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Büyükokutan, Barış

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Barış

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Büyükokutan

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Büyükokutan, Barış

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    Bound together: the secularization of Turkey's literary fields and the western promise of freedom
    (University of Michigan Press, 2021) Department of Sociology; Büyükokutan, Barış; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 126139
    Bound Together takes a new look at twentieth-century Turkey, asking what it will take for Turkish women and men to regain their lost freedoms, and what the Turkish case means for the prospects of freedom and democracy elsewhere. Contrasting the country’s field of poetry, where secularization was the joint work of pious and nonpious people, with that of the novel, this book inquires into the nature of western-nonwestern difference. ​Turkey’s poets were more fortunate than its novelists for two reasons. Poets were slightly better at developing the idea of the autonomy of art from politics. While piety was a marker of political identity everywhere, poets were better able than novelists to bracket political differences when assessing their peers as the country was bitterly polarized politically and as the century wore on. Second, and more important, poets of all stripes were more connected to each other than were novelists. Their greater ability to find and keep one another in coffeehouses and literary journals made it less likely for prospective cross-aisle partnerships to remain untested propositions.
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    Elitist by default? interaction dynamics and the inclusiveness of secularization in Turkish literary milieus
    (Univ Chicago Press, 2018) Department of Sociology; Büyükokutan, Barış; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 126139
    Nonwestern secularization has the reputation of an elitist project, but poetry milieus in 20th-century Turkey experienced secularization in a relatively inclusive manner. Using comparative-historical, network, and statistical methods, this article compares poetry milieus to novelistic milieus, whose secularization closely resembles the Turkish/Islamic stereotype. This exercise identifies a previously unnoticed role that interaction dynamics play in shaping secularization patterns. As such, western-nonwestern difference as regards secularization is neither fiction nor fate: it involves structures of interaction that may appear anywhere. These findings suggest a more Simmelian direction for future scholarship, broadly affirming the ascendant culturalist orientation in the sociology of religion while revising some of its particular claims. They also call for a civic republican turn: while tempering past scholarship’s vilification of the state, they suggest that a vibrant civil society is the more vital component of relatively inclusive secularization.
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    Elites in Turkey: Murray Milner’s political sociology versus the new ulemate
    (Boğaziçi Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, 2017) Department of Sociology; Büyükokutan, Barış; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 126139
    This article features an extensive review of Murray Milner, Jr.’s Elites (2015). After summarizing its argument, locating it in debates in political sociology, and highlighting why it matters, I apply the conceptual framework advanced in the book to Turkey. I find that while Milner’s framework captures the Turkish case quite well, it cannot account for generous state support of some status elites. I offer a tentative solution to this puzzle by distinguishing between political elites’ short- and long-term interests. This shows that Milner’s framework should be developed further to better account for multiple and competing interests. /Öz: Bu makale, Murray Milner, Jr.’ın Elites (2015) isimli kitabının geniş bir değerlendirmesini sunmaktadır. Milner’ın eserini özetleyip siyaset sosyolojisinde durduğu yeri tartıştıktan ve kitabın önemini açıkladıktan sonra, kitapta geliştirilen kavramsal çerçeveyi Türkiye örneğine uygulamaktadır. Milner’ın çerçevesi Türkiye örneğini oldukça başarıyla açıklasa da devletin bazı statü seçkinlerine verdiği cömert destek bu çerçeveye uymamaktadır. Makale, bu durumu siyasi seçkinlerin uzun dönemli ve kısa dönemli çıkarları arasında bir ayrım yaparak açıklamayı önermektedir. Sonuç olarak Milner’ın kavramsal çerçevesinde farklı ve yarışan çıkarların daha iyi kuramsallaştırılması çerçevenin geleceği için uygun olacaktır.
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    More than subversion: four strategies for the dominated
    (Springer, 2018) Şaşmaz, Hale; Department of Sociology; Büyükokutan, Barış; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 126139
    This article asks what strategies are available to dominated actors in fields of cultural production. Using archival and biographical materials on Ottoman/Turkish women intellectuals, we show that they effectively used, depending on their social and cultural capital and their past practices, at least four strategies. Apart from the well-theorized strategy of subversion, they could also deploy acquiescence, collaboration, and defiance. These four strategies, we argue, constitute a two-dimensional space defined by loyalty vs. resistance on one hand and the overtness vs. covertness of loyalty or resistance on the other. While much of this space is best understood in terms of reciprocal social exchange, the assumptions of exchange break down in the case of overt resistance, showing that strategy goes beyond negotiation and that the understanding of power as always-already implicated with resistance has limits.
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    Democratic problem-solving: dialogues in social epistemology
    (Sage Publications Inc, 2018) Department of Sociology; Büyükokutan, Barış; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 126139
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    Sekülerleşme ve devlet: “Mardin tezi”, edebiyat alanları ve toplumsal sermaye
    (İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2018) Department of Sociology; Büyükokutan, Barış; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 126139
    This Journal article concerns the thesis that state intervention into secularization processes in Turkey vitiates those processes by making them more elitist. By demonstrating that a state action that had nothing to do with secularization pushed the secularization processes of two similar fields of cultural production (poetry and the novel) in opposite directions by changing their composition of human capital in the 19405, it questions a key assumption of the aforementioned thesis-i.e. that it is possible for the state not to intervene in secularization. It thus calls for a secularization theory in which the state ceases to be the key independent variable-a theory that takes the perspective of civil society and of social capital instead. / Türkiye’de sekülerleşme süreçlerine devletin müdahil olmasının o süreçleri seçkinci bir yola sokarak kalıcılaşmalarını önlediği tezi sıklıkla dile getirilir. 1940’lardaki bir devlet ediminin iki kültürel üretim alanını (şiir ve roman) nasıl etkilediğini ele alan bu makale, sekülerleşmeyle ilişkisi olmayan bu edimin birbirine çok benzeyen bu iki alanın insan sermayesini farklı şekillerde değiştirerek sekülerleşme süreçlerini farklı yönlere soktuğunu ortaya koymaktadır. Dolayısıyla, anılan tezin temel bir dayanağı olan devletin sekülerleşme süreçlerinden elini çekmesinin mümkün olduğu varsayımını tartışmaya açmakta ve devletin “karar değişkeni” olmaktan çıktığı, sivil toplum ve toplumsal sermaye perspektifli bir sekülerleşme kuramının öneminin altını çizmektedir.