Wednesday Talk

Assoc. Prof. Suavi Aydın

RACISM, ANTHROPOLOGY AND TURKEY

On the 15th of March, Assoc. Prof. Suavi Aydın from Hacettepe University delivered a public lecture on racism and anthropology.

Mr. Aydın contextualized this topic in regard to Turkish History Thesis in the 1930’s. He argued that the history of “racism” in Turkey does not go any deeper than being a response to the Western pseudo-scientific argumentations, which were trying to find some biological foundations to legitimize the hierarchy of races.

In the discussion part questions regarding the contemporary notions such as ethnicity, the future of nation-state, semantical unity and globalization, have been discussed in relation to the different political conception of race.