Anthropology, State-Formation and Regulatory Governance: EU Bureaucracy as a Site for Analysing the (Post?)-Modern State
Christopher Houston Macquarie University
In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott assumes the necessary failure of state-initiated social engineering schemes, if a number of ‘pernicious’ elements combine. These are the administrative ordering of society and nature; a high modernist ideology; an authoritarian state; and an incapacitated civil society. In this paper I want to examine one particular transnational project of social engineering, that of Kemalism in Turkey, Iran and Iraq after the First World War. Historic Kemalism can be seen to meet each of Scott’s criteria for a ‘fully-fledged disaster.’ Did or has Kemalism failed? How do we assess its success or failure? Using the example of the Kemalist State’s ‘cultural revolution’ in Turkey in the 1930s as a brief case study, the paper investigates the success or otherwise of the revolution’s attempts to craft in citizens a new ethic and subjectivity, as well as a new embodied knowledge.
