This website has been created as part of an ongoing oral history project conducted by Prof. Dr. Nazan Çiçek of Ankara University, Faculty of Political Sciences. The project is titled "Being a Child During the Childhood of the Republic in Turkey" and funded by TÜBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). The aim of the project is to understand the ways in which childhood was experienced by people who were born and raised in Turkey between the years of 1930 and 1945 during which the Turkish Republic as a newly founded nation state sought to consolidate itself through the introduction of western style institutions. The decision-makers of the new regime were the proponents of the modern notion of childhood that had gradually become predominant in the landscape of child-raising since the Victorian times in the Western world. This notion professed the sui generis qualities of children as a group and imagined a child-centered society whereby children were kept away from the hardships of the adult life being surrended with toys, games, sweets, affection and education. Under the influence of this notion the founding cadres of the Republic re-discovered the childhood as a potent vehicle that would not only represent the modern and Western orientation of the young State but also construct the citizens of the new regime mainly through school system.
In this context this project seeks to shed light on a vastly under-researched topography of the history of childhood in Turkey through a series of childhood narratives that have been collected via semi-structured in-depth oral history interviews. The study is informed by critical-social constructionist epistemology that conceives childhood not as a fixed biological stage in life cycle but rather as a fluent social and cultural construct that changes in time and reflects the values and worldviews of the society within which it emerges. The project asserts that while the body of academic work on the cultural history of childhood in Turkey during early republican era has recently expanded, there is hardly any scholarly work that focuses on the social history of children for the same time period. Social history of the child documents the meaning and values of the cosmos of childhood as experienced from the child’s perspective as well as reveals the historically specific parameters of being a child in a particular society at a certain time. Unlike cultural history of childhood that gravitates towards capturing and analyzing the image of the child as mirrored by the hegemonic and rival notions of childhood, child-centered social history approach tends to prioritize the narratives of children themselves over the gaze of the adult vis-à-vis children while chasing authentic testimonies voiced by real children. However, the most common challenge that scholars across the world face is to find written historical documents penned by actual children. The prevailing literature on the subject suggests scholars employ empathetic and de-constructivist methods in order to endow the ‘invisible’ child in the conventional archival documents with some agency. Another tool that is frequently mobilized is oral history which refers to a particular type of research method, theoretical inquiry, historiography, data collecting and interviewing practices and performances. The research indicates that during the oral history interviews interlocutors usually lucidly remember and elaborately portray the incidents from their childhood days that left an imprint on their psyche. Although oral history narratives are characteristically retrospective they nevertheless are considered invaluable in particular cases like Turkey whereby it is almost impossible to obtain any written archival material that conveys the genuine voices of children from the past. Childhood as a social construct which is plastic and prone to transformation in times of historical ruptures is also usually re-discovered throughout the nation-building processes.
In this sense the decision-makers of the republic used childhood as a metaphor to emphasize the productive potential and vigour of the newly established Turkish nation-state and utilized it in furthering their nationalist-modernist agenda. They allegorically likened the newborn republican regime to children and discursively benefited from that analogy. In tandem with the zeitgeist of the era, Western romanticized modern notion of childhood that had been on the rise since the Victorian times not only came to be regarded as a yardstick of being civilized by the founding elite of the Turkish Republic but also had profound impact on their health and education policies. Despite the momentous role the new sense of childhood played in the self-identification of the Turkish nation and state there has been an enormous lacuna as to how the actual members of the first generations of the Republic perceived and experienced childhood. This project which has been recording a series of oral history interviews with people from diverse socio-cultural and economic backgrounds who were born between 1930-1945 in different cities of Turkey has set out to fill that deficiency.
Since October 2022 around 50 interviews have been conducted and recorded in Ankara and İzmir by Prof. Çiçek. Almost all interviews were also recorded with video cameras. On the day of writing the interviews still continue with the goal of reaching the number 75 through a couple of visits to Istanbul. The birth place of the interlocutors appears dramatically diverse and in many cases the locations they spent their childhood differs from their birth place. The oldest interlocutor so far is 93-year-old primary school graduate and current dairy store owner Eşref Taşkın who spent his whole life in Bergama, İzmir followed by 92-year- old retired professor of urbanization Ruşen Keleş who was born and raised in Trabzon.
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