Meltem Türköz’s book is about the Republic of Turkey’s Surname Law of 1934 (No. 2525), which enforced the adoption and registration of surnames in the Turkish language. The Surname Law was one of the last reforms undertaken by the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) under Mustafa Kemal, reforms that had begun with the abolition of the caliphate and were followed by measures such as the Hat Law (No. 671, 1925), the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and the standard hour system, the shift to the metric system of measurement, and changes in the penal and civil codes. In the book, Türköz undertakes a multilayered examination of the preparation, dissemination, enforcement, adaptation, reception, criticism, and recollection of the Surname Law by seeking out the actions and experiences of the various actors involved. Using historical ethnography, she presents a rather compelling story of the making of Turkish national identity in the 1930s.
For a long time, scholarship on the early republic had approached this period as a rather one-dimensional one shaped by Mustafa Kemal and a small group around him. The state was placed in the center of the historical narrative as an omnipotent actor, with the population being depicted as a passive entity sculptured freely by the elites. In the last thirty years, however, this perspective has undergone a radical transformation as the legacy of the Kemalist era and the manner in which republican reforms were perceived and/or shaped by social groups and citizens have become subjects of critical research. Türköz’s book represents a thought-provoking contribution to this new vein of scholarship. By exploring how the reforms were received, appropriated, and negotiated, the work allows agency to individuals and groups previously depicted in a passive manner.
In previous scholarship, the Surname Law has been treated as part and parcel of the republic’s modernization process, which took secularization and Westernization as its primary goals. From this perspective, the law was conceptualized as by and large an administrative measure rendered necessary by an increasingly advanced and complex society. As opposed to this view, which effectively reduces the law to a form of societal development, Türköz approaches naming as an element of state-building. Her conceptual framework draws largely on James Scott’s “notion of the modern state as an entity that seeks legibility” (p. 1), and accordingly, surname legislation is conceptualized as one of the tools that makes the population legible. In other words, as Türköz frames it, the Surname Law addressed not only administrative needs, but also nationalist ones. Within this challenging framework, the dissemination of linguistically uniform Turkish surnames was meant to contribute to the Turkification of a population originating from diverse geographies, ethnicities, and languages. According to Türköz, the Surname Law was also a boundary-making measure, establishing the boundaries between the state on the one hand and its individuals and various groups on the other, in addition to drawing lines in relation to gender, ethnicity, age, and power.
Türköz taps an impressive variety of sources, among them memories, popular visual and written material, oral historical narrative, official documents, and archival sources. She successfully weaves her examination together by advancing step by step through chapters that each handle different aspects of the law, with each chapter utilizing different sources as well as the relevant tools of historical and ethnographic study. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 examines the intellectual roots of and cultural context for the Surname Law of 1934, concentrating on the nationalist cultural climate of the 1930s, which constituted the immediate background of the law. This chapter links the Surname Law to the broader currents of the Turkification of language and culture, with particular emphasis laid on the language reforms, which aimed to recreate Turkish as the language of the new republic and which found expression in numerous language congresses, the preparation of word collections (söz derlemeleri), and language substitution efforts meant to build up an authentic Turkish in the place of Ottoman Turkish. Türköz’s arguments in this chapter are further strengthened by her use of caricatures, although the section on the history of caricature is, I believe, extraneous, serving only to unnecessarily distract the reader from the gist of the arguments.
Chapter 3—entitled “Making, Disseminating, and Enforcing the Law”—searches for the precedents of the Surname Law and discusses its formulation and dissemination process primarily through an examination of parliamentary debates. This chapter shifts the reader’s attention from the broader political and cultural climate toward more specific legal and administrative changes, seeking out the relationship of the law to concurrent reforms and legislation. In particular, Türköz juxtaposes the Surname Law with the law (No. 2590) abolishing titles (Agha, Molla, Pasha, etc.), arguing that, together, these laws aimed at creating a homogeneous community unmarked by any distinctions. At the same time, as Türköz meticulously demonstrates, there were manifold distinctions that were not or could not be erased. For example, it was the husband, as the head of the family, who was charged with choosing the surname, thus revealing deeply entrenched social distinctions based on gender. Here, Türköz also duly treats the Surname Law in connection with the Resettlement Law (No. 2510), thus focusing on ethnicity as yet another important marker of social distinction and hierarchy.
Chapter 4 delves into the difficult task of creating for a large population surnames that were individual and unique. Here, Türköz examines the surname booklets that were produced as a solution to this conundrum. These booklets were prepared and published by a variety of government and non-government actors, and were essentially guides instructing how one could create composite words using the relatively scarce vocabulary of “purified” Turkish. In addition to the surname booklets, this chapter also examines surname registry documents and petitions dating to between 1934 and 1936, which were unearthed from the archives of two separate population offices in İstanbul to which the author was able to gain access. Türköz, following Matthew Hull, conceptualizes the registry documents as “graphic artifacts” (pp. 3, 101) and proceeds to interpret their varied scratches, marks, rewritings, and replacements as evidence of negotiation between state officials and ordinary people. She demonstrates that a great deal of negotiation and revision occurred, especially in the case of the surnames of non-Muslim citizens, and also that many of these negotiations resulted in the Turkification of non-Muslim surnames via a Turkish suffix or Turkic-sounding names.
Chapter 5 is based around face-to-face interviews conducted primarily at nursing homes between 1998 and 2000 with (mostly Muslim) elderly men and women who had experienced the Surname Law firsthand. Here, following Alessandro Portelli, Türköz calls her methodology “history-telling” (pp. 22, 118), in which the respondents shared their memories of choosing and registering their surnames as well as their recollections of the law in particular and of the environment of the 1930s in general. This chapter gives some idea of how the law became known to individuals and how people and families chose their surnames. These stories offer us glimpses into the complexity of the naming experience, and hence into how one particular legal reform penetrated into the daily lives of ordinary people.
Chapter 6 focuses on oral historical interviews conducted with non-Muslim (especially Armenian and Jewish) elderly citizens in an attempt to show how, at the time, surnames were used to neutralize ethnicity. While the Surname Law itself makes no direct reference to minority status, the pressure to choose a Turkish surname had strong ethnic implications. To be more specific, Article 3 of the law restricted surnames relating to “tribes and foreign races and ethnicities” (quoted on p. 183), while Article 7 of the concurrent Surname Regulation clarified the unwanted “ethnic” and “foreign” surnames as including, among many others, such elements as the Armenian patronymic -ian and the Greek -poulos. Even in cases when not stipulated directly by the law, many people belonging to minority groups felt pressure to avoid the markers of their ethnicity, as is amply demonstrated by the interviews that Türköz utilizes as a source. In sum—as suggested by the chapter’s title, “The Burden of Minority Names”—this chapter concerns the semiotic burdens that a surname could carry, and thus deals once again with the ethnic dimension of the nation-building process.
Chapter 7 discusses criticisms of the Surname Law. The first part of the chapter addresses contemporary conservative, right-wing criticisms, while the second part deals with how Kurdish citizens of Turkey continue to contest the law’s legacy and stake a claim to their own history. Despite the merit of demonstrating both past and modern criticisms of the law, the two parts of this chapter are not well integrated, with the links between past and present criticisms appearing, unfortunately, incompatible.
In sum, Türköz’s book is very thoroughly researched, well framed, and well written. While there are some parts that may diverge from the book’s main thrust, the overall account and the historical ethnography of the Surname Law is rather impressive and convincing. This will prove to be an indispensable study for anyone attempting to understand and analyze the state-building process during the early republican period.
