Pamuk's Kars and Its Others

PAMUK’S KARS AND ITS OTHERS: AN ETHNOGRAPHY ON IDENTIFICATIONS AND BOUNDARIES OF ETHNICITY, NATIONALISM AND SECULARISM A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY BY KÜBRA ZEYNEP SARIASLAN IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN THE PROGRAM OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY SEPTEMBER 2010 Approval of the Graduate School of Social Sciences ____________________ Prof. Dr. Meliha Altunı şık Director I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science. ____________________ Prof. Dr. Ay şe Saktanber Head of Department This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Science. ____________________ Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser Supervisor Examining Committee Members Prof. Dr. Tayfun Atay (A.Ü., ETH) ____________________ Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser (METU, SOC) ____________________ Assist. Prof. Dr. Aykan Erdemir (METU, SOC) ____________________ I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all material and results that are not original to this work. Name, Last name : Kübra Zeynep Sarıaslan Signature : iii ABSTRACT PAMUK’S KARS AND ITS OTHERS: AN ETHNOGRAPHY ON IDENTIFICATIONS AND BOUNDARIES OF ETHNICITY, NATIONALISM AND SECULARISM Sarıaslan, Kübra Zeynep M.S., Department of Sociology Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser September 2010, 118 pages Kars is an ethnically diverse city located at the North East Turkey, neighboring Armenia. In the year 2002, Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk published a political-historical novel named Snow, the story of which is set in Kars. The book created a public debate on national and global scale about cutting edge questions of Turkey. This thesis aims to address these questions from the perspective of inhabitants of Kars, who had reacted fiercely to the representations in the book Snow . By focusing on identification and boundary negotiation processes of people in Kars, this thesis and presents an ethnography of Kars, which was achieved by application of grounded theory method and by discussing local perceptions of ethnicity, nationalism and secularism at the periphery of Turkey. Keywords: identification, boundaries, ethnicity, nationalism, secularism, ethnography, Kars, novel Snow, Orhan Pamuk, grounded theory. iv ÖZ PAMUK’UN KARS’I VE KARS’IN ÖTEK İLER İ: ETN İSİTE, MİLL İYETÇ İLİK VE LA İKL İK’ İN SINIRLARI VE ÖZDE Şİ MLER ÜZER İNE BİR ETNOGRAF İ Sarıaslan, Kübra Zeynep Yüksek Lisans, Sosyoloji Bölümü Tez Yöneticisi: Doç. Dr. Sabine Strasser Eylül 2010, 118 sayfa Kars, farklı etnik grupların ya şadı ğı, Türkiye’nin kuzeydo ğusunda, Ermenistan’a kom şu bir şehirdir. 2002 yılında, Nobel ödüllü yazar Orhan Pamuk, öyküsü Kars şehrinde geçen Kar isimli politik ve tarihi bir roman yazdı. Kitap, Türkiye’nin bıçak sırtı sorunları üzerine ulusal ve küresel çapta bir tartı şma yarattı. Bu tez, bu sorunları, Kar ’da temsil edilmi ş olmalarına tepki gösteren Kars sakinlerinin gözünden irdelemeyi amaçlar. Karslıların özde şim ve sınırları müzakere süreçlerine odaklanarak, bu tez, Türkiye’nin kıyısında etnisite, milliyetçilik ve laiklik meselelerine dair yerel algıları tartı şan ve gömülü kuram metodu uygulayarak gerçekle ştirilmi ş olan bir Kars etnografisi sunar. Anahtar Kelimeler: özde şim, sınırlar, etnisite, milliteçilik, laiklik, etnografi, Kars, Kar romanı, Orhan Pamuk, gömülü kuram. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser, who led me to develop this project that I have loved to work on. She listened and responded to all of my confusions throughout the research process with an astonishing patience. I am cordially grateful to her guidance, advices, constructive insights, generous engagements and everything that I learned from her during this period of time. I am thankful to Prof. Dr. Tayfun Atay and Assist. Prof. Dr. Aykan Erdemir for accepting to be in the evaluation committee of this thesis. I am thankful to Peter Finke, who directed me to the discipline of social anthropology which perfectly fits me in terms of my inner conflict between political engagements and academic passion, and provides powerful instruments to moderate them wisely. I owe very much to the members of my dear nuclear family, Zehra, Nadir and Özgür, for always being there and believing in me. I am grateful to sincere encouragements of my colleague and my friend Yakup Deniz Kahraman. I want to express my wish to work with him together in the future, since he is the best companion I’ve ever had. I also want to thank to Katerina Vaseva for reading my drafts delicately. I cannot thank enough to my dear friend Esra Demirkıran not only for opening the door of Kars to me