MEDIA AND THE IMAGINATION

From relentless newspaper reportings to lurid television news broadcasts, from vulgar cartoons to pornographic websites (entitled “A Cinci Hoca's Webpage” promising access to “A Cinci Hoca's Beauties” for those who click on the “Hoca's Instrument”—an image of a penis), the media in its multiple modalities seems obsessively fascinated with the various improprieties of the cinci hoca. Although figures such as the cinci hoca have long been surrounded by scandal, this article's point of departure in considering the media's fascination with the cinci hoca is the emergence of a privatized media industry in the 1980s. It is this privatization and expansion of the media industry that both broadened the means of attacking cultural practices perceived as antimodern and, in the process, revealed a deeper logic whereby the public disavowal of “superstition” serves to sustain the Turkish modernization project.

Throughout most of the Turkish republic's history (1923–), the state has maintained a hold on the production and dissemination of ideological discourses aiming to mold a new citizenry. In at least the past fifteen years, however, especially since the 1990 breaking of the state broadcasting monopoly, Turkish Radio and Television Authority, and the introduction of the first private television channel, the roles of the state and the media have undergone a remarkable reversal. As compared to the early relationship between the state and the media, it is now the newly privatized media, although still accountable to state censors, that has moved to the foreground as the principal provider of news and entertainment. Meanwhile, with the proliferation of inexpensive television sets in the past decade, television has become a ubiquitous presence in homes throughout Turkey. Taken together, these interrelated shifts mark at once the expansion and privatization of the historical link between the media and the nation-building project of the Turkish state.

This shift in the media industry also reflects a major transformation in the types of neighborhoods where this project was located—established squatter communities of Ankara made up of densely clustered, self-made homes that house staggering numbers of the unemployed and working poor. Where residents had previously been principally producers for the national and global economy, they are now also its major consumers. Images of stylish consumer goods and slender models, of both foreign and domestic provenance, that previously only cluttered the newsstands of upscale neighborhoods are now equally at home in these newly emerging consumer markets. In the now commonplace sights of young, thin women in tightly fitted clothing and neatly styled hair (the staple of fashion magazines) walking alongside their thick-set mothers wearing loose combinations of homemade sweaters, skirts, and headscarves (the staple of tourist brochures), it is not difficult to discern the rapidly burgeoning role of the private media, and the accompanying advertising industry, in influencing daily lives within such neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the scope of this article is considerably broader than a particular neighborhood and signals one of the specific characteristics of the Turkish media: its dominant national, rather than local, generative framework. That is, the media industry in Turkey is closely monitored by a state authoritarianism that is deeply distrustful of local autonomy, which is prominently reflected in campaigns against Kurdish-language media.⁹

In such a nationalist ideological climate that refuses locality (inasmuch it does not contribute to an innocuous “Turkish culture”), virtually all media is “national” media.

At this intersection of Turkish nationalist thought and mass mediation, the work of the imagination stands as a privileged site of struggle that spans and constitutes relationships between the personal, local, and national. In what Arjun Appadurai describes as the “imagination as social practice,” mass mediation (in its realistic and fictional modes) profoundly shapes and creates “ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects.”¹⁰

In this regard, the history of Turkey's nation-building project can be regarded as, along numerous fronts, a project of the imagination.¹¹ Yet, according to Appadurai, such nationalist projects of imagination have given way to something new (and critical) occurring today. That is, for Appadurai, the imagination has become “an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.”¹²

Although Appadurai overstates the case, presuming that the imagination was not already a field of social practice and site of negotiation, he nevertheless correctly draws attention to the contemporary significance of the interconnectedness of the media, the imagination, and everyday lives. As a productive site of emergent possibilities, it is at this intersection where new futures are fashioned and the place of one's life within them plotted. Crudely put, as the slender young woman and her heavy-set mother walked along the gecekondu road that cut between newly constructed apartment complexes, they imagined very different futures for themselves.

Appadurai's framing of the constructive or generative intersection of the media and imagination is significant in that it opens our consideration of media representations of the cinci hoca to a deeper reading than simply as instances of repression or desired elimination of unwanted remnants of a political and cultural past. At this intersection, rather, new worlds are being imagined as old ones are being rendered unimaginable, or at least obsolete. In the case of the cinci hoca scandal, for example, it is not that the hoca is experiencing a form of censorship in which something is edited out before being published or broadcast (an absence without lack). Instead, as a scene of denunciation that is at once a productive site for re- or unimagining, the cinci hoca is first presented and then publicly disavowed. A brief introductory example will illustrate this point.

“THE VILLAGE WHERE THE DRUM ISN'T PLAYED”

Babacan, a television program classified alternatively as a “news program” and a “reality show” but nonetheless cast in the “realistic mode,” was a weekly, one-hour program hosted by the Turkish cinema star Cüneyt Arkin. Whether it was the misery of abject poverty or the horrors of false belief, Babacan devoted itself to traversing the country in search of the unbelievable, miraculous, or simply bizarre. For this discussion, the episode, titled, “The Village Where the Drum Isn't Played,” which aired in October 1999, is particularly illustrative. Although not specifically about religious healing, it nonetheless has one of its characteristic features—the yatir, a place where a holy person is buried—and treads on similar conceptual grounds. The particular destination of this episode was a village renowned for prohibiting the playing of the drum, an instrument of central importance for celebrations throughout the country (e.g., weddings, circumcisions, soccer-match victories, and the departure of young men for military service). According to villagers interviewed, the dead holy person disliked the sound of drums, and their playing was thus forbidden for fear of retribution.

