Personal States: Making Connections Between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey

This text charts how Turkish people, both individually and collectively, attempt to personalize the impersonality of the state. The narratives and metaphors used in these constructions draw on resources close to hand such as the organization of the factory and the family structure.
Catherine Alexander charts how Turkish people, both within the state bureaucracy and outside it, attempt to personalize the impersonality of the state. Based on a detailed study of the nationalized Turkish Sugar Corporation, this book considers how people from the highest levels of the state bureaucracy to farming villages understand "the state", and, in turn, how they imagine themselves to be perceived The narratives and metaphors used in these constructions draw on resources close to hand such as the material organization of state factory compounds, state personnel encountered in the course of everyday life, and the image of the family structure. By also exploring notions of state and personhood within the highest echelons of the administration itself, Alexander shows how ideas of "the state" recede once one is actually "within". For officials the state becomes other institutions and Ministries with which they have little contact. The process of striving to make connections with other groups and people within the bureaucracy mirrors that at levels in the Turkish Sugar Corporation and outside it.