The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

Author(s): Berna Yazici

Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 103-140
Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41427090
Accessed: 19-03-2016 07:34 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41427090?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Anthropological Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Artide

In memory of Diele Kogacioglu

The Return to the Family:

Welfare, State, and Politics
of the Family in Turkey
Berna Yazici
Bogaziçi University

ABSTRACT
This article examines the transformation of the Turkish state's social work

policy to engage recent debates in anthropology about welfare restruc-

turing and neoliberalism. Building on ethnographic research from top to
bottom, I trace welfare policy through the discourse of politicians and
bureaucrats into everyday bureaucratic practice. Drawing attention to
the stark contrast between the discursive image of the nurturing three
generational extended family put at the center of the АКР (Justice and
Development Party) government's political rhetoric and policy-making
and the experience of urban poor women who pass through the welfare
orbit, I argue that for poor women and children, the globally influenced
transformation in welfare corresponds to the reinforcement of socio-
economic vulnerabilities, all of which constrain their already precarious
lives. [Keywords: Welfare restructuring and neoliberalism, state, bureau-
cracy, politics of the family, Turkey]

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1 , p. 1 03-1 40, ISSN 0003-5491 . © 201 2 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

103

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

Introduction
During the last week of October 2005, a single topic dominated the head-
lines and primetime news in Turkey: debates over how to reform the state
social work system. The heated debates were triggered by secret cam-
era footage, broadcast on a national channel, of caregivers' physical vio-
lence towards children in a residential home run by the state social work
agency, the Social Services and Children's Protection Agency (SSCPA).1
These heated debates were informed by and fed back into the ongoing
restructuring of state-sponsored social work, crystallized in the Return to
the Family Project which aims to return institutionalized children to their
families. The period when this shift from state-provided institutional care
to familial care began also corresponded to Prime Minister Erdogan's in-
vocation of stories of the "strong Turkish family." These stories pointed
to a nurturing three-generational extended family- specifically contrast-
ed with the presumed weakness of familial ties in "the West"- to pose
"the Turkish family" as the best agent to provide social protection and lift
"social burdens" on the state. Around the same time, female clients who
pass through the welfare orbit- such as Ay§en and Gülsüm, whose sto-
ries I discuss below- were seeking help in social work offices precisely
because their family experiences were in stark contrast to those put at the
center of political rhetoric and policy-making.
In this article, I combine the different levels of political discourse anal-
ysis, state social policy, and everyday institutional practice to examine
the ongoing restructuring of the field of state-sponsored social work as
part of a larger neoliberal-conservative project unfolding in Turkey in the
early 2000s.2 Welfare restructuring constitutes a significant component
of this neoliberal-conservative project. The ongoing transformation in
the Turkish welfare regime has been affected by the IMF-guided structur-
al adjustment programs, preparations for integration with the European
Union (EU), the emergence of new actors in the welfare field (such as the
World Bank), and the neoliberal politics of the Justice and Development
Party (АКР) government which has particularly encouraged familial re-
sponsibility in social care.
In what follows, I draw from two years of ethnographic research.3 In the
spirit of anthropology of public policy (Shore and Wright 1997; Wedel et
al. 2005; Shore, Wright, and Pero 201 1), I "study through" (Reinhold 1994)
sites of policy formulation and implementation. Mapping the connections
among the sites, actors, discourses, and practices of the field of social

104

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

work, I illuminate the continuities and disjunctures that occur as policies of

welfare restructuring are translated into practice. Studying from top to bot-
tom, I move from media debates and policy discussions in five-star hotels
to poorly furnished welfare offices in Ankara and Istanbul and conflict rid-
den interactions among welfare workers and their clients, the urban poor.
Linking the analysis of political discourse and social policy to on-the-
ground bureaucratic practice, I show how opportunities to receive help
through the state social work system are shaped through broader po-
litical and socio-economic processes. These processes, while linked to
powerful global actors and national politics, also touch and constrain the
lives of individuals who pass through the welfare orbit at this critical mo-
ment of welfare "reform." As I illustrate through ethnographic material,
for many clients- particularly poor women and children- the restructur-
ing of the welfare system corresponds to the reinforcement of social and
economic disadvantages, including systems of domination by gender
and age in domestic relations, all of which constrain their already ex-
tremely precarious lives. An important contradiction thus emerges when
the different levels of analysis are connected: policies emerging from a
discursive emphasis on "strengthening the family" along with the desire
to diminish state responsibility for social protection serve to undercut
precisely those already vulnerable families, married/unmarried women
and their children, who do not fit into the discursive image of "family" and
who, most importantly, need the state's help to survive.

Welfare Restructuring and Neoliberalism

This analysis builds on the recent anthropological literature on welfare
restructuring and neoliberalism. Much of the anthropological literature
on welfare restructuring has focused on Europe and particularly on the
experience in the US after the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, famously known as welfare "reform."
Discussions on welfare transformation in non-western contexts remain
under-examined in this literature, hindering the development of broader
comparative frames.4
Yet despite this comparative limitation, the anthropological literature
on welfare restructuring has opened up important new lines of inquiry
which I have followed. As argued by Morgen and Maskovksy (2003), an-
thropologists contributed along several lines: in contrast to mainstream

105

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

poverty studies,5 anthropological analyses situated the study of welfare

restructuring within wider processes- the most prominent of which is
the rise of neoliberalism- and have drawn attention to the production of
new forms of poverty and inequality under global capitalism (Collins, di
Leonardo, and Williams 2008; Kingfisher 2002; Goode and Maskovksy
2001 ; Hyatt 2001 ; Lyon-Callo 2001 ).6 Ethnographic analyses of the wel-
fare bureaucracy explored the bureaucratic encounter and the power-
laden interactions between welfare workers and clients as a key site for
the production of welfare policy (Morgen 2001; Kingfisher 2001, 1996;
Edgar and Russell 1998; Brodkin 1986).Through ethnographic analyses
of the lives of welfare recipients, anthropologists further challenged the
policy success claimed by the proponents of welfare "reform."7
Like ethnographic accounts of welfare bureaucracy, I also utilize the
bureaucratic encounter between welfare workers and clients as an in-

valuable site for the analysis of welfare policy, which I suggest should be
understood as more than the provision of cash assistance.8 My analysis
is not, however, confined to bureaucratic encounters between workers
and clients.

Diverging from most studies of welfare, which "study down" by focus-

ing on welfare recipients and in the spirit of those (Kingfisher 2007:93)
who utilize Nader's (1969) call to "study up," I also bring in the perspec-
tives of powerful actors in policy formulation, including top level politi-
cians, bureaucrats, and the media.9 My analysis draws on participant
observation in public meetings among these influential actors and dem-
onstrates that not only technocratic or expert knowledge10 but also sto-
ries about families, culture, and the nation guide policy formulation.
Specifically relevant to my discussion are feminist analyses which un-
derscore the intricate link between welfare policy and the production of
gender along with race- and class- based inequalities, illuminating the
implications of welfare restructuring for particular groups of women. I
expand the insights of this anthropological literature11 to a non-western
context with the intention of contributing to the development of com-
parative welfare analyses12 and the specific study of welfare reform in
Turkey and the Middle East. In the latter case, the investigation of social
welfare has generally consisted of historical analyses of charity, with an
emphasis on the role of Islam,13 while ethnographic analyses of modern
social work institutions such as the one provided here have remained
more limited.14

106

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

In this article, my use of the term neoliberalism is a particular refer-

ence to neoliberalism as policies and programs (England and Ward
2007:12) which target specific major changes in the domain of welfare.
Neoliberalism as a doctrine on free market society promoted through the
writings of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman became the ideological
building blocks for the processes of neoliberalization that since the late
1970s have become dominant world-wide. Whether defined as a political
project to restore class power (Harvey 2005), market driven socio-spatial
transformation (Brenner and Theodore 2002), implementation of the "uto-
pia of unlimited exploitation" (Bourdieu 1 998), or a shift in governmentality
(Rose 1996, Ferguson and Gupta 2002), neoliberalism has a characteristic
feature with respect to the domain of welfare. In tandem with a commit-
ment to budgetary austerity, the state's responsibility in social care and
protection is often transferred to non-state actors including the private
sector, non-governmental organizations, and familial networks.
My analysis is informed by anthropological analyses which challenge
the dominant conceptualization of neoliberalism as a monolithic force
which has inevitably spread from the US and Europe to the rest of the
world. I particularly follow the lines of inquiry that foreground the ways
neoliberalism is produced through social action in particular places in rela-
tion to shifting "local" dynamics and debates.15 As some suggest, analy-
sis of neoliberalism as a process that entails its own contingencies and
contradictions (Kingfisher and Maskovksy 2008, Ong 2006, Clarke 2004,
Kingfisher 2002) may be enriched and Europe-centered assumptions
about neoliberalism (Kipnis 2008:284-286, Ong 1999) may be challenged
particularly through empirical analyses of its experience in contexts be-
yond its ideological centers in the US and Britain (England and Ward
2007). 16 As I show, in the Turkish context, neoliberalism's contradiction
emerges in the simultaneous deployment of neoliberal welfare policies
with a conservative political discourse about the family that denounces
neoliberalism's ideological center, "the West."
In examining a state institution - in this case, the social work bureau-
cracy in Turkey- I am theoretically and politically concerned with "the
need to keep the state clearly in view" (Kingfisher 2002:8) and to under-
mine the popular view (Ong 1999:6) that neoliberalism and globalization
diminished the state's significance. If bureaucratic practice is tremen-
dously significant in the formation of government even in unstable places
such as Gaza and across changes in state regimes (Feldman 2008a: 1 -2),

107

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

there is no reason to assume that state bureaucracies become irrelevant

under neoliberal regimes.17 Here, I particularly want to draw attention to

the state's significance in the lives of the poor (Maskovksy and Kingfisher
2001). I focus on the state not as a unitary entity but study through its
multiple levels of policy formulation and implementation. I point to bu-
reaucratic struggles within the state (Herzfeld 2005), particularly the con-
tention between the finance ministries and the spending ministries which
deal with social problems (Bourdieu 1998:2).

Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

In recent ethnographic work on Turkey, there has been a move to study
the production of state power outside the state's institutional bound-
aries. In advocating a new political anthropology, several authors have
privileged social practices such as the public rituals (Navaro-Yashin
2002) or consumption practices (Özyürek 2006) of actors considered
to be "outside" the state. These innovative studies brought into focus
the under-examined dimensions of politics in Turkey, provided invalu-
able criticism of hegemonic political discourses, and drew attention to
the transformative power of neoliberalism as it becomes integrated with
state ideology in Turkey.
Yet, this important reconfiguration of analytic focus should not pre-
clude investigating the significance of state institutions and practices18 in
the growing neoliberal hegemony. Especially for the socio-economically
marginal who do not participate as fully in market consumption as do the
middle classes, the state and its power also enter into their lives through
bureaucratic sites and procedures. It is through these sites where social
policies are translated into practice that the most powerful effects of
structural adjustment programs, and neoliberal policies directly impinge
on the lives of marginalized citizens.
A focus on state bureaucracy is indispensable for unique reasons re-
lated to the topic of this study. In contrast to some other countries in the
Middle East, the state social work agency has been the only institution
in Turkey with the exclusive legal authority to provide residential care for
children. This monopoly, also historically utilized by some communist
regimes such as the People's Republic of China (Shang and Wu 2003),
has to do with the intricate discursive link established in Turkey between
children and the nation. Yet, this discursive emphasis on children and

108

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

the nation has not been matched by extensive state investment in child
welfare, as it was, for example, in Cuba.19 Instead, it brought about the
state's monopoly on the residential care of children in the aftermath of
the 1 980 coup. The 1 983 Social Work Law which introduced the monop-
oly, while important in promoting state responsibility for child protection,
was also driven by a political motivation: socializing children under resi-
dential care with "national values" and state ideology. For this purpose,
the exclusion of non-state actors from the residential care of children

was regarded as necessary. Hence, while in other social work domains

(such as assistance to the urban poor) other actors (such as munici-
palities or civic organizations) that mobilize private donations to charity
through the employment of Islamic norms and local cultural codes may
be important (White 2002, Bugra and Keyder 2006), 20 the Turkish state
has maintained a monopoly in the field of child protection services.21
Historically, the Turkish welfare regime has been characterized by an
inegaiitarian, corporatist social security system which linked benefits to
employment status, and excluded the rural and urban informal sector
workers. While the family always remained the key provider of social pro-
tection, the developmentalist state of the post World War II era played an
important role as an employer and provider including through informal
means such as possibilities for informal housing for a city's new migrants
(Bugra and Keyder 2006:212, 221). However, the 1980s marked the on-
set of neoliberal policies in Turkey when state-led developmentalism and
import substitution economic policies were abandoned in favor of an
export-oriented market economy.
After the AKP's rise to power in 2002, neoliberal policies in welfare
politics became more resilient. Along with the IMF's close supervision of
the economy and the government's commitment to fiscal discipline,22 the
social security and health-care system was subject to a radical restruc-
turing with significant losses in terms of social rights.23 However, one
cannot explain the transformation of the Turkish welfare regime in terms
of simplistic arguments on the retreat of the state. Especially with regard
to public expenditures on means-tested social assistance,24 there has
been an increase in the aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis. The latter

sustains clientelistic relations between political authorities and the poor

(Bugra and Canda? 2011). It also demonstrates that "privatization and
retreat of the state in terms of service provision can exist side by side
with the growing political reach and power of the state" (Eder 201 0:1 82).

109

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

Still, the share in gross domestic product of expenditures on social

assistance is extremely low in comparative perspective (Bugra and Adar
2008). And more importantly, since gross social spending may not be
the best indicator of welfare transformation (Clarke 2004:16), one also
needs to look into the institutional arrangements through which welfare
provision is organized. Since its rise to power, the АКР government has
systematically promoted non-state actors, the private sector and vol-
untary initiatives, especially charity mobilized through nongovernmental
organizations and municipalities, as leading actors for poverty alleviation
and the provision of social services. For the provision of social care, the
АКР has turned, as I discuss below, to "the family" as the best agent to
alleviate "social burdens" on the state.

I should note that I employ the term "family" in reference not to a

biologically determined unit, but to an historical and political construct.
I am particularly interested in elucidating a political discourse through
which "a narrow definition of legitimate family structure" (Stacey 1 996:5)
is officially being promoted for a national populace. More specifically, in
the spirit of Haney and Pollard (2003), I maintain the analytical focus on
the family both as a discursive tool in state politics, as well as a key site
of state institutional practices, underlining its critical role in the state's
restructuring within a global context.
Drawing attention to the state politics of the family is by no means
novel in scholarship on the Middle East. As demonstrated through so-
phisticated analyses,25 images of the family, household structures, re-
production, domestic and gender relations, and debates on women have
been key sites for political struggles in the modern history of the region.
The gendered dimension of the modernist project, although often con-
fined to discursive analyses, is also a key theme in the scholarship on
Turkey.26 By foregrounding state social work practice on the ground, I
seek to move beyond the discursive focus of these gendered analyses
and draw attention to how socio-economically disadvantaged women
are positioned within projects of the Turkish state, which itself is under-
going transformation.27
The following discussion consists of three parts: First, I discuss the
АКР government's conservative political discourse on the family by situat-
ing it within a comparative framework of conservative/neoliberal projects
as well as the broader state politics of the family in Turkey, pointing to
historical continuity and change. Second, I investigate how the political

110

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

focus on protecting the family specifically manifests itself in state social

work policy. Finally, drawing on my research in Ankara and Istanbul and fo-
cusing on the interactions between welfare workers and clients in a Family
and Children Services facility run by the SSCPA, I examine how policy
objectives are translated into on-the-ground bureaucratic practice.

Discursive Justifications for Welfare Politics:

Strong Family, Strong Society

A man had an elderly father who was living together with the man,
his wife, and son. One day when the elderly man had a stroke and
became sick, the man's wife said: "I am not going to take care of
your father. You shall choose either him or me." The man chose his
wife over his father. He and the little son took the old man to the
mountains and abandoned him there. Once they had left the old
man and were on their way back home, the son asked his father:
"Daddy, am I also going to leave you like we did grandfather when
you get old?" Shaken by his son's question, the man all of a sudden
understood his mistake and went back to the mountains to take his
father back home.

I heard this story in the opening speeches of the 2004 National Family
Conference organized by the State Directorate of Family and Social
Research (SDFSR),28 which the prime minister attended as the guest of
honor. During my fieldwork, I observed that such stories around the fa-
milial were invoked by leading national politicians as well as by different
individuals sympathetic to the АКР government. Among the latter were
bureaucrats, academics, and non-governmental organizations' represen-
tatives whom I met in social policy circles.
These stories point to an ideal family consisting of three generations,
with grandparents, parents, and children living together. This idealized
family, furthermore, takes on an implicit patrilineal form. I often heard sto-
ries in which the woman was criticized for her unwillingness to care for
and live together with her husband's parents, but never a story which told
the opposite. But what do these stories around the familial have to do with
state politics?

111

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

The link between state politics and family rhetoric can be observed
across diverse political projects and historical periods. For example, one
can point to the romance of the invented Confucian family, which was criti-
cal in the making of Chinese capitalism along with the state's provisioning
of social programs to the middle classes in order to enhance capitalist
development (Ong 1999).
Here, the most relevant cases for comparison are the various post-so-
cialist transitions of Eastern Europe, which drew on family narratives while
often reducing state-provided social benefits and services (Verdery 1 994,
Gal and Kligman 2000, Haney 2003) as well as more recent neoconserva-
tive and neoliberal projects. In contexts such as Thatcherite Britain, or
the US family values campaign dating back to and extending beyond the
Reagan era, a conservative political rhetoric of the family was employed
to promote the nuclear family ideal, often against poor, single mothers,
African-Americans, gays, and lesbians. In the process, conservative and
neoliberal forces joined in the project of dismantling state welfare.29
In the Turkish context, the АКР government's conservative family rheto-
ric invokes not the nuclear unit, but a three-generational extended family,
construed as the foundation upon which the nation's genuine cultural val-
ues rest. Family-decline rhetoric is employed to point to a social phenom-
enon characterizing "the West," while "the strength of the Turkish family"
is offered as the primary solution to all major socio-economic and political
problems facing Turkey. These references to the family constitute a basis
for the AKP's formulation of a political identity as well as a discursive justi-
fication for concrete material re-arrangements in the welfare system.
Prime Minister Erdogan himself has seized various occasions to propa-
gate his view of the three-generational family. For example, in his public
statement on Mother's Day 2005, Erdogan said: "We should take care of
our mothers and fathers when they get old. These days there has appeared
a mentality which views living away from parents as modernity. There is no
such thing in our culture. Such a mentality reflects cultural degeneration"
(as quoted in Milliyet 2005).
As the framing of certain familial arrangements in terms of cultural de-
generation suggests, discourses on the family are not merely about the
family. Indeed, Erdogan has been very explicit about the political signifi-
cance of his statements on the family. In his public speeches, he defines
his government's conservatism as the emphasis put on family and family-
centered policies. This definition of political identity indexed to family was

112

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

also officially stated in the AKP's 2003 Government Program: "The major
philosophical and political concern of our conservative identity is to keep
intact and healthy the social organism of the family that is capable of pro-
tecting the individual" (AkParti 2003:2).
Such political uses of the idiom of the familial are no surprise to scholars
of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Idealized images of the nuclear family
much promoted by the early modernizers against the Ottoman extended
family or the Ottoman "big house" were critical for the national imagination
of Republican Turkey (Peirce 1993, Kandiyoti 1997, Sirman 2007, Toprak
1991) as well as the metaphors of "father state, mother country" (Delaney
1995).30 However, in the present, by way of contrast, ideals of the three-
generational family- in opposition to nuclear families in which adult/mar-
ried children "neglect" their duties to their own elderly parents- are valo-
rized in the public discourse of the АКР leadership and those sympathetic
to the government.31 But how are we to understand this discursive shift to
an idealized three-generational family?
In order to answer this question, one has to begin with an historical and
political understanding of the АКР government. The АКР emerged from
and transformed the tradition of political parties that had mobilized Islamic
politics in Turkey since the 1970s. It was founded in 2001 by the young-
er, reformist politicians including Erdogan who chose to depart from the
mainstream Islamist party. The АКР defined itself as conservative rather
than Islamist and presented a pro-Western, pro-Europe, and pro-private
sector position while simultaneously deploying religious idioms. The party
came to power after the 2002 general elections and reinforced its one-
party government rule in the elections of 2007 and 201 1 .32
Since its rise to power, the АКР government has been confronted
with a delicate task. The АКР has had to accomplish major institutional
transformations as Turkey seeks integration with the EU while also re-
sponding to the reform pressures from the IMF, maintaining its ally sta-
tus with the US without undermining the party's "Islamic politics," and
proving- at least to its religious electorate- its distinctiveness from its
"secularist" predecessors.
It seems that one of the AKP's solutions for demonstrating its dis-
tinctiveness from both national political rivals and an imagined "West"
is the use of the image of the three-generational family. Prime Minister
Erdogan's family rhetoric posits the upper-middle classes, particularly
the secularist elites, as "the other" of the ideal family he promotes. It is

113

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

the well-off, the intelligentsia, according to Erdogan, who have opted in

the name of modernity to live away from and neglect their duties towards
their elderly parents.33
In 2008, Erdogan complemented this vision of a three-generational
family with the Ideal of "a family with three children." Through numer-
ous public statements, he insistently called on families and particularly
women to give birth to a minimum of three children. Otherwise, Erdogan
claimed, Turkey's population would age in several decades. His much
protested statements and disputed demographic projection also por-
trayed those who did not embrace this view as traitors who wanted to
fool the Turkish nation and weaken it by pushing her toward the historical
mistake made by "the West" which now finds itself facing the problem of
an aging population.
Thus, the most powerful otherlzing in this discourse on the idealized im-
ages of a three-generational family and a family with three children takes
place in relation to an imagined "West." For example, Erdogan finished
his speech at the 2004 National Family Conference by elaborating on the
story with which I started this section:

Thank God we are not a society that celebrates the mentality that
leaves the paralyzed father in the mountains as modernity. And those
who do so are destined to stay alone. When I was in Dublin recently,
one man asked me about our conservatism and I responded: "In
your society, don't the children leave home when they reach the age
of eighteen? Don't the girls leave home? What happens if the mother
and the father die alone at home and the corpses start smelling in
ten days?" And that man responded to me: "You are right. That is
where our [society's] catastrophe resides." [...] We have to protect
a society where children continue to live together with their parents.
We are all mothers and fathers. We do not want to be left alone in
the mountains one day. We do not want to be a nation that does so.

