Ethnographic authority and public culture in Turkey in the 1950s

Abstract

The article is a historical study of ethnographic practices in non-academic fields of culture. It examines the practices and artefacts of cultural production in post-war Turkey and reveals that in the long 1950s popular as well as elite culture lived through an 'ethnographic moment' in which ethnographic authority was elevated to be the dominant criterion for the evaluation of good work. During this ethnographic moment, artists, writers and journalists turned their professional practices into ethnographic fieldwork, forged distinction based on their ethnographic methodology, and excluded armchair practitioners as amateurs. By focusing on four main fields - folklore, painting, cinema, and photojournalism - in post-war Turkey, this study disentangles the history of ethnographic practices from the narrower scope of the history of anthropology/sociology and situates it in an overarching account of cultural encounters with the others. In this period, any form of representation of the others was expected to be based on intersubjective intimacy, first-hand experience, and local knowledge. Modern ethnographic methodology was the zeitgeist of public culture.