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Bayan Gonul Ertem

2000

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DANCING TO MODERNITY: Cultural Politics of

Cherkess Nationhood in the

Heartland of Turkey

Approved by

Dissertation Committee:

PJLJL ft - T&w-*—

■l C~~

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DANCING TO MODERNITY: Cultural Politics of

Cherkess Nationhood in the

Heartland of Turkey

Bayan Gonul Ertem, B.Sc., M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor o f Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

August 2000

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number 9992784

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dedication

for Samiye and Mustafa Zeki Ertem, my parents

and

for James and Judy Brow

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgments:

Many years went by in the process of producing this ethnography, so

the list of friends, family members and colleagues who contributed to its

making or patiently waited for its completion is long and inevitably

incomplete. My deepest gratitude for the accomplishment of my

dissertation project goes to James Brow. It is not easy to convey my

appreciation for James Brow’s generosity with his time, his interest and

patience, his sharp criticism, and his unfailing support and encouragement.

From the early days of my project’s conception in a research proposal to

the last draft of the final ethnographic text, I benefited from James’s incisive

comments, relentless challenges to my textual explorations, and moral and

intellectual support for its completion. For my intellectual formation, I am

deeply indebted to him, his teachings, his faith in my passion for

anthropology, and his mentorship. I am also deeply grateful to Robert

Femea, my co-chair and advisor for many years, for always challenging my

intellectual orientation while simultaneously participating in its new

directions and extending his support, even from worlds apart, through every

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. possible medium available. I am very thankful to Elizabeth Wamock

Femea for her persistent support and encouragement. When I first read

Guests o f the Sheikh in the 1980s, it was unthinkable for me, as an

anthropologist, to put my own ethnographic presence in print. Robert

Femea and Elizabeth Wamock Femea have left their imprint on me in many

ways, sometimes not readily apparent to me. Their warmth and hospitality,

however, was apparent the first week I arrived in the United States and

continued all throughout my graduate school life in Austin. Their

enthusiasm for and success in advancing studies of Middle Eastern

societies are hard to follow.

Other members of my dissertation committee have inspired me in

many ways. Douglas E. Foley's repeated counsel at the initial stages of my

writing, Kamala Visweswaran's support and encouragement of my

ethnographic explorations, and Pauline Strong's generosity in sharing her

immense knowledge of the literature and pushing for unexplored analytic

connections have been invaluable. I have learned a lot from Victoria

Holbrook’s scholarship, support of my work, and friendship over the years.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I am grateful to all of my committee members for giving me a memorable

defence and engaging my ethnographic explorations with challenging

questions. Judy Brow and Elizabeth Wamock Femea were extraordinarily

generous in making that rite of passage a precious memory.

I am grateful to De Ann Pendry, Kathleen Murphy, Jennifer Burtner,

Jeff Donnell, Jay Clark, Jenny White and Louise Meintjes for their

comments, criticism, support, and friendship during various stages of the

writing process. I appreciate Sally Cole's editorial suggestions while writing

an article during this process.

I have greatly benefited from the friendship and critical comments of

Sharon Ba§tug, Pelin Ba§ci, Emanula Guano, Nukhet Sirman, Sultan Tepe

and Barbara Wolbert. Bahattin Ak§it, Akile Gursoy, Ay§e KDrtung, Zulal

Balpinar, Fazil Tekin and Henry Selby also helped me during the initial

research or writing stages of my ethnography, in Turkey and in the United

States. The fieldwork was made possible by funds from the National

Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council and Middle East

Research Competition. I am most grateful for their generous support. My

vii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. research and studies have also been assisted by support and funding from

the Department of Anthropology, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and

International Office at the University of Texas at Austin. I am most grateful

to the officials, faculty and staff at these institutions as well as those at the

Anadolu University in Eski§ehir and in various offices in Turkey. I sincerely

appreciate their contributions to the making of this ethnography. Darlene

Gavenda, the late Turhan Baraz, Tim and Carolyn Armstrong, Yildiray

Erdener, Sabri Dinger, Susan Lane, Marjorie Payne, Tara Hopkins, Linda

Odom, Hillary Hutchinson, Deane Willis, Annes McCann-Baker, Diane

Watts and Celeste Neathery are just a few whose names I can list here.

Michael Woost and Diane Woost have been incredibly supportive since our

very first encounter. I cherish their friendship and support.

The research itself would not have been possible if it were not for the

worm hospitality and generosity of the Cherkess people and their

enthusiastic support of it. My fieldwork is a fond memory, to say the least.

The Cherkess individuals, families and their various members, to whom I

owe my deepest gratitude, will remain nameless, as a token of my respect

v iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for their personal names and the individual and familial fame of all the

Cherkess who have contributed to it. Although some Cherkess may find

traces of themselves and their experiences in the following text, in

accordance with the old Cherkess convention that enforced or encouraged

every outsider to re-name every member of a household, I renamed all the

individuals, following the conventions in terms of address currently used in

Turkey. A few public figures whose assistance and support have been

invaluable are Murat Pap§u, Sonmez Baykan and Hayri Ersoy.

Finally, I thank my parents, Samiye Ertem and Zeki Ertem, and other

close members of my family for their love and support, particularly Emel

Pekmezci, Akif Pekmezci, Cengiz Qetin and Meral Qetin. My mother’s

family stories planted seeds of anthropological inquiry early in my

childhood. My father did not endure the long process to see where my

interest has taken me. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Samiye

Ertem and the late Zeki Ertem. Judy Brow and James Brow opened their

home to me during a particularly stressful time in my life. Words cannot

express my gratitude for their personal support then and throughout the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. years I have known them. I also dedicate my dissertation to you, James

and Judy, for your unrelenting support of my pursuit and contributions to its

accomplishment.

§inasi Biisel, the unrivalled surprise of this long journey, has my

sincere and heartfelt appreciation for his love, support and faith in me.

No institution, no friend, no family member or colleague is

responsible for the form and contents of the following text. I do and will

carry the responsibility of the ideas expressed here even if their influence in

its making eventually seems to be all a blur.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DANCING TO MODERNITY: Cultural Politics of

Cherkess Nationhood in the

Heartland of Turkey

Publication No. ______

Bayan Gonul Ertem, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2000

Supervisors: Robert Femea, James Brow

This ethnography examines struggles over Cherkess identity in

Eskisehir, Turkey following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989. Its

analysis of ‘the question of identity’ is grounded in the dialectics of

hegemonic processes and their power to constitute subjects as agents.

Within this theoretical frame, the narrative describes the process of

hegemony by exploringb o th the objective constitution of subjects (through

homogenizing discourses of identity)a n d subjective self-constitution

(through the multitude of articulations effected by ongoing hegemonic

subjectification). The narrative form of the dissertation attests to the

salience of the ethnographic moment by textually exploring not only the

workings of hegemony, but also the methodological and epistemological

positionings that occur among the ethnographer, ethnographic practice and

its objects. Cherkess identities emerge as subjectification process

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. continues and ethnographic subjects engage in the production of their

selves as gendered agents of their history.

Key words: Cherkess (Circassian) ethnicity Identity constitution Subjectification Gender Turkey (Eskisehir)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents:

Introduction: ...... 1 Chapter One: In Quest of Turkish National Identity ...... 16 1. Opening up to the friendly new world and its order 17 2. Looking for My Place ...... 31 3. Moving-in ...... 36 4. Native Anthropologist’s luggage ...... 41 5. On Early Negotiations of Positionality ...... 49 6. Enacting the misafir kiz ...... 58

Chapter Two: Turkish Nationalist! Hegemony ...... 70 1. The Turkish national identity: historic tensions ...... 73 2. Gender and Modernity ...... 85 3. In Search of Stability: the 1980s ...... 89 4. Emergent discourses of civility and modernity: Modernist Islam, ethnic pluralism, and feminism ...... 99 a. Modernist Islam ...... 100 b. Ethnic pluralism ...... 106 c. Feminism: in pursuit of national, personal, conjugal liberation ...... 113 5. Whose nation? Whose modernity?...... 129

Chapter Three: (Trans)national Contours of the Cherkess Communal Identity...... 143 1. Naming a Circassian: Who is a C h erke sst? ...... 148 2. The Celebration and Containment of Cherkess Linguistic Diversity...... 166 a. Discursive Differences...... 167 b. The Turkish (speaking) Cherkess...... 178 3. First Cherkess, then .... Muslim e...... tc 184 4. Going home or staying there?...... 204 5. A F irs t S te p in the National Arena? ...... 214

x iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Four: The D em ek. Site of Urban Cultural Continuity? 221 1. Initiations: the First Caucasian Youth N ight ...... 221 2. Legal definition of the dem ek...... 227 3. A Safe H a v e n ...... 232 4. The Visible Difference: Young Men's Line...... 238 5. Demek: a Cozy Urban Hang-out? ...... 242 6. Demek's Modem Headquarters ...... 253 7. Demek as Social and Political Body ...... 259 8. Demek, Kahve or K ira a th a n e ?...... 266 9. Re-Naming the Demek and its Mission...... 274 10. Politics and Culture of Ethnicity ...... 285 a. Qerkeslik (Cherkessness)...... 285 b. Stepping in and ou t ...... 290 c. Pushing the culture’s strongholds...... 297

Chapter Five: Dancing to Modernity: Gendered Landscapes 305 1. Avoidance as (Anti-)Modem: K a g-g6 g versus A d e t 315 2. The modernity of commingling...... 320 a. Ka$en: how many is too many? ...... 321 b. Zexes (and D ujjun) ...... 328 c. Semerkho (§aka)...... 335 3. Avoidance as Modem: Respect within the conjugal fa m ily ...... 340 4. The Fall of the Cherkess Modernity or, New Grounds for (another) Modernity...... 347 5. Modernity against hegemonic Cherkess culturalism 353 6. A cultural space for play? ...... 357

Chapter Six: Reflections...... 363 1. (Turkish) National(ist) Hegemony as an Ongoing Process .. 367 2. Struggles for Cherkess Identity...... 376 a. Identity-Subjectification ...... 382 b. Identity—Identification ...... 391

xiv

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Appendices:...... 400 Appendix A. Through Humor Uses of Attire in Representations of Identity...... 400 Appendix B. Maps ...... 403 1. Geographic Contours of the Middle East including the Caucasus and the Balkans ...... 404 2. The expansion of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus 405 3. Contemporary Political Boundaries in the MiddleEast 406 G lo ssa ry ...... 407

Bibliography ...... 411

V ita ...... 431

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction:

The following text examines Cherkess identity constitution in Turkey

in the face of the opening of the North Caucasus following the break-up of

the Soviet-Union in 1989. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which the

Cherkess community of Eskisehir negotiates discourses of nationality and

modernity as they have been reproduced by national and transnational

discourses of collective identity. Whereas the discourses of nationality

privilege a horizontally imagined community, communal positioning vis-a-vis

the discourses of modernity, particularly with respect to its constructions in

Turkish political culture, indicate disparate nationalizing aspirations

primarily on the bases of gender and social class. Post-1989 struggle for

Cherkess community thus appears to be a transformative moment that is

marked primarily by tensions between nationalizing discourses of ethnicity

and historically situated understandings of community. My dissertation

examines these tensions in an attempt to foreground Cherkess identity in

historical experience of itself.

Nationalizing Cherkess discourses struggle to imagine a unified

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cherkess community whose intrinsic process for a sovereign nationhood

was interrupted by the Russian colonization of the Caucasus in the middle

of nineteenth century. Theirs is a struggle to draw boundaries around a

diasporic community, which has become both by will and by coercion an

increasingly integral part of the nation of Turkey for much longer than its

official status among nations of the world since 1923. This (trans)national

struggle strives to end the process of cultural assimilation among the

Cherkess in diaspora; however, paradoxically, it foreshadows the ways in

which the thus-far loosely experienced Cherkess ethnicity in Turkey is

being reconstituted within the Turkish national territory and political culture.

Constitution of a unified Cherkess identity entails a difficult negotiation,

within and without, and presents disparate challenges for the community

and its leadership.

Discourses of Cherkess nationality are informed by the age of

nationalism and aspire to create a nation based on objectified criteria such

as shared history, an autochthonous (in Turkish, otoktanus) national

territory in northern Caucasus, and cultural unity defined by a distinct

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. language group, religion and social organization. Pre-diasporic

communities of the North Caucasus were very diverse when examined with

respect to such criteria. A comparable diversity prevails among the

diasporic Cherkess community in Turkey. In addition, due to the seventy-

odd-year-long political experience in hostile camps of the Cold War,

Cherkess people of Turkey and their cousins in the North Caucasus have

been culturally distanced from each other to the extent of “mutual

unrecognition.” Thereby, imagining a national state, pun intended,

indicates a boundedness in stark contrast with the complexity of

contemporary Cherkess identity (or, perhaps, identities) and fluidity of its

emergent styles and forms of transformation. Cherkess identity politics

thus entails a difficult process of distancing vis-a-vis the others and of

proximity with each other, just as others of the sort have, do, and will do.

This text, overall, attests to the difficulties that identifying and classifying

elements of Cherkess collective identity present for both insider actors and

social analysts. It also attests to an objectifying nationalist desire/practice,

a hegemonic struggle, engaged in this endeavor in order to mobilize deeply

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. entrenched feelings of communal difference from political kin of the

Cherkess people in Turkey. Inevitably, it accounts for the ways in which

these feelings have been disparately structured in diverse diasporic

experiences, by the geopolitics of identity constitution in the region as well

as by seniority, class and gender. In a nutshell, my dissertation is an

ethnographic endeavor to depict the practical consciousness of the

Cherkess in 1990s’ Turkey in general, and in EskiDehir, in particular.

Neither the nationalist desire nor the struggle for a bounded

Cherkess identity is new. Its current manifestation has gained a

momentum by the post-1989 global conjuncture, and impacted by the

societal transformation in Turkey in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup.

The period following the break-up of the Soviet Union presents for

the Cherkess all over the world a notably salient moment, an historic

opportunity, in order to attain a sovereign political state and secure their

legitimate place in the inter-national community. The Cherkess process of

nation-alization was decisively interrupted in 1864 when armies of Czarist

Russia defeated northern Caucasian anticolonial resistance and the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cherkess were forced or obligated to leave their homes in the Caucasus.

The displaced people of northern Caucasus formed diasporic populations in

what had been the domains of the Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century,

the Ottoman Empire itself was in the process of political disintegration, and

possible colonization, vis-a -vis the colonial (European) powers of the time.

The age of nationalism (Hobsbawm: 1990) impacted the displaced

Cherkess in two ways. Those groups that spread into the Balkans had to

be displaced again, only a few decades after their initial exodus, as Balkan

nationalisms gained the upper hand and the Russians/Slavs defeated the

Ottomans. Also, the Cherkess became involved in nationalist movements

and processes of nationalization in their new homes. In other words,

Cherkess homemaking in diaspora was tightly entangled with the home-

making projects of their neighbors, in the literal everyday sense of the term,

which gained momentum in the 20th century. In the Middle East, the

Cherkess were part of the Arab political formations in Syria, Jordan and

Israel/Palestine. In Turkey, they were involved in Turkish nation-building

processes, as both supportersa n d opponents. In their ancestral lands in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Caucasus, the Cherkess were involved in the revolutionary movements

that resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Socialist regime, the short

lived 1918 federative Republic of Northern Caucasus notwithstanding.