This story reveals how politicians may use persuasive anectotes "to
make high-policy statements about the kind of modernity Turkey should
be pursuing" (Strathern 2011:7). More specifically, Erdogan's speech is
significant for revealing the AKP's use of religious idioms, note the term
"thank god" (çok §ükür), and for underscoring how the nation is still the
framework of imagination while the structures of the nation-state are

114

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA VAZICI

undergoing radical transformation. This speech also illuminates the dis-

cursive power of the trope of "the smell of corpses." I observed such
references to the smell of corpses, implicit references to the deaths that
the 2003 heat wave in Europe caused among the elderly who lived alone,
not only by Erdogan, but also by various participants during the Family
Conference. "Could you imagine," many people would ask, "old people
dying alone in their homes in the West and nobody noticing until they
begin to smell."
In this political discourse, the dissolution of familial ties, as drama-
tized through the smell of corpses, is constructed as a sign of the coming
societal decay in "the West." At the same time, "the Turkish family" and
its purported strength is pictured as the foundation of a solid societal
order in Turkey. As it was stated in the AKP's 2003 government program,
"[t]he family is the foundation of society. Societal solidarity, happiness
and peace depend on the family. In spite of all the negative experiences
and economic hardships we have been through,34 if we as a society are
still intact, we owe it to our strong family structure" (Akparti 2003:1 7).
Yet, this vision of the strong Turkish family flies in the face of recent
research conducted on contemporary forms of poverty in Turkey.35 The
much-celebrated ideal of a Turkish family's solidarity in the face of eco-
nomic crisis may actually mean "the mobilization of child and female la-
bor" in the form of irregular jobs in the informal sector, with wages below
that of the official minimum (Bugra and Keyder 2006:222).
The ideological promotion of the slogan of "strong family, strong so-
ciety" should thus be subject to critical scrutiny, not only for concealing
forms of subordination in the labor market, but also because this slogan
becomes the grounds for justifying the government's attempts at shifting
social care (even further) from state to familial sources and implicitly to
women as primary caregivers. In this shift, both processes of interpreta-
tion and redistribution come into play.
The politics of need interpretation (Fraser 1989a) entails a political
struggle over what people's needs are and how they should be met. In
this "struggle over needs" (Fraser 1989b), one central question revolves
around the debate of which institution- the market, the state, or the fam-
ily-best meet individuals' needs. In the political interpretation of the АКР,
the family is offered as the self-evident answer to this question.
The АКР discourse asserts that the family is inherently the best site in
which to meet the needs of the elderly, the disabled, and children and for

115

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

"solving the problem of social care." Such messages have direct implica-
tions for the state's responsibility in social care. As "the strong Turkish
family" is portrayed as a "problem-solver" in the sense of resolving what
would otherwise be a "burden" on the state, the state's "proper" role is in-
creasingly confined to a specific interpretation of "protecting and strength-
ening the family."
Here, it is important to note that while social trends- such as significant
increases in divorce rates and female employment outside the home-
which may trigger a conservative discourse on the family have been large-
ly absent in Turkey, the phenomena of increased violence against women
and child abuse that need to be addressed by the social work system
point to an alarming trajectory.36 Yet, the prevailing policy discourse fails
to analyze these growing conflicts in familial relations. The hegemonic as-
sumption is that conflicts emerge in families only due to disruptions from
the "outside," such as poverty, "cultural change," or migration. Indeed, the
principle of protecting the family is to be understood as the state's pro-
tection of the family (rather than women and children) from the negative
effects of these external "threats."

The importance attached to the principle of protecting the family is to

be understood in its linking of societal and familial realms. The protec-
tion of the family is seen as an important means, as reflected in both
Erdogan's public statements and policy discourse, to prevent a "societal
crisis" and achieve a "healthy social order." The Turkish family discourse
hence entails a depoliticizing thesis by signaling family breakdown as
the underlying cause of major "social problems" and in the process eras-
ing not only familial inequalities and relations of power, but also larger
socio-political ones.37
Such a political discourse on the family is not totally novel in Turkey as
official policy discourses have long posed the family as the central institu-
tion of welfare (Bugra and Keyder 2006). Hence, the concept of protect-
ing the family is not an invention of the АКР government.38 However, the
familial ideology that underpins state social policy has been accentuated
and transformed by the АКР government as part of its conservative and
neoliberal project. Currently, the АКР is stressing the family even more; it
is relying on a model of the idealized three generational family, in contrast
to the nuclear family promoted in the official nationalist discourse, and
systemically turning its family discourse into practice through social policy
reforms and various projects.

116

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

Since its rise to power in 2002, the АКР government has systemi-
cally promoted, in spite of criticism from feminist groups, social policies
that encourage home care by family members instead of care in state
institutions, be they residential homes for children or the elderly, or day-
care centers.39 This policy of shifting care from state to familial sources
is linked, as I discuss below, to the objective of reducing costs in state
welfare spending. Therefore, despite its claims to tradition and distinction
from "the West," the AKP's political project is a neoliberal one, similar to
those pursued in other parts of the world. Thus, in Turkey, as elsewhere,
"the public repudiation of Western culture" does not necessarily contra-
dict with the simultaneous implementation of "the rules of neoliberal or-
thodoxy" (Ong 1999:197, 7). This paradox becomes explicitly manifest in
the AKP's definition of its social policy.
Many АКР officials underscore that for them, "social policy" is equal to
"family policy," which, they claim, is accepted as the most effective social
policy in "the West." In this way, the construct of "the West" is strategically
and paradoxically used as something different from "us" while simultane-
ously presented as a model to claim the effectiveness and timeliness of
the social policy reforms undertaken by the АКР government. This mes-
sage is intended not only for Turkish audiences, but also for the EU, who
as I will discuss, monitors Turkey's progress in the domain of social policy
through annual reports.
The so-called family-centered social policy of the АКР is most explicitly
inscribed in the party program, which states that "[yjounger generations
will be encouraged to take care and live together with elderly parents, and
for children in need of protection, return to the family and foster family
services will be prioritized" (Akparti 2012). But what does "return to the
family" mean?

State Social Work Policy: The Return to the Family

During the last week of October 2005, the news of abuse in a children's
home operated by the SSCPA in the eastern Turkish city of Malatya
dominated the headlines and primetime news in the country. The de-
bates triggered by the so-called Malatya Scandal focused on building
a better child protection system in the country. Yet, as in the debates
on "the child question" (Libai 2003) from the 1920s and 1930s,40 these
contemporary debates on child welfare were connected to the agendas

117

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

of differently positioned social actors. In the struggle over needs (Fraser

1989b) that followed the scandal, different arguments were raised con-
cerning the role of the state, the family, and the market in the country's
changing welfare regime.
Opponents of the government's neoliberal reforms argued that the
scandal reflected the problems of inadequate state welfare spending and
the privatization of social services.41 However, leading government offi-
cials appropriated the scandal to legitimize their reform agenda of reduc-
ing state-provided welfare, arguing for the necessity of civil actors, the
private sector, and above all, the "family" in social care. The latter focus
was already manifest in the Return to the Family Project which promotes
familial care as a policy solution to the problems observed in the state's
residential care of children.

The state minister for social work repeatedly declared during my field-
work that to be with the family was better than being in the best institution.
It was with such public statements that in 2005 the SSCPA started a proj-
ect entitled "Return to the Family" (Aileye Dönü§), which is still in effect.
The project reflects the crystallization of the double policy objectives on
top of the agenda in social work policy: de-institutionalization and protect-
ing family integrity.
The Return to the Family Project aims to send children currently insti-
tutionalized in the SSCPA's residential homes "due to economic reasons"
back to their families. This shift from institutional to familial care is to be

achieved through the monetary assistance that the SSCPA provides to

families who remove their children from residential homes. At its inception,
the project was also a source of political propaganda for politicians who
proudly emphasized that the government had significantly increased the
amount of social assistance that the SSCPA gives per child to each family.
There are several dynamics behind this project. One has to do with
the actual negative conditions in the children's homes as reflected in the
media scandals, pointing to an indisputable need- which I myself do not
dispute- to reform institutional care for children in Turkey. The motivations
to transform institutional care are also linked to various international politi-
cal forces acting on Turkey, the most significant being the EU.
As in the case of other (former) candidate countries (Micklewright and
Stewart 2000), the most notable example being Romania (Gavrilovici
2009), Turkey's need to improve its child protection system, through
both reducing the number of institutionalized children and improving the

118

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

conditions within these institutions, is an important criterion monitored by

the EU in relation to the issue of children's rights.42 For example, the EU's
2006 Progress Report for Turkey referred to the Malatya Scandal, arguing
that the event "revealed the shortcomings of the child protection system
in Turkey" (European Commission 2006:1 9).43 This link between Turkey's
EU candidacy and its child protection system was also observed by the
former British princess Sarah Ferguson, who in the fall of 2008 distributed
her secret camera images of the ill-treatment of disabled children in one of
the SSCPA's residential homes on a British TV channel in order to declare

that Turkey was not yet ready for EU membership.44

While the EU is one relevant actor influencing the restructuring of the
institutional care of children, it is important to remember that national pol-
iticians both respond to transnational pressures and strategically com-
bine them with their own political agenda. In the case of the Return to the
Family Project, the policy on de-institutionalization is also related to the
government's conservative ideology of the family and the motivation to
cut down public expenditures on welfare.45 During my fieldwork, I often
heard from policy-makers that institutional care is too expensive. Related
to this argument was the comparison often made between the amount of
social assistance that the SSCPA provided to families at the time of my
fieldwork (1 80 YTL7USD 1 49) and the monthly cost of childcare in an insti-
tution, which was claimed to be around 900 YTL (USD 748).46
Another relevant factor that drives the Return to the Family Project is
the assumption that the major reason for the institutionalization of children
in Turkey is their families' economic deprivation. This claim, while not all
together invalid, also conceals a more complicated set of reasons for chil-
dren's institutionalization in the first place. As my fieldwork has revealed,
clients may claim economic hardship as reason for institutionalizing their
children, which, they assume, is perceived as more legitimate than other
reasons- such as the reluctance to keep children from previous marriages
or relationships.47
The stipulated scope of the Return to the Family Project is quite sig-
nificant. The aim has been to send roughly 12,000 children from residen-
tial homes back to their families which in 2005, corresponded to half of
the total number of children under the SSCPA's institutional care.48 Given
its stipulated scope, the success of the Return to the Family Project has
top priority in state social work policy. SSCPA policy and practice have
been restructured and resources have been channeled according to the

119

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

requirements of the project.49 The most dramatic effect was seen in 2005
in the domain of social assistance.

