As grad school applications are coming due, I want to wish all the best of luck to this year's AH applicants--both with eventual decisions, and with surviving the waiting time. :)

So this is something of a request for similar cases. As some of you know, I'm not actually a historian but a historical sociologist. We love comparisons more than almost anything else (probably more than primary sources, even). So here's what I'm seeing, and I wonder if anyone else has seen something similar:

In Turkey, competitive multiparty elections with universal franchise start in the 1950's. In the cities, this is often the old elite (the Western educated, the bureaucrats, the secularists) against the "periphery" (the somewhat more pious, the businessmen, the traditionally educated). Whatever, that's a common enough pattern (though if it reminds you of politics of a country you study, you can tell me too), and it's been well established in Turkey. What's really interesting is in the countryside, in the 1950's and 1960's, we see electoral politics based not on these big national identities or interests, but on primary ties (family, kinship, tribe, etc).

Anthropologist Paul Stirling describes the general pattern of rural politics like this:

two sharply defined factions already existed [before democratic elections]. The reigning faction had necessarily already identified itself with the existing government, so that the headman3 and his supporters were automatically R.P.P. [the CHP, the party of Ataturk which had been in power since 1923]. Those who opposed them were thus committed to the D.P. [the party of the "periphery", which was a broad coalition of those kept out of power.] No one can be certain in a secret ballot how people actually voted, but on the whole it is probably safe to assume that most votes follow public affiliations, and affiliations for most villagers follow, not national lines, but local ones. So long as the two-party system continues, the votes of each village and small town are likely to be split in this way, giving the opposition a certain minimum number of votes more or less regardless of national issues (Stirling 1965:281).

I've found similar patterns across units of various sizes (sometimes it's within village; sometimes you see the patterns in the small towns; sometimes it's across the whole district, including towns and villages in one interconnected system; in one case it's across the whole of a particularly under developed, tribal province). These systems can be familial; or tribal; or patronage networks around an agha (large, semi-feudal land-owner) and opposing patronage networks around the new merchant elite; or two competing aghas. So that's cool, right? It's a pattern I've seen over and over again. Well, what's even cooler is that this pattern breaks down at a certain point. It's not the same time everywhere. In the West of Turkey, it's clear that it's breaking down by the late 60's, in the East it certainly goes into the 80's.. In some places I suspect there are remnants of the system still in place (especially, but not exclusively, in the Kurdish majority Southeast).

This article, for instance, shows a clear, quantitative decline in the political importance of "local notables" in the Kurdish majority Diyarbakir province. The proportion of MPs with "family notoriety", "property resources", "charisma" all decrease after the 1970's period (figure 2, figure 3) (family notoriety and property are both signs of being an agha, charisma means religious charisma and often means, especially in the early periods, being from a sheikh family). Correspondingly, we see a corresponding increase of activists/political operatives being elected, especially after the "pro-Kurdish"/Kurdish nationalist party was able to find ways around the 10% electoral threshold (which was designed in part to keep them out of parliament).

Does this pattern seem familiar to anyone else? By this pattern, I mean first politics based on local, sometimes very local, ties (of family, kinship, tribe) forming social cleavages which, once republican/democratic government comes, and second the gradual breakdown of this system of local cleavages in favor of a system based on national cleavages of class, ideology, ethnicity, religion, etc? Even just electoral politics based on these local ties would be great--most countries only extended franchise to peasants and workers long after these sorts of local ties politics broke down through the "master processes of modernity" like state centralization, urbanization, proletarianization, etc. Since Turkey was such a late urbanizer (in the 1980's, half the population was still rural--the last in all Europe and the Middle East), we get to see this process play out in a democratic setting.

I'm really interested in how these old, primary ties are made into new politics of identity around class, ethnicity, religion, etc. It doesn't need to be a democracy. The closest I've found to an analogous case is Tilly's The Vendee, where he makes a clear argument that two adjacent regions have different kinds of social relations (different types of "ties"--in one, the peasants are close to the nobility) and therefore that explains why one rebelled and one didn't. Roger V. Gould's Insurgent Identities is also really cool (he argues that different relationships--ties--between neighborhoods in 1848 and 1871 explains why the two Paris Communes were so different). There's also a bit on purely elite networks of the capital (Karen Barkey's work on the Ottomans, John F. Padgett's work on the Medici) and that I'm less interested in honestly--but seriously, anything about electoral politics and the existence of these local ties or the breakdown of local ties would be great. But just, seriously, anything that this reminds you of, shoot me a line. I think this is a common process but, because of the unique timing of Turkey (relatively late urbanization, relatively early democratization), I'm having a hard time finding other cases where we can actually witness the changing valence of these ties play an important role in politics.

Halp.

I've been going through some public history articles for work this week, and I thought this 2012 article Passionate Histories: “Outsider” History-Makers and What They Teach Us was particularly interesting in light of what we do here. It got me thinking about this recent meta thread discussing academic vs. buff historians on AskHistorians, "buff" and "outsider" are different names for the same set of people.

Most of the commenters in the meta thread seemed to assume rather uncritically that what we do here is automatically public history, because it's history, to the public, and we got a bunch of degrees here, yadayada. But in light of this article (written by a public history professor) I think it's less clear to me now that we are truly doing public history. A lot of the people here, even if they have degrees, I think are doing more "outsider" history work here than public history.

I also think the article's discussion about how the historical entertainment industry (focusing in particular on Story Corps from NPR) has responded to the public's love of stories and emotions and a personal connection to history, whereas traditional public history (like smaller museums) has resisted it and maintained emphasis on telling the "full" or "true" story of whatever is in their purview.

I was also kinda surprised that public historians are supposed to resent genealogists and their influence on local history, because I've never really gotten that in archives-land. I like genealogists, they're fun and they generally don't mind paying for things, which is nice, I really hate fee-whiners. I think that's more because I personally don't see my work as in the same public history realm as museums at all, even though many public historians seem to want to drag us into their sticky fold, but that's another bag of gumballs probably for another day...

Anyway I sent this article to the other mods and I'm pretty sure NONE of those bums read it, so if anyone would like to read it and give me their opinions, I would be much obliiiiiged.