When Greeks think about Turks

The View from Anthropology

Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317997498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing upon anthropological studies that document culturally specific ways of perceiving ethic Others in Greece and Cyprus, this book explores the cultural boundaries of the categories 'Greek' and 'Turk', and compares views on what it means to be one of these ethnic groups or both. The contributors examine the opinions of diverse social groups, such as ordinary middle-class citizens, intellectuals, army officers, children, villagers, refugees from Asia Minor, and Greek-and-Turkisj-Cypriots. They also investigate the local attitudes to international politics and highlight the contextual – as opposed to immutable and essentialist – meaning of evaluations about nations, such as Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, and their citizens.

When Greeks think about Turks carefully unpacks the cultural meaning of popular metaphors, stereotypes and versions of history as these are articulated in the context of discussions about the Turks in Greece. It sets the template for understanding how local perceptions of resemblance and difference provide a conceptual framework for defining and negotiating ethnic identity at the local, national and international level. It sheds valuable light on the politics of identity-making and the constitution of nationalism in Greece and Cyprus.

This book was previously published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.

Introduction: The ‘Turks’ in the Imagination of the ‘Greeks’

Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

This volume is concerned with the views held by some Greeks about the Turks, mostly the generalized, treated as undifferentiated, Turks. It addresses the preoccupation of some people (who imagine themselves as similar to each other) with some other people (imagined as homogeneously dissimilar and incompatible in ethnic terms). This is an example of ethnic categorization set in opposition, and the case of ‘Turks in the minds of Greeks’ is one of the most enduring variations. Like many other conflict-ridden pairs of ethnic identification—Israelis and Palestinians, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs—the categories themselves, like their supporting nationalisms and ethno-histories, rely upon taken-for-granted, unexamined in everyday conversation, perceptions of cultural incompatibility. The contributors to this volume examine these taken-for-granted perceptions, and several other, less antagonistic ones, which contradict them. They draw attention to the complexity of cultural worldviews about Others as these manifest themselves, both in particular arguments and social dynamics, and when Greeks think about Turks.

The ethnographic accounts in the chapters that follow consider the points of view of diverse social groups—ordinary citizens, intellectuals, army officers, children, villagers, refugees from Asia Minor, the Rum, Greek and Turkish Cypriots—and pay careful attention to the process in which these views become apparent and negotiated. The emphasis on particular case studies, emblematic of the anthropological approach, is introduced here as an antidote to sweeping generalizations, and with an intention to facilitate a more complex understanding of ethnic categorization in South Europe and beyond. The Turks for the Greeks—or more accurately, the Turks in the minds of those who call themselves Greeks—are indispensable ingredients of nation building in Greece and Cyprus. They comprise one of the most representative examples of a national Other used as inspiration for imagining the national Self. In this respect, the generalized category of the ‘Turk’, and its facilitating role in the narratives and arguments of the Greeks, can shed some valuable light on the processes that inform ethnic identity making in several other European and non-European contexts.

Greeks and Turks as Hollow Categories

Western Europeans and North Americans who have travelled, lived and acquired a sense of familiarity with Greece and Cyprus have not failed to observe that the Greeks and the Greek Cypriots ‘think and talk a lot’ about the Turks. Some of them would not hesitate to argue that the Greeks are ‘obsessed’ with the Turks, that most conversations with Greeks, at least those about politics, focus on ‘the Greeks themselves, the Turks and their unending enmity’. In a similar manner, academic commentators very frequently refer to the undifferentiated Turk as the most significant—or salient (Mandel 1996)—‘Other’ of the Greeks.¹ In fact, it is a matter of simple observation that an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Greece and Cyprus engage frequently with the category of ‘the Turk’ and with the meanings and emotions with which this category is endowed. They do so in debates about politics, when they indulge in speculation about order and justice in the world, or in arguments about identity and lifestyles, when they simply contemplate themselves and their way of life. The Turks, in whatever capacity they are discussed, inspire the moral and national imagination of many people in mainland Greece and the island of Cyprus. And in this respect the Greeks appear to be preoccupied with the all-inclusive, generalized category of the Turk.

