Degeneration Anxieties and Eugenic Contemplations in Modernizing Turkey during the Interwar Period(İki Dünya Savaşı Arası Dönemde Modernleşen Türkiye'de Dejenerasyon Kaygıları ve Öjenik Düşünceler)

Abstract

Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with certain desirable hereditary traits. Eugenic movement gained importance in the nation-building and modernization processes starting from the late nineteenth century and reached its’ greatest popularity in the first half of the twentieth century. This study, by treating eugenic thought as one of the travelling ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explored the origin and the development of eugenics movement and its associated discourse in Turkey in the early republican period. It charts the arrival of the movement and its associated ideas in Turkey and the reasons behind its appeal for the architects of a new republic as well as, how and to what extent was it modified by the intellectual and political milieu and what elements of it, if any, were put in practice. By reading the existing literature on Turkish eugenics and major works of Turkish Eugenicist of the period, this study demonstrates that the early Turkish Republican elite and medical bureaucrats discussed the significance of motherhood, marriage, hygiene, childcare, sports, and physical education to come up with a generation of citizens that would be healthy, strong, and productive. In other words, the discourse of Turkish eugenics aimed to create a healthy and robust Turkish society with a collective national identity with policies adapted from the West to both catch up with the West and prove itself against the West in the process of modernization.

Keywords

• eugenics
• turkey
• modernization
• inter-war period