All of these political processes entailed new sets of displacements,

some reversible, for at least a group of Cherkess peoples. And each

re g io n a l process, in terms of the nationalizing partitions following World

War I am/during the Cold War, has entailed a d iffe re n t experience for the

Cherkess: Communism/Atheism in the Soviet Union and the Balkans,

Monarchic Nationalism/Islam or Socialism/Islam in the Arab World,

Restrained Capitalism/Secular Islam in Turkey. A vast experience indeed,

which covers the spectrum of political expressions of our modem age quite

thoroughly! So, what has become of the Cherkess? Or, what is left of

them, the people to whom I have so far referred as “Cherkess"? Now that

the Cold War is over and the whole world seems to be experiencing

capitalism, with a small c, experimenting with the “-ism” in variegated ways,

how may the Cherkess pick up the pieces after more than 130 years of

fragmentation and go for it, that is, for a political formation that belongs to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. them, that represents them and, that reproduces them?

These questions are related to issues that are on the international

agenda concerning peace and stability in a naturally penetrable vast

territory. Even posing the questions has significant ‘global’ political

repercussions. How do these immensely broad questions pertain to this

dissertation, a limited ethnographic project?

The broad questions I have just raised are relevant and central to

this ethnography since the post-Cold War era indicates an indigenous

Cherkess desire to open up to the international community and speak up in

their own name. Cherkess identity in the post-Cold War environment is

pushing back the boundaries of the listed -isms, their nationalized territories

and the corresponding regionalized scholarship. This complexity is much

beyond the scope of any single anthropological project and much too

politicized for its mission. However, it is specifically pertinent to this study

due to its conjunctural power for the Cherkess in Turkey, particularly those

in Eski§ehir, who are the primary historical actors of my ethnographic

account.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In Turkey by the 1990s, through televised representations, ‘the

world’ had taken center-stage in living rooms of every household in

Eski§ehir. The completion of electrification in many of Eski^ehir’s Cherkess

villages occurred as late as 1978. At the time, people who now constitute

the Eskisehir Cherkess inhabited in over 30 villages in the vicinity of the

city.1 In a few of the villages, Adyge and Abhaz, the two primary branches

of the Cherkess collectivity, cohabited in adjacent neighborhoods of the

same village. To a large extent, however, villages were composed of

homogeneous groups with common language or descent. In just over a

decade following the electrification, many Cherkess settled in the city of

Eskisehir or became daily or weekly commuters between their homes in the

city center and in villages. Young members of many families worked in

1 In the province of Eskisehir, there are 29 Cherkess villages. Inhabitants of 18

of these villages are of the Adyge group; 11 were of the Abhaz group. The total

number of villages cited often reaches 41, including 12 additional villages, which

are outside the administrative boundaries of Eskisehir but have had easier access

and closer ties with the city itself. A number of people whose accounts and

experiences are incorporated into this ethnographic study were originally from

these villages. 8

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Eskisehir and its industrial environs. Perhaps the immediacy of the close

encounter with the urban world can account for the current manifestation of

the Cherkess politics of nationhood. However, the Cherkess have always

been in close contact with outer worlds, in Turkey and beyond. Many

Cherkess families had already integrated into urban Eskisehir and national

structures long before the urbanization of the 1980s. How does the

contemporary encounter differ from traditional Cherkess journeys to

participate at wedding parties and funeral ceremonies in dispersed

diaspora communities, regardless of their frequency? Televised images

have undermined the power of the traditional power holders in the

community, primarily elder men. The opportunities that life in the city

center offers, have deepened cleavages between traditional nobility and

emergent social classes as well as those between young men and women

whose expectations and success at educational institutions are uneven.

Whereas many Cherkess individuals maintain a critical distance from the

televised cultural representations o f‘the world', the images from

contemporary Turkey that pour into the living rooms, as well as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. coffeehouses and cultural associations, from many private and state-owned

television channels have an impact. And this is a product of the rapid

economic growth and liberalization in Turkey in the 1980s and the particular

ways in which Cherkess practical consciousness unfolds itself in the 1990s

is integral to it.

The Cherkess people are now negotiating their identity with respect

to two audiences at once. Their voices first speak to the Turkish nation

state, its people and modernizing classes who created the nation under a

Turkishness that repressed and eventually effaced public expressions of

ethnicity, particularly among Muslim nationals. They also speak to the

international community and its discourse of modernity, which has

established its hegemony in Turkey, quite firmly, thanks to 70-odd years of

official support. One by-product of this ethnographic reality is my attempt to

present Cherkess negotiations with the discourse of modernity and of

nationality as moving hand in hand. The two conjunctional developments—

post-1980 transformations in Turkey and the post-1989 window of

opportunity for Cherkess sovereignty in the Caucasus—serve as the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. political and historical context of the transformative moment this

dissertation attempts to capture. Affective elements of Cherkess

consciousness are being restructured within this context and its relations of

power.

One impact of these national and trans-national developments is

distinctively gendered. Intra-communal negotiations focus on the public

and private aspects and representations of Cherkess communal identity,

indicating a gendered differentiation. This has significant ramifications for

both the salience and potential forms of Cherkess nationhood in the

making. Gendered positioning is the new component of Cherkess

negotiations of modernity. Previously, such negotiations were primarily on

the axes of class and seniority. Thus, the dissertation initially sets out to

examine the ways in which totalizing discourses of Cherkess communal

difference are negotiated vis-a-vis selected (trans)national premises of

“modem” and “national” identity. It then moves into the local negotiations of

such discourses within the cultural spaces at the primary research site of

the ethnography, Eskisehir.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As a female ethnographer whose fieldwork experience has

constituted her at once as a native and a non-native for her national,

transnational ties, as well as her interest in Cherkess identity, the

boundaries between the subject and object of the dissertation inevitably

become fuzzy as I depict, discuss or consider different perspectives.

Specifically, chapter 1 attempts to situate the ethnographer and discusses

her methodological positioning with respect to complex negotiations of her

identity in the local setting. The impossible balancing act between her

national nativity and her anthropological sensitivities, seems best

characterized as that of a m isafir k/z (guest-giri) who is at once an insider

and an outsider-entitled to autonomy and granted special care. My

narrative style is inspired by such a position as I depict and discuss various

positions and perspectives in my ethnographic account. The subsequent

representation of my observant participation has a personal, yet distinctly

self-reflective style as an ethnographer whose multiple identities are

negotiated by the Cherkess just as their internal negotiations are projected

in my account.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter 2 outlines the post-1980 transformations in Turkey. I

identify feminism, kurdism and islamism as the three discursive categories

that constitute the background for Cherkess discourses of identity, an

expression of their complex positionings vis-a-vis Turkish society.

Feminism started as an elite movement in Turkey and quickly had an

impact among the popular classes, at least in urban areas. Kurdism started

as a student protest movement and turned into a regional guerrilla war with

political aspirations that shifted within a decade from independence, to

regional autonomy to ethnic rights. Islamism, a popular movement

supported, manipulated and co-opted in different ways by successive

‘populist’ nationalist governments, had produced its own elite by the 1990s.

All three are ‘tensions’, deeply grounded in the early Kemalist national

imagination; their impact has been felt throughout Turkish society, including

the Cherkess, in complex and diverse ways.

Chapter 3 discusses the complex historical, linguistic and political

composition of Cherkess ethnicity in Turkey. The discussion draws upon

both the existing scholarship and their expressions through nationalizing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. discourses of Cherkess identity. Intercommuna! negotiations, both national

and local, are then foregrounded in the tension between objective and

subjective aspects of identity as the dissertation gradually turns to local

specificities of their cultural expression in Eskisehir.

Chapter 4 examines the Cherkessdem ek, the cultural association,

in Eskisehir as both a safe-haven in an alienating urban context and as a

site of contestation over Cherkess identity. The organization of space and

social relations at the demek indicate a gendered tension within the

community and a struggle between its modernist and culturalist leaders,

primarily defined by social class and seniority.

Chapter 5 approaches gendered social relations through the distinct

cultural practice of courtship. Cherkess courtship practice is a key signifier

of Cherkess identity and distinguishes it from cultural practices of their

neighbors. Gendered relations, however, are negotiated beyond the

discourse of courtship and constitute a point of tension within the

community in various ways, particularly with respect to work and marital

relations.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter 6 reflects upon the ethnographic process and its findings by

emphasizing the dialectics of hegemonic processes and their power to

constitute subjects as agents. By shifting the analytic focus from

negotiations of the objective constitution of subjects to subjective self

constitution, the chapter highlights Cherkess negotiations of identity as

historical effects of ongoing hegemonic subjectification and identification.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter One: In Quest of Turkish National Identity

Fieldwork is situated between autobiography and anthropology, it connects an important personal experience with a general field o f know ledge. Hastrup, 1992, 117 Recognizing the blurring of the boundaries between ‘personal’ and

‘objective’ aspects of the fieldwork experience is by now quite common. As

Dubisch recently stated, “what distinguishes the current experiments in

ethnographic writing, however, is the deliberate questioning of the

necessity to maintain boundaries between different modes of writing, and

between the perspectives they represent, within the ethnographic account

itself (1995: 5). In this chapter the ethnographic context is particularly

refracted through my personal experience as an anthropologist with urban

origins in Turkey coming back home and then settling in Eskisehir. Such a

‘self-conscious experimentation’ prevails in the dissertation as I position the

Cherkess vis-a-vis the national and trans-national discourses of identity in

smaller groups, distinguished by age, by gender or more generally as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. agents of their socio-political histories responding to my anthropological

inquiries.

1. Opening up to the friendly new world and its order

Less than a year after my preliminary research I returned to Turkey

for my doctoral research in June 1992. I was at my mother’s flat in Ankara

when I turned the TV on for the evening news to catch a glimpse of the

national atmosphere since my last return to the U.S. The national weather

forecast that followed the news continued by covering the weather in major

capitals of the newly independent Turkic republics in Asia and then, major

European capitals; things had changed. From the summer of 1991 to that

of 1992, TRT, the state-owned broadcasting institute, seemed to have

adapted to the post-cold war position of Turkey as situated in-between her

eastern and western worlds. In the far-end of the western world during the

Gulf War, as the NPR correspondent’s utterance expressed (“but Turks are

Muslims”), Turkey’s secular identity puzzled the American reporters. The

question, How could Turks have supported the U.S., implicated ‘the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. western coalition' as a C h ristia n affair and dismissed the credibility of

ongoing battles of non-Christian, non-white traditions to reclaim their

colonized cultural heritage, even the firm position of non-Christian countries

in the ruling elite of nations, such as Japan. In Turkey, the lack of an

appreciative American public opinion, as highlighted by the media,

regarding the Turkish government’s unwavering support in the war, and the

economic sacrifices that people of Turkey had to make (still do, today)

created an ongoing national frustration. On the other hand, in the

aftermath of the cold war, it became obvious that in the U.S. Turkey was

now perceived as a springboard for the successful incorporation of ex-

communist Turkic nations into the world capitalist economy. The U.S.

preferred Turkey’s secular political system over the radical Islamic republic

of Iran, as a model for a ‘Muslim style democracy’ for the emerging Turkic

nation-states in Central Asia. So, what did this new weather map mean in

terms of Turkey’s interest in playing that role? And how different this world

is from the one I grew up in!

Due to its historical choices as a nation-state, my Turkey had to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. jump over often ‘hostile’ neighbors (national partitions that were then

clumped together as the Middle East, including Greece, and the USSR) in

search of friends in western Europe or the United States where, again, her

identity and choices would meet raised eyebrows. Would, or could, this

opening to the east provide a contiguous friendly world for Turkey based on

‘ethnic affinity’?1 Less than a decade ago, it was only radical Turkists, a

small minority, who had concerns about and nostalgic interest in those

remotekin of the Turkish nation.2 in what ways were common-sensical

1 For assessments of Turkey's positioning in the post cold-war era see, Oni§ (1998: 413-434) for a liberal economic perspective, and Rittenberg (1998b) for an assessment of Turkey’s political economic situation “going west and looking east?” in the aftermath of the cold war, as the subtitle reads. Rittenberg starts the introduction to the volume by asking similar questions: Like the rest of the world, Turkey felt the reverberations from the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. In a very short time, long-standing assumptions about who was friend and who was foe became an open question, alliances and relationships had to be re-considered, new challenges faced, and new opportunities explored. For Turkey, as a crossroads nation between the Eastern and the Western worlds, between the rich, industrialized and the developing worlds, and between the Christian and Muslim worlds, the new situation generated a number of special issues (Rittenberg 1998a: 3). 2 For an extensive study of the Turkist movement see Landau (1981). 19

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. notions of collective identity going to be affected by the recent opening of

Turkey to Central Asian republics? Furthermore, Turkey, against all odds,

had also filed an application (in 1987) for full membership in the European

Community (now EU) .3 Did Turkey now intend to solidify its position as a

bridge with one leg firmly rooted in the east and the other in the west?

3 A book seemingly written in anticipation of Turkey’s full membership in EC was published in 1993. Oncii, one of the co-editors, states that the “volume is a collective attempt to come to grips with the new terms of the debate on Turkey’s quest for Westem-ness and Westernization—a problem that is both very old and also very new in the light of the 1980s" (Heper, Oncu, and Kramer 1993: 261). Another co-editor, Heper states, “the principal aim of this volume is to examine the degree to which different groups in Turkey came to have a political culture that reflects the notion of a liberal-democratic state. The assumption is that to the degree to which the Turks have such a culture pattern, to that extent they would better fit politically into the EC” (Ibid: 16-17). Each chapter focuses on ‘a distinct sub-set of the elite', Officers, Bureaucrats, Journalists, Novelists, Politicians, Academics, Businessman, Engineers, Workers in Europe and Islamist Intellectuals and presents “the multiple worlds of the Turkish elite” and their images of and approaches to the West and Turkish westernization. For discussions of Turkey’s relationship to EC see also Eralp (1993), whose assessment anticipates Turkey's rejection by EC. See also Steinbach (1994), for a multi-regional assessment of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The following weeks of my stay in Ankara provided me with ample

examples of Turkey's political leadership and of people grappling with such

a position. The Black Sea Economic Cooperation Initiative, BSEC

{Karadeniz Ekonomik !§biriigi Toplantisi) founded under Turkey’s

leadership had its first meeting in Istanbul that June .4 At a bank I

overheard a conversation between an Azeri woman and the Turkish bank-

teller, speaking presumably the closest dialects of the Turkish language.

