Critics, politics and cultural legitimation: An exploratory analysis of the Turkish film field

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Yaren Ö. B., Hazir I. K.

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL STUDIES, vol.23, no.4, pp.611-629, 2020 (AHCI) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 23 Issue: 4
  • Publication Date: 2020
  • Doi Number: 10.1177/1367549418810079
  • Journal Name: EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL STUDIES
  • Journal Indexes: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, IBZ Online, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, Communication & Mass Media Index, Educational research abstracts (ERA), Film & Television Literature Index, Index Islamicus, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Political Science Complete, Social services abstracts, Sociological abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
  • Page Numbers: pp.611-629
  • Keywords: Cultural legitimacy, cultural recognition, film criticism, MCA, Turkey, QUALITY TELEVISION, UNITED-STATES, ART, DISCOURSE, CLASSIFICATION, PARTICIPATION, NEWSPAPERS, ELITE, TASTE
  • Ankara University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

In this article, we draw on the growing Euro-American literature on cultural recognition, legitimacy, and film criticism and focus on the classificatory struggles taking place in the Turkish film field. We content-analyze the criteria that critics deploy as they review films as recognized by different institutions and actors. Multiple correspondence analysis demonstrates that the distinction between artistic and commercial films is still very prominent. Moreover, the existence of political content in a film elevates its symbolic status, regardless of its production mode. To account for this peculiar finding, we explore a fraction of the reviews qualitatively. Our research contributes to the cultural legitimacy literature by crosschecking the effectiveness of recently posited trends and questioning the role of politics in the process of critical recognition in a specific national context located on the margins of Europe.