"Don't let the children wilt away in the streets" reconsidering poverty and philanthropy through the eyes of muslim women in contemporary Turkey : the case of the Ç.S.S., children's welfare project

Abstract

This thesis examines Muslim women‘s role in philanthropic organizations in contemporary Turkey. It is the product of an ethnographic study on a group of veiled Muslim women who carry out a welfare project for the poor children working in the streets, called Don‘t Let the Children Wilt Away in the Streets (Ç.S.S.). Based on the activities the Ç.S.S. volunteers undertake to achieve the social, economic, and cultural wellbeing of children and their families, this study tries to analyze the relationship between piety, philanthropy, and the middle class in Turkey. It concentrates on the emergence of volunteer subjectivity as a result of the increasing role of civil society organizations in welfare policies. Through an emotional-discursive analysis of the narratives of the volunteer subjects of the Ç.S.S. project, this study claims that emotions play a vital role in the formation of a philanthropic culture as well as the production of welfare politics today. It elaborates on the role of emotions in the formation of a philanthropic tradition by referring to the studies that identify philanthropy as a modern kind of giving that originates from human love. It also brings up the studies that emphasize the Islamic form of philanthropy as being undertaken for both the love of God and the love of humanity in the name of God. This thesis argues that human love and God‘s love complement each other and thereby, prompt the Ç.S.S. volunteers to voluntarily act for the wellbeing of humanity. In this respect, it challenges the boundaries drawn between modernity and religion, between being modern and pious. It suggests that the volunteer subjectivity which emerges within this framework of inquiry is both modern and pious. Correspondingly, it tries to demonstrate that there is compatible but as well as ambigious relationship between the modern and the pious along with the internal contradictions of the both. This thesis also concentrates on the Ç.S.S. as a children‘s welfare project. By emphasizing the recognition of children as vulnerable and innocence beings, it raises the question of which children are included or excluded from being part of this project.