Into this visibly impoverished village rides Cüneyt Arkin in his new, unmistakably expensive sport utility vehicle. Over ghostly music and shifting camera angles noticeably seeking to create an aura of mysteriousness, Babacan confronts villager after villager with what he regards as their “irrational belief.” With little restraint, he forcefully interrogates them on why they believed in this prohibition. He then becomes more threatening, questioning them on what would happen if he played a drum. “How will this hurt that dead person laying over there?” he asks. Villagers repeated the prohibition. If they played the drum, a great calamity would befall them, perhaps even death. If he played it, however, nothing would happen. He is, after all, an outsider.¹³

He pushes on, again, in awe at their ignorance. Questioning older residents, he learns that they had never heard the sound of a live drum playing. With a contrived air of bafflement, Cüneyt Arkin leaves the village.

The vehicle is then shown returning from a nearby town where they had hired a drum and zurna (a reed instrument) player. Turning to follow the road sign pointing toward the village, one of the musicians insists on getting out of the truck. He too is struck by fear. (One questions the sincerity of this response, particularly considering the camera is somehow already outside of the vehicle, at some distance, when the musician insists on getting out.) Picking up the drum, Cüneyt Arkin, the intrepid warrior against irrationality, nevertheless forges forward.¹⁴

As he enters the village, again accompanied by eerie music and shifting camera angles, he prepares to play the drum. There is a peculiar expression on the villagers' faces; they try to stop him with what seems to be half-serious effort, joking and smiling as Arkin readies the mallet to strike the drum. One can also sense trepidation in their remonstrations, betraying the conviviality as politeness masking palpable unease. However, Cüneyt Arkin continues undaunted, eventually convincing some of the villagers to begin dancing along to his drumming. He leaves the village with a visible air of accomplishment. He had, as he discussed, opened their belief. After a commercial, Cüneyt Arkin reappears on the screen, months after the initial taping, and explains that he had not experienced any harm since he left the village.

What is left unclear, however, is the impact of this event on the village he has long since moved beyond. Nevertheless, in this spectacularized confrontation of realities, a now public drama that would reach millions of viewers, the subtext was difficult to ignore: “rationality” had encountered and vanquished the “ignorance” and “superstition” of “tradition.” Cüneyt Arkin, with a theatrical flourish, pulls into daylight and questions what is taken for granted—“no drum is to be played in the village”—and, mockingly, attempts to refute other worldly injunctions through the earthly, yet ethereal, technology of television. In depicting the place of superstition at the intersection of a national media and local imaginaries, this episode also reveals the staged characteristics of its disavowal (e.g., the “spontaneous” reaction of the hired musician) and the alternative community it seeks to articulate. Within the village, the injunction against drum playing is one of the community's constitutive prohibitions, the breaking of which is accompanied by sanction. In turn, Arkin, representing an important segment of the Turkish elite, callously rejects inappropriate superstitious behavior in order to replace a local, communal prohibition with a set of prohibitions (against superstition) that designate a distinctly national community.

READING AND VIEWING THE CINCI HOCA

Particular types of viewers are presumed and readings encoded within the Babacan program. As opposed to the “mainstream secularist” press,¹⁵

for instance, the station airing Babacan (TGRT) has discernible Islamist roots. Although TGRT was undergoing a transition toward the mainstream during the period of fieldwork, its promotion of Islamist-oriented politics in the 1990s and, more generally, its desire to promote appropriate religious practice within a modern world were still evident. In this context, Cüneyt Arkin's attack on superstition carried a dual valence. On the one hand, it portrayed superstition as an example of inappropriate behavior not befitting a properly modern individual. On the other hand, it referred to superstition in its connotative association with notions of orthodox Islam and inappropriate religious practice. This point of convergence highlights two important factors. First, the condemnation of the cinci hoca is not only a secularist outlook, but also one shared within orthodox Islam. Second, although religious condemnation of figures such as the hoca predates the Republic by centuries, its contemporary configuration is inseparable from the history of Turkish secularist development and its promotion of a specifically “modern” national image. This situation parallels Jenny White's and Yael Navaro-Yashin's arguments in that, like Islamist politics in Turkey,¹⁶ Islamist-oriented media also work through conditions framed by secularist discourses. Furthermore, and beyond Stuart Hall's argument that the media industry tends to share the dominant code of the nation state,¹⁷ the media in Turkey must by default work through a national-secularist lens in order to be allowed to operate.

