analytical depth regarding a variety of social and cultural phenomena, including the failures of “modernity.” Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork, this presentation uses nostalgia as a theoretical lens for thinking about contemporary Turkey.
