Sèvres as Monument, Europe as Eternal Other: Challenges of Making Turks into Europeans Through the Pedagogy of the Early Turkish Republic.

From the birth of the Turkish Republic, elites emphasized education as a tool to construct a new identity for citizens, realigning the psychic geography of the country. The project to find a place for Turkey in 'Civilization,' mainly meaning Europe, has persisted down to the present. Alongside diplomatic and strategic efforts such as engagement with European organizations, there has continued an internal, cultural effort to nationalize and Europeanize citizens: a project torn between the local and particular, on the one hand, and the supposed/desired universal on the other. In the mode of Greg Starrett's anthropology of cultural power in Egypt, this paper will analyze Turkey's efforts by means of a careful reading of official textbooks through the lens of Nietzsche's concepts of the different uses of history. It will examine in particular the portrayal of Europe and Christianity on the one hand, and the Middle East and Islam on the other, in history textbooks from the 1930s through the 1950s, the period of nation-building in the immediate shadow of Sèvres. The paper will conclude by discussing the implications of this ambiguous project for the sustainability of Turkey's efforts to become more integrated into Europe. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]