Crossing Borders into Turkish Sociology with Gunder Frank and Michel Foucault

TL;DRAbstract

To t ravel int o t he past of sociology in Turkey, I have chosen to focus on two books of international acclaim that have crossed cultural borders. By tracing how these books have been actively appropriated and filtered through the conceptual grid of prevailing controversies and ongoing events in the national arena, I hope to be able to say something about the changing contours of the discipline. This is not because there is a dearth of scholarship on various aspects of society, by and non-Turkish authors. On the contrary, there is a wide literature of indisputable merit. But the landmarks that signal shifts in the trajectory of the discipline are not influential books. It is the mesmerizing play of political events, wars, economic crises, military coups, liberalizations that usher in moments of intense anxiety and of reappraisal, imparting a sense of new departures and breaks with orthodoxy. Of the two sensibilities out of which sociology has been historically Inolded, one intellectua

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