Culture and Social Structure: Identity in Turkey on JSTOR

Culture and Social Structure: Identity in Turkey on JSTOR

Human Studies 27: 137-167, 2004.

2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

137

Culture and Social Structure: Identity in Turkey

M. AYTÜL KASAPOĞLU' AND MEHMET C. ECEVIT

Department of Sociology, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey

(E-mail: kasap@humanity.ankara.edu.tr); Department of Sociology, Middle East

Technical University, Ankara, Turkey (E-mail: ecevitm@metu.edu.tr)

Abstract. Using a historical and biographical perspective, this paper examines the structural elements and cultural signs of contemporary social events and problems in Turkey in order to understand their basic features. Hermeneutics is used in order to understand contemporary Turkey by way of its historical background and prominent biographies. Two basic epic texts were interpreted using Gadamarian hermeneutics with the help of key concepts such as gaza¹ and gaza cult. Semiotics is used to examine key concepts as binary opposites. Dialectics is used to understand these concepts as the unity of binary opposites coexisting at the same time and place. It is concluded that the contemporary cultural values and biographies explored are linked to their historical past and Islam seems to be more influential on hybrid identities than on ethnic status.

Introduction

Culture has become one of the most commonly employed concepts in the social sciences. Nevertheless, due to their greater emphasis on change, soci-ologists prefer to study social structure rather than culture, since the former exhibits a greater magnitude of change in a given time, while the latter changes at a relatively slower pace. Although conceptualized separately, culture and society in fact are in a process of reciprocal interrelationship and interaction. This is because no culture can exist without a society and/or vice versa. As Mukherjee (1998, pp. 41-47) specifies, cultural products or the culture itself are the very instruments that maintain a society. Thus, it could be said that a reciprocal and parallel interrelationship exists between cultural products and social structure.

Culture could also be defined as the background in our world-view, as well as our past and memory. The subject of study, thus, turns out to be a concern of sociology as far as the terms social and present are concerned. In this re-spect, one can talk about a shift from the past as cultural history to the present-day modern society that transposes the reality of the past into the present. As Mukherjee points out, what happens in the past constitutes a field of study for history while the present is the domain of sociology (1998, pp. 40-41).