Mesleğinin 50.Yılında Prof. Dr. A. Fügen Berkay’ın Türk Sosyolojisindeki Yeri

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of her profession Dr. Ayşe Fügen Berkay graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Istanbul University and started to work as a research assistant at the Department of Sociology at Istanbul University in 1967. In the same year she completed her undergraduate thesis entitled “Layers of Existence in Turkish Folk Poetry in terms of the Ontology of Art.” In 1973 she obtained her PhD with her dissertation entitled “Yunus Emre’s Place in Turkish Society.” Later on for her associate professorship she prepared a thesis entitled “The Village–City Relations and Appearances of Those Relations in our Country” in 1981. During 1976–1978 she conducted her postgraduate research in Switzerland through a scholarship from the Swiss Government. Owing to her knowledge of Latin French and English Prof. Berkay has accumulated sound knowledge of the Western cultures in addition to Eastern cultures and Anatolian origins. In this context she has internalized the East–West synthesis through her personal and professional endeavors. Through her work she analytically examines cultures and civilizations from both internal and external perspectives. In addition to her sui generis sociological understanding her sociological stance has been influenced by Hilmi Ziya Ülken and Cahit Tanyol. In a nutshell we can express her stance through the following concepts: social history and historicist perspective a holistic imagination of world and society a holistic understanding of the history of civilization and a somewhat modernist philosophy that refers to the 18th-century Enlightenment ideas. Thanks to her philosophical background she has adopted the motto of the Gulbenkian Commission “Open the Social Sciences” even before this viewpoint was mentioned. Finally Prof. Fügen Berkay is a sociologist from the schools of Braudel Annales and Fuat Köprülü.