With the changes introduced in March 2005, in order to compensate

for the increase in the amount of assistance offered per child, the SSCPA
limited the number of clients that could be offered assistance during that
year, emphasizing that no additional funds were to be distributed except
for applicants to the Return to the Family Project. The rationale accompa-
nying the new legislation stated that the most important function of social
assistance was contributing to family integrity by enabling the child's care
within the family. At the same time, stricter eligibility criteria were intro-
duced through the subtle regulatory legislative tools. These stricter eligi-
bility criteria were introduced under pressure from the Ministry of Finance
and much regretted by the administrators and staff of the SSCPA, who
sought to have the new legislation canceled. Their struggle perfectly illus-
trates bureaucratic struggles within the state (Herzfeld 2005), particularly
the contention between the finance ministries and the spending ministries
which deal with social problems (Bourdieu 1998:2).
The discussion I present here points to the central place of the principle
of protecting the integrity of the family within SSCPA policy, particularly
interpreted as facilitating the child's care within its own family. While this
dominant focus in social work policy has been in place since the 1990s,
there seems to have been a significant difference in the early 2000s when I
conducted my fieldwork. With the restructuring of social assistance, keep-
ing the child in the family and achieving de-institutionalization have been
increasingly reinforced at the expense of many other possible needs that
clients seek to resolve in the social work system. This is, of course, mean-
ingful in terms of what scholars of welfare have underscored: through their
definitions of eligibility criteria, social policies specify the social relations
and needs to be addressed, shaping how and to whom benefits are to
be distributed, at the exclusion of others. But how then do these poli-
cies translate into institutional practice and touch the lives of individual
people? In order to answer this question, I turn to a detailed examination
of on-the-ground bureaucratic practice.

Bureaucratic Practice
The discussion I present here draws on my fieldwork in the Ankara and
Istanbul SSCPA administrative offices- namely, the city directorate offices

120

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

and a Family and Children Services Unit located within these offices.50
However, the following critical discussion of the practices of the city direc-
torate office should not be seen as representative of the entire state social
work system in Turkey. Nor is this analysis intended to undermine the hard
work of individual social workers that I have met throughout my study who
toil tirelessly on behalf of their clients for little material and symbolic gains.51
The practice at the Family and Children Services unfolds in the specif-
ic encounters between welfare workers and clients. The clientele of the

SSCPA consists of the urban poor, mostly immigrants from rural areas.
Welfare workers, on the other hand, mostly come from the lower middle
classes. These workers are themselves faced with economic problems
given their deteriorating salaries and working conditions in comparison
to the developmental ist period of the 1960s. However, their university
degrees, relatively better life circumstances, and stable familial relations
separate them from their clients. The divergent class backgrounds of
workers and clients become manifest in the conflict ridden interactions
which I examine here.

I argue that two simultaneous motivations mark the practice of Family

and Children Services: the policy priority of achieving deinstitutionaliza-
tion, and the broader pattern of channeling clients to their family and kin
for the resolution of their problems. I observed that many clients, in return
for their appeals for help, were offered the message that the family is to
provide for itself or to "manage" (idare edeceksiniz)- as the workers often
told clients- with minimum support from the state.52
I observed that the first information workers tried to elicit during their
interviews was about the familial and kin networks available to the client.

In processing applications concerning requests for institutionalizing chil-

dren, the welfare workers were guided by the overall goal not to accept
any children into the agency's children's homes. One social worker reflect-
ed on her practice: "Here, we do acrobatics not to place one more child in
residential homes." Of course, this statement reflects the other side of the
Return to the Family Project. The agenda to achieve de-institutionalization
was thus pursued on two fronts. On the one hand, there was the process
of sending children currently under institutionalization back to their family
members. On the other hand, there was the goal not to further increase
the number of children in residential homes by blocking new applicants.
Institutionalization was thus considered a last resort reserved for cases

involving severe sexual or physical abuse or neglect.

121

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

What then replaced the option of institutionalization for the majority of

applicants? When clients inquired with appeals to institutionalize children,
the first preference was to "persuade" the available family or kin mem-
ber to continue to care for the child by offering monetary assistance. The
policy change which politicians so proudly announced as the increase in
the monetary assistance provided per child was initiated with the logic to
increase, as it were, the persuading power of the agency. Social work-
ers commented: "Before, we also tried to keep the child with the family
through the provision of social assistance but the amount was not signifi-
cant enough to persuade the families."
These same workers' as well as my own observations also pointed
to a negative development regarding social assistance. What was not
made visible in political propaganda, but surfaced rather strikingly in the
SSCPA's daily practice was the fact that, while the amount of monetary as-
sistance was increased, both stricter eligibility criteria as well as an overall
limiting of funds were introduced through the more subtle legislative tools
of regulations. With these legislative changes, anyone covered by the so-
cial security system or receiving assistance from another state institution
became ineligible to receive social aid from the SSCPA.
When I first visited the Family and Children Services in March 2005,
they had run out of annual funds, except for applicants to the Return to the
Family Project.53 This meant that new clients who requested social assis-
tance were ineligible for aid. Increasingly, I saw a process of filtration and
exclusion through the daily practice of welfare workers. Potential clients,
who inquired about social aid but could not be provided with it because of
the lack of funds or the eligibility criteria, were told at the beginning of their
interaction that they could not be offered help. At best, they were referred
to other public sources for social assistance. Their inquiries did not make
it into the written record.

While invisible in official records, their existence became apparent

in ethnographic research.54 Unraveling these officially invisible inquiries
points to the range of clients and the problems they seek to resolve
within the state social work system. Following the lead of Haney (2002)
who demonstrates how officially invisible inquiries particularly illuminate
the problems that remain unaddressed by the Hungarian welfare system,
I focus on some of the officially invisible worker and client interactions. In
doing so, I also hope to demonstrate how "anthropological techniques

122

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

can in fact illuminate features of bureaucratic practice to which other ap-

proaches might not pay attention" (Feldman 2008a:295).
What happens if keeping the child with the biological family and kin is
not an option or not desired due to familial violence and abuse? SSCPA
policy states that the second policy preference is adoption or finding a
foster family for the child. In Turkey, both adoption and foster family servic-
es are fraught with practical difficulties. Although a number of profession-
als publicly speak out about the need for foster families and the SSCPA
carries out public campaigns, in 2005 there were only 600 foster families
in the country, in contrast to the 20,000 children under institutionaliza-
tion. Neither is adoption an option for the majority of children. This cannot
exclusively be explained in terms of the "slow state bureaucracy," as be-
lieved in the popular imagination. Nor does Islamic law constitute an ob-
stacle to adoption, as is the case in other Middle Eastern countries, since
Turkey has the most secularized civil law system in the region.
The obstacles to adoption in Turkey arise from prospective adoptive as
well as biological parents. Clients who would like to adopt usually seek
infants between the ages of zero and one year. This disqualifies many chil-
dren currently under institutionalization as well as the children of many new
applicants. Furthermore, most institutionalized children do have at least
one parent or kin. When these family members institutionalize children,
they often think of this situation as temporary, hoping to take their children
back once they resolve their social and economic situation. Hence, the
SSCPA cannot easily secure their legal permission for the child's adoption.
Where infants are concerned, the agency systematically encourages
clients to give their children up for adoption. However, throughout my re-
search, I observed that clients with older children were channeled to their
family and kin. Parents of younger children, however, experienced a differ-
ent procedure. Clients were told about the disadvantages of institutional
care and encouraged to give their children up for adoption to "good fami-
lies," to be raised in "better life situations."
The more socio-economically marginal the clients, the less likely they
were to receive support from the SSCPA when trying to keep their chil-
dren. The social and economic disadvantages that constrain the lives
of such clients thus ended up being reinforced by the state social work
system. Such (non)intervention on the part of the SSCPA not only disad-
vantaged clients, but often worked to the disadvantage of the children
involved as well. The negotiations between social workers and clients

123

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

over the legal permission for adoption were not always resolved quickly
or smoothly. Clients had ambivalent feelings as they tried to make deci-
sions about their children's futures.

For example, a single father I encountered during my fieldwork gave

his infant up for adoption at the Family and Children Services. However,
the following day, he returned, saying that he had changed his mind and
wanted his child back. Another case was that of a single mother who insti-
tutionalized her infant, agreeing to bring the legal permission for adoption
immediately, but then disappeared as her social worker tried for months
to track her down. As they waited for the parent's legal permission, social
workers constantly complained about "infants growing up in the terrible
conditions of the children's homes."

Ayçen's Case: "If My Family had Supported Me,

I Would Not Be Here"
Ayçen, a 22-year-old woman, came to the Family and Children Services
in tears, with her one-year-old child in her arms and a court clerk accom-
panying her. She had gone to court to give legal permission for her child's
adoption, but in the middle of the proceedings, she broke into tears, say-
ing that she would not be able to leave her child. With the proceedings
unfinished, the court clerk brought her to Family and Children Services,
where she and her child might be temporarily placed in a women's shelter.
As Ay§en explained at the beginning of our interview, her mother, with
whom she had been living had recently re-married. Her mother and step-
father did not want Ay§en and the baby in the house and so had kicked
them out. Upon the worker's inquiry, Ay§en revealed the fact that her child
was from a non-marital relationship and she did not know the whereabouts
of the man. Trying to find out about available familial networks, the worker
asked Ayçen about the possibility of her own father helping her. Ay§en told
the worker that she had lived with him for some time while she was em-

ployed, only to pay for all expenses and be beaten by him every night. "I
am definitely not going back to him," said Ayçen. After learning that Ay§en
did not have any siblings who could help and had exhausted all potential
sources of familial support, the worker suggested that Ayçen should give
her child up for adoption.
When Ayçen explained that she had tried but could not, the worker
confronted her with the question of how she would raise a child on her

124

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

own, referring to living costs. "And you are only a primary school gradu-
ate. So we cannot find you a secretarial job. You have to do domes-
tic work, and you cannot do it with the baby," said the worker. When
Ayçen asked about leaving her child at the free daycare center while she
worked, she was told that children younger than two were not accepted
at these centers. "And besides, how can you afford it all, the rent and
everything else? But families who adopt, they have good conditions.
Now is the time to repress your own feelings and think about the future of
your child," continued the worker. When Ay§en asked about the option of
temporarily placing her child in a children's home, the worker respond-
ed: "Forget about the children's homes. People always institutionalize
their children for what they assume will be a short period, but then ten,
1 5 years pass and the children grow up very troubled in the children's
homes." Once more emphasizing Ayçen's difficult conditions, the worker
told Ay§en: "If you did have someone from your family supporting you, I
would say 'OK, keep the child,' but you do not." Reflecting on her situ-
ation with great clarity, Ay§en responded: "If my family had supported
me, I would not be here." The worker sent Ayçen to the women's shelter
"to think things over" and called the center's staff, saying that Ay§en
seemed convinced about adoption and that they should continue to en-
courage her in the same direction.

