Representation of poverty and gift culture in turkish cinema from 90's to present

The Gift (Essai sur le Don), which is written by Marcel Mauss is a key text to understand the gift culture and potlatch. Gift culture has a pivotal role to understand the mentality of archaic societies. In this universe, social relations are shaped by gift exchange. To give, to receive and to reciprocate are crucial acts to define the social relations and to make them interrelated. Therefore, social status is defined by the consumption of the wealth as opposed to modern societies in which social status is characterized by wealth accumulation. In this way, gift culture and potlatch look different than the way modern societies operate. Since the time of the Ottoman Empire, gift culture has strong effects on Turkey's social history. The culture and mentality of the society we live in reproduce the relations based on gift exchange and this impact can also be seen in Turkey's cinema. This research focuses on the representations of poverty in Turkey's cinema through the lens of the gift culture and potlatch. To achieve this goal, this study approaches to the representations of poverty through culture and mentality by adopting some defining concepts of the gift culture: Give and take relations, oppression and subordination, reciprocity, generosity and parsimony, value or meaning, magic and religion, chance and destiny, wealth, honor and prestige, and conspicuous consumption. This research attempts to elaborate upon the representations of poverty together with the gift culture framework in the movies from Yeşilçam period (Turkey's popular cinema between the 1960s and late 1980s), 1990s and today. In this respect, the research contains the in-depth analyses of five movies including two popular and commercial, and three independent and art movies with the framework of the gift culture and representations of poverty.