The difficulty of communication left the bank-teller with a noticeable smile,

which was to me an indication of ethnic pride about her Anatolian Turkish

even if not for her Turkishness as a ‘racialized’ difference. On a TV-show,

a tourist woman visiting from a Central Asian republic expressed her

Turkey’s foreign policy choices.

4 BSEC Initiative includes countries that border the Black Sea as well as a couple

of others, such as Greece and Albania, whose links to the region are less

immediate. The eleven members that signed an agreement for economic

cooperation are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Moldova,

Romania, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the Ukraine. For a discussion of the

development of the BSEC initiative and its implications for Turkey see Sayan and

Zaim (1998). 21

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. frustration during a street interview: “People keep saying “I am a Turk,” but

so who a re they? A Kazak? A Turkmen? Or what? We areT all u rk i

(Turkic)." Her frustration overlooked completely the outcome of official

attempts to create a single Turkish ethnicity since the establishment of the

nation-state, as well as the popular desire to be a member of the young

ambitious national body.

This Turkishness, the young national body formed in 1923,

embraced diverse groups of Anatolian, Asian, Caucasian and Rumelian

origins5; each group consisted of people with a number of languages,

5 Anatolia is the peninsula at the westernmost end of the Asian continent on which the vast portion of modem Turkey is located. Armenians, Anatolian Greeks and Kurds are among the Anatolians who have contributed to the Turkish national stock, despite the long history of wars, expulsions and denials of mixture. Caucasian peoples are originally from the Caucasus region to the northwestern part of modem Turkey, and have also become part of the Ottoman-Turkish society. Among the Caucasians are Georgians, Chechens, and the subjects of this study, the Cherkess. Rumelia is the region in the northeastern part of Turkey, which roughly corresponds to the region known as the Balkans. In everyday usage, it may stretch until the shores of the Adriatic Sea to include people such as Bo§naks (Bosnians). Among the people of Turkic and non-Turkic groups of 22

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. customs or religious affiliations. Whatever was left of the Kazak, Uzbek,

Karachai or any other Central Asian or Caucasian Turkic group in language

or custom, slowly eroded, to a large extent, during the 70 year period of

Turkishness as a nation. Perhaps this Central Asian woman’s difference,

indicated by her strong accent and whatever else, such as clothing or

mannerisms also invited declarations of Turkishness in replies to her

inquiry. Who this woman’s references included was unclear. Whom they

excluded may form a long list, including the Abaza (Abkhaz or Abkhazin),

the Bo§nak (Bosnian), the Qeq;en (Chechnian), the Qerkes (Cherkess), the

Kurt (Kurdish), the Laz (Lazik), or the Musevi (Jewish). Such groups,

whose identity would differ in som e respect from those who could more

readily melt in the Turkish pot, would not have frustrated her this much.

They would either have directly identified themselves by their name as a

Bo§nak or a Kurt, or rank-ordered their double-identities, as I had heard

many Beritanli nomads say in the 1970s: “Hem Kiirdum, hem Turkum (I am

Rumelia-proper who have contributed to the Turkish nation are Pomaks and

Albanians. 23

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. both a Kurd and a Turk)”-similar to the officially hyphenated identities of

many U.S. nationals. However, in Turkey, this was not a matter of public

debate. Such was my experience growing up in Ankara and doing field

research in eastern and southeastern Turkey in the late 1970s and early

1980s.

After nearly a decade in the U.S., I had now come back to seek

anthropological answers to the question of collective identity in Turkey in

the post-cold war context. How was collective identity constituted in the

new world order which had chosen Turkey as a test case for economic

liberalization programs and now expected her secularist Islamic orientation

to be the model for her ex-communist kin, as opposed to the radical Islamic

order of her neighbor Iran? How was Turkishness defined in the 1990s,

especially in places such as Eskisehir, where many groups of Turkic and

non-Turkic origin coexisted without a history of ethnic violence? The

central position that Turkey held in TRT’s weather map as being equally

interested in whether it would shine in Bi§kek tomorrow as in the amount of

rain in London, was bound to reflect as well as create a change in popular

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. consciousness of who we were. Such a central position would also create

new social and political cleavages and reinforce or refigure the old ones in

the society. So, how did collective identity unfold in the Turkey of the new

world, which was celebrating communism's demise? Such a concern

needs to account for the decade of restructuring which began with the

political and economic crisis of the late 1970s and the subsequent military

coup of September 12, 1980.6 By 1992, the turmoil resulting from the post-

1980 economic and political renewal process and the post-cold war global

order was reflected in a public discourse which was debating the need for

and possibility of establishing “the second republic.”? I will return to this

6 For assessments of the process of democratization in Turkey in the 1980s see,

Heper and Evin (1994) and, for a westemist assessment of the orientation of

Turkish political culture during this decade see, Heper, Oncu, and Kramer (1993).

In this collection, Eralp (1993) examines the socioeconomic and political

consequences of the Turkish experience with austerity and economic restructuring

that began with the January 24, 1980 measures and Sezer (1993) discusses

Turkey's position in the Western Alliance.

7 Advocates of the “second republic" believe that the Republic of Turkey, which

was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk and evolved through a number of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. moment in chapter two so as to situate Cherkess ethnic politics within this

transformist moment in Turkish political and intellectual hegemony.

In the rest of this chapter I describe the setting that serves as the

home-in-the-background for my ethnographic account, the process of my

settling in Eskisehir, the choices I have made while structurally positioning

myself, as well as the initial negotiations vis-a-vis the cultural setting of my

neighborhood and my research companions among the Cherkess

community. Eskisehir is a city of about 500,000 people located between

constitutional and institutional changes, is not sufficient for the advancement of

Turkish society in the post-1989 era. The principles of Kemalism, symbolized by

the emblem of the six-shooting arrows (Republicanism, Populism, Secularism,

Revolutionism, Nationalism, Statism) cannot continue to be a national guide any

longer. Institutions established under those premises are outdated and corrupt;

they have lost their functions. A holistic structural rejuvenation of the regime is

needed (Ekonomik Panorama 1992).

In a recent publication, entitledPolitics in the Third Turkish Republic,

political scientists Heper and Evin (1994) use phases of the Turkish democratic

process as the criterion for their analytic periodization. The first republic refers to

the single party rule under Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, the founder of the nation-state,

and Ismet Inonu (1923-1945). 1961 marks the beginning of the Second Republic,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ankara and Istanbul, two major metropolitan centers in Turkey. The city’s

growth as an urban center is interlinked with its growing population due to

the 19th century displacements from the Balkans, Caucasus and northern

Black Sea coast, due to expanding colonization by the Czarist Russia. The

incoming northern Caucasians (various Cherkess peoples) first occupied

the neighboring agricultural lands and, soon after, the Crimean Tartars,

Bulgarian Turks and Pomaks enjoined the growing urban population. The

city's original inhabitants are called manav. In addition to these groups,

Eskisehir’s current population includes sizeable Alevi and Yoruk groups

and some Albanians. It is an Anatolian city that has continued to receive

immigrants from rural areas and other cities since 1950s.

Just when I started writing my dissertation, a novel written in the

early 1980s by a well-known Turkish writer Adalet Agaoglu, C u rfe w{in

Turkish O9 Be§ Ki§i), was considered for publication by the University of

Texas Press. Eskisehir is the primary setting for the novel and home for its

key protagonists, as it was for my ethnographic research. In the author’s

in the aftermath of the first military intervention (coup) into political life. 27

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Foreword written for the English translation, Agaoglu characterizes

Eskisehir as “a typical Anatolian town ... [which] is linked (through trade)

with the old capital Istanbul and (through politics) with the new capital

Ankara” (1997 viii). Due to its strategic position as such, for Agaoglu,

Eskisehir is a city

[whose] population belongs to a time and context in which people and classes have not yet been clearly defined. Whatever their age or social position, all are inhibited, confused, struggling to keep going. They are being tom apart, between the past which they are trying to get away from and the present to which they are trying to adapt. In that sense it is a site for the writer ‘to excavate ... the depths of

the human spirit’ as it is geographically, socially and historically emplaced.

Through such a depiction of inner lives, Agaoglu’s intention, however, is “to

draw a social map of the whole of Turkey” during the ‘oppressive time

frame’ of three hours before the start of pre-coup curfew at 2:00 a.m. (Ibid.).

My own decision to examine collective identity constitution in Eskisehir was

grounded in a curiosity about nationalization among the city’s numerous

ethnicities (Turkish and non-Turkish) as well as the dynamics of selective

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. localization of identity discourses. Historically, Eskisehir was extensively

populated by incoming m u h a cir (immigrant) populations from the north

Caucasus, Crimea and the Balkans. Since the early migrations of the early

1800s, others from the same regions were added as Turco-Muslim

populations were displaced as a result of new political conflicts (such as

World War II) or recurring old ones (such as the periodic ethnic

displacement of Turco-Muslims out of Bulgaria). During the pre-1980

political strife, while ethnic polarization (grounded in religious or linguistic

differences) was widespread in many Anatolian cities, Eskisehir was among

those where violence did not appear. I was thus interested in the ways in

which Turkishness, as a national identity, was negotiated among these

groups and, the possible relation of politics to an ethno-linguistic

component. My interest, then, was foregrounded in local negotiations of

the national and global processes of identity.

Initially, I set out to investigate the constitution of identity among the

Bulgarian Turks who were displaced in 1989. Whereas the Bulgarian Turks

set out to belong in Turkey, in an ahistorical sense as Turks returning to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. their vatan (homeland), the Cherkess in Turkey were looking to the north

Caucasus as the homeland to which they yearned to return. My research

thus led me first to investigate Turkishness and its various elements as

perceived opportunities as well as obstacles to identity reconstitution for

these populations. Consequently, the following ethnographic account

treats “Turkishness” as an index of that which challenges, refutes or

supports communal aspirations within the post-1989 national context.

The narrative form I have appropriated in my ethnographic account,

discovering, re-membering through past and present feelings, thoughts and

experiences, parallels the traveling Cherkess people (male or escorted

female), those even before diaspora (living in stories told or written). It

intends to explicate textually the methodological and epistemological

positioning, or distancing that occurs among the Native Ethnographer, the

Cherkess community and ethnographic practice. The bewildered,

disoriented and wandering Native Ethnographer, primarily as a m is a firk tz

(guest-giri), is perhaps my artless simulation of the ‘trickster agency’ that

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Visweswaran has conceived.®

2. Looking for My Place:

“What in the world have they done to this city?" my brother-in-law

(e n i§ te ) exclaimed, as he turned from one street into another, only to detour

again due to infrastructural construction. I had asked him to help me find a

place in Eskisehir where I planned to live for a year. He and my sister had

lived there for several years in the late seventies. It was barely a decade

since they had left Eskisehir but the city had changed enough for my

brother-in-law to feel at a loss in the streets. We seemed not to reach our

destinations easily, due to, if not construction, the recently implemented

one-way traffic flow or exclusive pedestrian traffic. The dry August heat,

typical of Central Anatolian summers, felt stifling especially in the dust-

soaked air.

My brother-in-law, his local friends and my mother all seemed to

® Visweswaran (1994: 100) deploys the term “trickster agency” in order to

account for the indeterminacy “between success and failure” of the feminist

ethnographer “who does not profess faith in what she believes.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. agree quietly that I should live in a flat in one of the six-story apartment

buildings on a major street. They were convinced that, having grown up in

a middle class neighborhood in a centrally heated flat, I would be unable to

take care of myself during the cold winter of Eskisehir. This is no joke, my

mother said, Eskisehir’s dry cold weather freezes your bonemarrow; it is

worse than Ankara. I resisted. I would go to an older neighborhood with

small houses, preferably one where the recentm acuts (immigrants) from

Bulgaria concentrated.9 I was not only up against my family and our

escorts' ideas of where I, as a city woman who had spent many years in the

United States, ought to live but also against college students. Countless

constructions indicated that the housing market was expanding and

evolving, parallel to the rapidly growing university and its student

population's demands. However, many places were already taken by

9 The word m uhacir loosely corresponds to the English term immigrant and is

commonly used by the inhabitants of Eskisehir as a referent to identify

collectivities, self or other. Its vernacular pronounciationmuajer as (macur).

however, connotes almost a different sense of identity particularly used by or for

those immigrants from the Balkans (specifically, Bulgaria or Romania). 32

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. students.

On a wide dirt street with one- to four-story houses I found what I

needed. One of our escorts, a minor government official, arranged for me

to see this flat. It was next to his own house, a block of apartments that

belonged to his extended family. A year before, the owners had moved out

into a flat, a big one with central heating and hot water, in the gar§i,

downtown. Since they had attentively furnished this flat for themselves,

with wallpaper, m a rie y (vinyl squares) floors and kitchen cupboards (which

my land-lady told me were brought from Switzerland piece by piece on their

yearly visits home) they did not want to rent it out. But my single status as

well as urban and overseas experience qualified me as a tenant they could

accept. The flat was unusually clean and nicely sunny with wide windows

and two balconies on opposite sides. It faced south as any good house

should, my mother remarked. The issue of heating was a concern for me

too, I admit. Having spent winters in Texas for many years, I was afraid I

would not acclimatize easily. Could I deal with coal stoves, which were the

most heat-efficient? How about starting the day in a freezing-cold house,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. having to carry in coal and wood from the cellar in the backyard up to the

second floor, AND cleaning and taking out ashes? I settled for a quick

burning clean but less heat-efficient tiip -stove (catalytic heater) on wheels.

I could even afford two of them, it seemed. Yes, this is the house I wanted.

My landlord was an always impeccably dressed man in his sixties; a

fair-skinned blue-eyed child of a m a c u (immigrant) r whose great

grandfather had come from Bulgaria. His wife had the same background.

The three-story building my flat was in was one of many houses or flats

they owned all over Eskisehir and in a summer resort on the Aegean coast.

My flat was reserved for their son, they repeatedly said, who would return

home one day, any year now, from Switzerland and move in after

refurbishing it with modem amenities.

With its friendly small houses, especially those on my row, each of

which had a small front yard for flowers and a tree or two, my street made a

pleasant contrast with many developing cr ‘modem’ neighborhoods. In our

block, a wall joined each pair of buildings. This enabled the owners of the

lots to enjoy a distance from the house on the other side. For me, this

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meant having a plum tree between my living room window and that of the

neighbor across from me. In the back, I had a big long balcony, which

overlooked other balconies, roofs of buildings and wood-coal cellars in

backyards. Two blocks away, big constructions on the major street marked

the borders of my view. They could accommodate perhaps 20-30

apartments. I could simply focus on the quince and the apple trees in my

own backyard, or my neighbor’s cherry, to meet the needs of my eyes for

greenery. The fall rains would soon wash the dust-covered leaves.

On the opposite side of the road the houses of my street did not look

as dreadful to me simply because of their varying height—one- to three-

story—and interestingly colored facades, such as purple facades with

shades of blue and pink trims. Small modestly built houses side by side

with better built concrete apartment houses. They did not have the luxury

of small front and side yards as we did. The trees on the sidewalks and in

the gardens made my street special in comparison to the modem streets

which, due to theirb iti§ ik n iz a m (joint-walled) houses in a row, looked like

tall concrete walls conjoined by asphalt sidewalks and roads.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3. Moving-in:

Three weeks later I came back from Ankara to live. My mother went

by bus a day before while I oversaw the loading of my household

belongings. When I arrived the next morning, everything was already

unloaded.