but also sharing tears and amusements, and for calling me to ‘remain in play’ whenever I feel lost in this struggle. Also, I am very much grateful to Nermin Pınar Erdo ğan, whom I admire and envy all the time. vi I am indebted to Ay şe Uslu for the precious endless discussions on strange correlations of life, art and science; and to Nilay Belat for her stability in my life and the shoulder that she offers to me. I gratefully acknowledge the hospitality of my dear friend İhsan Karayazı during the fieldwork and his ability to make me smile in the times that I was down or tired. I also thank to Armine Avetisyan, who became a sister to me in a very short time and never left me alone during this study, despite the distance. Finally, I would like to thank for the great time we had in Kars to all of the participants of this research, who made this thesis possible. This study was supported by the Graduate School of Social Sciences and State Planning Organization (DPT) Grant No: BAP - 07.03.2010.00.02 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS PLAGIARISM………………………………………………………………. iii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………..... iv ÖZ…………………………………………………………………………… v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………. vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………….…………………….. 1 1.1 Sources of Curiosities…………………………….……………………... 1 1.2 Rationale for Re-writing a Novel……………………………………….. 2 1.3 Content………………………………………………………………….. 6 2. CONCEPTUAL INQUIRIES, DEBATES AND DEFINITIONS……….. 9 2.1 The Concept of Identification…………………………………………… 9 2.2 Inquiries of Ethnicity …………………………………………………… 13 2.3 Ethnicity and Nationalism……………………………………………….. 16 2.4 Border and Nation……………………………………………………….. 18 2.5 Neo-Nationalism and Nationalist Discourses in Turkey.………………... 18 2.6 Debates on Secularism in the Context of Nationalist Modernization…… 22 3. THE RESEARCH PROCESS.……………………………………………. 27 3.1 Applying the Grounded Theory ………………………………………… 27 3.1.1 The Context of the Fieldwork………………………………..... 29 3.1.2 Sampling, Data Collection and Data Analysis………………… 31 3.2 Rehearing the Field……………………………………………………… 36 3.3 Conclusion………………………………………………………………. 37 viii 4. ETHNICITY: OTHERS WITHIN………………………………………... 39 4.1 “What Millet Are You?”: Overlapping Discourses……………………… 40 4.2 Yerli : Constructing An Ethnic Category………………………………… 45 4.3 Negotiating Boundaries: The Case of Election…………………………. 49 4.3.1 Class Differences within Kurds……………………………….. 50 4.3.2 Encompassing Religious Differences of Azeris……………….. 52 4.4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………. 56 5. MAKING THE NATION AT THE FRONTIER………………………… 59 5.1 The Kurdish Question….………………………………………………... 61 5.1.1 ‘Unemployed Kurds’……………………………..……………. 63 5.1.2 Kars as the ‘City of Fear’…………………………...…………. 66 5.2 The Armenian Question…………….…………………………………… 70 5.2.1 Re-inscriptions of History…...………………………………… 71 5.2.2 The Closed Border Phenomena……………………………….. 75 5.2.2.1 Between Submission and Amity: The Case of Monument…………………………………………………..... 79 5.3 Conclusion………………………………………………………………. 83 6. ISLAM INSIDE AND OUT OF KARS.……..…….……………….……. 85 6.1 “Kars Has Nothing to Do with Religion”: Islam Kept Out……..………. 87 6.1.1 “We Don’t Fast As You Do”: Othering Erzurum …..………… 88 6.1.2 Diversity Explanation………………………………………….. 91 6.2 “The Novel Came True”: Islam Interferes from Inside ………………… 93 6.2.1 Cemaatler : An Outsider’s Point of View……………………… 96 6.3 Conclusions……………………………………………………………… 102 7. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………… 104 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………... 108 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1.1 Sources of Curiosities I went to Kars in November 2007 for the first time in my life. As a new graduate student in social anthropology, I was very interested in visual anthropology and accordingly, I was willing to take part in projects which deal with film theory and practice. Therefore, I joined the lecture series called “Let’s Talk about Cinema” organized by Festival on Wheels , a film festival travelling from city to city. During the festival, France based European Young Cinema Network Nisi Masa organized a workshop in Kars, where young filmmakers from various European countries were going to produce short films with contents inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow (2002). Although I was not in this particular workshop, I could follow the debates in the evenings. People from different workshops discussed their experiences in the city throughout the day. The participants of the workshop repeatedly complained about the reactions of the inhabitants of the city when they heard Pamuk’s name

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