Despite differences, these scandals appear on channels and in newspapers maintaining a range of ideological positions. And since the privatization of the media industry, this range has become significantly fragmented along political and religious lines, with each media outlet frequently linked to larger media conglomerates owned by identifiable families and catering to specific audiences. Although some attract very specific and loyal audiences, those characterized as “mainstream secularist” are the most watched and frequently draw a mixed audience. Especially when it comes to television news programming, where these scandals most frequently appear, the “mainstream secularist” stations are extremely popular and attract a wide viewership. In both the pro-Islamist and ardently secularist/Kemalist neighborhoods where I conducted research, residents most commonly turned to these stations when it came time for the evening news.¹⁸

Although audiences are roundly cognizant of each media outlet's ideological position, and approach the outlets accordingly, one cannot presume that messages are decoded as anticipated. Although a full consideration of “audience” or “reception studies” within media theory is beyond the scope of this discussion, one must bear in mind that audiences receive messages in particular ways and make use of them in divergent contexts. As such, this essay addresses calls to take television seriously in making sense of the sorts of ethnographic realities within which social scientists work¹⁹

and, in its consideration of cartoons and satirical magazines, diverges sharply from other textual analyses of political cartoons in the Middle East.²⁰

Building on recent work in the anthropology of the media that stresses a contextual analysis of media representations²¹

and following Purnima Mankekar's ethnographic study of television viewing in India,²² I am situating my analysis in a tension between reading the cinci hoca scandal locally versus translocally—in this case, nationally. As opposed to ethnographic analyses considering the viewing of television serials and melodramas,²³ however, the unique structuring of televised news segments more directly encodes a particular interpretation and significantly reduces the range of potential readings. Although the richly developed plots and affectively laden symbolism of serials and melodramas provide viewers with multiple points of identification and a narrative flexibility within which they can locate their own life experiences, the television and print media's reportings of the cinci hoca scandal are typically short, admonishing, and didactic. Consequently, in the tension between focusing on localized interpretations of the cinci hoca and their significance as national figures, the following discussion places greater emphasis on the latter.

Locally, nonetheless, it is important to recognize how television, for instance, is watched. Broadly speaking, television watching is a lively, collaborative event in which items are noted, commented upon, and argued over. The audience in this case is not frequently a passive or quiescent one. Media representations that capture the various improprieties of healers, for example, are not merely absorbed but rather become subjects of debate, used to ridicule characters on television or relatives in the same room. In both neighborhoods where I worked, viewers reacted with disdain and frequently ire—at times spitting at the television—when these programs aired. That the viewers I worked with came from poor, working-class neighborhoods is significant in that it counters relentlessly drawn associations between poverty and the cinci hoca. As opposed to common portrayals of elite segments of society acting as enforcers of an appropriately modern national image, one that frequently takes as its target the “ignorant” (cahil) social practices that are presumed to be endemic among the poor and less educated, my neighbors' reactions to the hoca scandal attests to the fact that such an ideal is very much a national ideal in which they, too, are deeply invested.

ANATOMY OF A SCANDAL: SEX AND MONEY

Media scandals pervade the entirety of the cinci hoca's world, profoundly shaping how, where, and when they do their work. Well-established fears of secret agents, MIT (National Intelligence Organization), and informers are now met with suspicion over hidden cameras, concealed microphones, and undercover reporters. For instance, one day while visiting Ahmet, a local cinci hoca who had spent some time in prison, he talked at length about a recent visitor whom he instinctively suspected of being an agent, possibly from MIT. He then showed me a microcassette recorder he had recently purchased and proceeded to play back the taped meeting with the suspected agent. “If he were to take me to court for doing the work of those fake hocas,” Ahmet explained, “I'd have something for my defense. I could just play this tape… Prison taught me a few things.” Trepidation of being caught on television, and then by the police, has pushed the hoca largely underground. In the course of fieldwork, there was no more prominent yet elusive figure than the cinci hoca.

Repeatedly, and with striking consistency, however, cinci hoca after cinci hoca were caught in compromising positions on the national news. No less frequently than once a month, news broadcasts featured a story involving a hoca, with trailers repeated throughout the show until the final revelation of yet another cinci hoca's improprieties. The distinct pattern and recurrent themes of news reports featuring the cinci hoca are illustrated in the following two accounts:

Although many dismiss stations such as ShowTV and StarTV as sensationalizing media organizations that can be only loosely described as providing news, they are nonetheless hugely popular. ShowTV and StarTV, with respective ratings of 58.8 percent and 54.6 percent, were ranked as the third and fourth most popular channels (out of a total of sixteen private television channels broadcasting nationally) at the end of 1997.²⁶ The popularity of cinci hoca scandals in the print media is also worthy of note. Based on a recent national survey, 62 percent of men and 32 percent of women nationwide read newspapers or magazines weekly, and most likely more often.²⁷ Furthermore, even the “most serious broadcast agencies,” as one contributor to the newspaper Cumhuriyet explained, have not stayed away from the lure of the hoca.²⁸

As opposed to the Cüneyt Arkin episode, however, rarely does such reporting simply conclude with a reporter leaving. Rather, they commonly—if not inevitably, for this is part of their script—come to a resolution with state intervention and the appearance of the police or a gendarmerie. In unraveling the multiple themes that converge around the cinci hoca, the following discussion will be framed by the dominant motifs of cinci hoca scandals, two themes already evident in the earlier excerpts and themselves the universal trappings of news scandal: sex and money. Although historically these are not unfamiliar themes to be associated with the cinci hoca, their content and details reveal a shifting set of contemporary social, political, and economic conditions.