Gülsüm's Case: "You Have to Manage"

A young woman, Gülsüm, came to Family and Children Services with her
six-year-old son and her neighbors, a couple and their two children who
brought her to the office. Gülsüm wanted to be placed in the women's
shelter. "My parents kicked me out with my children. Now, I have no-
where to stay for the night," she explained. Before the interview, the
worker responsible for applications to the agency's only women's shelter
in the city, which could accommodate only sixteen women and often
operated over capacity, had received the news that the shelter could not
accept anyone for that night. "There is no room available in the shelter.
So we will not be able to accept you, but we can have the interview," the
worker told Gülsüm.55
Gülsüm had married three times; however, none of the marriages had
brought her happiness, and at least one was forced on her by her par-
ents. Gülsüm had one child from each marriage. She recalled her first

125

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

marriage as one in which she faced physical violence. Her child from
her second relationship was the six-year-old son she had brought with
her, though Gülsüm also had an older child from her first marriage and
a small infant from her last marriage. The very brief words she used to
describe this most recent marriage reflected the difficulties she and her
children experienced, both in their relationship with the husband as well
as Gülsüm's own parents. "My parents owed this man [the third hus-
band] money. In place of their debt, they married me to this man. My
parents sold me like a commodity, you know.. .Now he [the husband] had
a stroke. I think God gave this to him as a punishment, because he used
to torture my six-year-old son."
Gülsüm wanted to divorce her last husband. She was now separated
from him, but afraid that he would take their child away from her. Keeping
her children with her seemed to be the most important thing in her life,
and she was clearly there to seek the state's help with this. Yet, as in all
interviews, the worker was tasked with illuminating all non-state resources
(i.e., familial and kin networks) at the client's disposal. After the worker
confirmed that Gülsüm had been staying with her parents after she left her
husband, she told Gülsüm that, with three children, the women's shelter
was not an option. During her stay at the shelter, which could not exceed
three months in any case, she would be required to hold a job; yet with an
infant, this option was ruled out. "So you have to get the support of your
parents.. .why are they not taking care of you, anyway?" asked the worker.
To this Gülsüm responded, "Because they cannot really be considered
parents. If they were, would they kick me out with the children? Would they
sell me to this man?"

The worker told Gülsüm that her only option was to find a job, rent an
apartment, and get help with childcare. She then offered Gülsüm one of
the very few concrete proposals available. If Gülsüm could manage until
September, the beginning of the school year, she could then send her older
son to the state boarding school. This did not sound appealing to Gülsüm
who wanted to keep her children with her and was more worried about find-
ing a place to stay for that night, rather than planning for September. When
another worker joined the interview, emphasizing that Gülsüm needed to
get her parents' support, Gülsüm reiterated her prior point: "I told you. You
should not think of them as my real father and mother. My father says to
me, 'I will fuck you.' Does a father ever say such a thing to his daughter?
Has your father ever said this to you, [elder sister]?" Like many of the clients

126

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

whose applications were rejected, Gülsüm attempted to connect with the

worker and create empathy. Or, perhaps she was suggesting that her ex-
perience of "family" did not match that of the worker's.
Upon Gülsüm's dismissal of parental support, the workers' response
was to inquire about the couple accompanying her. Upon learning that
they were neighbors, they suggested Gülsüm ask them for support.
Gülsüm reacted: "I do not want to be a burden on anyone. I want to be
able to stand on my own feet and keep my children with me. Besides, I do
not trust anyone." Gülsüm then said that she had been working at a textile
workshop while staying with her parents and felt that the sexual harass-
ment she faced at work and the worry that her parents were not properly
taking care of her children made her suspicious of everyone. Neither work
nor family seemed to be a place where she felt secure. In expressing her
wish to be "able to stand on her own feet," Gülsüm was telling the welfare
workers, very ironically, what social work education teaches as the mis-
sion of social work: to help clients become self-sufficient. However, she
was offered a rather vague statement that social workers often tell their
clients: "You have to manage" (idare edeceksiniz).56
Upon another reiteration that she had to somehow manage until
September, Gülsüm exclaimed: "Why am I not able to make it clear? I am
in need now, at this moment. I need even one Lira, I need milk for the baby
and a place to stay." As a strategy of last resort, Gülsüm used motherhood
to relate to the workers and bridge "the social distance separating them,"
very much like the female clients of the liberal Hungarian welfare state
discussed by Haney (2002:230). "You must be married and have children.
You would know what I need at the moment," Gülsüm said, looking at ev-
eryone in the office one by one.
When the workers told her to apply to the Social Assistance Unit, it
turned out that Gülsüm had been there before and was told that the agen-
cy did not have any money to distribute for the rest of the year. With all the
funds reserved for the Return to the Family Project, clients like Gülsüm
had no chance of receiving monetary support. The workers thus referred
her to other sources of social assistance- the municipality and non-gov-
ernmental organizations. Gülsüm told of how she went to "every single
place" and would keep going and asking for help. As she left the office
with these words, the neighbor couple was whispering: "I guess we should
now take her to the police. She and the children cannot after all spend the
night in the street."

127

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

However, since she was invisible in official records, Gülsüm also became
invisible in the ethnographic research once she left the office. I was not able
to learn what she did after she left the Family and Children Services.

Conclusion
During my fieldwork, I observed many clients- mostly (but not exclu-
sively) women with children- who asked for the state's help in the form
of shelter, money, jobs, and child care to facilitate establishing a life in-
dependent of their parents, husbands, and kin. These clients were there
precisely because of the conflicts, subordination, or at best, the lack of
support they experienced in familial relations. As the cases of Ayçen and
Gülsüm demonstrate, there was a stark contrast between the discur-
sive image of the nurturing three generational extended family put at the
center of the АКР government's political rhetoric and policy-making and
clients' family experiences.
Yet, in a system that locates an idealized family at the center of so-
cial care and protection, both Gülsüm and Ay§en, as many other clients,
were channeled to familial networks and resources.57 Ay§en was told that
her social disadvantages- that is, her lack of education and familial sup-
port-disqualified her from getting state support to keep her child.58 In
sum, these two cases demonstrate that in channeling clients to familial
resources, state social work practice has overlooked and reinforced sys-
tems of domination by gender and age in familial relations as well as other
socio-economic disadvantages.
An important contradiction thus emerges when the different levels of
political discourse analysis, state policy and bureaucratic practice are
connected: policies emerging from a discursive emphasis on "strength-
ening the family" along with the neoliberal objective to diminish state re-
sponsibility for social protection serve to undercut the already vulnerable
families, married/unmarried women with their children, who do not fit into
an idealized discursive image of a family and who most importantly need
the state's help to survive.
Following the lead of anthropologists of public policy (Shore and
Wright 1997; Wedel et al. 2005; Shore, Wright, and Pero 201 1) by study-
ing sites of policy formulation and implementation, I have demonstrated
that Ayçen, Gülsüm, and other clients' possibilities for receiving help were
defined through much broader processes. These processes are linked to

128

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

powerful global actors (such as the EU) and national politics (of the АКР
government), and hence necessitate the "studying up" of influential actors
in policy formulation, including politicians, bureaucrats, and the media
(Kingfisher 2007). My exploration of these powerful actors and dominant
debates within policy circles shows that not just technocratic or expert
knowledge but also stories about families, culture, the nation, and an
imagined "West" guide policy production- a demonstration of the fact
that policy is always a cultural formation.
While intricately linked to powerful actors, welfare policies also touch
and constrain the lives of the individuals who enter the social work system
at this critical moment of welfare "reform." For urban poor women and
children, welfare restructuring corresponds to the social work system's
exclusion of their needs and the reinforcement of their socio-economic

marginalization.
Thus, in Turkey, as elsewhere, neoliberal reforms of welfare restructur-
ing have increased the vulnerabilities that poor women and children face. I
have argued that bureaucratic practice is one of the key sites where these
vulnerabilities are perpetuated. My analysis demonstrates that the state
and its bureaucratic practice do not lose their significance under neoliberal
reforms, but rather play a significant role in further reinforcing the socio-
economic inequalities which characterize already precarious lives.
This article has expanded the lines of inquiry opened up by the anthro-
pological literature on welfare restructuring beyond the US and Europe
to the specific study of welfare reform in Turkey. Conceptualizing neo-
liberalism as always produced through social action in relation to "local"
dynamics and debates, I have highlighted the contradictions of the neo-
liberal restructuring of welfare by exploring the simultaneous deployment
of neoliberal social policies with a conservative political discourse about
the family and a denunciation of neoliberalism's ideological center, "the
West." This shift of geographic focus in the study of welfare transformation
does not merely add a non-Western dimension to the anthropological lit-
erature on welfare, but demonstrates how "the West" and "the non-West"
are intricately linked in the remaking of social policies. ■

129

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

Acknowledgments
Research for this paper was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (grant 7101) and an Annette B.
Weiner Fellowship from New York University. I am indebted to Roy Richard Grinker for his guidance and
two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and constructive criticism. My deepest gratitude
is to Lila Abu-Lughod for her great mentorship that extends beyond my graduate studies. As a wonderful
mentor, I am also grateful to Rayna Rapp. Both have nourished me with their encouragement and criti-
cal input for the larger study. For their critical comments on this larger study, I am also grateful to Susan
Carol Rogers, Lynne Haney, Michael Gilsenan, and Ay§e Parla. I thank Arif Dirlik for his comments on
an earlier version of the manuscript. I thank the Bogaziçi University Social Policy Forum and particularly
Ay§e Bugra for the valuable institutional affiliation which allowed me research access which I would not
be able to accomplish as an independent researcher. I have benefited from the discussions at the social
science seminars at Bogaziçi University's Ataturk Institute, Sabanci University, and Koç University, where
parts of this article were presented. I am thankful to the participants for all their insightful suggestions.
My sincere thanks go to the AAA's Middle East Section for awarding an early version of this article the
2007 Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Student Paper. Lastly, thanks are also due to all the welfare
workers, clients, and bureaucrats who made this study possible, as well as to the Social Services and
Child Protection Agency.

Endnotes

1Social work is a fairly new institution and profession in Turkey. It was established in the1960s through a
top-down process guided by the nation-state (Göbelez 2003, özbek 2006) and the United Nations, which
sponsored the foundations of social work in the "developing countries" in the post-World War II era. The
SSCPA, a national institution established in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup has operated through
a general directorate in Ankara, administrative offices (city directorate offices) in 81 cities in the country,
as well as women's shelters and residential homes for children, the elderly, and the disabled. Most recent
legislative changes, which are to be become effective as of 2012, bring major restructuring as part of a
broader public sector reform. With the reform, SSCPA's general directorate is to be dismantled and incor-
porated into the newly established Ministry for Family and Social Policies while its other institutions are to
be transferred to provincial administrations.

2However, I do not focus on the actual institutional care of children in the residential homes. Rather, I
explore the publicly much less known institutional practices which affect all individuals who seek various
forms of help through the SSCPA.

3I conducted the research between 2003 and 2005. 1 analyzed official policy documents, legal regulations,
and leading politicians' discourse on family and welfare politics. As a participant-observer, I attended na-
tional social policy meetings in Ankara and interviewed key policy-makers and bureaucrats. I interviewed
more than 50 social workers and attended social work conferences at Hacettepe University, which until
recently was the only school of social work in Turkey. Finally, through fieldwork in the Istanbul and Ankara
offices of the SSCPA, I investigated on-the-ground bureaucratic practice.

4On non-Western forms of welfare, see Ong's (1999) analysis of the "caring society" model in Asian liberal
systems, which in contrast to the welfare regimes in the neoliberal West, embody a multiplicity of social
programs to allow "the state to take accounts of the skills, consumer power, and interests of the middle
classes as a way to attract faster development" (1 999:1 96).
5For a call for anthropologists to formulate a new welfare knowledge that challenges the mainstream
research on poverty, see Morgen and Maskovksy (2003:331-332), Morgen 2002, and Maskovksy (2001).
For one of the earliest calls for an "anthropology of welfare," see Edgar and Russell (1 998). See Schneider
(2001) who argues that "theoretically informed, empirically grounded ethnography can contribute to poli-
cy, programs and more general social knowledge" (2001 :705). Similarly, Stack (1997) points to the impor-
tance of ethnography in "critical policy studies," particularly in formulating "social policies that respect the
variety of human experiences" (1 997:1 91 ). Okongwu et al. (2000) also discuss anthropology's contribution
to social policy research.
6See also Süsser (1996) for an earlier discussion on the new generation of poverty in US cities.

