Disciplining Religious Bodies, Forming Secular Bodies: Atatürk, Modern Power and Secular Affect

This work is an investigation into secular and religious male embodiment in Turkey. The explorations in this work are interdisciplinary showing how the European body became coded and formed onto the archetype of a universal secular male body. In particular, I show how the secular male body formed during the rupture between empire (Ottoman) and nation-state (Turkey). I focus in particular how the body of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1938) became the way in which the secular body was disciplined, taught and performed. I explore the enigmatic indeterminacy of the secular male body by showing how the secular functions as a separating power, partitioning men into public (secular) and private (religious) persons.

I try and capture how secular life was coherently and discursively constructed in the early Turkish Republic through brute force, humiliation and acquiescence. Thinking with Wittgenstein and Foucault, I do not theorize the secular, nor do I employ special critical theoretical strategies such as archeology or deconstruction to unsettle the secular. Such theoretical strategies may themselves be an expression of secular power. Instead, I follow how secular power works in the utterances, institutions (horizontal power in ordinary life as well as vertical state power) and bodily practices of subjects through what anthropologists influenced by the seminal work of Talal Asad call a "discursive-embodied" tradition. Here, I comment on several Kemalist sources of inspiration such as the journal La Turquie Kemaliste, Atatürk's Anıtkabir Mausoleum, bodies memorialized in Kemalist museums and early Republican newspapers. I go on to examine ethnographically how a contemporary Nekşibendi sufi community in Istanbul practice embodiment and view secular life. For them and many other of my interlocutors, the partitioning of men into public and private persons constituted a separation of a "form" from its "life", what was called to me a "hypocrite" body (munafiq). The munafiq body does not so easily live well with views of embodiment that coalesce "inner" and "outer" life in sufism, thus reifying in some sufi circles in Istanbul the problem of religious and secular embodiment in Turkey today.