SEX: SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND THE HOCA

The association of hocas with sexual impropriety runs through an array of settings—from newspaper reporting to television news broadcasts, from arguing and joking on street corners to pornographic websites.²⁹

Take a cartoon that appeared in the 21 January 1997 issue of the secular, left-wing daily Cumhuriyet (Figure 1).³⁰ This cartoon lends itself to several interpretations. The conventional reading would focus upon the duplicity and hypocrisy of its central characters: the immoral conduct of the religious revealing piety as but an outward pretense. As such, it follows a recurrent trope that juxtaposes a religious exterior with its underlying immorality. Widely circulating stories of covered young women wearing tight jeans beneath their modest outer garments is perhaps the most common version of this juxtaposition. In this case, it is the image of the woman lifting up the most concealing form of Islamic dress (itself rare in Turkey) to show her naked body (itself marked with Arabic script). A similar play between exterior and interior can be seen in the turbaned mask that the hoca has discarded so that he can “exorcise her cin.” Although this is undoubtedly a critical aspect of the cartoon's humor, I want to focus on the dynamic of the relationship between characters and the inversions of authority on which its humor relies.

In this regard, the specific context of the cartoon is significant. Published in 1997, it appeared alongside the arrest and trial of Ali Kalkanci, an infamous figure labeled a cinci hoca who was accused of illicit sexual behavior with a young female follower, Fadime Şahin. Although Kalkanci worked on a much grander scale than the local hocas of the neighborhoods where I conducted research and unlike the local cinci hoca in that he assumed the position of leader of a religious order, or tarikat, and was also referred to as a shaykh, he was notwithstanding depicted as a cinci hoca and thereby instrumental in reinforcing popular, daily images of the cinci hoca as lustful, indecent, and licentious.

At the end of 1996, based on statements from a young female follower named Fadime Şahin, Ali Kalkanci was arrested. As the mainstream secularist newspaper Milliyet recalls, “The fearless words of Fadime Şahin about tarikats and fake shaykhs created the effect of a bomb.”³¹

At the opening of his criminal trial, he was officially charged with “violating a person over 15 years of age by using force, violence, or threat.”³² Meanwhile, other charges (civil offenses of getting married in a religious ceremony, gathering unlawful support, fraud, and opposing the law prohibiting dervish lodges) were imminent. As the trial began and investigations intensified, the power and influence of Ali Kalkanci was found to far exceed expectations. In addition to having built a significant following, particularly among businessmen and young women, he had vast holdings in numerous companies, connections with high-ranking government officials, and intimate associations with several “radical” Islamist groups. As befits a paradigmatic cinci hoca, he was “unimaginably” wealthy, powerful, and libidinous.

Throughout the trial, Fadime Şahin's tearful face filled television screens as she explained that she had been lied to, that he had taken advantage of her sexually, and that she was now a ruined woman. The explicit details of their relationship only came out later, with the publication of her memoir in August 1997, not a year after Kalkanci's arrest.³³

In it, after broadly tracing the trajectory of her life—highlighting themes of poverty and gecekondu life already commonly associated with the cinci hoca—she reveals her steadily intensifying devotion to Ali Kalkanci. She eventually becomes “married” to him (imam nikâhı), although not legally,³⁴ and after reporting to the police that she had been raped, he was arrested. The trial, and the events that unraveled around it, assumed a prominent position in newspapers for months before and after the trial. In addition to continual reporting on the sordid details of their relationship, there was an onslaught of commentaries and editorials about Ali Kalkanci, as a cinci hoca, and Fadime Şahin, as a victim of his sexual allure. In Milliyet alone, there were some eleven commentaries or editorials in a two-month period talking about Kalkanci and Şahin. Most involved explicit associations between the broader category of cinci hoca and themes of nudity, illegality, and sex.

In the outpouring of editorials and reporting that accompanied the trial, a broad set of themes, associations, and anxieties were drawn into debates over the cinci hoca. Duygu Asena, for instance, took the opportunity to promote “imaginary sex” on the Internet for Turkey's youth in order to release their stifled sexual desires. She went on to lament hearing time and again “how many times a day, with whom, and how the young girl from wherever makes love with the frauds that are taken to be religious men and with whom they marry (imam nikâhı) in order to more freely love.”³⁵

Elsewhere, Şahin Alpay used the events around Kalkanci's trial as a means for understanding the implications of a “sexual revolution” for Turkey, specifically among the religiously conservative segments of Turkish society.³⁶ Another columnist writing for Milliyet, Metin Toker, complained that television watching had “turned to torture” because of the incessant sensationalism it promoted. “Tomorrow,” as he joked, “nude Aczmendi Muslim first, wearisome chatterer Fadime second.”³⁷

Ali Kalkanci fulfilled all the contemptible expectations one had of the cinci hoca and, in this regard, the implications of his trial extend well beyond him. Although Kalkanci and Şahin represent a prominent case, the images of the cinci hoca's sexually libidinous behavior that fueled it are not exceptional. If anything, the Kalkanci–Şahin case amplified preexisting sentiments. Television and print media, in scandal after scandal, reproduce the image of the lustful and indecent cinci hoca. Recall, for instance, both the news program described earlier (its emphasis on the hoca's touching of the patient's chest) and the cartoon in which the young (covered) woman receives “treatment” from an impotent hoca (Figure 1). The association between the cinci hoca and sexual licentiousness has become so commonplace that the phrase the cartoon used to describe the ritual practice of the hoca—the exorcising of cin (cin çıkartma, lit. “extracting cin”)—has entered popular language as an idiom for sexual intercourse. A series of satirical diary entries of a “young female member of a tarikat” published in the popular, leftist satirical magazine Dinozor illustrates this well³⁸

: The entries continue with the hoca losing interest in her. She becomes depressed, and her mother takes her to other cinci hoca. When one hoca finally says she had cin that needed to be exorcized, she writes, “Oh, the hope for my troubles is this man.” Soon after again undergoing a religious marriage ceremony (imam nikâhı), he is arrested and she enters the media spotlight.