After a long day of unpacking and settling in, my mother and I

decided to go out for dinner. This would give us a chance to get some rest,

as well as to explore the city and figure out how convenient it was to go to

gar§i. We walked to the main street and took a bus downtown. Coming

back was not easy. We were told to go to a bus stop across from the

restaurant. While waiting, I wanted to check if we were at the right stop by

asking a passerby. He listened to my description of where we were going

and said No. This was not the right stop; these buses would take us in the

opposite direction. Then, he just started to walk with us. Several blocks

down the road, he stopped at another bus stop, told us the number of the

bus and left. We counted on the bus driver to drop us off at the right stop

but he was not able to do so since he was new on the route. The streets

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seemed awfully dark; it was hard to see anything that could tell us if we

were close. A neon sign for Efes Pilsen beer overb a ka k a /s (grocery

store) sign seemed like the right place, and I grabbed my mother—yes, this

is our stop. We got off. The narrow street with occasional dim streetlights

did not seem familiar at all. This was the beginning of a long walk at

around 11:00 p.m. with lots of consultation with strangers about which

direction we should go.

Our first experience and observations of the street life in my

neighborhood offered nice surprises; so many people walking around,

single women, bicyclists, friendly and courteous gestures from the men who

came out of the coffeehouseska ( h ve le i) to direct us. The stress of getting

lost on our first night out was replaced by warm feelings about the people

of my neighborhood, my neighbors. This seemed like a safe and friendly

neighborhood after all. Much later I realized that the bus I took with my

mother to return home had followed a different route, an indirect and longer

one. I also realized most grocery stores had liquor licenses and, thereby,

the Efes Pilsen sign.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. With offerings from family members’ basements and loans from my

brother-in-law’s friends I had a full-furnished house. I even had an old

refrigerator. It took my mother and me a couple of days to make it look like

home. I stored the wood for my bathroom stove in my extra room, instead

of using the cellar outside.

My mother left for Ankara a few days after I moved to Eski§ehir,

telling me that I needed to have my privacy while organizing my new life;

that she would come back later for a visit. A couple of days later, my

neighbor Muzaffer bey^rang my doorbell to tell me he was bringing the

table he promised me. When I went down to open the door of the building

(the automatic lock to open my door from upstairs was broken) 11 a young

girl, perhaps 8 years old, walked in. Muzaffer bey said she was his

younger daughter. She walked into my flat and sat down on the sofa and

10 B ey is a Turkish term of address for men. It follows the first name and

expresses respect and distance. In writing, it is not capitalized. When I use

various terms of address in my text, I have applied the same convention.

11 In contrast to Ankara, I was surprised to see how commonplace this feature

was all over town in Eskisehir, including lower income neighborhoods. 38

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. started shyly looking around the room that served as my living room and

study. Soon my neighbor came back with “the girls' old desk,” a portable

table that was to serve in my dining comer for a year. My neighbors did not

stay very long. Perhaps they, or the father, adhered to the principle of an

old saying of which my mother had taught me (and was putting to use

again now that I was back within her reach): Birolaym vukuundansa §uyuu

b e te rd ir “The narratives about a happening carry more weight than its

actual happening.” Was the young girl's visit together with her father a

casual opportunity to meet me, the new neighbor? Or was her curiosity an

excuse for the father to protect our reputation for fear that stories may be

triggered by his visit, stories that would leave out the desk that he brought,

embellish it with other more exciting details?12 Did Muzaffer bey believe in

the moral risks two *//7/©/«afecf individuals from opposite sexes in e v ita b ly

take if ever left alone, as in the proverbial explosion looming in the

12 When he came alone to collect my rent, my landlord never came in for a cup of coffee or a chat either. We would exchange pleasantries at the door and he would leave. 39

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. coexistence of fire and gunpowder?13 Perhaps, naturally, my neighbor

took his daughter along in order not to offend m e on those grounds.

Whoever may have had the potential for strife by word or by deed-

neighbors, the married neighbor, his wife or the single woman

ethnographer—did not have a chance to counteract the accompanying

young daughter’s sweet and subtle intervention.

It seemed I had moved in. In order to remain a respected

researcher, a returning native of Turkey, I would need to remember small

town sensitivities that prevailed more in this neighborhood than my family's

and escorts’ suggested choices of central neighborhoods for me to live in

Eski§ehir. I certainly needed to keep at bay my insubordinate, perhaps

even rebellious, disposition, characteristic of my political generation, that

took seed within the modernizing familial warmth and tolerance in Ankara,

flourished in my university circles, and remained unchallenged during my

stay overseas. Against this personal backgroud, in the following sections, I

will turn my attention to a discussion of my complicated status as a Native

in Turkish, the saying I here refer to AteOleis: barutyanyana durmaz. 40

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Anthropologist—an unavoidable troubling ascription that I was initially

awarded by my peers following announcement of the grants which funded

my research—which certainly lacks the glorious acknowledgment of the

days long gone when the //re/bferauthority of native anthropologists fortru e

representations oftheir peopte were unquestionable. In an attem pt to

displace the fixity of the category of Native Anthropologist, I chose a

narrative style that stays close to the process of (dis-)orientation in

ethnographic encounters, this may be summed up as re-membering

through cultural collisions.

4. Native Anthropologist’s luggage

An anthropologist’s singlemost tool is her self. This has not changed

since the beginnings of the discipline. Pack your self and go back and

forth, in and out as necessary.14 The bare essentials, (clothing, gifts, the

perfect sized notebook), or the inevitable equipment of our times—tape-

recorders, cameras, portable computers—are extras. The load that matters

14 For a recent renegotiation of fieldwork as “a mix of institutionalized practices of dwelling and traveling, See, Clifford (1997). 41

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. is packed within the self. Despite its weight, the contents are not always

and not readily within reach. For a native anthropologist, sudden

invocations at home—which is her field—may increase her awareness of

how much heavier her load was than what she had planned to bring back:

Back from homes-abroad as well as back from homes-within-home. This

temporally, experientially and historically complex-yet-compact luggage that

packs and unpacks itself in indeterminate ways cannot be conceptualized

by attempts to account for the primacy of distance from ethnographic

subjects. The textual expression of such indeterminacy installs a

necessary uncertainty’ (Dubisch 1995) into the ethnographic account and

befits the contingency of the moment it sets out to capture.

Cognitively I had acknowledged and evaluated the constraints and

difficulties as well as the ease and comfort of doing fieldwork as a native of

Turkey before my departure. I weighed my gender identity, single status in

the field, relative ease in living and working in the Turkish society, previous

fieldwork experience in the villages and among nomads in light of my

prospective project and, in my memory, considered how each of these

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. would affect my research experience. However, I still was not prepared for

it. In time, I settled in restlessly, clearing away accumulations of many

years, from previous homes I had made, rediscovering, sorting, and

reorganizing as I made my(self) home again.

I was privileged to be on the inside track. I was complimented for

my linguistic skills, despite long years abroad, for my warmth and care in

visiting, for making myself available and for listening attentively. And, I

enjoyed walking in the streets freely, getting to know a shopkeeper here, a

do/m u$ (chartered taxi) driver there, and moving smoothly along, usually,

without feeling like an ‘other’. Inside track was close to home, as that place

we deeply feel we belong. And that was that. Isn’t home made up of

things we want to have around? Can we always be so selective? How

often can we afford selectivity? How precious the longp u f (Ottoman as it is

called in English) that was part of my mother’s living room set is for me

now. Who would think one day I would want to have it in my home. The

kidney-shaped seat with its tiny legs placed in the middle was my main

piece of furniture. Now that I have used it for 18 months in my home ‘in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. field', happily carrying it from Ankara, I know how careful you had to be to

maintain a balance sitting on it, especially when you shared it with

somebody. The many times I shared that seat with my sister, friends or

relatives when we had a full house, is back in my memory. I remembered

how with the unwarned movement of one person up, the other would be

thrown off suddenly, even specific events after which laughter or

embarrassment followed. I had no plans to bring back those memories as I

loaded the p u f 'mio the truck. I did not know I had kept them.

Settling in my home-in-the-field also entailed clearing away recent

accumulations from my home abroad. How much time passed before I

remembered that I was culturally expected to request a visit or, could so

easily initiate a visiting relationship. Considering people's busy schedules,

and their faithfulness to be hospitable to their guests regardless, made me

reluctant to drop by—a habit developed in urban Ankara and reinforced in

Austin. 15 However, my clumsiness and hesitancy to initiate visiting cycles

15 Much later in my research a young Cherkess man told me: “Don’t hesitate!

Just call and say, I am coming over. And boom... you go!” I could have taken that 44

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. with people did not take as long as did my realization in the United States

of needing to invite people over. In Turkey, it was more considerate of me

to invite myself, than to be invited by my hosts, which would inevitably

burden them due to cultural requisites ofhospitality.My subject position

on the inside track was complicated also by my long exposure to troubling

representations of my homeland and its people: A representation, which

stripped the whole Turkish nation of its complexity and saw, in each of its

members, the totalitarian image of the representation itself. Going home,

then, to my fieldwork site in Turkey, was simultaneously to live the

‘household's diversity, to find comfort in its accepting familiarity while at the

same time getting lost in the changes that occurred since my physical

departure and experiencing the new forms that tensions within the

as an invitation to break formalcy in my relations with Cherkess families if he did

not continue by saying: "Can we do that?You can go everywhere. Go learn so

we learn it, too." By then, I had learned about urban Cherkess men's contingent

relationship to homespaces, which is subject of discussion in chapters 4 and 5.

16 Visweswaran (1994, chapter 6), highlights a comparable blunder, “a failure”, in

order to constitute an accountable practice of feminist fieldwork as homework.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. household had taken. All in all, it meant renegotiating the relationship

between my previous long-term residence and upbringing in Turkey, and

my ongoing interest in its representations. The burden of nativity inevitably

accompanied “the comforts of home” if not replacing them with ‘ceaseless

interrogation.”17

Thus, my fieldwork demanded an arduous process of unlearning: An

unlearning that required the engagement of my whole self, and unlearning

the Orientalist (native and western) constructions of Turkishness and Islam

that I had been exposed to for many years. It required me to relearn and

re-member what it means to live Turkey, to be Turkish, Muslim, modem,

conservative, a woman, a scholar, in orthodox, politicized or conventional

versions and from varying class and gendered positions. Unlearning often

17 Here I am reflecting upon Weston’s recent critique of the Native Anthropology, as virtual anthropology, which, she argues, is the site of the 'un-fit' of the discipline “that substitutes ceaseless interrogation for all the comforts of home” (1997: 163). While her discussion particularly highlights the disciplinary and disciplining representation of those anthropologists 'who study one's own’, I intend to bring into focus the additional trans-national and extra-disciplinary tension that is

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. means to control and gauge, at least, to begin with, the exterior knowledge

that has seeped through one’s emotive self—orientalism. Relearning here

means to leam with your body and emotions, to leam experientially, as

opposed to merely intellectually.

The relational quality of ethnographic knowledge is the

‘commonsense’ of anthropological practice in the 1990s. It “goes without

saying”, as in Bourdieu’s doxic knowledge (1977), that each ethnographer’s

relative distance from subjects of her study will nourish epistemologically

significant differences in ethnographic experience and affect the

consequent style. The native anthropologist’s luggage, then, does not

contain tools that will necessarily endow her with “a superior moral claim or

advantage" (Abu-Lughod 1991:137). Moreover, its contents can disturb the

balancing act or, 'dialectics of engagement and distance’ (Alonso

1995:235) that is at the heart of anthropological practice in the field and in

the ethnographic text that follows. If fieldwork can admittedly mediate the

remaking of a ‘native’ anthropologist, how may the consequent

embedded in positioning of a national-native. 47

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ethnographic text be crafted? What should it look/read like? Can a native

anthropologist “escape representation while representing,” as Haraway

speaks of the panoptical conquering gaze (1990: 188). Challenges to my

own subjectivity impacted me when I turned my attention from the

Bulgarian Turks to the Cherkess in Eski§ehir.18 For in reflexive

ethnographies of our time, feelings as well as failings of ethnographers

have also become legitimate objects of ethnographic epistemology

(Rosaldo Ibid. Visweswaran 1994), I venture an account of my initial

encounters narrating “the process of negotiating political affinity and

alliances, of coming to terms with—whom I owe allegiance, and where my

accountabilities lie” (Visweswaran 1994:139).

For one of the earlier accounts on ‘studying your society’, see (Altorki and El-

Solh 1988). For discussions of the complexities of native anthropologist’s identity

and positioning see, Abu-Lughod (1991), Rosaido (1993), Kondo (1990), Narayan

(1993), Visweswaran (1994) among others. In this literature Kondo’s discussion

of fragmentation of the self—its collapse into Japanese and American strands in

conflict with one another, stands out as an example of a heightened experience

leading her into taking measures for re-nourishing the neglected fragment of

herself while she was in the field. 48

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I ask my reader to travel through discourses, places, relations of

authenticity, difference and change, as I did as a m is a fir k izam ong the

Cherkess. In theM isafir kiz role, I was at different moments taken into

different groups as a guest-daughter, as an elder sister as well as being

trusted as an independent ‘Cherkess’ woman. My ethnographic encounters

took place in organized and impromptu visits and interviews in a range of

public and private places from middle-class to low-income homes in the

city-center, in squatter areas and villages, to restaurants, bars, cultural

associations and privately owned workplaces or government offices. Thus

always signified as a ‘guest’, my roles varied vis-a-vis the Cherkess of

different ages, sexes, and families. Now I ethnographically identify, as

Visweswaran proposed (Ibid.), the unfolding of the misafir kiz position and

the ways in which I negotiated its boundaries.

5. On Early Negotiations o f Positionality

In November, 1992, feeling worn out by dealing with my

displacement in the field, I sought comfort in the friendly chat of a recent

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. acquaintance. I hoped to step out of my researcher persona, and was

struck in a highly unexpected way. The person I had chosen to visit was a

young Cherkess man, a research assistant at the Anadolu University. I had

hoped our education at politically kindred institutions in Ankara, as we had

discovered early on, would provide a common ground in our interaction.

Our shared political experience, I presumed, would create a common

language for me to communicate with him my personal experience as a

lone newcomer, engaged in research in his hometown.

He seemed to listen. Perhaps more so did a Tatar woman, his

officemate whom I met that afternoon. She joined us shyly, and shared her

stories with me about her difficulties in “returning home” after spending her

early adulthood in Germany. After the two of us-women-shared feelings of

displacement coming back from abroad, my friend went to his desk, took

some pictures out of his drawer, sorted through them quickly, and threw

one in my direction on the small coffee table between us. With confidence,

he reminded me of the comment he had made during our first encounter,

about my resemblance to his mother: “Here you are!” he said, as I looked

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. at the old black and white picture. “Do you see what I mean?” I shivered.

