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Strengthening the Family through Television: Islamic Broadcasting, Secularism, and the Politics of Responsibility in Turkey
- Anthropological Quarterly
- George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
- Volume 90, Number 3, Summer 2017
- pp. 675-714
- 10.1353/anq.2017.0040
- Article
- Additional Information
ABSTRACT:
Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at "strengthening the family." Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the "moral fabric of the family" and devaluation of "family values" in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. The anthropology of Islamic media has mostly tended to emphasize the alternative or oppositional character of such media in terms of how they circulate and promote discourses, practices, and ethical sensibilities that are incommensurate with secular norms and national state power. Such an approach is not an adequate framework to characterize Islamic television in Turkey, where Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals' self-ascribed mission to "strengthen the family" emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members.