A great deal can be said about the case of Ali Kalkanci, as well as the outpouring of representations of cinci hocas in the media coverage that followed. On the one hand, humorous cartoons and satirical diaries found in leftist media organizations are clearly lampooning the surging presence and political influence of pro-Islamists within state politics. Portraying the religiously conservative (who are presumed to be supporters of Islamist political parties) as immoral, duplicitous, and lacking in self-control serves both as a source of humor and, in its indignation, as a form of critique. To return to the interactional dynamic captured in Figure 1, the cartoon's humor relies on an inversion of status and authority: instead of the dominating elder male and submissive young woman, one encounters the weak and impotent religious man confronting a strong and independent woman. In contrast, especially in the less humorous instances of real life sexual harassment, the cartoon's inversion becomes unsettling.

In media scandals that portray actual young women falling prey to the uncontrollable sexual power of the hoca, the intent is not humor. Moreover, they speak toward something more than the need to protect helpless young women. If Ali Kalkanci inspired dread not only in terms of moral fear (as someone who could seduce young women) but also in regard to political power (with his associations to radical Islamists and their perceived threat to the viability of contemporary state structures of authority), a perhaps not obvious question should be posed: exactly whose authority is threatening or being threatened in accusations of sexual misconduct? In other words, is it only a question of the cinci hoca's authority and persuasiveness animating media attacks?

In an analysis of satirical magazines in Istanbul (the magazine Dinozor being one), Ayşe Öncü notes a similar set of concerns in relation to the cartoon figure of the maganda—“a ribald and bawdy…figure of derision who is totally oblivious to his own uncouth and offensive masculinity.”⁴¹

Situating this term's invention in the late 1980s, coinciding with Turkey's neoliberal integration into a global culture of consumerism, she argues that “this was also a historical moment when the dangers of sexuality, publicly flaunted as a form of commercial consumption, emerged as a major focus of public anxiety, and produced an extended discourse on its problems.”⁴² Figure 1 is clearly informed by this genre of humor. In addition to highlighting the multiple ways in which anxiety over sexuality infused public imagination, Öncü's analysis locates this discussion within a specific set of historical and economic conditions.

It is within the same set of historical and economic conditions that we must locate the contemporary cinci hoca scandal. In this case, however, it taps not only into concerns over public sexuality and consumerism, but also into transformations in structures of gender authority. Note, for instance, that the woman in both the cartoon and the satirical diary were not merely passive objects of the hoca's persuasion. In each, it is ultimately the principal character—the young woman—leaving one hoca to go to another. With the final cell of the cartoon in particular, the story of an elder man's exploitation of a powerless young woman becomes radically subverted when the woman reveals her complicity in the affair—that she is not simply being deceived—as she leaves in search of another hoca who will satisfy her (and wear a condom). In this respect, what is threatening is neither merely the hoca's sexual appetite nor necessarily the woman's desire, but rather her willingness to abandon one man for another.

A similar dynamic appeared in the earlier mentioned connection between the cinci hoca, religious marriage (imam nikâhi), and Turkey's “sexual revolution.”⁴³

As Şahin Alpay argues, one finds the daughters of religious families using imam nikâhı as a means of achieving the sexual freedoms they see other youth having. In this respect, the use of imam nikâhi represents the appropriation of older social practices for contemporary demands. As opposed to Alpay's emphasis on sexual desire as the motivating force behind imam nikâhi, however, the demands underlying “sexual freedom” have as much, if not more, to do with authority than they do with sexual desire—the authority and ability to choose one's sexual partner. Although caution should be taken in generalizing Alpay's argument (because the extent to which imam nikâhi is practiced is unclear, and it is likely that imam nikâhi is utilized most often to assert men's authority), it nonetheless reveals how charged struggles over transforming notions of sexual propriety and their threat to inherited norms of social authority converge around the image of the cinci hoca.

Representations of lascivious hocas and their desirous clients should not be read simply as critiques of invading Western notions of sexuality, pleasure, and desire. Beyond problems of identifying what constitutes Western desire, this was not how they were received within the neighborhoods where I worked. Although linked, sexual pleasure is not viewed as being problematic—as long as it is within marriage. In addition, it is in marriage and associated expectations of women's submission where the first dimension of our discussion becomes entangled with the cinci hoca. For instance, a news segment airing on ShowTV that described a cinci hoca being hacked to pieces for luring away a man's wife concerns not only the dangerous influence of a hoca's power, but also the woman's willful decision (however constrained) to leave her husband for another man. Hence, on the one hand, the public dismemberment of the cinci hoca stands clearly as an example and warning to other cinci hoca. On the other hand, and although we can only speculate about the fate of the man's wife, it captures a sense of threat to men's authority emerging from ongoing societal transformations. Although on the surface cartoons and satirical diaries appearing in secularist and leftist publications are utilizing accusations of widespread immorality to deride those regarded as religiously conservative (who are linked, however inaccurately, to the cinci hoca), a deeper anxiety courses through the humor. The cinci hoca, as represented in the news media, is a figure that threatens patriarchal structures of authority—submission both to one's father and one's husband—and, in his sexual relations with young women, signifies the rapidly transforming position of women within homes, the labor force, and the global economy.

