Fate of Turkish Traditional Crafts: A Case of Economic, Legal and Political Marginalisation

Abstract

Traditional handcrafts have been going through a somehow familiar historical course in Turkey: Through the establishment phase of the nation-state, from mid-1920's, the new republic had a strong claim on the concept of traditional crafts as a cultural legacy, a constitutive element of the to-be-constructed national identity for about three decades. Exhibitions, ethnographic museums, academic studies were common practices employed to reinforce the nationalist idea of a continuous and noble craft tradition as a proof of the existence of the national culture. However, the same process of republican development also aimed to create an industrial society. The radical change in production and distribution processes with succeeding introduction of industrialization, state capitalism, corporate capitalism and free-market economy not only made it impossible to sustain the craft practice as the dominant mode of production, but also transformed the cultural meaning of crafts. Today, many practitioners either complain about the lack of official support from the state, and consider quitting the practice because of monetary problems, or switch to a so-called degenerate mode of craft production, that is, for cultural tourism.

Many research studies have been conducted in Turkey aiming to document the transformation of Turkish crafts throughout the 20th century and to propose methods for intervention. A brief review of such literature reveals two dominant streams in positioning crafts within contemporary economical, political and cultural conditions. In the first approach, which can be called the 'cultural-conservative approach', crafts are considered as genuinely national and cultural artifacts, which have recently been abandoned to degeneration, even extinction, by the impact of modernity, industrialisation, neo-liberal economy and tourism. The second approach, namely, the 'economic-reformist approach', claims that production and marketing of crafts should be reformed and integrated in the contemporary economic conditions in order to survive. Utilising the tension between conservation (with its nostalgic or conservative references to an original past) and reformation (with its reference to the global economic context), this paper attempts to map the way in which crafts are conceptualised in Turkish academy, and how the recent economic transformations and the changes they bring about fit in this mapping.

To observe these transformations on field, the paper includes a partial case study, representing a qualitative research approach through literature reviews, interviews with selected role-players, and observations. A field trip was held to Amasya, a city in Anatolia undergoing touristic transformation, including interviews with government figures and local craftsmen and manufacturers. These were accompanied by visits to local workshops, city museums and crafts markets. The impact of local branding policies (with their objectives to boost tourism output of localities) on crafts practices were explored with an eye to understanding how economic transformations influence the general conditions of sustainability of crafts production in Turkey. Due to the nature of the study, detailed conclusions are not possible, but the study highlights some policy-relevant implications that should be considered in the future.

Since the general concept of sustainability is scarcely figured in laws and legislations of the "developing" economy of Turkey, considerations of traditional craft has never been discussed in terms of the sustainable development. The sustainability issue enters the crafts agenda just in the mean of impossibility to sustain craft production without referring to a shallow understanding of local cultural souvenirs. Exploring the legal, economic and political processes involved, the paper comments on the currently economically unsustainable condition of traditional crafts in Turkey. The paper, therefore, addresses the cultural aspect of sustainability and emphasise the detrimental effects of the current situation on sustainable development in general - for the fall of crafts also means losing their indispensable contributions to the project of sustainability, like customary manufacturing methods, local production and use of natural materials.