Club Med Foça: The Transformation of Leisure Culture in Turkey

Abstract

In this paper, we trace the transformation of leisure culture and emergence of tourism as a form of life-style consumption in Turkey by analyzing the representation of Club Med Foça, in Turkish media between 1967 and 2005, during the Club’s active period in which it served as a catalyst for such cultural transformation. We deploy Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological framework for this purpose, and examine a variety of historical resources including popular magazines, news pieces, feature films, postcards, official documents and a photo-romance series for analyzing the representational contexts involving Club Med Foça. Our analysis shows that leisure culture and life-style consumption in Turkey has emerged between the tension of national identity and westernization, yet, at a later stage of the country’s modernization process, the main axis of tension shifted from an ambivalent relation of Turkish national identity with its western other to an ambivalent relation between the social classes in Turkey.