MONEY: ECONOMIES OF HEALING

Inextricable from the sexual implications of the cinci hoca scandal, recurrent images of the cinci hoca as a swindling profiteer out to make a quick profit at the expense of vulnerable patients highlight a further set of anxieties arising from the economic transformations of the 1980s and, in particular, the uneven and frequently destructive repercussions of the opening of Turkey's economy to the vagaries of global capital. While charges of defrauding helpless patients have a long history, they take on a particular dynamic in contemporary Turkey that marks their divergence from older scandals. In addition, because these accusations are not unfounded, the media's focus on the cinci hocas' financial exploitation serves to confirm frustrations over making sense of the newly emerging economic order.

Broadly speaking, the practice of the cinci hoca has undergone a process of deprofessionalization and reprofessionalization since roughly the mid-19th century. Under the Ottoman Empire, many persons practicing the forms of healing represented by the cinci hoca emerged from or claimed association with such state-authorized institutions as the medrese (theological school or medresseh). Although such practices as the exorcising of jinn was certainly not part of formal medrese education (being long regarded as against orthodoxy by the ulema), oral historical data show that many medrese trained clerics—as they traveled into villages—regularly engaged in such practices. It is in such official training in or claimed association with the medrese that we see resonances of professionalism. As tarikats were banned (but certainly not eliminated) and medreses closed under the secularization reforms of the early Republic, however, the claiming of authority based on association with religious institutions took on radically different implications. In the past several decades, however, the cinci hoca has become reprofessionalized under alternative models of professionalism—what some refer to as the ticaret, or commercial, hoca. Furthermore, with the political and economic transformations of the 1980s—most notably, a military coup and the radical liberalization of the economy—this reprofessionalizing process has greatly accelerated and resulted in the proliferation of self-taught cinci hoca (although they may have received sanctioning from a noted religious figure).

Despite increasing commercialization, the cinci hoca's historical association with the religious establishment remains relevant for how the cinci hoca is positioned in relation to contemporary Islamist political mobilization. For committed Kemalists who regard themselves as defenders of Turkey's secularist future, these healers (and their patients) epitomize the increasing influence of an Islamist politics that is viewed as oppositional to the ideals of secular democracy. While the association between figures such as the cinci hoca and either Islamist politics or religious conservatism is far from self-evident, it nevertheless persists as a popular trope for denigrating Islamist politics. That the media fervor created by the Kalkanci scandal emerged soon after the leader of the pro-Islamist Welfare Party, Necemettin Erbakan, became Turkey's prime minister is highly suggestive in this respect. When one recognizes that many forms of religious healing have historical roots within the same religiopolitical structures that were suppressed with the establishment of Turkey and that are currently being mobilized within pro-Islamist circles, it is not surprising that religious forms of healing have emerged as targets of widespread antagonism.

The cinci hoca's new professionalism must also be understood in relation to the history of biomedicine in Turkey. Alongside commercialism as an emblem of authority, hocas also commonly employ medical symbols, rhetoric, and paraphernalia in their cultivation of therapeutic legitimacy. It is not surprising that physicians roundly condemn such practices as ignorant and potentially harmful to patients. This is not, however, simply an instance of concern for or competition over patients; the medical establishment's critique of the hoca, in other words, is not merely a medical critique. When one recognizes that the modernization of Turkey's medical system was a prominent site for the articulation of the state's broader modernization project (encoding many of its central themes, such as individual autonomy, rationality, faith in scientific progress, and the health of the national body), medicine's critique of religious healing folds into the larger project of marginalizing particular religious and social practices so that they can be supplanted in the name of a national image befitting a properly modern nation.⁴⁴

Countering portrayals of the cinci hoca as antimodern, many contemporary hoca have thus turned toward commercialized and professionalized models of self-legitimation. In other words, and in sharp contrast to past cinci hocas' reliance on medrese authorization (or claims to medrese association), there are now healers associating legitimacy (as a healer) with the legitimacy of the financial transaction. On one occasion, while visiting Ahmet, a cinci hoca, one of these scandals serendipitously appeared on television. Clearly incensed, he explained:

For Ahmet, the cinci hoca on television was counterfeit precisely because she did not pay taxes, although Ahmet still did all he could to avoid paying them, often cutting receipts showing sums much lower than actually paid. This in itself, however, reflected standard business practice. In addition to intriguing implications for understanding the role of the state in legitimating healer–patient relations (i.e., are they taxable?), Ahmet's comments highlight how business models of professionalism are impacting cinci hocas' struggle to reproduce their own legitimacy. For Ahmet, issues of taxation communicated his legitimacy as both a healer and a businessman. As this suggests, accompanying a series of broad structural transformations in Turkey, an array of novel modes of capital accumulation have emerged. With this, religious healing has become a legitimate (for some) source of income.

In the case of Ali Kalkanci, the troubling scope of his financial exploitation (in the form of a massive accumulation of wealth) slowly emerged to reveal, at the opening of his trial in 1997, that he was part owner of six companies, ranging “from medicine to food, from construction to textiles and leathers.”⁴⁵

Although local healers work on a far smaller scale than Kalkanci, they nonetheless become trapped within similar sets of associations. If a cinci hoca such as Ali Kalkanci can accumulate such wealth based on the manipulation of vulnerable individuals, who else might be out there? While the sexual appetite of the hoca is typically the most sensationalized justification for disapproving of them, more pervasive perhaps is a critique of their unbridled commercialism. Furthermore, whereas accusations of sexual impropriety are somewhat specific to the cinci hoca, complaints about healers treating something spiritual as a form of business (and hence as a path to wealth) represents a widespread discourse through which religious forms of healing more generally are criticized.