I am tempted to argue that this intriguing proposition is liable to several layers of generalizing simplicity. The people who call themselves Greeks are derived from various cultural, social (and, occasionally, ethnic or religious) backgrounds. They could be citizens of Greece, Greek Cypriots from the Republic of Cyprus,² members of the Christian minority in Turkey or Greeks from the diaspora. Their use of the notion of the Turk evokes numerous, and similarly diverse, associations and serves manifold purposes. It depends on particular circumstances, contexts and strategies, different historical instances or personal histories. Moreover, the ‘Turk’ as a category in local conversation in Greece and Cyprus cannot be straightforwardly defined. It is employed to refer to a number of ideas or people or ethnic landscapes, which are not outlined with precision, and could take many different forms in the imaginations of those who reflect upon them.

Imprecise and all-inclusive, the notion of the Turk—as this is used in Greece and Cyprus—can be seen as a ‘hollow category’, a term used by Ardener (1989) and Chapman (1978; 1992) to account for the image of an ethnic group as this is forged or reinvented by its neighbours, who impose upon it from outside their own meanings and categorical distinctions. Hollowness, here, does not denote meaninglessness, but ampleness in terms of taxonomic space (Ardener 1989). It does not refer to the identity of the Turks, but to several possible identities for the Turks made up by Others, a conceptualization of Turkishness broad enough to accommodate the imagination of those who see the Turk as their significant Other. My somewhat adjusted use of ‘hollowness’ is applied here to describe—unlike the peripheral or imagined groups discussed by Ardener and Chapman³—an ethnic category represented by a large and vibrant nation with a distinctive language and national identity. What is important from my point of view, and that of the contributors to this volume, is that the idea of the Turk in Greece and Cyprus is implicit in the construction of ethnic difference, and assists in the classification of the Self and Others into discreet categorical distinctions. The ‘Turk’ in the minds of the ‘Greeks’ (those who call themselves Greeks) might have very little in common with the actual Turks living in Turkey, but the very concept of the Turk is very instrumental in shaping the worldviews of local actors in Greece and Cyprus.

As is probably apparent, I am hesitant in employing the generalizing term ‘Greeks’. This is probably because the ‘Greeks’, like the ‘Turks’, suggests another hollow category, one that can be filled with many dissimilar meanings. Banks (1996, p. 151), reading Just (1989), has commented upon the ‘hollowness’ of Greek national identity, which, as several anthropologists have argued so persuasively (Herzfeld 1982; 1987; 1997; Just 1989; Stewart 1994; Faubion 1993; Karakasidou 1997a; Sutton 1998; Hirschon 2000; Kenna 2001; Yalouri 2001; Brown & Hamilakis 2003), contains a great deal of historical material. In fact, so vast is the hollowness of‘Greekness’ that it is able to squeeze three millennia of historical information into its timeless imagined reality. In this respect, its capacity to incorporate new and old ingredients of culture is enormous. And, despite the richness and variety of culture that it embraces, the hollow category of the ‘Greeks’, like that of the ‘Turks’, has always quanta of available empty space that can be loaded with additional properties: more virtues, more glories and more blame.

The majority of the people who discuss the Turks and Turkey in Greece and Cyprus would call themselves Greeks, but their understanding of what it is to be Greek and Turkish is, in general, unclear and imprecise. In fact, in this very inexact quality lies the naturalizing power of generalizations, the legitimization of historically constructed truths as inevitable, inescapable, primordial (see Yanagisako & Delaney 1995; Herzfeld 1997).⁴ As Anthony Cohen (1994, p. 62) has argued, ‘ethnicity has a definite appearance but a rather indefinite substance’. This is why nationalisms are deliberately imprecise (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983): they seek to render themselves available to any potential substantiation of claims or complaints across the boundaries of geographical imagination and historical depth.

In this respect, and especially when placed in a context of comparison, the categories of the Greeks and the Turks are equally as hollow and indefinite as several other categories set in opposition: Macedonians and Albanians (cf. Brown 2000; Neofotistos 2004), Serbians and Bosnian Muslims (cf. Jansen 2003), Bulgarians and Pomaks (cf. Mihaylova 2003), Israelis and Palestinians (cf. Rabinowitz 1997; 2002), Catalans and Castillians (cf. Llobera 1989; 2004), Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland (cf. Jenkins 1986; 1997; McFarlane 1986; Donnan & McFarlane 1986) are all significant Others to each other in significant ambiguity. In all of those cases, the hollow quality of ethnic categorization facilitates the common sense treatment of interpretations of conflict and opposition, which are in turn naturalized and reproduced as primordial and inescapable. And, alongside the articulation of dominant models of national(ist) identity, there is always some hollow space for innovation and negotiation in local debates, an illusion of interpretative freedom. This serves as a source of inspiration for anthropology's favourite subjects, those local-level commentators who—as ethnographic analysis in Southeast Europe has shown (Herzfeld 1992; Jansen 2000; Sutton 2003; Theodossopoulos 2003; Brown & Theodossopoulos 2004; Papadakis 2004)—are experts in the rhetorical exploitation of imprecise categorization.

