Ottomanism as an identity issue: An anthropological study of the attribution to Ottoman Era

In this phd. D thesis, I studied the culture or identity of a basic socio-economic group in Turkey called 'conservatives.' The basic problematic is investigating a common motive of this group, the attribution to Ottoman era. Later on, during the study, an other issue, the symbolic representation of President Tayyip Erdoğan for this group appeared as a second, but related problematic. In parallel with the problematic mentioned above, the discursive and memory processes of this group are considered. For this purpose, cultural performance events organized by Üsküdar Municipality is decided as field of the study and evidences observed in this field is analyzed with the special technique, critical discursive analysis (CDA). Main characteristic of the study is having a semiologic anthropology perspective. In parallel with this, conservative identity is considered and studied as a uique text. When the evidences (discursive and memorial) derived from the field is analyzed with the CDA technique, two textual and two grammatical elements of this text is appeared. They are 'daily life' and 'market' as textual, 'religion' and 'state' as grammatical issues. With the reasoning described above, the paper is written with a reverse flow of the field study: After describing theoretical framework and special role of discourse and memory, definition and discussion of grammatical and textual elements are accomplished. Textual issues are considered as communicational and exchange dynamics; and grammatical elements are considered as basic cognitive cosmological components. Then basic discursive (and memorial) elements derived from the field are demonstrated. While approaching to the conclusion, the representation of two content (Erdoğan and Ottomans) are analyzed and tried to translate to another semiological system (anthropology). Finally in conclusion section, in parallel with the representation mentioned above, a special motive of conservative identity is psoposed which is named as 'secluded public'