At the Nexus between the National and the Global: The Discursive Construction of the Turkish Halal Market in the Neoliberal Age

Abstract

This article analyzes a recently emerging halal market in Turkey and illuminates how discursive strategies foster the halal movement in an Islamic culture, and in a neoliberal economy. By exploring websites of the Turkish halal regulatory institutions and employing critical discourse analysis of the media materials, I demonstrate how Islamic actors (halal certification institutions and businesses) adapt, appropriate, and contest different discursive strategies to achieve legitimacy, to compete for distinction and to acquire power in a newly emerging and fiercely competitive, yet a globally defined field in a national economy. The discursive contestations of the actors shaped by the ambivalent structure of the Turkish halal market and accompanied by the deregulation principal of neoliberalism create equivocal meanings of halal-ness, symbolic consumption and education in this emergent field.