European Journal of Turkish Studies (May 2022)
Enquêter sur la reconnaissance des sensibilités athées en Turquie contemporaine
Abstract
While the presence of atheism in Turkish society is often reduced to an indicator of the evolution of religiosities, the concrete modalities of its manifestations have yet to be pinpointed. This article attempts to address this by acknowledging that a long-standing dynamic opposing the continuity of a denial to attempts at recognizing outsiders from the prevailing system of majority confessional assignation shapes the variation of the degree of exposure of atheist sensibilities. Relying on the theoretical framework of the sociological forms of recognition (objective, self, mutual), three social patterns are drawn from a field survey among a range of individuals: sceptics, non-believers, ambivalent atheists and so on. The first logic is the uncertain outcome of the social test to the normative gaze: the problematic situation, which may occur on a daily basis, whereby the suspicion or accusation of apostasy is circumvented, negotiated or confronted. The external signs of atheist sensibilities are thus labile insofar as they are displayed or concealed through the performance of oneself. Second, within a biographic timeframe, the ex post facto discovery of the inner signs of an atheistic sensibility occurs as a result of an awareness of being religiously illiterate for some, a social class attribute that distinguishes them from the mass of believers, or in the cleavage induced by a social mobility, either fantasized or achieved, for another part of the sample that stems from a pious background. Finally, I analyse the extent of mutual recognition based on the common denominator of an atheistic sensibility as largely dependent on the aspirations of an emerging associative movement. This movement, which is embodied in particular by the Association of Atheism (Ateizm Derneği), founded in 2014, transforms a sense of ostracization, i.e. denial of recognition, felt by some of the Godless into a motive for struggle. Despite the material, human and symbolic means it has put in place, this association appears condemned to marginality as its potential adherents benefit from competing resocialization networks.
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