From Categories to Worldviews

This volume explores the vast and largely uncharted cultural territory encompassed by the hollow categorical boundaries of the notion of the Turk as this is understood in Greece and Cyprus. Its contributors document culturally specific ways of perceiving the Turks and Turkey in local contexts and highlight the situational—as opposed to immutable and essentialist—evaluations about nations such as Greece, Turkey and Cyprus and their citizens. Their ethnographic accounts build upon previous anthropological studies that do not take ethnic identities for granted, a tradition initiated with the work of Fredrick Barth. His introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) had been generally regarded as the start of a new era in anthropological writing about ethnicity, but it has been subsequently criticized for focusing too closely on the social boundaries that separate and define ethnic groups and for paying insufficient attention to the content of culture within those boundaries (Handelman 1977). And, indeed, ‘the cultural stuff enclosed by the boundaries—downplayed by Barth (1969, p. 15)—is used in the processes of category-making as raw material for establishing the diacritics of the boundaries themselves, facilitating thus both group identification and social categorization (Jenkins 1997, p. 23, Donnan & Wilson 1999, p. 25). Paradoxically, Barth's intention was to identify these same processes and move away from static anthropological descriptions.

The fragments of culture that help certain people become aware and think about certain significant or less significant Others are the primary data of category-making. They comprise information disseminated by the nation state and its institutions, influenced by personal experience, organized in terms of coherent or less coherent (local or formal) worldviews. This cultural information—part of what Barth calls ‘stuff within boundaries—is not necessarily self-contained, but subject to change and reinterpretation, and partakes in the negotiation of the boundaries themselves. Similarly, the cultural worldviews that organize information about Others are not in any sense completely static, since they are constantly employed in dynamic evaluations about politics and justice in the world; evaluations that entail the possibility of new conclusions, based on up-to-date information now treated as new evidence.

I shall refer to these views that attempt to explain justice and injustice in the world, war and peace, and the complexities of hidden or transparent motives in international politics, by the term ‘political cosmology’. My use of ‘political cosmology’ is an adaptation of Michael Herzfeld's ‘secular theodicy’ (1992), an analytical concept he has applied, in a more restricted sense, to describe indigenous theorizing as a means of coping with injustice and frustration in the domain of bureaucracy and state affairs. Political cosmologies aim at the legitimization and explanation of historical causality, and help ordinary citizens to arrive at what Herzfeld (1992; 1997) would call ‘convenient explanations’ of the failures and disappointments of world politics. They are symbolic systems of cultural justification and as such they could be—and often are—closely structured on models promoted by national(ist) myths and historical narratives. The latter have been very appropriately described by Bruce Kapferer (1988) as ‘nationalist cosmologies’, systems of belief with a certain hermeneutic capacity, based on legends and other traditions of the nation.

Ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction: The ‘Turks’ in the Imagination of the ‘Greeks’
• 2 How Greeks Think: About Turks, for Example
• 3 Tourkokratia: History and the Image of Turks in Greek Literature
• 4 Knowledge of Diversity: Towards a More Differentiated Set of ‘Greek’ Perceptions of ‘Turks’
• 5 Beyond the Greek and Turkish Dichotomy: The Rum Polites of Istanbul and Athens
• 6 Constructing ‘the Turk’ as an Enemy: The Complexity of Stereotypes in Children's Everyday Worlds
• 7 Guarding Each Other's Dead, Mourning One's Own: The Problem of Missing Persons and Missing Pasts in Cyprus
• 8 Writing about Turks and Powerful Others: Journalistic Heteroglossia in Western Thrace
• 9 Ethnic Turks and ‘Muslims’, and the Performance of Multiculturalism: The Case of the Drómeno of Thrace
• 10 Phantom Menace: What Junior Greek Army Officers Have to Say about Turks and Turkey
• 11 Bicommunal Initiatives and their Contribution to Improved Relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots
• 12 Politics of friendship, worldviews of mistrust: The Greek-Turkish rapprochement in local conversation
• Notes on Contributors
• Index