Nükhet Sirman (born 1951) is a Turkish

social anthropologist Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...

. She earned a doctorate degree from Britain's

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

in 1988, and since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at the

Boğaziçi University Boğaziçi University (Turkish language, Turkish: ''Boğaziçi Üniversitesi''), also known as Bosphorus University, is a Public university, public research university in Istanbul, Turkey, historically tied to a former American educational insti ...

in Istanbul, Turkey. She has done academic analysis of the feminist movement in Turkey and introduced the concept of "familial citizenship" in the academic realm.

Education and academic career

Sirman finished high school education at the American Robert College of Istanbul and did a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University College London. She completed her Ph.D. in 1988 with the thesis titled ''Peasants and Family Farms: The Position of Households in Cotton Production in a Village of Western Turkey''. It was an ethnographic study of the production of cotton in Turkey's Söke which detailed "the production and labor processes during the 1980s in terms of household". Since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at sociology department of Boğaziçi University.

Research

Sirman is a

. Her research subjects include gender, establishment of

gender identity Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it. In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent and consistent with the in ...

ethnic conflict An ethnic conflict is a conflict between two or more ethnic groups. While the source of the conflict may be political, social, economic or religious, the individuals in conflict must expressly fight for their ethnic group's position within so ...

, family and

kinship In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that ...

feminist theory Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or Philosophy, philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's Gender role, social roles, experiences, intere ...

, interpretive methods, postcolonial societies, rural sociology, and

sociology of emotions The Sociology of emotions applies a Sociology, sociological lens to the topic of emotions. The discipline of Sociology, which falls within the social sciences, is focused on understanding both the mind and society, studying the dynamics of the s ...

. She has also studied "gender construction under nationalist discourses", " honor crimes and

violence against women Violence against women (VAW), also known as gender-based violence (GBV) or sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), violent, violence primarily committed by Man, men or boys against woman, women or girls. Such violence is often considered hat ...

", " Kurdish women's movements", and "settlement of

internally displaced persons An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced displacement, forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the Refugee#Definitions ...

Feminism

Sirman is a feminist. Between 1984 and 1991, she participated in Turkey's

feminist movement The feminist movement, also known as the women's movement, refers to a series of social movements and political campaigns for Radical politics, radical and Liberalism, liberal reforms on women's issues created by inequality between men and wom ...

, and she has carried out research on the life of women in Turkey. In her research on the feminist struggle, Sirman pointed out three movements which she considers as "standard reference points" in the study of feminism in Turkey. She views the resistance to the "Ottoman family system" by women "within the framework of proposed reforms to save the

empire An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outpost (military), outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a hegemony, dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the ...

" during its final decades as the first, the according of numerous rights to women by the "modernizing Turkish state" as the second, and the "reaction" of women in opposition to "the patronizing role of the Turkish state in defining how women's liberation should look" that surfaced as an after-effect of the

1980 Turkish coup d'état The 1980 Turkish coup d'état (), headed by Chief of the General Staff General Kenan Evren, was the third coup d'état in the history of the Republic of Turkey, the previous having been the 1960 coup and the 1971 coup by memorandum. During ...

as the third historically important movement. Sirman is of the view that the feminist movement in the 1980s was Turkish women's stand against the "Kemalist regime and the limitations of state feminism inspired by Kemalism". Some feminism and social science scholars are of the opinion that the

leftist Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy either as a whole or of certain social hierarchies. Left-wing politi ...

and Kemalist ideologies equally repress women's gender identity. Sirman suggests that though the "integration" of women in "traditional

Islamic Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...

", "

statist In political science, statism or etatism (from French, ''état'' 'state') is the doctrine that the political authority of the state is legitimate to some degree. This may include economic and social policy, especially in regard to taxation an ...

Kemalist" and "revolutionary leftist" ideologies made them enter the political arena, the feminist movement will gain momentum only when it would steer clear of these ideologies. In her study on the "discursive and cultural productions" of

nation state A nation state, or nation-state, is a political entity in which the State (polity), state (a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory) and the nation (a community based on a common identity) are (broadly ...

, Sirman has put forward the idea that "women were made part of the nation through the control of their bodies and, through cultural elaborations of femininity, the definition and control of the cultural boundaries of the nation".

Familial citizenship

Sirman studied Turkey's "nation-building

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. F ...

" which had established that a "sovereign" man and his "dependent" wife or mother are "ideal" citizens. In 2005, she devised the term "familial citizenship" to describe "a situation in which a position within a particular familial discourse provides the person with a status within the national polity." Daphna Hacker views Sirman's definition of the term as "relational and identity-based". Drawing from Christian Joppke's definition of citizenship as "membership in a

State State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

", Hacker herself applies a "physical-legal sense" to term "familial citizenship" and defines it as "the right of family members to be citizens of the same country, based on their family relations". "Familial citizenship" differs in meaning from the term "family citizenship" which was devised by Pierpaolo Donati in 1998. Donati wrote that "family citizenship means that the family as such must enjoy its own set of rights–obligations, as a reality of solidarity, and not simply as the sum of the rights–obligations of its individual members".

Law

From October 2016 to June 2017, Sirman worked on a research project titled ''Creating a Life Alongside the Law'' as a

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a p ...

at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study Foundation. In her research, she worked to present an ethnographic study report from her field study that was conducted in Turkey's

Mersin Mersin () is a large city and port on the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean coast of Mediterranean Region, Turkey, southern Turkey. It is the provincial capital of the Mersin Province (formerly İçel). It is made up of four district governorates ...

where the

Kurds Kurds (), or the Kurdish people, are an Iranian peoples, Iranic ethnic group from West Asia. They are indigenous to Kurdistan, which is a geographic region spanning southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syri ...

have moved in to, and are not living within the bounds of official laws, after being "forcefully displaced from their villages in the 1990s". Sirman labored to answer — "what exactly is the law, and what does it mean to be alongside the law; and, secondly, what do we understand from the notion of "a life," what constitutes a life?"

Selected papers

* * * * * *

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sirman, Nükhet 1951 births Alumni of University College London Academic staff of Boğaziçi University Turkish women academics Family sociologists Rural sociologists Sociologists of law Turkish sociologists Scholars of feminist philosophy Turkish feminist writers Social anthropologists Turkish women anthropologists 21st-century anthropologists Anthropology educators 21st-century Turkish women writers Living people