He searched some more and gave me another one with even more power

in his voice: “And th is is what you wiH \ook like ten years from now!” I was

utterly speechless.

I had chosen to visit with him because of our distantly shared

political-cultural milieu from Ankara; and, he was invoking a commonality,

which privileged something else that he saw in my features. Orw as he? /

did n o t have an ethnic identity. I had a maternal great-grandmother who

was said to be Cherkess. My casual and occasional declaration of this

distant female ancestor’s ethnicity was simply meant to contest the racist

nationalist discourses whose motto in the 70s was: “Turk! Tremble and re

turn to yourself!” Declaring the impurity of my blood was simply to question

their valorization of Turkishness on grounds of “the purity of blood.” “We

the Turks” of the nation-state came from all four directions—not only from

Central Asia! as ‘turkism’ as such was squarely articulated in the

discourses of the seventies. The trip to Turkish nationhood has been,

indeed, quite long and involved quite a few people of “other kinds.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Now was I supposed to tremble and re-tum to my CherkessSelf?

And w hy d id I shiver at the thought of my close resemblance to this

Cherkess woman? I did not even se e the resemblance myself. What was

so threatening about the power of my host’s enactment of a Cherkess

identity as an alternative for my self-ascribed-constituted being? What was

so eerie about the link, which started with apparent features and penetrated

through the skin down into that crucial substance in your veins and defined,

in absolute terms, your social and political being? Perhaps my uneasiness

was due to the allegiances that could potentially be demanded of me on

this essentialized common ground. Perhaps I felt uneasy to realize that my

being was not a finished project and that my own demands on its

reformation could entail more than I had recently envisioned. I was there to

search for answers to these questions as an anthropologist and, suddenly,

was struck by how those answers could encroach upon my well-constituted

being.

I shivered again in 1993, when I was formally introduced to the

Cherkess community at a youth event sponsored by theKafkas Demegi,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Eski§ehir Caucasian Folklore Association. As I stood up and nervously

faced the crowd in the jam-packed room, all I heard after my name was that

I had come from America, the University of Texas; I was a Cherkess, a

Kabardin, and was there to study the Cherkess culture. / was declared a

C herkess. The information I was asked to write down about myself before

the program started, was reduced to what seemed to be the bare

essentials for a person to qualify as an ethnographer in the Cherkess

community. The thought made me tremble with anxiety. There was not

even a word about the fact that I had been in town for almost a year

studying T urkish ethnicity among the immigrants of the 1989 exodus from

Bulgaria. I was afraid of /roip-properiy and politely-l would re-introduce

myself as a non-Cherkess, and what would happen when I did so. My

common-sensical “insider knowledge” about the Cherkess society’s tight

cultural boundaries, which reminded me of ‘the strict exclusion of outsiders'

from participation in Cherkess gatherings, did not help alleviate my feelings

of inadequacy.

At that moment, the brief personal account I offered (in a rush) as an

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. alternative to my formal introduction stated, somewhat apologetically that

“I’m from Ankara. I am not really Cherkess. I ju s t k n o w that I had a great

grandmother who was known to be a Cherkess.” This was all I could relate

to the three young men sitting on the couch opposite me, who had leaned

over as soon as there was a long enough pause between the reading of

nationalist poems and asked, almost in a chorus, “which village do you

come from?”

My ‘quintessential’ identity continued to be an issue.

The Cherkess community valorizes formal personal presentations.

These involve standing up and introducing yourself first by giving your

name (as in the name on your birth certificate), then your tribal affiliation

and, then the village or small town from which you come. This custom was

cited among others as an important ethnic marker. Whenever I stood up

for a greeting and an introduction, someone else complemented my

statement by a declaration that I w as a Cherkess or that I was n o t. In spite

of having strong emotional reactions to b o th declarations, which I disguised

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in my propriety, initially I let my companions define me freely. The

recurrent follow-up discussions initiated by the members of the community

(at appropriate moments) about w hy I was ‘introduced’ in a particular way

and what that meant about the introducer’s allegiances, signaled to me that

perhaps I had intervened at a turning point in the Cherkess community’s

self-constitution. Perhaps the desire to speak to the larger world, of Turkey

and beyond, was integral to this agenda. And yet, who qualified for this

position? Was it only a Cherkess? Did I? As my ‘observant participation’

in the community continued, despite its shaky personal grounds for

legitimacy, the negotiations over the unspoken deep meanings of the

simple three or four words, names, spelled out in presentations of individual

selves became increasingly complex.

Cherkess nationalisms imagined by the Cherkess in the metropoles

of Turkey and the Caucasus constructed the Cherkess population in my

research site as provincial. This pointed to the local Cherkess' over

reliance on traditions whose time has passed. For the local Cherkess, the

politics of identity meant to preserve traditions; they were essentially

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. superior and inseparable from the Cherkess cause. Nevertheless, feelings

of loss due to departures from the performance of the invented identity

were strongly felt at every attempt to legitimately incorporate me. Me and

my work in the community indicated the local Cherkess’ modernity,

progressiveness. When an activist schoolteacher wanted to recruit my

intellectual skills for an upcoming political event, he qualified his request “so

they see that we have one, too,” (meaning an independent female

scholar?). However, in another context, when I supported a woman in her

grievance against him, whose political style was often resented as

inappropriate for a Cherkess woman, I was reproached by the same man.

"H ojam (my teacher)," he said to me, “have you started sailing in h e r

wake?" My scholarly presence as a woman was respected as long as I

constrained myself to male political paradigms and discourses.

While Cherkess political representation was predominantly the

domain of older men; and cultural re-presentation was the domain of

unmarried young men and women, what kind of representation was

expected of me? I observed the men and youth’s maneuvers into the older

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. men’s domain, and women’s maneuvers to carve their own niche in this

transforming hegemony. Whose subjectivity would I retrieve in the name of

the Cherkess ethnicity? Most often i found myself in the position of an

arbiter, between young women and the few men who participated in

discussions actively, mediating mutual accusations of betrayals of the

‘national cause'. Perhaps my subject-position would be that of an arbiter,

mediating women and men's negotiations of Cherkess patriarchy?

My fieldwork experience, overall, has been at once a witness to, and

an excuse for the enactment of the intricate centrality of gender in

nationalizing discourses in the Turkish context, imagined by both the

Cherkess and ethnic Turkish nationalists. Speaking from a Turkish

inteilectual position in the 90s necessitates an acknowledgment—if not an

approval-of the way patriarchal relations are imagined in the name of

ethnicities, religious affiliations as well as dominant Turkish national

identity. The overarching trope of ‘modernity , concerning both its contents

and the people who embody 'the modem’, clashes and interplays with, as

well as collapses into, collective imaginings while reinforcing ©/"challenging

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. patriarchal relations.

6. Enacting the m isafir kiz:

In the year of 1993, OniversitelerarasDSegme Yerie$tirme Smavi,

(the University Placement Exam) had a question about the ka§en institution

among the Cherkess. I learned this from a Cherkess friend, a civil

engineer, about a week after the actual exam when the questions and the

correct answers were published in newspapers nationwide. He phoned me

to say: “Gonul hanim, USY exam has a question on the Cherkess. (So and

so) drew my attention to it. I have the paper." He read the question. We

commented on it, got excited about it. I thanked him since I had not

thought of looking for ethnographic information through the college

entrance exam questions. After I hung up, I rushed to my paper to see.

Yes. Hmmm. That night, this was the subject of discussion and teasing at

the d e m e k (short for, Association for Caucasian Folklore in Eski§ehir). I

raised the subject. It seemed this simply revived the day’s discussions.

Men reported each other to me for not knowing the correct answer.

Somebody talked to another at another table: “So what is the function of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ka^e n/ik? " Another one yelled back with a smirk: so and so does not know.

So and so was quiet.

I joined the teasing: “But the question is misleading. This is a very

patriarchal perception of the ka§en/ik. Right? You should send in a

correction.” A female friend picked this up immediately and turned to a

nearby Cherkess male. “Mete, Look what Goniil hanim says. We should

write a letter of correction. This question gives a patriarchal tint toka§en/ik.

What do you say?” Mete bey looked down with a slight smile and refused

to comment.

Sometime later, as the end of my extended fieldwork was

approaching, I got a call from the dem ek. Nusret, one of my younger

friends told me “A b /a,19 Abdullah bey is here. He wants to talk to you.” As

I walked to the d e m e k I wondered what the meaning of this call could be.

This Cherkess man’s request to visit with me made me self-conscious and

Ab/a literally means elder sister in Turkish. Also, it is commonly used as a

term of address to express respectable intimacy toward the female who is

addressed. 59

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. somewhat embarrassed for not having paid him another visit sooner, after

my last interview. I arrived, only to realize that I was to be tested on the

level of knowledge I had acquired of The Cherkess Culture. He asked: “So,

tell me! In what order would three Cherkess people of different generations

be when they walk in the street? Where would you be in relation to me if

we were to walk some place together?” Taken aback by the question, I

tried to remember the information that had been told to me, and that I had

recorded and, perhaps, also put down in my notebooks many many times.

I hastily thought that my recent walking experiences with a Cherkess man

would be handy. He apologetically had been repositioning us as against

this Cherkess convention. I knew his hearing-problem-related preference

was an impropriety according to this old rule, but... Exam anxiety. I didn’t

even remember, which was his problem ear. As I tried to picture ourselves

walking in relation to each other, I said: “On your right?” “Nooo!” Abdullah

bey protested like a paternal teacher, with a smile, “The man always takes

a woman to his left. When three men walk together, the oldest walks in the

middle, the youngest on his right, the second elder to his left. The oldest is

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. always in the middle. If something needs to be done the youngest goes to

take care of it and the oldest is still protected. See how every detail is

thought of in Cherkess culture. You just don’t go anywhere casually with

no order.” Feeling like a school child, I tried to tell him apologetically that I

was not sure if all these rules were in my memory.

In receiving questions that came later I found comfort in the fact that

the young men who sat around the table did not really care about these

rules. The two horsemen, in one of the stories Abdullah bey told us that

day were mythical characters at best. Would any one of these men wait

upon the elders in full composure while cutting himself secretly and putting

salt on his cut, so that the pain would avert him from an unbearable need

for sleep, due to his days-long, non-stop ride, to deliver an important

message? The men's shirts and slacks (usually jeans) lacked the rows of

tiny silver containers filled with necessary medicinal spices and belted over

men’s ge rkeska s, the knee-length fitted coats of days gone. Besides, many

admitted to laziness, although defensively, and a taste for personal

comfort.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Not only did my friends n o t care about old rules; they were always

impressed with my patience and perseverance listening to Abdullah bey

and his generation’s nostalgic stories. I was the only one, it seemed, who

could sit composed for hours attentively, to listen and take note of Abdullah

bey’s Cherkess cultural history. Even during these encounters, individually

and quietly men took turns leaving our table for a cigarette break at the

other end of the room. My younger friends had a different agenda.

"B igim ,” the form, they said, in reference to these rules, did not

matter. The older generation's emphasis was merely on the ‘form.’ In

response to the older people’s critique of the youth's unfortunate lack of

concern to observe Cherkess rules of social interaction, they argued, those

rules had lost their meaning in these times. Why should you know how far

ahead a horseman would get off his horse while approaching a woman in

order to show her respect? Are you supposed to stop your car and get

out? Laughter followed. Of course not. Being Cherkess now meant to be

faithful to its essence. In one word, this wass a y g t(respect). As my male

and female friends enacted ‘Respect’ and carved out its boundaries in our

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. relations with one another, with elders, older/married or young women, we

all learned and coded for ourselves, individually and together, what being a

Cherkess meant in 1990s in Eski§ehir, Turkey and the world. In doing so, I

used my notebooks, tape recorders, camera and myself—a compact mass

of intellectual and spiritual accumulation.

My interactive ‘learning’ through fieldwork thus entailed an

enactment ofm y s e lf as the Turkish woman I was raised to be in the ‘non

cosmopolitan’ urban Ankara (as my mother had described the city while

she told me of my parents' decision to raise their two daughters there, as

opposed to the cosmopolitan Istanbul). I repositioned that self during my

fieldwork encountersvis-a -vis the person I had made m yself to be starting

in the formative years of college in Ankara and later in the U.S. The long-

forgotten memories of my childhood and youth helped me fit in, sometimes

instinctually, and feel at home with the Cherkess. My mother picked up the

opportunity to continue her teachings—raising her youngest daughter—on

the phone and, occasionally, in person. I listened with respect. In addition

to my memories, her project gave me a chance for comparison, a test of my

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nativity—from my subject position, of Turkishness of my generation and

Cherkessness.

Contemporary Turkishness was nearly a decade distant from me

experientially. It was an anthropological project of a different kind. As I

repositioned myself as an anthropologist and a Turkish national, my

complicity in projects of the Cherkess community and those of my mother

(which often did not overlap) in (re)constituting my identity, I snapped back

to my self-made person who questioned, challenged and talked back. My

fieldwork style inevitably constituted a struggle negotiating different cultural

proprieties, re-membered, presumed, learnt anew and questioned from my

anthropological as well as personal perspective. I conceive of this guest

girl stance, m isafirkiz, not only as a requirement of my interrogative project

but as part of my ‘nativeness,’ my native privilege, as I adopted this mode

more intentionally the longer I stayed in the field and the more I felt myself

at home in Eski§ehir and among the Cherkess.

This position is very compatible with the role I have been expected

to play within the Cherkess community as well, namelym isafirkiz, “the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. guest girl”. Young female guests have a special position among the

Cherkess. They are insiders when accepted as guests. They are always

on call, however, and always in demand to be entertained, pampered and

courted as insiders may not always, at all stages of their lives or in various

hierarchical social circles be.20 Thus, m isafir ktzstatus gives a person a

20 Shami (1988), in another diasporic Cherkess context, in Jordan, initially

experiences a presumed familiarity and acceptance due to her well-known

genealogy by members of the Cherkess community. Her special insider position

(perhaps, initially, also as a misafir kDz), then, is reconstituted as “ a man” freeing

her up to pursue notetaking in public gatherings. In Shami’s words:

While my presence had no effect on the formal proceedings, my arrival at the meeting would have some impact. ... [S]ince the iocation varied all the time and the meetings were open to all, there were always a few people who did not know me and would therefore be surprised by my presence. There would be some whispering as someone took it upon himself to explain who I was, who my father was, and what I was doing, whereupon I would receive a smile and a nod of recognition. My arrival would also cause a little confusion as to where I should sit. Generally, the chairs were arranged lining the walls, sometimes two or three rows deep. As a woman, I was worthy of respect and should be sitting with the most important people, i.e., at the head of the room, facing the main entrance. As a relatively unimportant guest (I had no high-ranking job or standing in the community), I should be seated toward the sides and to the back. As a young Circassian, if I were following tradition and proper manners, I should be standing, preferably by the door. At one meeting, the problem was solved by 65

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lot of freedom, and, in a sense, obliges her, to circulate in and out-of-town

together with the community members, in various classes, at different

political or social events. The fact that I was a female visitor from overseas,

educated and adult, also considerably increased my verbal mobility. In

addition, due to the cultural mystification that occurred in the Turkish

national context, due to the ongoing insider hierarchies and the difficulties

of teaching ‘modernizing’ generations through aged means of continuity,

my particular guest status was perceived as (and provided) an opportunity

to bring into open what was not available to the insiders themselves. As a

special female guest, in a sense, I was given the responsibility to take the

young Cherkess home.

