MİLLİ VE MODERN KÖYLÜNÜN PEŞİNDE: HALKEVLERİNİN KÖY GEZİLERİ
SEEKING FOR NATIONAL AND MODERN PEASANTS: VILLAGE EXCURSIONS OF THE PEOPLE’S HOUSES

Summary/Abstract: The People’s Houses which have been founded in the early 1930s with the aim of closing the gap between the existing regime and peasant masses have sought for transforming the Anatolian peasantry that had been until now living as dispersed communities into a homogenous modern nation. This institution whose branches have been opened up in the different parts of Turkey has tried to discover and then modernize and nationalize the Anatolian peasantry through the village excursions. But these excursions which have been conducted in the villages and among the peasantry that both have been romanticized and glorified in the nationalist discourse of the period turned into a moment in which the nationalist cadres have experienced the realities of the village life. In this article, through focusing on the village excursions, I’ll examine the challenges of the Kemalist imagination of the nation which came out of the such as fusion of moment between the regime and the people and assert that these inculcations and several limited scientific implementations which nearly completely ignored the historical and social roots of the “problems” of the village life in an effort to close the gap between the national and modern image of the regime and the real situation of the peasants remained by and large pointless for this social group. In fact, the village excursions rather than representing a moment of fusion between the regime and the people, meant a disappointment for the participants as they witnessed a very different and frustrating village life from what they had imagined. For the villagers, through the village excursions some outsiders who represented the state authority turned up for one day and made some recommendations which mostly did not resonate with their experiences. As a result, these were another border-separating activities between the regime and the people unlike its original purposes.

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