Miniaturizing Atatürk Privatization of state imagery and ideology in Turkey

Since the late 1990s Turkish consumers have purchased pictures of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and the most potent symbol of the Turkish state, as popular commodities, displaying them in homes and private businesses. In this article, I argue that these consumer citizens seek to reconcile the memory of Atatürk's state‐led modernity of the 1930s with recent international pressure to achieve a market‐based modernity. As citizens try to mask the authority of secularist state institutions with consumer choice, the market carries state symbolism into new, private spheres, which it previously had not been able to infiltrate.