Okely recently has pointed out, “the fieldwork experience is totalizing

and draws on the whole being. [However] it has not been theorized

because it has been trivialized as the ‘collection of data’ by a dehumanized

one of the more outspoken members who, tired of different people motioning me to different chairs, said: “Until the end of her research, we will treat Seteney as a man.” This effectively banished me toward the back of the room, where I sat and wrote my notes freely. It was an excellent arrangement from my point of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. machine” (1992: 3). As I venture into narrating my experience among the

Cherkess I feel the weight of the responsibility to write against such a

theoretical disposition, and the accompanying fear of failing my hosts,

Cherkess or not. Crafting myself into my narrative, and historicizing us all

through it, may be seen as disrespect for certain groups or their cultural-

political agendas/practices. Some Cherkess wished, perhaps others

hoped, this account to be a homogenizing/totalizing one. In my writing, I

have deliberately worked against this inclination. Instead, I strived to

represent the complexity of the ontological, historical, political, in short,

cultural diversity of the people I have encountered in person and previous

writings. I hope the Cherkess men and women, the young and the old, will

find a rich portrayal of their identity in my attempt to historicize the

complexity of its current moment. A Cherkess man one day came to me

with a proposal for the title of my dissertation. It was a line from a

renowned Cherkess poet, Resulov and cried: “and now they have deprived

view (Ibid: 124-25). 67

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. me of myka lp a k :m21 Working with that title would inevitably have privileged

Cherkess men’s voice, particularly of his formation and political generation.

Instead, I tried to weave that experience, as I understood it to be, into those

of others and the incessant debates about them. I felt obliged to tell the

stories of headscarves and mini skirts along with kalpaks. I now contend

that my friend and his male peers will agree with my choice of the metaphor

of dances in my title, as the cherished representation of the Cherkess

couples negotiating their past, present and future.

After all it was one such man who prepared the emblem for the

Eskidehir Cherkess cultural association, representing a Cherkess couple

whose faces are turned to the Mount Elbruz, the peak of the yearned

ancestral lands. I have seen men and women dance to such an image

negotiating where and in what ways they were going to look to see/make

their home. I could not have written about that representation from the

men’s perspective alone, nor could I present men and women side-by-side

21 K alpak is a headgear worn by the Cherkess (northern Caucasian) men, made

of thick short fur and a quasi-cylindrical shape. 68

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. exacting women in men’s image. I found strength in the yet-unfulfilled

dream that the emblem represented just like those young men who kept its

folded copy in their breastpockets. I hope the young Cherkess do, too, in

my account to enrichen their future negotiations.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Two: Turkish Nationai(ist) Hegemony

Talking about social change in Turkey is not a novelty, as most literature has been dealing with this phenomenon since the mid-IS* century. Yet the pace of change has been so rapid during the last twenty years that it is not fanciful to advance the hypothesis that the Turkish society is now on the brink of a social mutation. ... We are now facing a complex and diversified society which impresses observers as a jigsaw of contradictory elements. (Tekeli 1995:3)

Cherkess nationalizing discourses found fertile ground to (re-

)flourish in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup in Turkey,a n d renewed

hopes for a nation-state for the Cherkess following the opening of the North

Caucasus in 1989. These two dates are significant turning points in the

history of Turkish national(ist) hegemony. Political leadership, the military

and post junta political parties, with support received from international

financial powers such as World Bank and IMF, undertook a bolder step

toward developing the nation’s capitalist economy, thus challenging the

Kemalist principle of statism ,as institutionalized during the single party

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. period (1923-1946). The military coup and immediate socio-economic

effects of export-oriented market economy led quickly to a proliferation of

critical discourses negotiating, criticizing and outright challenging the

hegemonic ideals and structures of the nation. S e cu la rism and

nationalism, two other Kemalist principles, came under attack by the

growing Islamist and Kurdish challenges to national(ist) hegemony.

Actually, the People’s Republican Party (PRP), the nation’s founding

father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ‘had founded himself, was subjected to the

1980 military regime's indiscriminating political ban and disappeared from

the political scene for years, until the ban was overturned by the parliament

and leaders who were disbanded from politics reassumed their pre-1980

leadership positions. In the 1980s, out of the six principles codified by the

PRP as Kemalism, symbolized by six shooting arrows from the same root,

republicanism and re fo rm is m seemed relatively untouched. In light of the

new economic policies,p o p u lism , as it was previously understood, was left

behind. The Turkish national arena in the 1980s represented a terrain of

fierce hegemonic struggle, understood in a Gramscian sense, as that

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. uneven and ongoing process seeking to coordinate competing and often

conflictuai interests of subordinate groups with those of an already or

potentially dominant group (Brow 1990, 1996; Hall 1980; Gramsci 1971).

All throughout the 1980s, the national common sense was shaken

with consequent shock waves of discourses and practices that challenged

the integrity of the nation-state, its national community, its founding

principles and territorial integrity. Cherkess communities, however, entered

the historic scene in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union in

1989. Cherkess communities were themselves shaken by the unforeseen

opening into their ancestral lands in the North Caucasus. As they rekindled

ties with long-lost kin beyond national territories, Turkish common sense

was stirred up again by complex and unfamiliar aspects of its Cherkess

constituent. Cherkess communal identity started to be negotiated against

the post-1980 struggles to reconstitute the Turkish national(ist) hegemony.

And yet, Cherkess identity became a site of hegemonic struggle in its own

right, as aspirations to nationhood in ancestral lands revived and local

communities positioned themselves vis-a-vis ongoing conjunctural changes

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. within and without. This chapter overviews the post-1980 crisis of Turkish

national(ist) hegemony, against the background of historic tensions of

Kemalist nationalism and its unitary identity. The chapter thus constitutes

the historical background for the Cherkess hegemonic struggle for identity.

Undoubtedly, Cherkess identity and pursuit of hegemony are products of

their Turkish counterparts and have been formed within its historic

development. As chapter 3 will elaborate, as an entangled struggle for

communalization, they share not only the terrain of the struggle but have

been formed within it and also share its historic tensions. The impact of the

national struggles for hegemony and the ways in which its historic tensions

interplay with Cherkess struggles for community are subjects of chapters 4

and 5. They are discussed through the experiences of members of

EskOehir Cherkess community vis-a-vis the competing discourses of

identity and their entangled struggles for hegemony.

1. The Turkish national identity: historic tensions

Since the establishment of the Turkish nation-state in 1923, religion

and ethnicity have featured prominently in hegemonic struggles over the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nation’s identity. The idea of a single Turkish identity was the central

concern of Turkism, one of the three main ideological currents of the late

Ottoman period. It was strongly emphasized by some intellectuals

following the development of Turcology among western Orientalists and,

later, in response to the pan-Slavism of the Russian empire, in contrast to

Turkism, which invoked a pre-lslamic Turkic identity and aspired to a

political union of all the ethnic Turks of the world in order to salvage the

rapidly disintegrating empire, Islamism emphasized religion as the basis of

identity. Ottomanist alternative stressed the preservation of the multi-

religious, multi-ethnic composition of the empire, but could not withstand

the fervor of the nationalist movements in the Balkans and in greater Syria

(Lewis 1967; Kushner 1977).

Political foundations of Turkish nationalism that gave birth to the

Republic of Turkey, as a unitary nation-state, were laid out within this

broader context following the Great War of 1914-1918. The whole political

and ideological practice which was initiated and led by Mustafa Kemal, the

leader of the anti-colonialist resurgence and founder of the nation-state, is

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. referred to, in retrospect, as Kemalism. Historically, Kemal's nation was

grounded in an overt repudiation of the Ottoman imperial identity and

heritage, especially its religious and ethnic pluralism, which were

considered to be incongruous with the idea of a nation-state (Lewis 1967;

Mehmet 1989; Timur 1986). Kemai also opposed the Turkists’ ideal of a

political union of all the ethnic Turks (i.e., Turkic peoples).1 Instead,

Kemalism imagined a nation that was to be rooted in the territories that

could be salvaged from colonization (Anatolia and Rumelia), defined as

misak-i m illi, the national territory, and coexisted peacefully with other

nations. Such coexistence was a necessary part of commitment to the

cause of modernization and progress as defined by contemporary socio

political discourses in European states of early twentieth century. The

nation was imagined as a collectivity whose individuals would be indivisibly

united by language or custom and driven by a will for progress, “to reach

the contemporary nations of their time”. It intended to link the common

1 Pan-Turkist dreams of liberation of Turks', including those in Central Asia, for a

new political union “was pursued not by Kemal Ataturk but by his defeated political

rivals like Enver Pasha” (Hobsbawm 1990: 163, see also Gellner 1994, chapter 7). 75

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. experience of all who had ever inhabited that territory, even as far back as

the Hittites.2

2 In his discussion of deployment of history in order for new states to imagine their nation “to loom out of an immemorial past,” Anderson (1991: 11-12, footnote 4), seems mistaken in his ahistorical projection of Kemalist history-construction. He states: Kemal Ataturk named one of his state banks the Eti Banka {sic) and another the Sumerian Bank (Seth-Watson, Nations and States, p.259). These banks flourish today, and there is no reason to doubt that many Turks, possibly not excluding Kemal himself, seriously saw, and see, in the Hittites and Sumerians their Turkish forebears. Before laughing too hard, we should remind ourselves of Arthur and Boadicea, and ponder the commercial success of Tolkien’s mythographies. It is only fair to appreciate Anderson’s cross-cultural referencing whose comparable accuracy I cannot assess. However, the specificity of this Kemalist rendition of the past first has to be understood with respect to the desire to contain the nation within the territories of the state—in other words, as against the expansionist Turkic (or Turanic) aspirations and in order to constitute Turkishvoik as legitimate inhabitants of Anatolia, not as “nomadic/barbaric invaders." This inflection speaks more directly to the hegemonic rivalry during the formative years of Kemalist nationalism than Anderson's remark. The effects of such a historic stretch was certainly a tendentious quest and its more devoted followers were persecuted (Oran 1988). This fact, understandably, does not erase it from the collective memory of the nation, as I also argue in this ethnography. The persistence of Turkist renditions of the past and their present effects, however, are 76

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The aspired nation that was to be crafted was a double-edged

sword: establishing a nation-state required an institutional restructuring

that broke ties with the Ottoman court’s authoritarian and corrupt ruling over

its multi-ethnic and multi-religious populace.3 It also required breaking ties

of economic dependence to European powers who took action, as winners

of the Great War, to colonize “the Sick Man of Europe,” as the Ottoman

Empire was called.4 Kemalist nationalism, embodying the Sick Man

no doubt products of a complex—and ongoing—hegemonic struggle and still in the ideological fringes of the Turkish society. 3 Keyder (1987) is a classic account of Turkish nation-state formation, historically analyzing its continuities and discontinuities with its discursive rival Ottoman Empire, and particularly insightful for its discussion of emergence/disappearance of classes and formation of alliances throughout the history of Republic of Turkey. See also, Ozbudun 1976 and Tachau 1984. 4 Regardless of this ambition to pay off foreign debts incurred by the Ottoman State, the national state did not intend to have an economic alternative to European capitalism. On the contrary, Turkish nationalism was as much a response to encounters with European capitalism as to nationalist thought and politics. Turkish national state started as a patrimonial capitalist economy intending to raise national capitalists who would gradually take their rightful place in world capitalist competition. 77

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. metaphor, then, was ‘a refusal to die' as well as an ambition ‘to recover by

no intervention’ of those who anticipated his death and, to prosper in

peaceful coexistence as neighbors of equal status with those European

powers. The Turkish nation, accordingly, was a being to be created under

Mustafa Kemal’s leadership and with his willing compatriots, not a s te e p in g

B e a uty to be awakened (cf. Danforth 1995: 15, especially footnote 4 on the

metaphor of awakening nations). In Mardin's (1981: 208-9) words,

Mustafa Kemal took up a non-existent, hypothetical entity, the Turkish nation, and breathed life into it. It is this ability to work for something which did not exist as if it existed, and to make it exist, which gives us the true dimensions of the project on which he had set out (cited in Tachau 1984: 30).

In principle, and later in official practice, the Kemalists denounced

religion and the expression of cultural differences in attire, customs,

language and the like.5 The decision to erase ethnicity from public

5 Secularization of the nation-state was attained through the following reforms:

The abolition of the Sultanate and Caliphate, of the office of the Geyh-ul-lslam—

the highest religious rank in the Ottoman empire, of the Islamic institutions of

higher learning—m edreses, of religious courts, of the Muslim lunar calendar were

all accomplished during the first decade of the founding of the nation-state. In

addition, the Arabic alphabet was replaced by a modified Latin alphabet in 1928 78

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. discourse seems to have been finalized by the removal of questions

involving linguistic diversity from the census questionnaire after 1965.

As Anderson (1983:11-12) forcefully argues, the crux of national

histories is the link they establish between the past and the imagined

future, the ‘glide from an immemorial past* into a ‘limitless future’. The

primary rapprochement of the Turkish nation-state to its Ottoman heritage,

from which it was structurally and ideologically distanced, was through the

construction of a national history.6 According to this history, the Turkish

nation is the heir of the degenerate Ottoman Empire whose patrilineal

ancestry is traced back to the Turkish-speaking mercenaries and nomadic

tribes from Central Asia. The nation's 70 odd year old history as a modem

state points to a struggle for hegemony by keeping the ancestors at a

distance—at arm’s length, if you wish—and choosing a new identity as

envisioned by the young founders. The founders’ historically situated

that was put in exclusive use in print media in less than half a year. The new

alphabet was taught to masses through an extensive literacy campaign.

6 For anthropological accounts of the ways in which the hegemony of national

histories is attained (see, Handler 1988, Alonso 1988 and Swedenburg (1988). 79

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. preference for exclusivity within the national borders was based on the idea

of progress for improving the lives of people who would constitute the

modem nation. Such a goal privileged a structural reorganization that

would displace traditional vertical ties of patronage, by a § ire(tribal), t

lineage and ta rik a(religious t brotherhood) ties. Unhampered by such old

ties, individuals with the will for shaping their ‘national’ future would rise in

the socio-economic ladder. These new classes of people were needed to

constitute a national bourgeoisie, and would be overseen and their

activities supported by the state, as the father of the nation to be bom.7 In

this sense, the crucial tension in the Kemalist nationalist project lay

between its aspiration to be ‘modem’ and its deployment of history in order

to cultivate a sense of national identity in the collective consciousness.