7As Piven (2001) has argued, policies of welfare restructuring in the US have been intricately linked to the
construction of low-wage labor markets, increasing the material vulnerability of welfare recipients. Among
the number of critical ethnographic analyses of recipients' experiences of welfare "reform," see Davis
(2006), Kingfisher (2006), Hays (2003), Piven et al. (2002), Newman (2001), Riemer (2001), Seccombe
(1999), Edin and Lein (1997), Stack (1997). See Schneider (1999) on recipients' perspectives on welfare
"reform." See also Goldstein (2001) who analyzes microcredit training programs supported by the Clinton

130

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

administration. See Williams (2001) for the relationship between new poverty and new forms of debt pro-
duction. See Morgen and Gonzales (2008) for counter hegemonic perspectives of low income people who
constituted the target populations of "reform."

8The anthropological literature on welfare "reform" in the US has predominantly worked with a narrow
conceptualization of welfare as cash assistance (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003:320). However, as my
discussion shows, clients use the welfare system to seek help in the form of shelter, jobs, child care and
the like, along with monetary assistance.

9I am aware that my analysis does not consist, as in the case of Kingfisher (2007), of a detailed discourse
analysis of everyday conversation among policy-makers and cannot be considered as an equal fore-
grounding of these actors. Yet, I hope to shed light on the narratives and tropes dominant in policy circles.

10On technocratic knowledge, see Schwegler (2008), Mitchell (2002), Escobar (1995), Ferguson (1994).
11 However, on the basis of my data, I am unable to provide an argument on the implications of social work
intervention in terms of ethnicity. The important question of how, for example, Kurdish women might be
particularly disadvantaged in the social work system remains for further exploration.

12Here, I do not provide a comparative study. For comparative anthropological studies on Western experi-
ences of welfare, see Edgar and Russell (1998) and Kingfisher (2002). Outside anthropology, see Haney
and Pollard (2003) for an attempt to develop a comparative framework that includes both Western and
non-Western welfare states.

13For a sophisticated collection, see Bonner, Ener, and Singer (2003).

14Midgley (1981) includes a survey of social work in the Middle East, but does not refer to Turkey. Bargach
(2002) includes a very brief discussion of social work in Morocco. Baron (2008) refers to social workers'
promotion of fostering in her historical analysis of orphans and abandoned children in Egypt. Bibars (2001 )
offers a feminist analysis of social assistance in Egypt. Karshenas and Moghadam (2006) offer a compara-
tive analysis of social policy dynamics in the region. For an exceptional, recent volume which stems from
a similar observation on the insufficient scholarly attention to daily welfare practices and encounters in the
Middle East, see Naguib and Okkenhaug (2008). For another exception that foregrounds the importance
of social services, see Feldman (2008a:25) who examines a variety of service practices such as shelter,
utilities, and education to highlight "the formations of government, place and people in Gaza" between
1917 and 1967. For analyses of welfare policy in Ottoman ЕпгргеЯигкеу within a historical perspective,
see Bugra (2008) and Özbek (2002, 2006). None of these studies offers an ethnographic analysis of social
work as a professional institution.

15These analyses include Ellison (2009), Kingfisher and Maskovksy (2008), Kipnis (2008), England and
Ward (2007), Mains (2007), Ong (2006), Ferguson (2006), Ong and Collier (2005), Tsing (2002), Comaroff
and Comaroff (2000).

16Neoliberalism has often been explored in analyses of structural adjustment in contexts such as Latin
America. For anthropological analyses of neoliberal market reforms in the Middle East, see Elyachar (2005)
on micro-credit programs in Egypt.

17Feldman (2008a:233) suggests that "the question of how to rule with limited resources which was so
important in governing Gaza has continued relevance" in the era of neoliberalism which is associated with
the restriction of services.

18For ethnographies that focus on institutional sites in their analysis of the state in Turkey, see Kaplan (2006)
on education, Alexandar (2002:9) who explores "connections between state and persons" based on her
case study of the Turkish Sugar Corporation and Hann's (1 990) study of the Turkish Tea Corporation. See
also Altinay (2004) who has studied the production of the "military idea" through nationalist historiography
and practices of military service and education.
19Cuba's extensive investment in child well-being is confirmed by UNICEF (see http://english.pravda.ru/
society/stories/04-01 -201 0/1 1 1 545-cubaleads-0/).

20See White's (2002) ethnography in which she deciphers Islamist civic organizations' charitable activities
in a now expanding former squatter area in Istanbul. White draws attention to the successful employment
of "cultural traditions and widespread political strategies as much as Islamic values" (White 2002:194) in
assistance to the poor. She demonstrates how the charity work carried out by civic organizations through
the "informal and unacknowledged links" (White 2002:179) with the Islamist Welfare Party and the party-
run municipality are part of a larger Islamist mobilization rooted in community networks.

21 However, most recent legislative changes introduced in June 201 1 are likely to open the door for founda-
tions and private individuals to operate residential homes.

131

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

22Currently, Turkey does not hold a stand-by agreement with the IMF. However, previous agreements
influenced the welfare transformation since the late 1 990s until 2008.

23ln 2008, a "reform" long in preparation and already partially operationalized was finalized with the Law
of the Social Security and General Health Insurance. While aiming in principle to substitute the corporatist
health system with a universal one, the law has brought major losses in social rights: increases in retire-
ment age, decreases in retirement wages, payment of premiums for access to health services, along with
measures that promote private provision of social services. See Bugra and Keyder (2006); Eder (2010) on
the broader parameters of welfare regime transformation; Agartan (2008) on health reform; Özdemir and
Özdemir-Yücesan (2008) on social security reform. On social exclusion, see also Adaman and Keyder
2006, Yükseker 2009.

24Several central state institutions, including the SSCPA distribute social assistance on a means-tested
basis to the elderly, disabled, and poor families with children. There aren't any minimum income support
policies.
25For some examples for this literature, see Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1 989), Kandiyoti (1 991), Abu-Lughod
(1998), Meriwether and Tucker (1999), Joseph (2000), Ali (2002), Kanaaneh (2002), Pollard (2005).

26For the extensive literature on political significance of gender within the Turkish nationalist project and
its implications for women, see, among others, Tekeli (1988); Kandiyoti (1997); Sirman (2007); Saktanber
(2002); Arat (1998); Arat (1997); Durakbaça (1998); Bora (2002).
27This is in contrast to most analyses of women's experience vis-à-vis the state, which have focused on
elite or middle-class women in Turkey. For some exceptions that focus on non-elite women's experiences
vis-à-vis official institutions and discourses, see Kogacioglu (2003) on urban poor women and the legal
system, Akçit (2005) on public girls' schools, Beige (2008) on Kurdish women and the legal system, and
Kasli and Parla (2009) on Bulgarian Turkish immigrant women and the state's visa policies.

28The "social scientific" discourse that the SDFSR has generated has been critical in the formulation of a
political discourse on the family. See Stacey (1 996) who in the US context draws attention to the role of "a
network of scholarly and policy institutes" (Stacey 1996:54) in the family values campaign that flourished
during the Clinton administration, when family rhetoric began to be embedded in social scientific "truth"
(Stacey 1996:57).
29For gendered analyses that point to the joining of neoconservative and neoliberal forces in the US, see
Goode (2002), Stacey (1996), and Fraser (1993). See also Williams (1999) on family values rhetoric in the
US. See Lister (2002) on Conservative and New Labour projects in Britain.

30As Duben and Behar (1991) have shown on the basis of demographic data, the Ottoman extended
family much critiqued by the nationalist modernizers was not a widespread phenomenon in late Ottoman
Istanbul. Kandiyoti (1998:280) has argued that this discrepancy between the modernizers' critical dis-
course and existing social patterns "must be sought not in the realm of misconception but in the urge to
articulate a new morality and a new discourse on the regulation of sexuality."

31See Ong (1999:206) who notes that under housing programs in Hong Kong "grown children are urged to
live with and care for aged parents" as a way of "being Chinese."
32The АКР and the dynamics underlying its electoral success have been the topic of a proliferating lit-
erature; see for example, Cizre (2008), Yavuz (2006). Political economic accounts of the AKP's electoral
victory point to the economic recovery since the crisis of 2001 as well as the party's success in building a
multiclass coalition that include the business groups as well as the poor. These accounts point to the criti-
cal role of a new conservative business class (Öni§ 2006) and specifically the support from new export-ori-
ented industrial elites of Anatolia (Pamuk 2008) in shaping the AKP's economic and pro-European Union
policies. See also Tugal's (2009) ethnographic study where he argues that the AKP's victory in constituting
neoliberalized Islam is a passive revolution in the Gramscian sense through which the АКР mobilized and
integrated the urban poor and marginal intellectuals into capitalist politics.

33For a historical account of household forms and composition in Turkey, see Özbay (2005). Research
suggests that while the incidence of coresidence with elderly is not high, the incidence of living nearby
is significant (Aytaç 1998). Also, irrespective of coresidence, intergenerational, extended familial ties and
solidarity remain significant in urban areas (Duben 1982, Güne§-Ayata 1996, Kagitçibaçi 1996).
34Here, the implicit reference is to the 2001 financial crisis in Turkey, which led to a series of bankruptcies
as well as massive unemployment in the country.

35Recent qualitative studies (Bugra and Keyder 2003, Ayata and Ayata 2003, Erdogan 2007) on urban pov-
erty show that contrary to popular belief, the "new poor," who include the post-1 990s Kurdish migrants to
major Turkish cities, do not benefit from extended family support or other informal mechanisms of social

132

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

protection. Unlike earlier waves of migrants, poverty constitutes a permanent rather than a transitory situ-
ation for the "new poor." According to the World Bank, those with an income below the poverty threshold
constituted, in 2005, about 27 percent of the population in Turkey.

36Turkey has one of the lowest female employment rates (around 23 percent) in the world. While official
statistics are nonexistent, experts and civil society groups point out that child abuse is a widespread
phenomenon. Violence against women has increased at an alarming rate (1400 percent) over the last
decade, leading to feminist campaign to stop the murder of women by (ex)husbands, partners, and family
members. LGBT persons also face violence as well as discrimination, the latter most strikingly revealed
by the State Minister for the Family who said in 2010 that she believes homosexuality is a disease that
requires treatment.

37ln the current Turkish context, there is a distorted distribution of income; poverty constrains even the
employed and is conflated with ethnicity. Political conflicts not only surface in the armed conflict in south-
eastern Turkey, but also in various public protests in western cities. In such a context, the claim that major
"societal problems" will be resolved by the family and that societal solidarity will follow from the familial is
a significantly depoliticizing move.

38Article of 41 of the constitution states that "the family is the foundation of Turkish society" and assigns
the duty of protecting the family to the state.

39See Ecevit 2010 and Sosyal Politika Forumu 2009 on the strikingly inadequate public provision of child
care in Turkey.

40Libal's (2003) analysis of the public discourse on the "child question" points to the struggles among elites
on issues of child welfare and poverty. While some advocated charity, others insisted on state intervention;
"between these two positions rested the work of semi-voluntary organizations" (Libai 2003:257) which
combined local-level giving with state support. The Children's Protection Society, the historical precursor
of the SSCPA, was one of these semi-voluntary organizations.