In the context of daily discussions and arguments, then, it is the ways by which money is received and the substantial amounts of capital the hoca is able to amass that causes consternation. It is not surprising that similar indictments can be found throughout media accounts of fraudulent cinci hoca. In the ShowTV news segment discussed earlier, for example, considerable attention was drawn to the amounts of money being paid and the haggling that followed. In addition to gaining media attention, the financial dimension of the cinci hocas' practices—and the charges of fraud and swindling (dolandiricilik) that frequently ensue—is what most commonly serve as the justification for their arrest. A 5 December 2000 article in Milliyet Newspaper captures the images of the undeservedly affluent cinci hoca and his resulting arrest well:

To such specific accounts can be added recurrent depictions of “swindling,” “hoodwinking,” “fake,” and “fraudulent” cinci hoca “filling their pockets” and driving “solid gold Mercedes” with the public's money.⁴⁷ The central characteristic of all of these stories is the precise recording of the amount of money that had been exchanged. For example, a 23 April 1999 story about a physician referring patients to a cinci hoca explained, “In authorized denunciations, it was clarified that they wanted 200 million lira at the start of the session and that it would be divided between them.”⁴⁸ Elsewhere, the same newspaper recounts a cinci hoca swindling U.S. $50,000 from hadj candidates.⁴⁹ In addition, more recently, Hürriyet reported a cinci hoca “snatching” 20 billion lira from a group of “customers” who included “professors, doctors, wealthy businessmen, and unemployed persons he was to find jobs for.”⁵⁰

When it comes to the cinci hoca's insatiable lust for money, however, there is a specificity to the accusations that distinguish them from earlier scandals and locate them within particular political–economic conditions. In media accounts, as well as in repeated conversations in the course of fieldwork, critiques were grounded in two interrelated dimensions of the hoca's finances: the modes of exchange that framed healer–patient relationships and the hoca's ability to accumulate capital. In other words, although they draw on longstanding idioms of fraudulence and quackery, contemporary criticisms focus on the commercial nature of the cinci hoca's interactions, where money is exchanged for services, coupled with distrust about his or her ability to prosper financially (in trying economic times). “If the cinci hoca was a real healer,” as countless people explained, “he wouldn't take money.”⁵¹

Because the media accounts ridiculing the commercialism of the hoca are largely correct—many hoca are in fact (successful) entrepreneurs—the cinci hoca is able to condense widely felt frustrations over recent societal transformations.

Although the interpenetration of capital economies and religious forms of healing, such as the cinci hoca, is far from surprising as an outgrowth of Turkey's capitalist development, it has nonetheless given rise to novel reconfigurations of the play between corruption and legitimacy, scandal and authenticity. As the case of Ahmet instantiates—where being a cinci hoca is a legitimate business, and hence taxable—the same forces that opened a space within the Turkish economy for a commercialized economy of healing have also created the potential for additional forms of exploitation, and legitimacy. For many, this form of legitimization is deeply unsettling and, through scandal after scandal, it becomes publicly expressed through accusations of corrupt claims to religious authority and authenticity. Around images of cinci hoca as exploitative profiteers thus converge a wider set of anxieties linked to the impact of Turkish capitalist development and, in particular, the dramatic restructuring of the Turkish economy in the 1980s. Through scandals that portray the ruthless and shameless greed of the cinci hoca—“Real healers wouldn't take money” (at least, not in the ways and to the degree that they now do)—one encounters themes of the corrupting nature of money, the degradation of an “authentic” Turkish culture (a mourned for village life), and a palpable fear of an imminent disenchantment of the world.

Paralleling the anxieties over the rationalization of the economy and its feared effects on cultural life, reactions to the cinci hoca scandal also reflect a bewilderment over and frustration with the seeming irrationality of the new economy. In attempting to gain access to the promised economic fruit of transformed economic policy, people, especially in the types of poor neighborhoods where research was conducted, were continually thwarted in their efforts to obtain secure employment, establish new businesses, and trade successfully in the stock market. More often than not, they persisted in the same economic condition as they had, but now with the burden of an unfulfilled dream. Yet, according to the news, the cinci hoca has been able to make it big. In this light, a question posed earlier can be reworded: if an ignorant man such as Ali Kalkanci can accumulate such wealth, why can't I? Thus, linked with melancholic sentiments of cultural loss and religious corruption, the cinci hoca scandal expresses frustration over something that should not be: not only were cinci hocas not meant to survive Turkish national development, they certainly were not supposed to represent a “legitimate” means of succeeding in the new economic order.

CONCLUSION: TELEVISION VIOLENCE AND THE TENACITY OF ADVERTISING

Despite their popularity as objects of media derision, it is important to bear in mind that figures such as the cinci hoca are central dimensions of local health care systems and people (from all backgrounds) seek their assistance for a variety of reasons: for the treatment of problems not defined as treatable within biomedical settings; in instances where one has no access to or cannot afford biomedical treatment; or, most commonly, alongside biomedical treatments that are seen as overly impersonal and fraught with divisions of class and authority (divisions similarly encountered, for instance, in the Babacan episode). From this perspective, going to a cinci hoca for treatment is neither necessarily an act of devotion nor a consciously strategic act of resistance against the state, but a decision driven by the desire to receive appropriate and effective care. Such forms of healing are deeply embedded in social life and, against the ostensible hopes of many, show no signs of disappearing.

