This paper examines the “social development” practices carried out within the framework of the Southeast Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi or GAP) in Turkey in the 1990s. In its initial phase, GAP was a state-run regional development project in southeast Anatolia which consisted of massive infrastructural investments. But beginning in the late 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, the scope of GAP expanded to include a set of social projects. The emergence and transformation of the notion of social development within GAP constitute the major focus of this study.

In the late nineteenth century, the religion, nationality, and citizenship of abandoned children became a contested terrain over which much effort was spent by local authorities, foreign missionaries, religious and civil leaders of the communities, municipalities, the police force, and the central state. Relying on Ottoman and French archival sources, together with periodicals and contemporary literature, this paper discerns the elevated political significance of abandoned children within such realms as demographic politics, politics of conversion, and national identities. The state's new preoccupation of properly registering new-born infants, in line with the new Regulation on Population Registration created controversy over the nationality and citizenship of abandoned children. As new administrative reforms challenged the customary jurisdiction and the autonomy of the communal authorities and as the power of the governmental bureaus, police departments, the municipality, and the foundling unit of the Dârü'l-aceze increased, non-Muslim leadership resisted these practices: they both submitted official appeals to the government and opened or strengthened their own foundling facilities. Furthermore, the child gathering efforts of Catholic missionaries created an atmosphere of self-defense on the part of the communities, as they felt threatened with losing prospective members of their newly conceived and idealized imagined communities. In this context, abandoned children attracted interest hardly due to pity, or disinterested charity. Institutional solutions, policies, and strategies of diverse and competing actors were closely related to the emergence of a modernized governmental structure and attempts to strengthen communities as its mirror image.

The advent of democracy in Turkey has been far from tranquil. Since the transition to multiparty politics in 1946, democracy has been interrupted by three military interventions (in 1960, 1971, and 1980)- unless we count as the fourth intervention the more recent incident, euphemistically labeled “the 28 February Process,” in which the military played a crucial role in forcing the resignation of the governing coalition led by the Islamist-oriented Welfare Party (WP). Not only has Turkish democracy followed a cyclical pattern in which breakdowns and transitions succeeded each other, the degree or the quality of democracy that was in place never ceased to attract bitter criticism.

This article presents a case study of the influence of Muslim and Christian logicians on medieval Jewish law. The case in question is why it is a punishable offense for Jews to eat mammals that do not have either sign of purity—that is, neither have split hooves nor chew their cud—and the article examines the answers given by three medieval Jewish sages: Rashi, Maimonides, and Naḥmanides. The Written Law of the Torah explicitly allows the consumption of mammals, such as cattle, with both signs of purity. It also explicitly prohibits the eating of mammals, such as camels or pigs, with one sign but not the other. It does not, however, appear to explicitly prohibit the consumption of mammals, such as horses, with neither sign. Using a fortiori logic, Rashi derives a punishable prohibition against eating horses from the prohibition against eating camels and pigs. Maimonides ascribes this prohibition to the Oral Law of the Talmud. Naḥmanides, by contrast, attributes it directly to the Written Law without relying on either a fortiori logic or the Oral Law. This article argues that this solution was available to Naḥmanides because he adopted inclusive disjunction from Christian logicians, but it was not available to Maimonides because he adopted exclusive disjunction from Muslim logicians. The choice between inclusive and exclusive disjunction is shown to continue to be of importance in modern American law.

The purpose of the research on which the present article is based was to collect and analyze socio-economic and cultural data on seasonal and permanent migration within the South-eastern Anatolian Project (GAP) Region and between that region and the Metropolitan areas of Turkey. The absence of social scientific knowledge on intra- and interregional migration in this particular context has already been emphasized in the GAP Master Plan Study Report (SPO, 1989). In addition, the region is interesting for social scientists not only because of radical transformations taking place due to the construction of large dams and irrigation projects but also because of the ethnic identity questions that are raised by some Kurdish speaking groups in the region. The present article presents the framework of the research, carried out in 1993, and some of its findings. The findings reported here do not shed direct light on the so-called “ethnic question” or “Kurdish question”; but they help in understanding the transformation and continuity of socio-economic and cultural structures that shape social and political action in the region.

The Commercial Convention of 1838 has often been used as a landmark delimiting the end of Ottoman economic insulation and the beginning of massive influence by foreign powers. Quite recently, Ottoman historians and economists have documented the enormous importance of the Free Trade Treaties, showing that “whereas British manufacturers began to expand their markets in the Ottoman Empire before 1838, the opening of Ottoman primary products to trade with Britain accelerated only after the signing of the Free Trade Treaties” (Pamuk, 1987, p. 29). For the empire as a whole, it seems probable that the Treaties influenced the patterns of international trade.

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 event. From an archeological-historical perspective, however, what we choose to preserve in our landscapes, archives and museums reflects choices made through historical-political processes. Within this framework, for an ethnographer in search of memory, there is an ongoing dialogue between narratives on what people remember and the material cultural context in which these narratives are produced. This essay is an attempt at writing an ethnography of memory in a small Black Sea town, Tirebolu/Tripoli, whose material culture and demographic structure radically changed since the 1900s through the effects of war, harsh climate, forces of modernization, and nationalism. To sum up very briefly, communities in Tirebolu—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—have been displaced at different times, temporarily or permanently since the First World War.