41The latter arguments were based on the fact that the abusers in the Malatya children's home, the caregiv-
ers, were employees of a private company, one among many to which the state agency has outsourced
daily care and cleaning jobs in its institutions.

42l am thankful to Çigdem Kagitçibaçi for drawing my attention to the role of the EU.

43The EU's monitoring of the child protection system continues. After the so-called Malatya Scandal, the
SSCPA started to convert its mass institutions to smaller homes and reformulate the criteria for hiring
care staff. This change is positively interpreted in the EU's 2008 Progress Report which states that "mini-
mum standards on care and protection for children living outside parental care have been developed"
(European Commission 2008:21).
44Sarah Ferguson recorded these images illegally and by concealing her identity on her visit to the resi-
dential home in Ankara.

45This project of de-institutonalization currently implemented by the conservative government in Turkey,

recalls the "care in the community" policies that date back to and extend beyond the conservative rule of
the 1980s in Britain. See Edgar and Russell (1998), particularly the pieces by Christensen, Hockey, and
James (1998) and Davies (1998). See also McCourt Perring (1994).
460ne of the most worrisome aspects of this cost analysis has to do with the fact that policy-makers do not
include the process of following up with families and providing services other than monetary assistance.

47The majority of male and female clients whose children are institutionalized have had multiple relation-
ships and children from different partners.

48See http://www.shcek.gov.tr/aileye-donus-ve-aile-yaninda-destek.aspx.
49After I had completed my fieldwork, the SSCPA in 2006 initiated a second project entitled Home Care.
The Home Care Project also aims to substitute familial care for the state- provided institutional care of
individuals by providing monetary assistance to family members who care for disabled individuals.

50For purposes of anonymity and confidentiality, I do not name the specific office. All personal names are
pseudonyms.
51 For example, my research on the educational services offered at two community centers in low-income
neighborhoods in Istanbul suggests that the free services offered were experienced as significant benefits
by the clients. Most of the centers' social workers were embedded in the communities, in touch with
feminist groups and were individually committed to their professional ideals. These workers could at
times establish engaging interactions with their clients. Such interactions were hardly present in the single

133

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

city directorate office (and hence the Family and Children Services) because it was the only office that
processed applications in a densely populated metropolis. Since the city directorate offices constitute the
dominant component within the social work system, I chose to foreground their practice in this article.

52This resembles the message and situation which Haney (2003:1 71) describes in relation to the workings
of the Budapest welfare agencies in post-socialist Hungary.
53l observed that the social workers at the Social Assistance Unit felt helpless because they could not
provide monetary aid to clients, despite their professional evaluation which asserted that provision of
assistance was necessary.
54Thus, official documents have the potential to make certain clients invisible. For how official documents
can unintentionally become means to gain visibility in some cases, see Feldman (2008b) who discusses
the role of identification documents in Palestinian refugees' struggles' for recognition.

55Most likely, the welfare workers continued with the interviews even if they could not offer help because
they did not want to face being confronted by clients who thought their cases were being dismissed too
easily.

56ln asking client women to "manage" (idare etmek), the social workers were telling the women to rely on
their familial resources and networks, even if these did not exist in practical terms.

57The most clients could receive was social assistance for their children in order to prevent the institution-
alization of another child. If clients were women without children, they were usually provided with referrals
to employment agencies with occasional and temporary placement in the women's shelter.

58With the restructuring of social assistance, even the strictly economic support provided by the SSCPA
was a benefit neither Ayçen or Gülsüm could access.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1998. Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Adaman, Fikret and Çaglar Keyder. 2006. Poverty and Social Exclusion in the Slum Areas of Large Cities
in Turkey. Report for the European Commission, Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities.
Brussels: DG.

Agartan, Tuba. 2008. "Turkish Health System in Transition: Historical Background and Reform Experience."
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton.

Akparti. 2003. "Hükümet Programi." Accessed from www.akparti.org.tr/tbmm/tbmmgrup/59hükümet%20

programi.doc on Jan 16, 2012.

programi#bolum_ on Jan 16, 2012.

Akçit, Elif. 2005. Kizlarin Sessizligi. istanbul: ileti§im.

Alexander, Catherine. 2002. Personal States: Making Connections Between People and Bureaucracy in
Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ali, Kamran Asdar. 2002. Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies , New Selves. Austin: University of
Texas Press.

Altinay, Ayse Gül. 2004. The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism , Gender, and Education in Turkey. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Arat, Yeçim 1997. "Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey." In Sibel Bozdogan and Re§at Kasaba,
eds. Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Arat, Zehra F., ed. 1998. Deconstructing Images of "the Turkish Woman." New York: St. Martin's Press.

Ayata, Sencer and A.G. Ayata. 2003. The Benefit Dependent and the Regular Income Earning Poor. World
Bank, Turkey: Poverty and Coping After Crises (Report No: 24185).

Aytaç, l§ik. 1 998. "Intergenerational Living Arrangements in Turkey." Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology
13:241-264.

Bargach, Jamila. 2002. Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in Morocco.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

134

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

Baron, Beth. 2008. "Orphans and Abandoned Children in Modern Egypt." In Nefissa Naguib and Inger
Marie Okkenhaug, eds. Interpreting Welfare and Relief in the Middle East, 13-34. Leiden: Brill.

Beige, Ceren. 2008. "Whose Law: Clans, Honor Killings and State- Minority Relations in Turkey and Israel."
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Washington.
Bibars, Iman. 2001 . Victims and Heroines: Women, Welfare and the Egyptian State. New York: Zed.

Bonner, Michael David, Mine Ener, and Amy Singer, eds. 2003. Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern
Contexts. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bora, Aksu. 2002. "Türk Modernle§mesinde Annelik Kimliginin Dönü§ümü." In Aynur ilyasoglu, ed. YerliBir
Feminizmin Olanaklari, 77-107. istanbul: Sel Yayinlari.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New York: New Press.

Brenner, N., and N. Theodore. 2002. Spaces of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Brodkin, E. Z. 1986. The False Promise of Administrative Reform: Quality Control in Welfare. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.

Bugra, Ay§e. 2008. Kapitalizm, YoksuHuk ve Türkiye'de Sosyal Politika, iletiçim: istanbul.

Bugra, Ayçe and Sinem Adar. 2008. "Social Policy Change in Countries without Mature Welfare States."
New Perspectives on Turkey 38:83-1 07.

Bugra, Ayçe and Ay§en Canda§. 201 1 . "Change and Continuity under an Eclectic Social Security Regime:
The Case of Turkey." Middle Eastern Studies 47(3):51 5-528.

Bugra, Ay§e and Çaglar Keyder. 2003. New Poverty and the Changing Welfare Regime of Turkey. Ankara:
UNDP.

16(3):21 1-228.

Christensen, Pia, Jenny Hockey, and Allison James. 1998. "'You Just Get On With It': Questioning
Models of Welfare Dependency in a Rural Community." In lain Edgar and Andrew Russell, eds. The
Anthropology of Welfare, 16-32. London: Routledge.

Cizre, Ümit, ed. 2008. Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development
Party. London: Routledge.

Clarke, John. 2004. Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Collins, Jane L., Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams. 2008. New Landscapes of Inequality:
Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research
Press.

Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2000. "Millennial Capitalism." Public Culture 12(2):292-343.

Davies, Charlotte A. 1998. "Caring Communities or Effective Networks?: Community Care and People
with Learning Disabilities in South Wales." In lain Edgar and Andrew Russell, eds. The Anthropology
of Welfare, 120-136. London: Routledge.
Davis, Dana-Ain. 2006. Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
Albany: State University of New York Press.

Delaney, Carole. 1995. "Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Turkey." In Slyvia Yanagisako and
Carole Delaney, eds. Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, 177-200. New York:
Routledge.
Duben, Alan. 1982. "The Significance of Family and Kinship in Urban Turkey." In C. Kagitçibaçi, ed. Sex
Roles, Family and Community, 73-101. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Duben, Alan, and Cem Behar. 1991 . Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940. New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Durakbaça, Ay§e. 1998. "Kemalism as Identity Politics in Turkey." In Zehra Arat, ed. Deconstructing
Images of Turkish Women, 139-156. New York: St. Martin.

Ecevit, Yildiz. 2010. "i§ ve aile ya§amini uzla§tirilmasi baglaminda Türkiye'de erken çocukluk bakimi ve
egitimi." In ipek ilkkaracan, ed. Emek Piyasasinda Toplumsal Cinsiyet Eçitligine Dogru: i§ ve Aile
Ya§amini Uzla§tirma Politikalari, 87-115. istanbul: ÍTÜ BMTKAUM.

135

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

Eder, Mine. 201 0. "Retreating State?: Political Economy of Welfare Regime Change in Turkey." Middle East
Law and Governance 2(2): 1 52-1 84.

Edgar, lain R., and Andrew Russell. 1998. The Anthropology of Welfare. New York: Routledge.

Edin, Kathryn, and Laura Lein. 1997. Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-
wage Work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Ellison, James. 2009. "Governmentality and the Family: Neoliberal Choices and Emergent Kin Relations in
Southern Ethiopia." American Anthropologist 1 1 1 (1):81 -92.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession : NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo
(Politics, History, and Culture). Durham: Duke University Press.

England, Kim and Kevin Ward, eds. 2007. Neo-Liberalization: States, Networks, People. Oxford: Blackwell.

Erdogan, Necmi. 2007. Yoksulluk Halleri. Istanbul: lleti§im Yayinlari.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton Studies in Culture/power/history. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

European Commission. 2006. Turkey 2006 Progress Report. Brussels: European Commission.

Feldman, llana. 2008a. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967.
Durham: Duke University Press.

Claims." Journal of Refugee Studies 21 (4):498-51 6.

Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic
Power in Lesotho. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Press.

Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. "Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal
Governmentality." American Ethnologist 29(4):981-1 002.

Fraser, Nancy. 1989a. "Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation." In Unruly Practices:
Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.

Political Culture." In Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Political Imaginery." Rethinking Marxism 6(1):9-23.

Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-historical Essay.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gavrilovici, Ovidiu. 2009. "Residential Care for Children in Romania: A Model for Child Reform Protection
in Central and Eastern Europe." In Mark E. Courtney and Dorota Iwaniec, eds. Residential Care of
Children: Comparative Perspectives, 54-72. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, Donna M. 2001. "Microenterprise Training Programs, Neoliberal Common Sense, and the
Discourses of Self-Esteem." In Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovksy, eds. The New Poverty Studies,
236-272. New York: New York University Press.

Goode, Judith. 2002. "From New Deal to Bad Deal: Racial and Political Implications of US Welfare
Reform." In Catherine Kingfisher, ed. Western Welfare in Decline, 65-90. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Goode, Judith, and Jeff Maskovksy, eds. 2001 . The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power,
Politics and Impoverished People in the United States. New York: New York University Press.

Göbelez, Selen. 2003. "The History of Social Services in Republican Turkey." M.A. Thesis, Ataturk Institute
for Modern Turkish History, Bogaziçi University.

Güne§-Ayata, Ay§e. 1996. "Solidarity in Urban Turkish Family." In G. Rasuly-Paleczek, ed. Turkish Families
in Transition, 98-113. Frankfurt-am Main: Peter Lang.