Yet, the tension between what is hoped for (i.e., how the hoca is imagined and represented in the media) and the actual practices of cinci hoca has run throughout this discussion. While the broader study from which this article emerges considers specifically how healers of various sorts reformulate religious authority in relation to overarching discourses aiming at their deligitimization, recognizing the interconnection between the real and the represented hoca is crucial for understanding how the media can function as a means of social surveillance. In its influence on how hocas are regarded and how hocas practice, the media stands as a productive and imaginative site for the policing of the disreputable and undesirable.

Many healers and patients, for instance, discussed repeated instances of spousal violence or fears thereof for either continuing to practice such modes of healing or seeking the cinci hocas' assistance, each time making explicit reference to media reporting that involved such figures as the cinci hoca. With the media attention drawn to hocas, individuals seeking their care not only run the risk of being the target of local suspicion and gossip but also gamble with being caught within a nationally broadcast exposé. In addition, especially in urban contexts, as people seeking the assistance of cinci hoca move more and more frequently through neighborhoods they do not know and whose residents do not know them, local systems of social surveillance have become less effective and decreasingly significant. In this sense, the cinci hoca scandal marks the nationalization of localized systems of surveillance, with the emerging community of the nation taking up its determined role as guardian within a reconfigured national village culture.

For this reason, the attack on the cinci hoca bears a historical genealogy within Turkey's project of modernization and aligns itself with a host of other discourses aimed at eradicating marginal social and religious practices regarded as contrary to the image of a modern nation. In this capacity, the critics that see these scandals as but a form of advertising are in some ways correct, albeit for the wrong reasons. As one columnist wrote, “One note to Babacan…his program has become a broadcast that advertises the veritable hoodwinker hoca and waters, caves, and homes that are said to be extraordinary.”⁵²

Returning to our opening epigraph, “[T]hey have been given extensive advertisement in newspapers and on television stations that seek to increase their circulation with dramatic news.”⁵³ In their insistence on blaming the media for promoting healers (through the very scandals that target them), these critics fail to ask why, exactly, the cinci hoca scandal makes for dramatic news. Thus, they take the properly modernist stance: these healers are antithetical to modernity and, because this is a modern country, they must not persist. For them, the presence of the cinci hoca is a symptom of the incompleteness of Turkish modernization and the cinci hoca persists at those sites where Turkey has failed to fully embrace modernity.

By framing the hoca as an anachronism, critics misread the relationship between the set of marginal religious practices represented by the cinci hoca and Turkish modernity. Writing about witchcraft in postcolonial Cameroon, Peter Geschiere, for instance, argues that witchcraft should not be conceptualized as a “traditional” obstacle to development; rather, in the close conceptual link between witchcraft and power, it represents a political and economic discourse located squarely within Cameroonian modernity.⁵⁴

Similarly, Jean and John Comaroff have written extensively about witchcraft discourse and ritual in Africa as an “especially likely response to contradictions created and (literally) engendered by processes of social, material, and cultural transformation, processes re-presented, rationalized, and authorized in the name of modernity.”⁵⁵ In each of these instances, witchcraft is not an anachronism but is instead a set of practices and discourses that is deeply enmeshed within the modern. By failing to recognize how embedded the figure of and discourse considering the cinci hoca are within contemporary political and economic conditions, media critics of the cinci hoca thereby underestimate the function that the scene of denunciation has come to assume.

That is, the critics ignore the simultaneously alluring and repulsive qualities of the cinci hoca both as the transgressor of prohibitions and as a particular knot within Turkish modernity that condenses a series of unsettling social anxieties. The figure of the cinci hoca thus points beyond the ostensible desire to eradicate “backward” and “ignorant” social practices. On the one hand, through the condemnation of cinci hocas (and their potential clientele), a set of prohibitions is asserted that constitute an ideal image of a modern, national community. On the other hand, such scandals hold the ability to condense a series of contentious debates concerning reconfiguring notions of sexual propriety, transforming economic conditions, a perceived threat to the institution of the family, the degradation of a social harmony issuing from an idealized village life, a resurgent Islamist political mobilization, and the implications of each of these for the persistence of inherited systems of authority. As an object of fascination and animosity, the cinci hoca becomes in many regards a necessary figure of Turkish modernity through which its boundaries are marked, its margins are enforced, and the unity of a national political imagination is rearticulated.

Rather than reading the image of the cinci hoca in relation to Turkish modernity as a symptom of its failure (the persistence of an underlying “traditional” core, as loathsome as it may be), I have taken it as a figure of modernity that serves to stage state authority and enact its position as sovereign protector. As such, the attempt to eliminate cinci hocas in the name of the modern transforms into a reliance on their presence so that they can then be disavowed. Not only is the cinci hoca not a threat to Turkish modernity and state authoritarianism, but the repeated performance of disavowal in many respects serves to sustain them. The actual elimination of figures such as the cinci hoca can thus be regarded as more of a threat to the imagined unity of Turkish modernity than their persistence.