CIRCASSIANS of UZUNYAYLA, TURKEY Eiji
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MEMORY POLITICS: CIRCASSIANS OF UZUNYAYLA, TURKEY Eiji Miyazawa A dissertation submitted for the degree of PhD. Department of Anthropology and Sociology Faculty of Arts and Humanities School of Oriental and African Studies University of London MEMORY POLITICS: CIRCASSIANS OF UZUNYAYLA, TURKEY BY EIJI MIYAZAWA ABSTRACT This thesis explores social memories among Circassians in Turkey. It is based on eighteen months’ field research in the Uzunyayla plateau, Pınarbaşı district of Kayseri province, central Turkey. The Circassians (Çerkez) settled there are the descendants of refugees who fled from the Russian invasion of the Caucasus in the mid nineteenth century. “Memory” here is used in a broad sense to include the experiences and expressions of historical consciousness in everyday interactions, as well as articulated historical narratives. By interweaving them, the present work aims to analyse the political process involved in the production of knowledge about history and society. In efforts to reproduce a community in their new homeland, Circassians emphasise their history and collective identity. The local elites from noble (worq) families dominate such conservative, essentialist discourses, stressing their status superiority over ex-slave families. They recognise historical significance and identify the driving forces of their history by reference to specific social themes, such as the opposition between the two status groups. They monopolise history as a resource by excluding ex-slaves from the production of authoritative knowledge. Here, memory politics, consisting of space construction, control over interpersonal exchanges, and hierarchized personhood, plays a crucial role. In that process, ex-slaves become muted, made passively to embody a “feudal” past. By contrast, in Karakuyu, an affluent village also known as “Slave Village”, male comrades produce social relations different from elite representations by committing themselves to alcohol drinking. These actors – of various family backgrounds – thus assert the legitimacy of their relationship with the national past. Older villagers’ memory narratives about an outstanding ex- slave man demonstrate how disassembling and reassembling physical objects such as sheep stable can help to reconstruct the past; the past thus evoked is composed of the memories symbolised in these mnemonic devices, and produces understandings of history that are empowering for them. The poor, though, often fail to benefit from overall improvements in living conditions, and are thus prevented from having their say within the wider community. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction 9 [1] Research Aims 9 1) Aims 9 2) The Fieldwork 10 [2] Circassians in Uzunyayla 12 1) The Caucasus: Its Peoples and History 12 2) Pınarbaşı and Uzunyayla 15 3) Karakuyu 19 [3] Social Memory, Forgetting and Memory Politics 21 1) Overview 21 2) Outline 27 Part I Landscape of Uzunyayla: From Displacement to Emplacement Chapter 2 Displacement Discourse on Circassians 30 [1] Introduction: Two Landscapes 30 1) The School Festival 31 2) The Ballad 33 [2] A Contested Landscape: Imposed Displacement 36 [3] The Soil of History 42 1) The Layers of Human Agency 42 2) Gendering Uzunyayla 45 2-1) Dede Yurdu: Gendered Transaction, Gendered Homeland 46 2-2) Seeds of History 48 [4] Representations in Action 54 Case 2: The Abduction of a Circassian Girl in Eski Yassıpınar 57 Case 3: The Murder of Three Circassians by Avşars in Yukarı Karagöz 59 Chapter 3 The Reconstruction of Homeland through Memories 64 [1] From Victim of History to Actors of History 65 1) Migration 65 2) Journey and Settlement 68 3) Reunion 70 [2] Uzunyayla as the Caucasus 73 [3] The Uzunyayla of Circassian Warlords 77 1) Landscape of Memory: Village Names 78 2) Landscape as Memory: Naming Villages 81 3) A Contested Village Name 84 [4] Conclusion: Emplacement as Memory Process 89 Part II Historical Memories and Social Forgetting Chapter 4 Remembering “Bridewealth Issues” 94 [1] Introduction 94 [2] Wase and the Bridewealth Meeting 96 [3] Memories of Bridewealth Meetings 100 1) The Yahyabey Meeting 100 2) The Karakuyu Meeting 110 3) Worq Memories and Slave Memories 115 [4] Conclusion 120 Chapter 5 The Politics of Forgetting and Remembering 126 [1] Social Amnesia in Karakuyu 126 1) The Loss of Social Knowledge, or the Art of Forgetting? 126 2) Absent Lords 129 3) History as the Past 135 [2] Worqs‘ Memories 138 1) The Worq/Slave Dichotomy 138 2) Manipulating Time 142 3) Slave as Category 146 4) Worqs‘ History as Narrative 149 [3] Re-examining Forgetting in Karakuyu 153 1) The Great Seferberlik: the End of the Past 153 2) Land Distribution: the Beginning of the Present 155 3) Raising One’s Voice: Which Dichotomy? 