But history itself is a central site in the ongoing struggle for

hegemony (Alonso 1988; Brow 1990), as the case of Turkish nationalism

also suggests. The gap created by Kemalism’s repudiation of the Ottoman

7 See Keyder (1987), especially chapters four and five for class dynamics during

this period.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Empire's Islamic heritage and its subordination of the pre-Anatolian

(Central Asian) Turkic past has been filled by alternative and competing

discourses of the nation. Since the 1940s, Turkism, no longer aspiring to

the political unification of all ethnic Turks, has nevertheless attempted to

shift the crux of Kemalist nationalism from territoriality to ethnicity (the

‘glorious’ Turkic race’) (Landau 1981). Islamists, on the other hand, have

had to confront the more trying problem of association with an officially

secular state. Their project has been to reconstruct both Kemalism and

Islam in order to situate themselves ‘legitimately’ in the ongoing struggle for

hegemony (Mehmet 1989; Qakir 1990). By 1980 nationalist processes in

Turkey indicated the formation of a delicate alliance between Turkist and

Islamist ideological practices which, in their official expression, tended to

privilege an Islamic Turkish identity as appropriate for the nation (Oran

1988; Ol?en 1991).

By privileging the Central Asian roots of the nation, Turkish national

historiography 1) renamed many Turkic and non-Turkic elements as

compound Turks, such as Kafkas Turku, Kibris Turku or Av§ar Turku and,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2) contrary to its official proclamation, undermined the legitimacy of 'hybrid'

identities as expressed for instance by linguistic competence of its multi

lingual nationals as well as those who spoke distinct dialects. The

hegemonic struggle increasingly tended toward erasing the complex

popular histories of the people who constituted the Turkish nation. As my

discussion of the emergence of ethnic discourses after 1980 will illustrate,

the erasure of Kurdish ethnicity from the official (national) discourse is a

good example of this gradual loss. The process of national history

construction in the Turkish republic is beyond the limits of the present

study; however, its effects are pertinent for the ethnographic case at hand.

Since 1960s, Turkish political society has frequently been dominated

by ‘Turkist’ parties and their militant extensions. A primarily ethno-

nationalist Turkishness has increasingly been given official legitimacy.

Occasional collective outbursts of opposition have often been readily

condemned as “communist” or “separatist” plots driven by the support of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. external forces.8 By erasing public expressions of ethnic and religious

affiliation, Kemalist practices have paradoxically helped to create an

overriding concern on the part of various groups to claim an identity different

from others (Salamone 1989; Mardin 1994). Official attempts to construct a

single Turkish ethnicity out of the diverse groups of Anatolian, Asian and

Rumelian origins-each one constituting an internally complex category with

different cultural markers based on language, custom etc., have played a

significant part in this process (Andrews 1989). In other words, (by the

1980s) the Turkish nation-building process demonstrated strong disparities

between the projects of the nation-builders, who are not necessarily

representative of a well-defined, dominant ethnic group, and popular classes

which might have developed alternative or oppositional ethnic identities to

8 The impact of external forces cannot be underestimated. There has been

strong evidence to indicate the role of neighboring states of different political

orientations in playing with ethnic and religious tensions intrinsic to Turkish

national(ist) hegemony (e.g., Mumcu ). My point in this discussion, however, is to

establish the political terrain of ethnic identity struggles and to account for the

impact of maneuvers by the state and popular classes in relation to the Cherkess

people's collective positioning. 83

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the national identity being developed. Stopping urban (and rural) violence

aside, the 1980 military intervention, provided support for economic and

ideological restructuring whose impact became quickly apparent in the post-

1980 political discourses of individuality and collective identity.

The post-Soviet opening of the ancestral lands from which ethnic

Turks had come signified a reunion after centuries of separation. The 70

year-old Kemalist cultural containment policy began to be pushed aside in

order to embrace fully the nation's Asiatic heritage. This is the Turkist

resolution of 1990s which, having secured its nation during its modem

history, reaches out to its ancestors with a revived interest. Through the

discursive relationship of a ta v a ta n(ancestral i land) and a n a va ta n i

(motherland), the Turkish nation-state is bridging ties with lives and

homelands of its distant past in ways that are reminiscent of relations of

power between parents and their children who struggle to redefine their

relations as adults through different positions of strength, sophistication and

wisdom. Such a lineal Turkist sprawl over centuries has a debilitating effect

on those members of the nation whose pre-nation-state histories lie in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lands outside Central Asia and on people of non-Turkish linguistic groups.

Contemporary Cherkess ethnicity is attempting to resolve its disjointed

participation in the Turkish nation as much as to envision a nation of its

own.

2. Gender and Modernity

If ethnic and religious belonging means to contribute to modem

Turkish identity in terms of enforced absences, gendered emancipation is a

proud symbol on its flag post. Ethnicity, especially within the Muslim

national body a n d Islam in the sphere of politics, are conceived as primary

threats to the identity of the nation-state and its modernist ideals. Women’s

emancipation, on the other hand, was crucial 1) in order to break away from

the Ottoman imperial heritage, 2) for the creation of a modem republic with

equal rights for citizenship as well as 3) to mediate aspirations set for the

nation to compete successfully in the international arena.

As Kandiyoti (1989: 127) has argued, “women made an irreversible

entry into political discourse and the question of their rights became a

privileged site for debates concerning questions of modernization vs.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cultural conservatism and integrity” during the last century of the Ottoman

Empire. Rising on that foundation, nationalist reforms were “an all-out

onslaught on existing social institutions and mores surrounding the status

of women” (Ibid: 126). Legal modernization included a new Civil Code and

electoral rights for women to participate actively in political life as voters

and politicians. 1926 Civil Code, modeled after the Swiss Civil Code,

outlawed polygamy, granted men and women equal rights in marriage,

divorce and child custody. In 1930, women were granted the vote at local

elections. In 1934, the right to vote at national elections followed. In a

similar vein, other republican reforms "refashioned gender,” creating “new

images of masculinity and femininity that involve the repudiation of the old

as well as the espousal of the new” (Kandiyoti, 1998: 284). The attire

reform of 1925 outlawed fez, the brimless headgear that had come to

symbolize Ottoman Muslim identity. Women were encouraged to unveil

themselves, to don fashionable western clothes, and eventually, were

banned from veiling themselves while working in civil service jobs.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The images of modernity invoked and imposed by such reforms

were perceived and appropriated selectively and differently by sectors of

the society, “making gender a contested and polyvalent marker” (Kandiyoti

1998: 284) of social and professional class, urbanity, cultural disposition

and, inextricably, modernity itself.9 In 1980s' Turkey, as Kandiyoti (Ibid.)

remarked in general terms, “the unresolved tensions around establishing

workable codes of heterosocial modernity [fueled] a search for alternatives

that [often took] contradictory and conflictual forms.

Since no hegemony is ever complete (Hall 1980: 331), the terrain of

struggle is inevitably fertile for alternatives that may intend to replace it, as

struggles to accommodate challenges, to renew the hegemonic principles

or ideals continue (Williams 1977), in order to reach for that imperfect and

contingent “unison of economic and political aims, [as well as] intellectual

and moral unity" (Gramsci 1971: 181). The cursory overview of the

Kemalist national project I provided above, needless to say, glosses over

9 Style of clothing, or attire, in return, gradually became an officially endorsed

expression and symbol of modernity. See Appendix One for two ironic

representations of the relationship between attire, modernity and Turkish identity. 87

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the complexity of political, economic and cultural struggles that incurred

within the national body, as individuals and members of subnational

religious or ethnic communities enacted overlapping, conflicting or

complementary agendas. By doing that, it only implies the extent to which

their subjectivities may have been constituted through this complex

process. The following discussion of the ways in which Kemalist nationalist

hegemony was shaken in the aftermath of the military coup of 1980

highlights the pertinent specifics of this constitutive process for my

ethnographic project.

The post-1980 conjuncture no doubt signifies a new stage in the

development of the Turkish capitalist economy—a decisive relaxation of its

state-promoted development that prevailed in earlier decades. Its

transformative power became quickly apparent in the sudden surge of

numerous counter-hegemonic or alternative discourses. In order to

contextualize the structural background of this moment, my discussion first

focuses on the economic restructuring implemented by the interregnum

government established by the 1980 military coup and subsequent civilian

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. extensions. Against this political-economic background, I then turn to a

discussion of discourses of ethnic and religious identity and feminism that

emerged in the post-1980 period. Overall, while situating these discursive

practices, my attention is on the complex ways in which each is critically

articulated with Turkish national(ist) hegemony.

3. In Search o f Stability: the 1980s

Walls in the Turkish national imagination were brought down, long

before the Berlin Wall was crushed, along with the radical shift in Turkish

economic philosophy and policy that began in 1980. The military

government of 1980 and the succeeding civil governments steered the

Turkish economy in a definitive liberal capitalist route. Turgut Ozal was the

master architect of this economic liberalization and along with the military,

was a key figure for the political stability that prevailed in the 1980s’ Turkey.

Ozal, an economist, started his political tenure in November 1979

during the civilian coalition government of the four right-wing conservative

parties in parliament, the coalition called the second Nationalist Front that

preceded the 12 September military intervention. He continued in the same

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. capacity during the period of military rule from October 1980 to 1983 and

then, as the founder of the Motherland Party, he became the prime minister

of the first civilian government which triumphed in the general elections

following military rule. Ozal’s election campaign focused on the need for

“crushing taboos.” I departed for my graduate studies in the U.S. soon after

the Ozal government was formed. In less than five years, by the time I

returned to Turkey in 1988, the effects of the broken taboos were impossible

not to notice: the wide-spread exchange bureaus where any national could

and would freely trade foreign currency; the foreign goods from Nacho chips

to the latest hi-fi equipment that inundated the market, the number of private

cars in the streets; the urban sprawl in big cities like Istanbul and Ankara—

all indicated a booming liberal economy as opposed to the reserved

capitalism of the pre-Ozal decades. The economic crisis of the pre-junta

years had passed, when we had to wait in line for hours to buy a small

package of margarine or a pack of cigarettes, or had to wear winter coats

indoors to keep warm due to the shortage of coal to heat houses and

apartments. In those days, in our living rooms, we were as much vulnerable

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to chance shootings due to political strife in the streets as to cold

temperatures. The political strife came to a halt with the intervention of the

military on 12 September. Many people in my generation burned books,

changed their protest attire of khaki parkas and gray-to-black genderless

clothes—men shaved their beards or trimmed mustaches; women feminized

their looks by lipsticks and skirts—in order to survive the military regime's

‘sensitivities’ to political codes of public visibility. Many successfully did

survive. Many others could only do so in prisons, waiting for years to be

tried and only then, to be acquitted. Quite a few did not.

During the military regime, parliamentary politics was banned.

Politicians were put under surveillance and then on trial. University

professors were fired, or quit in protest against the centralist restructuring of

academic institutions. Street shootings ended. Streets were safe for rightist

and leftist and apolitical people; they were free of conflict, of obligatory

partisanship, of blood that was suddenly shed due to bombs or shootings in

wars of factions in neighboring city quarters which were claimed by rival

militant groups. That sunny afternoon of September 12, when the curfew

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was temporarily removed, the streets of Ankara were crowded with people

who disseminated an aura of spring or holiday ease. We drove in the city

watching people in the parks, on the streets happy, ironically, just like

prisoners can possibly be during their allotted time in the sun.10 The fresh

confidence in the military's power to stop the factional violence was in the

air. The 1980s’ political stability was enforced by the military. It was

assured in the restricted democratic environment during the two consecutive

governments under Ozal11 while at the same time, the Marxist Kurdish

student organization (PKK) went underground, and carried on an armed

struggle in the east that gradually created an undeclared regional war.

10 The poem of NazHHm Hikmet, entitledToday is Sunday{Bugun Pazar), echoes

this feeling: “Bugun Pazar. Bugun beni ilk defa gune§e cikardilar.” “Today is

Sunday. For the first time, they took me out into the sun today." For the complete

Turkish and English versions of the poem, visit,

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/-sibel/poetry/poems/nazim_hikmet.

11 In 1991, when Motherland Party's popularity was down to 24 per cent of the

electorate in national elections, Ozal himself took office as the president of Turkey,

thanks to the changes in the legislation that facilitated this move. Ozal's political

reign continued until his sudden death in April 1993 while still holding office as the

President of Turkey. 92

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Just like the political stability, the economic stability (and expansion)

in the 1980s was facilitated by the military regime. The seeds of Ozalist

economic restructuring were sown at the beginning of 1980, by a set of

economic measures known as the decrees of January 24, or Austerity

Measures.

The main objectives of the [economic stabilization] programme were a reduction in government involvement in productive activities and an increased emphasis on market forces; the replacement of an inward- looking strategy with an ‘export oriented strategy of import substitution’ (the Government's own words); and the attraction of foreign investment. [The measures that were introduced included] a devaluation of almost 50 percent, ... reductions in the subsidies on fertilisers and petroleum products. ... [Accompanying institutional changes] included the creation of a Money and Credit Committee, chaired by Ozal as Under Secretary of the Prime Ministry, which was given responsibility for decisions on economic policy, previously the prerogative of the Council of Ministers (Oni§ 1998:128).

In March 1980, the Nationalist Front government, with Demirel as the

prime minister of the four-party nationalist coalition and Ozal as the under

secretary for economic affairs, signed an agreement with the World Bank to

receive a Structural Adjustment Loan. Despite Demirel’s concerns about

the public perception of the government’s economic measures as related to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. external pressure for economic restructuring, Ozal worked closely with the

IMF officers and “in June 1980 a three year stand-by agreement... was

signed” (Oni§ 1998: 129). When the military seized power, in Oni§’s words,

“within 48 hours ..., the military officially informed the IMF and the World

Bank of their intention to continue with the policies of structural adjustment,

with Ozal appointed deputy prime minister in charge of economic policy”

(Oni§ 1998: 129). Turkey thus became a model country, the first recipient of

the World Bank’s structural adjustment loans in order to experiment with

economic liberalization and diminishing step-by-step the state’s role in the

econom y.12

In the absence of a parliamentary regime and democratic institutions,

a major program of export-oriented liberalization began.13 During the

12 Oni§ records, “Between 1980 and 1984, Turkey received US $ 1556.3 million in

SALs. This amounted to over one-third of all Bank policy-based lending in the

early 1980s and far exceeded the value of any other Bank adjustment program of

the time. The next largest, in the Philippines, was worth just over US $ 500 million

between 1980 and 1984) (Oni$ 1998: 146).

