ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses puericulture as an assemblage of practices and knowledges related to the hygienic care and management of infants, as a biopolitical strategy of a similar kind and as a cultural system of reasoning in ordering the modern population and in inventing modern subjects. Puericulture discourse cohered around the common goal of fabricating children as republican citizens. The chapter traces the child-centered nation-making process during the two decades following the formation of the Republic of Turkey through the discourse of puericulture. It analyses epistemological contours of puericulture both as a quasi-scientific and a cultural discourse in the way it unfolded in Turkey. The chapter deals with its epistemological ties with eugenics and modern notions of childhood. It also analyses puericulture curriculum as a techno-epistemic and cultural-political mechanism that helped reproduce and disseminate the scientific and cultural principles and theses embedded in puericulture discourse.
