A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (review)

The culturalist approach to the study of nationalism has not yet been accompanied by equal emphasis on the social transformations that accompany the cultural ones. Indeed, scholars of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish republic, among whom European aspirations raise resistance against ideas of colonialism (whether post-, semi-, or anti-), have yet to take full advantage of the culturalist studies of nationalism published since Anderson.¹ In that light, Meeker's work, which combines anthropology and history to study the Black Sea district of Of and its relations with the governments of Istanbul and later Ankara, is most welcome. By showing how leading families maintained their influence for more than two centuries, Meeker shows that "what might well be called counterrevolutionary practices and beliefs ... nonetheless served as the hidden devices of the nationalist revolution itself" (xi).

Based on fieldwork starting in 1965, Meeker's analysis springs from the perception that the district around Of was dominated by two rival lineages, the Selimoglu based in Of and the Muradoglu based around Eskipazar, in the same district. Outwardly, both were towns of the republic, with state offices and officials. Behind the scenes, except for a handful of top administrators, all key positions in each town were held by members of the dominant lineage, from mayor to head of the Parent-Teacher Association. "[I]t appeared that the public life of the town, although not directly subject to state officials, was nonetheless under the strictest supervision by some other kind of authority" (11). Yet, existing anthropological theory could not explain the situation that Meeker encountered because he "could not locate a system of rights and duties that was uniquely linked with the clans, the sine qua non of the anthropological theories to which [he] was appealing" (21). Since analogous clans existed elsewhere in the Black Sea region, Meeker had to conclude that only relations with the "the state system of the Ottoman Empire" could have shaped the clans' role (30). These were local "phenomena because they took the form of an oligarchy woven together by agnation, affinity, partnership, and friendship"; simultaneously, they were "state phenomena because they came about through local participation in the imperial system" (33). People in Of could not see this for what it was. A European-born concept of the bureaucratic state had infiltrated their awarness, leading them to see the authority of the state and the lineages as antithetical. In particular, Osman Pasa, a governor of the 1830s, was "remembered" as having destroyed the aghas, although the evidence of their power remained all around.

The people of the district had had another avenue of participation in the imperial system—the provincial religious academies that had once linked the district to the imperial religious hierarchy and still existed unofficially under the republic. Found especially in regions of late conversion to Islam, where many people still spoke a Greek dialect, these institutions had made the Of'lu hoca (religion teacher from Of) a byword in Turkey. The district's steep ridges and valleys descending to the sea encouraged out-migration—Istanbul seemed nearer than the Antolian interior—and oversea ties to the metropolitan center worked their way deeply into local social reality.

Subsequent chapters examine the Islamic norms that structure sociability in Of and the legacy of the Ottoman era. In Ottoman times, a diverse populace merged into an increasingly Muslim Turkish one; the imperial palace came to be emulated in the households of provincial notables; and the sultans' exercise of power through interpersonal relations extended, by the seventeenth century, to encompass the local elites. Late Ottoman reform further developed the linkages between central and local power, even as European concepts of state power began to interfere with understandings of this reality. Osman Pasa, governor of Trabzon (1827-1840), defeated the most independent aghas and ended provincial revolts...