136

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

Haney, Lynne A. 2002. Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe. " In Lynne Haney and Lisa Pollard, eds. Families of a New World,
159-179. New York: Routledge.
Haney, Lynne A., and Lisa Pollard, eds. 2003. Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State
Development in a Global Context. New York: Routledge.

Hann, C.M. 1990. Tea and the Domestication of the Turkish State. Huntingdon, England: Eothen Press.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hays, Sharon. 2003. Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2005. "Political Optics and the Occlusion of Intimate Knowledge." American
Anthropologist 1 07(3):369-376.

Hyatt, Susan B. 2001 "From Citizen to Volunteer: Neoliberal Governance and the Erasure of Poverty."
In Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky, eds. The New Poverty Studies, 201-235. New York: New York
University Press.

Joseph, Suad. 2000. Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Kagitçiba§i, Çigdem. 1996. Family and Human Development Across Cultures. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associate.

Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2002. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1991. Women, Islam, and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

In Sibel Bozdogan and Re§at Kasaba, eds. Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, 1 1 3-
132. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Lughod, ed. Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, 270-287. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Kaplan, Sam. 2006. The Pedagogical State : Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980
Turkey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Karshenas, Massoud, and Valentine M. Moghadam. 2006. Social Policy in the Middle East: Economic,
Political, and Gender Dynamics (Social Policy in a Development Context). New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Kasli, Zeynep, and Ay§e Parla. 2009. "Broken Lines of ll/legality and the Reproduction of State Sovereignty:
The Impact of Visa Policies on Turkish Immigrants from Bulgaria." Alternatives 34:203-227.

Kingfisher, Catherine. 1996. Women in the American Welfare Trap. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.

Goode and Jeff Maskovsky eds. The New Poverty Studies, 273-292. New York: New York University
Press.

Notes on Déstructuration, Individualization, and the Production of (Raced and Gendered) Unmarked
Categories." American Ethnologist 34(1 ):91 -1 07.

Kingfisher, Catherine, ed. 2002. Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women's Poverty.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kingfisher, Catherine, and Jeff Maskovsky. 2008. "Introduction: The Limits of Neoliberalism." Critique of
Anthropology 28(2): 1 1 5-1 26.

Kipnis, Andrew. 2008. "Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of
Governing?" American Ethnologist 35(2):275-289.
Kogacioglu, Dicle. 2003. "Law in Context: Citizenship and Reproduction of Inequality in an Istanbul
Courthouse." Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of New York at Stony Brook.

137

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

Libai, Kathryn. 2003. "The Child Question': The Politics of Child Welfare in Early Republican Turkey." In
Michael Bonner, Mine Ener, and Amy Singer, eds. Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts,
255-272. New York: SUNY Press.

Lister, Ruth. 2002. "The Responsible Citizen: Creating a New British Welfare Contract." In Catherine
Kingfisher, ed. Western Welfare in Decline, 1 1 1 -127. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lyon-Callo, Vincent. 2001 . "Homelessness, Employment, and Structural Violence: Exploring Constraints
on Collective Mobilizations against Systemic Inequality." In Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovksy, eds.
The New Poverty Studies, 293-318. New York: New York University Press.

Mains, Daniel. 2007. "Neoliberal Times." American Ethnologist 34(4):659-673.

Maskovsky, Jeff. 2001 . "Afterword: Beyond the Privatist Consensus." In Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovksy,
eds. The New Poverty Studies, 470-482. New York: New York University Press.

Maskovsky, Jeff and Catherine Kingfisher. 2001 . "Introduction to Globalization, Neoliberalism and Poverty
in Mexico and the United States." Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World
Economic Development 30(2-3): 1 05-1 23.

McCourt, Perring. 1994. "Community Care as Deinstitutionalization." In Susan Wright, ed. Anthropology
of Organizations, 164-176. New York: Routledge.

Meriwether, Margaret Lee, and Judith E. Tucker. 1999. Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern
Middle East. Boulder: Westview Press.

Micklewright, John, and Stewart, Kitty. 2000. "Child Well-Being in the EU and Enlargement to the East."
Innocenti Working Papers, ESP NO. 75. Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Center.
Midgley, James. 1981 . Professional Imperialism: Social Work in the Third World. London: Heinemann.

Milliyet. 2005. "Ayri evde oturmak yozla ma mi?" May 1 0, Milliyet.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Morgen, Sandra. 2001 . "The Agency of Welfare Workers: Negotiating Devolution, Privatization, and the
Meaning of Self-Sufficiency." American Anthropologist 1 03(3):747-761 .

75(4):745-757.
Morgen, Sandra, and Lisa Gonzales. 2008. "The Neoliberal American Dream as Daydream: Counter-
hegemonic Perspectives on Welfare Restructuring in the United States." Critique of Anthropology
28(2):21 9-236.
Morgen, Sandra, and Jeff Maskovsky. 2003. "The Anthropology of Welfare 'Reform': New Perspectives on
US Urban Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era." Annual Review of Anthropology 32(1 ):31 5-338.

Nader, Laura. 1969. "Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up." In Dell Hymes, ed.
Reinventing Anthropology, 284-311. New York: Pantheon Press.

Naguib, Nefissa, and Inger Marie Okkenhaug. 2008. Interpreting Welfare and Relief in the Middle East,
Social , Economic , and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia. Boston: Brill.

Navaro- Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Newman, Katherine S. 2001. "Hard Times on 125th Street: Harlem's Poor Confront Welfare Reform."
American Anthropologist 1 03(3):762-778.

Okongwu, Anne Francis, and Joan P. Mencher. 2000. "The Anthropology of Public Policy: Shifting
Terrains." Annual Review of Anthropology 29(1):1 07-1 24.

Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University
Press.

University Press.

Ong, Aihwa, and Stephen J. Collier. 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as
Anthropological Problems. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Öni§, Ziya. 2006. "The Political Economy of Turkey's Justice and Development Party." In Hakan Yavuz, ed.
The Emergence of a New Turkey, 207-235. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

138

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BERNA YAZICI

Özbay, Ferhunde. 2005. "Household Forms and Composition: Turkey." In Suad Joseph and Afsaneh
Najmabadi, eds. Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Vol. 2, 260-262. Boston: Brill.
Özbek, Nadir. 2002. Osmanli ¡mparatorlugu'nda Sosyal Devlet, Siyaset, iktidar ve Meçruiyet, 1876-1914.
istanbul: ileti§im.

Özdemir, Ali Murat, and Gamze Yücesan-Özdemir. 2008. "Opening Pandora's Box: Social Security Reform
in Turkey in the Time of the АКР." South East Review for Labor and Social Affairs 4:469-483

Özyürek, Esra. 2006. Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Durham:
Duke University Press.

Pamuk, §evket. 2008. "Globalization, Industrialization and Changing Politics in Turkey." New Perspectives
on Turkey 38:267-273.
Peirce, Leslie. 1993. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Piven, Frances Fox. 2001 . "Welfare Reform and the Economic and Cultural Reconstruction of Low Wage
Labor Markets." In Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovksy, eds. The New Poverty Studies, 135-151. New
York: New York University Press.

Piven, F. F., J. Acker, M. Hallock, and S. Morgen. 2002. Work, Welfare and Politics: Confronting Poverty in
the Wake of Welfare Reform. Eugene: University of Oregon Press.

Pollard, Lisa. 2005. Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating
Egypt (1805-1923). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reinhold, Susan. 1994. "Local Conflict and Ideological Struggle: Positive Imagesé and Section 28." Ph.D.
Dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Sussex.

Riemer, FJ. 2001 . Working at the Margins: Moving Off Welfare in America. New York: State University of
New York Press.

Rose, Nikolas. 1996. "Governing "Advanced" Liberal Democracies." In Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne,
and Nikolas Rose, eds. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of
Government, 37-64. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Saktanber, Ayse. 2002. Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey. New
York: I.B. Tauris.

Schneider, Jo Anne. 1999. "And How Are We Supposed to Pay for Health Care?: Views of the Poor and
the near Poor on Welfare Reform." American Anthropologist 1 01 (4):761 -782.

103(3):705-713.
Schwegler, Tara. 2008. "Take It from the Top (Down)? Rethinking Neoliberalism and Political Hierarchy in
Mexico." American Ethnologist 35(4):682-700.
Seccombe, Karen. 1999. "So You Think I Drive a Cadillac?": Welfare Recipients' Perspectives on the
System and Its Reform. London: Allyn & Bacon.
Shang, Xiaoyuan, and Xiaoming Wu. 2003. "The Changing Role of the State in Child Protection: The Case
of Nanchang." Social Service Review 77(4):523-540.
Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright, eds. 1997. Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance
and Power. New York: Routledge.
Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, and Davide Pero. 2011. Policy Worlds: Anthropology and Analysis of
Contemporary Power. Berghahn Books.
Sirman, Nükhet. 2007. "Constituting the Modern Family as the Social in the Transition from Empire to
Nation-state." In Anna F. and Çaglar Keyder eds. Ways to modernity in Greece and Turkey, 176-190.
London: I.B.Tauris.

Sosyal Politika Forumu, 2009. Türkiye'de Çocuk Bakim Hizmetlerinin Yaygmla§tirilmasma Yönelik Bir
Öneri: Mahalle Kre§leri. Social Policy Forum Research Report. Istanbul.
Stacey, Judith. 1 996. In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age. Boston:
Beacon Press.

139

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey

Stack, Carol B. 1997. "Beyond What are Given as Givens: Ethnography and Critical Policy Studies." Ethos
25(2):191-207.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2011. "Discussion." Panel on Tracing Policy. American Anthropological Association
Meeting. Montreal, Canada.
Süsser, I. 1996. "The Construction of Poverty and Homelessnes in US Cities." Annual Review of
Anthropology 25(1 ):41 1 -435.

Tekeli, §irin. 1988. Kadmlar için. Istanbul: Alan Yayinevi.

Toprak, Zafer. 1990. "The Family, Feminism, and the State during the Young Turk Period, 1908-1918." In
Ethem Eidem, ed. Première Rencontre Internationale sur l'Empire Ottoman et la Turquie Moderne,
441-452. Istanbul: Institute National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales.

Tsing, Anna. 2002. "The Global Situation." In Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds. The Anthropology
of Globalization, 453-486. Maiden, MA: Blackwell.

Tugal, Cihan. 2009. Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

Verdery, Katherine. 1994. "From Parent-state to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary
Eastern Europe." East European Politics and Societies 8(2):225-255.
Wedel, Janine R., Cris Shore, Gregory Feldman, and Stacy Lathrop. 2005. "Toward an Anthropology of
Public Policy." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 600(1 ):30-51 .
White, Jenny B. 2002. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.

Williams, Brett. 1 999. "The Great Family Fraud of Postwar America." In Adolp Reed Jr., ed. Without Justice
for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality, 65-89. Boulder: Westview Press.

Poverty Studies, 79-102. New York: New York University Press.

Yavuz, Hakan, ed. 2006. The Emergence of a New Turkey: Islam, Democracy and the AK Party. Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press.

Yükseker, Deniz. 2009. "Neoliberal Restructuring and Social Exclusion in Turkey." In Ziya Öni§ and Fikret
§enses, eds. Turkey and the Global Economy, 262-280. New York: Routledge.
Yuval-Davis, Nira and Floya Anthias. 1989. Woman, Nation, State. New York: St. Martin's Press.

140

This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sat, 19 Mar 2016 07:34:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions