In a consumer society, identities are expressed through the medium of consumer goods. For example, secularist and Islamist identities in contemporary Turkey are seen to a large extent as products of consumer culture. Research in this field shows that the identity politics of secularists and Islamists in the 1980s and 1990s was involved with a history of commodification (Navaro-Yashin 2002). “The veil” and “Atatürk” have become central signifiers in the contemporary politics of identity over the last two decades.

Since the mid-1980s, economic and political changes at the gl…