161 4) The Time of the Community 164 [4] Some Perspectives on Future Investigation of Worqs’ Memories 167 [5] Conclusion 170 Part III Everyday Practice of Social Memories Chapter 6 Everyday Production of Memories and Forgetting 173 [1] Introduction 173 [2] Slaves as Lesser Persons 175 1) Personhood 175 2) Metaphors of Slavehood: the Incomplete Personhood of Slaves 178 2-1) “Property”: Materialising Metaphor 178 2-2) Respect and Love: Humanising Slaves’ Subordination 182 2-3) The Objectification of Slaves and the Production of Historical Knowledge 182 [3] “Kimlerdensin?”: Everyday Politics of Remembering and Forgetting 188 1) Sofra and Kapı: Politics of Space 190 2) “Kimlerdensin?”: the Production of Forgetting and Embodiment of History 198 Chapter 7 Drinking Alcohol as Re-membering the Past 210 [1] Introduction 210 [2] Sociability in Worqs’ Guest Rooms 214 1) Eating, Drinking and Feeding 214 2) Respect and Love: Honour and Shame 220 - 9 - [3] Male Sociability in Teahouses 226 1) Tossing “Hot Air”: Declaring Oneself a Social Actor 227 2) Taking: Visualising Male Competence 229 3) Çekememezlik: Masculinity as a Vehicle for Transition of Social Values 237 [4] “Fuck the Past!”: Making Bygones Be Bygones in the Construction of the Past 245 [5] Conclusion 247 Chapter 8 Memories of Huta: Re-construction of the Past through Memory 252 [1] Introduction: Abaza Hajji Huta 252 [2] Reconstruction of the Past through Materialised Memories 255 1) Cigarettes: Materialising the Past 257 2) The Barn: Dismantling and Reconstituting the Past 265 3) Kapı: Rearranging the Social Order 275 4) Lokum: Being a Circassian 283 Chapter 9 Conclusion 288 Glossary 297 Bibliographies 312 - 10 - LIST OF TABLES TABLE 1 Population of Pınarbaşı District 1935-1997 1.1 District Population Divided according to Town and Village Population 300 1.2 Ratio of Town/Village Population 300 1.3 Village Population according to Sub-district 300 2. District Population, divided according to Circassians and Turks 2.1 Circassians and Turkish Population Total and Ratios 301 2.2 Circassian Population according to Sub-districts 301 2.3 Turkish Population according to Sub-districts 302 3. Circassian Village Population and Caucasian Language-speaking Population in Rural Kayseri 303 4. Karakuyulu Population 303 5. 1995 General Election Results 5.1 Votes Cast according to Party 304 5.2.Votes Cast according to Percentage of Total Vote of Each Unit 304 5.3 Votes Case according to Ethnic Group 305 5.4 Votes Cast according to Percentage of Total Vote of Each Ethnic Group 305 6. The Scale of the Land Distribution in Karakuyu organised by the Land Commission in 1953 6.1 The Size of the Distributed Land according to the Social Categories of the Beneficiaries 306 6.2 Social Boundaries (Us/Them) Presented by Karakuyulus Belonging to Different Categories 306 LIST OF MAPS AND FIGURES MAPS 1. The Uzunyayla Plateau in Turkey 7 2. Pınarbaşı District and Uzunyayla 7 3. Circassian Villages in Uzunyayla 8 FIGURES 1. The Circassian Language Family 307 2 Land Distribution of 1953 and Beneficiaries 2.1 Consolidation of Land to a Xexes Worq Lineage 308 2.2 Some Xexes and Slave-Descendant Beneficiaries 309 3. Hajji Huta & Some Karakuyulu Narrators 310 4. Worqs’ Memory and Slaves’ Memories 311 One’s possession of greater power was often claimed through images of attacking the lesser partner’s bodily orifices, not only mouth (ağız) but also anus (göt) and vagina (am). Images of inequality were often presented by the use of metaphors of assaults on one of these points of access. Men frequently used idioms such as “to shit in someone’s mouth” (ağızına sıçmak), “to fuck someone’s ass” (götünü sikmek) or “to put something in someone’s vagina” (amına koymak). - 11 - By demonstrating their manful assertiveness, they opened up a moment in which they could stand in a dominating position over others. The scope of these expressions can be stretched to produce the same gendered image involving the relationship between a person and a collectivity, or between collectivities, including domains related to state politics and the market economy, e.g. between Turks and an ethnic minority: “Put ‘a Turkish soldier’ into PKK’s vagina” (Mehmetçik,1 PKK’nin amına koy), a slogan chanted in a nationalist demonstration (Yelda 1998: 132); between Turkish illegal labour migrants and a host country: “Let me fuck England’s ass from the back” (Ingilterenin götünü arkadan sikeyim); and the city of Kayseri and Karakuyulu youths, “Once you move to the city, you will give your tail to a ‘real man’ right away” (Şehire gidince, hemen adama kıyrığını vereceksin). These examples demonstrated that an intake of an object beyond the boundaries dividing self and society was an important image used to mark an uneven distribution of power between different actors. Recognition of a greater potency was manifested as a capacity for making the subordinate partner ingest an alien object. As its effect, the latter would be provided with a coherent self. The image of penetration and infringement of bodily boundaries deprived him of fluidity, giving him coherence as an object. Paradoxically, a series of ideas such as submission to the powerful, a renunciation of autonomy and a failure to achieve self-containedness were also presented in images of break-up of closure (the crumbling of a state of being clearly bounded and thus firmly closed), by which the integrity the recipient had just received was dismantled.