From rakı to ayran: regulating the place and practice of drinking in Turkey

Abstract

Despite religious proscriptions and practices, currents of alcohol never wholly ceased in Ottoman or Republican Turkey. Rather, Anatolian history overflows with examples of regulated consumption – and futile schemes for prohibition. Recently, prohibitionist discourse returned amid regulatory initiatives and in ways reifying secular-Islamist divides. Integral to permutations in policy implementation, even schemes of socio-spatial control arose that entail regimes of zoning and separation for trade and consumption. Accounting for narratives of regulationism and prohibitionism from a vantage acknowledging the republic’s past, we map today’s dynamic and ongoing shifts in Turkey’s regulatory and discursive engagements with the place and practice of drinking.

Keywords:

• alcohol
• prohibition
• public health
• regulation
• secularism
• Turkey

ORCID

Emine Ö. Evered http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2026-8912

Kyle T. Evered http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1429-1158

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Stewart Williams and Barney Warf for their invitation to include our research on this topic in their special issue of Space and Polity. We would also like to thank editor Ronan Paddison and the anonymous reviewers who read and critiqued our submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Support for the research that enabled this manuscript came from Michigan State University's Asian Studies Program and Muslim Studies Program.