How do farmers explain their engagement with commodity production and the market? This article describes the universe of cotton production and exchange in a Turkish village. Building on the scholarship concerning the anthropology of markets, I offer an account of the power relations concerning exchange in the countryside whereby a cluster of agents interact in multiple ways. Describing the microcosm of cotton production and exchange as it is perceived by farmers in the largest cotton-producing village of the Söke Plain in western Turkey, the essay documents how farmers mobilize resources, interact with agricultural workers, find credit, and finally sell their product. Farmers see the market and their fields as interconnected geographies of struggle between various actors. In contrast to the cotton field where they perceive themselves as active and formative agents in the rural political economic universe, cotton growers understand the market as a location of encounter dominated by traders and controlled by various mercantile tools that weaken their agency. The market is neither only a place where the price is set, nor merely a location of commodity exchange. It is a power field where farmers encounter the “production” of price as relatively passive agents of trade.

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), Turkey celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic, giving us an opportunity to rethink these remembrances as both collective and personal experiences, with all their political and social implications. As in any other country with a state-controlled educational system, the structure of these celebrations had been well established and consolidated over the years, having “an accumulative effect upon successive generations” (Ben-Amos 1994, p. 54). The formalism and the overemphasized nationalism of the celebrations, repeated over and over for years, eventually created a sense of alienation. Nevertheless, when the Islamist Welfare Party assumed power over the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, the revival of the national holiday celebrations was remarkable. Thus began a new approach to celebrating national holidays, with rock concerts, extensive TV coverage, and public interviews. The seventh-fifth anniversary celebrations further revived the national holidays, with contributions from state as well as nongovernmental organizations. After the Welfare Party's assumption of power, the celebration of national holidays symbolized support for the Republic's reforms and secularism, in opposition to rising Islamic fundamentalism.

The past to which a society refers in search of clues for self-identification and confirmation for its hopes and aspirations is not an objective reality. It is a myth that can be defined as “a (preferably narrative) reference to the past in order to shed light from there on present and future” (Assmann 1997, p. 78). However, the function of myth is not generally to legitimize the present order or to continue it into the future. It may also work as a counter-principle of the present, contrasting it with a better past and betraying the experience of a fundamental deficiency in present society. Assmann thus distinguishes several functions of the myth collectively termed mythomotoric: It can either serve the present (präsentisch, fundierend) or criticize it (kontrapräsentisch, in its extreme forms revolutionary) (Assmann 1997, pp. 80-86).

In the history of Ottoman institutions, their roots in a “timeless Islamic culture and mentality” have been emphasized to such an extent that Ottoman state institutions appear as perfectly defined and applied ideals and myths rather than real entities. The myth of Ottoman guilds controlling all of the empires economic activities is one of these. As court records, which show the details of the guilds' functioning, as well as other relevant records have been examined more often after the 1980s, a new image of institutional change has emerged, and the myth of continuity has been challenged. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, numerous sources demonstrate transformations in various local guilds; however, for the first half of the sixteenth century, from which scarcer records have survived, it is more difficult to disprove the myth of the guilds' static nature. In this study, I analyze the court records of Rodosçuk in order to explicate the type of changes that occurred in craft organizations between 1546 and 1552. The textual analysis of the designation records of bakers and other documents concerning the crafts help to bring to light modifications to the conditions of membership of the bakers' guild by 1551, challenging the assumed myth of the monopoly over membership, or the professional restrictions on crafts.

For governments in power during periods of war, securing the food supply of the urban areas and the military has been one of the most important economic problems. The expansion of the armed forces and the necessity to feed them better inevitably leads to increases in the demand for foodstuffs. In the more developed economies, the more mechanized and more flexible agricultural sectors have often been capable of responding to increased demand. The pressures of an emergency situation, however, have a much more severe impact on the agrarian structures in an underdeveloped economy, often leading to decreases in the levels of production. Under these circumstances, the food supply policies of the governments will have far-reaching implications for different strata of the peasantry and for the urban classes.

Liberalization programs are aimed at the removal of the restrictions placed upon the working of the market mechanism. These restrictions may be broadly classified under two categories. The first category of restrictions is aimed at the control of domestic markets, particularly financial markets. The underlying idea behind liberalization programs is that the removal of such restrictions will have a positive impact on the efficiency of domestic markets. The second group of restrictions are of an indirect nature and are aimed at the protection of the domestic economy from the effects of developments in international markets. Liberalization programs advocate the removal of the restrictions that prevent the integration of these markets. The removal of these restrictions is expected to increase competition, and enhance efficiency in resource allocation.

This paper discusses the consequences of EU migration control policies on irregular and transit migration in Turkey by focusing on African migrants. Our argument is that the EU's concern with transit migration through the Mediterranean and hence its externalization and securitization of migration control have contributed to Turkey's becoming a waiting room for irregular and transit migrants. Based on the findings of a survey with African migrants in İstanbul and analysis of secondary sources, we show that many African migrants get stranded in Turkey. In the absence of an institutional setup for migration management and the prevalence of a security approach, migrants are faced with humanitarian problems and human rights violations.

This study focuses on the mindset of a group of post-graduate cadets and academic cadres of the Turkish Military Academy and attempts to reveal, explore, and interpret this mindset regarding the normative structure of security sector reform, as well as the cultural and historical background of the Turkish context. While formal structures can be changed rather rapidly, changes in the underlying interpretive frameworks require more time and have no guarantee of institutionalization. Such changes entail the transformation of prevailing norms, perceptions, conceptions, and patterns of thought that underpin the role(s) of the military. If security sector reform aims to transform military culture and the civilian-military relationships in specific contexts, the traditional military mindset also must undergo a substantial transformation. How can we understand such a transformation? To answer this question, the methodological background of the study derives from linguistic-oriented phenomenology as a means for revealing and interpreting the mindset of post-graduate cadets and military academic cadres. The results of the research indicate that there are three dominant meaning clusters in the mindset of the sampled group, involving the parameters of paternalism, old security understanding, suspicion towards the civilian realm, and an understanding of state-society relationships that mark the pre-security sector reform era. The prevalence of these understandings might pose serious challenges to the internalization of the normative aspects of security sector reform and to the compliance to reforms.

The decay paradigm is part of the historiography of empires. Many scholars have also interpreted the demise of the Ottoman Empire in terms of decay. In contrast, the aim of this commentary is to offer a reconstruction of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish republic in terms of structural change and economic development. Thus, I argue that the Ottoman case would be better understood if viewed within the context of a more dynamic process of change versus inertia, rather than one of decay.