13 In 6ni§'s words, “The new economic strategy [in 1980s] aimed at decreasing

both the scale of public sector activity as well as the degree of state intervention in 94

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. military rule, all political parties and labor unions were closed. Strikes were

outlawed. A compulsory income policy was imposed. Price controls were

relaxed which brought about continuous devaluation of the exchange rate of

the Turkish lira and real decreases in incomes. The tariff protection on

import goods was significantly reduced and restrictions on foreign exchange

flow were removed. Such a fundamental shift toward the development of a

market economy in Turkey was accompanied by a discourse, which valued

entrepreneurship and profiteering. The organizational base of the export-

oriented economy was composed of foreign trade companies which,

according to the supporting legislation, “would become eligible for export tax

rebates” if they surpassed a predetermined export target (Oni§ 1998:187).

The abuse of this incentive as in the case of “fictitious exports” in order to

the operation of the market. ... the new approach represented a fundamental

break with the import substitution strategy of the earlier decades based on

extensive state intervention, a policy which had appeared to have reached its

limits in the second half of the 1970s " (6ni§ 1998: 183).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. maximize personal profits soon epitomized the emerging materialist

individual of the Ozalist economic liberalization era.14

If a primary outcome of the structural adjustments of the 1980s was

an increased gap between social classes, particularly to the disadvantage of

waged laborers in the public sector, acutely experienced in metropolitan

areas, another was the emergence of individualism. It is widely accepted

that the economic and political environment of the 1980s gave birth to “the

individual”. §irin Tekeli, a feminist scholar and activist, celebrates solemnly

the liberation of the individual from the political communities’ subjugating

demands in these words:

1980 also brought to realisation that the bearers of basic rights and freedoms for which the West had fought for two centuries were really individuals. The poor ‘individual’ who had been sacrificed by the right in the name of the nation, Turkishness, or the community of believers, and denigrated by the le ft as the subject ofpetite bourgeois or selfish individualism was now discovered to be an important person to whom the state and society owed respect. The left, in particular, now discovered that classes (which had long been held sacrosanct) were in fact composed of young people, the elderly, homosexuals, heterosexuals, artists, football fans—even men and

14 For an example of the ways in which the deregulation of prices on export goods

could be abused through fictitious exports see (Nokta 1984). 96

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. women—and that the very existence of this variety of humanity had significance (Tekeli 1990: 267, emphasis added.).

The post-1980 recognition of the individual as a political player and

as a rightful participant in the socio-cultural process thus became the new

ingredient of the hegemonic struggle, which has created the Turkish nation.

It should be noted that the celebratory approach that Tekeli represents

above is limited in its scope. Many individuals of emerging new classes in

terms of their urbanity, material means and values were denigrated by

attributions such as m a g a n d a or zonta. Above all ethnic, religious, or sexual

identities which inundated the public discourse, these terms represent the

despised and criticized type of person who was over-eager to attain material

gains in every relationship at the expense of the deep-seated social values

of sharing, generosity, and care for human relations. The public display of

newly acquired status and wealth has additionally alarmed the modernist

classes, who contend that Turkish society has become an a ra b e s ksociety.

Identifying the societal transformation as a ra b e sk; indicates the uneasiness

of urban modernists with the unexpected intricate assertion of non-

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. metropolitan values and styles in their vicinity. Foremost, however,ara b e sk

identifies the new-bom individual, an unrefined person who has lost touch

with social/communal values, is rampantly seeking personal interests,

shamelessly displaying wealth, and is vulgarly concerned about his ego. To

exemplify this change a recent critic ofmagandalzonta individuality

observes:

Ozal was a leader whose impact on Turkey,... whose contribution to the formation of new personality types has been deep. For instance, those fans at the Fenerbahce stadium on April 13 1993 who, when they heard the announcement that the [scheduled soccer] game was postponed [due to the sudden death of then president Ozal], reacted by a slogan which inquired “How about our money?” Perhaps they were not immediately affected by Ozal’s death; however, isn’t it obvious how much they were influenced by the values of the Ozal period?” (Kozanoglu 1995:14. translation mine).

The criticized a ra b e sk expressions of individuality as well as the

celebrated emergence of “the individual” in the public consciousness are

indicative of the historic moment of national(ist) hegemony. The celebrated

individual may signify the desired free agent of the Kemalist nation-state

whose willpower has been trusted for the nation's progress, along with

his/her own. Its arabesk style, however, signifies the complex ways in which

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. individualities may have been constituted by conflicting communal codes of

personhood as much as the individual desires to break away from them.

4. Emergent discourses o f civility and modernity: Modernist Islam, ethnic pluralism, and feminism During the 1980s, the political vivacity that is common to periods

following military interventions had a different tone.15 The masterminds of

15 The repressive political context of September 12 military intervention was

favorable for some political orientations: the religious and nationalist right.

September 12, the third military intervention in Turkish political history, was the

most decisive in orientation toward right-of center political ideologies. The military

intervention of 27 May 1960 gave Turkey its most liberal-democratic institutional

base by a new constitution. The 1968 student movement was experienced as

driven by a desire to change the state structure for a just, more egalitarian regime

(Beige 1992). The accompanying civil unrest marked by armed clashes between

various leftist fractions, bank robberies, or kidnapping for ransom ended up in the

military intervention of 12 March (1971). The prime minister of the interregnum

government Nihat Erim expressed the widespread feelings of the leadership: “the

1961 constitution is too loose for the Turkish national body. We need to tighten it.”

The modified constitution was not able to prevent students and labor unions from

organizing and, again, pressuring the system to change. The civil unrest

continued for a number of years with increased casualties among both the parties

involved and the civilian passers-by. The leadership of the September 12 99

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. economic liberalization had conservative political orientations, which along

with the military, found expression in political practices that shattered the

institutional and ideological foundations of the Kemalist establishment in

Turkey. Along with the rapid changes in the urban metropoles where

various ethnicities and classes clashed, new discourses emerged with fervor

to redefine, renew or completely break away from national(ist) hegemony,

a. Modernist Islam

The most striking aspect during my 1991 return home, on the eve of

my doctoral research, was a discursive polarization that had crept up into

the national arena distinguishing the Turkish nationals as “Muslims'’ and

others. Those distanced from the “Muslims” category were soon called

la ik le r(seculars) while some gathered around the self-attributed Kemalist

category. Perhaps this was a predictable consequence of the post-1980

intervention determinedly crushed the leftist opposition in the harshest way

whereas the religious and nationalist right came out of the critical period as near-

allies. The nationalist right's position vis-d-vis the military regime is signified by

words of Alpaslan Turkes, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party: “You have

100

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. surge of the policies, which, simultaneously, wished to increase religiosity

among the populace and to control its politicization to form a force

simulating a revolution like that which gave birth to an Islamic Republic in

neighboring Iran.

The military leaders of the 1980 coup and Ozal governments

seemed to agree that religion needed to play a more significant role in

people’s lives partly “as an important instrument in the struggle against

anarchy and terror” (Ayata 1993: 64 see also, Tekeli 1995:3: 7). Gulalp

observes that the post-1980 implementation of the Turkish-lslamic

Synthesis as an official policy was such an attempt to coalesce ua pro-

western economic liberalism and pro-lslamic [socio-political] legitimacy”

(Gulalp 1990-1991: 155). The policy seems not to have been followed

through with a systematic programme; however, in hindsight, it has

succeeded quite well in many respects. If the contentious definitions over

who a true Muslim is are an indication of the tenuousness of such

endowed our ideology with political power, and yet, in the courts, have put its

ideologues on trial.”

101

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. coalescence, the post-1980 proliferation of self-identified Muslims may

indicate its potential tenacity. As M. S. Eygi, the chief-editor of the Islamist

newspaper Z a m a ncontended in 1987, "M u slim s have raised cadres of

people who are comparable to the prosperous minority [of Turkey]" (1987

italics mine), therefore it is understandable and even desirable for many

Islamists that they take part in all the parties of the political spectrum (see

Yeni Gundem 1987:11).16 Such a cool-headed assessment of an electoral

16 Early Kemalist policies against public representation/expression of Islam have

been relaxed since 1946, a date that marks the beginning of the multi-party

political era in Turkey. Whereas the nationalist project remains predominantly

modernist as before, it has started to nourish its opposition in state-funded

religious institutions, primarily schools to raise religious leaders. Islamist politics

has had parliamentary representation on its own accord since 1970. All

throughout the 1970s, with 11.8% and 8.6% of the votes (in 1973 and 1977,

respectively), MSP (National Salvation Party) became a partner in coalition

governments, first along with the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the social

democratic party established by Mustafa Kemal himself and, then, two consequent

MC (Nationalist Front) governments (coalition of three rightist parties in the

spectrum propagating centrist liberal, Islamist and Turkist political perspectives).

Nabi Avci, an Islamist intellectual, argues that the MSP of the 1970s met the

needs of the urbanizing Muslim rural classes, and that today, such a socialization

102

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. failure that the Islamist party MSP (National Salvation Party) then faced,

being left out of the parliament, cannot simply be taken to express an

instrumentalist approach to the political process in order to bring about its

displacement by a radical Islamic alternative. It nevertheless accentuates

the futility of totalitarian representations of Islam (or, Islamic polity) and the

increasing difficulty of drawing boundaries within the Muslim population in a

country such as Turkey where religion has been the unifying element for

the nation even when its institutional bases, such as the Caliphate and the

Shariat, were abolished.17

need is being met by other institutions—dorms, magazines and the like (Yeni Gundem 1987: 11). MSP and its leader Erbakan do not hold the monopoly for such socialization. 17 A consideration of determining the criterion for the exchange of populations that took place between Greece and Turkey, during the initial years of the nation-state substantiates this argument. Whereas this is remembered as an exchange between Turks and Greeks, both identities were primarily understood as based on religious affiliation and disregarded, for instance, the fact that Greeks were not always fluent in Greek, or Turks in Turkish. Jewish populations of the Ottoman Empire remained. Recently, a community leader declared that, at the time of

103

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Currently, “Islamic groups in Turkey are so diverse that it does not

make sense to speak of a single Islamic movement or even a

fundamentalist resurgence. ... There is, without doubt, a fundamentalist

element, albeit a complex one, whose interests stand against those of the

secularists. The political and ideological space between these positions,

however, is occupied by a large number of intermediate groups (White

1995: 9). There has been extensive, if still insufficient, attention to studies

which focus on the distinct aspects of Islam, such as “the scholarly, the

popularized, and the mythical” (Mardin 1994), and to Islamist discourses as

opposed to the alarming and alienating discourses a b o u Islamist t politics

and their retrograde potential.

Whereas the history of Turkish nationalization and the current crisis

of hegemony necessitates studies of the “different faces of Islam”, to use

Mardin’s phrase, our understanding of the cultural experience of people of

Turkey would necessitate a parallel attention to specificities of diverse

nation's foundation, the Jewish population declined to take the status of a minority and preferred to be first-class citizens of the new nation. 104

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. positions among the overwhelmingly Muslim population of Turkey. The

post-1980 era has witnessed not only revivalist interpretations of orthodox

Islam, its politicization and deeper articulation with the official (state)

practices, but also those of historically marginalized Muslim groups such as

the Alevis. The future of the nation-state’s historical experience with

modernity and its national project can not be envisioned without examining

the interplay of the national experience with those of others who could not

be assimilated into the Turkishness, however loose that official definition

may have been. Islam has been an integral part of the Alevi, the Cherkess,

and the Kurdish experience— among others—to varying extents, as a

guiding light that shapes experience of the world, as a repressive political

force or as an outmoded ideology. After the 70-odd years of historical

experience, Islam as a monolithic code cannot stand alone as a basis of

unity nor can it be appropriated in order to break away from it. The current

turmoil requires an examination of the specific meanings of Islamic history,

practice and politics from each and every position that partakes in the

debate.

105

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. b. Ethnic pluralism

It was in November 1991 that the weekly political magazine 2 0 0 0 'e

D o g ru (Toward 2000) made Turkey’s ethnic diversity its cover issue (Soysu

and Akkaya 1991). Drawing upon the recent publication of Ethnic Groups in

the Republic o f Turkey, an archival and historical study conducted by a

research team at the University of Tubingen in Germany, the article

celebrated religious, racial and cultural diversity and the hybridity of the

populace within the Turkish national territory at the same time as it

nostalgically lamented traditions, dances, languages or costumes lost due to

the increasing influence of popular cultural forms. The reality that this

journalistic account presented is no news for the Turkish public, except for

certain groups such as the Sudanese blacks whose concentration in a few

villages in western Turkey may be unknown outside this region. To place

this reality on the public agenda is, however, new. Such a public

celebration, or recognition of diversity among the Turkish populace is

undoubtedly a product of the turmoil of the 1980s and indicates the degree

to which public discourse has since expanded.

106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Kurdish activism of the PKK was undoubtedly the primary agent

triggering the opening of public discourse on the issue of ethnic difference.

PKK is the Kurdish acronym for Partiyya Karkaren Kurdistan, Kurdistan

Workers’ Party, which was founded in 1978 following the disagreement

within the student organization DEV-GENQ (The Federation of

Revolutionary Youth of Turkey) regarding the analysis of the Turkish

national terrain and the subsequent route for revolutionary activism.18

During the military coup of 1980, PKK’s founders, including their

internationally renowned leader Abdullah Ocalan (APO), went underground

only to reappear in 1982 with separatist claims for an independent Kurdish

18 The foundation of the disagreement was the ethnic premise and mission of the Turkish nation-state: was it a nation for Turks? Could Kurds be liberated together with others within the nation-state? Those who advocated the need for a universal struggle to awaken and mobilize the people of Turkey to establish a non-capitalist state with a just redistributive system remained as the DEV-GENQ. Arguments, which emphasized the non-ethnic composition of the national elite, and intricate relations between national and local elites, were not embraced by all student members. Those who believed that predominantly Kurdish regions were indeed Turkish colonies and needed to carry out their own war against ruling classes formed PKK. 107

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. state in the southeast. According to Gurfoey, “The armed fight that the PKK

has led since August 1984 is based on ‘revolutionary violence' as a means

of achieving mobilization and liberation” (1996:23). The PKK is not the only

Kurdish organization that emerged in Turkey. Nor is it the first one. It is,

however, the most controversial organization and differs from others in its

firm appropriation of ‘revolutionary violence'. In the second half of the

1980s, the PKK engaged in violent attacks against both the people and

institutions of the Turkish state as presumed colonizers of the Kurdish

southeast. Also, Kurdish people themselves, seen as dissidents or political

adversaries, became targets and victims of the PKK’s violent struggle

against ‘colonization’. The PKK’s ‘revolutionary violence’ strategy has had a

significant impact on (re)imagining the Turkish nation. Once again it has

drawn public attention to the unitary and simultaneously divisive power of

the Kemalist collective imagination and its agents.

In the midst of the national uproar against the nondiscriminatory

violent attacks of the PKK, an ongoing public debate has gradually and

painfully forced people of Turkey to develop a critical consciousness about

108

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the role of the state for the perseverance and growth of ethnic polarization

beyond the PKK. Turning a critical eye to the political self, it was difficult for

people to disregard the vacuum created by the hard-line policies of the

1980 military regime, which crushed the leftist nonparliamentary political

opposition to the level of eradication, including anti-violent Kurdish political

organizations. It was equally hard to overlook the impact of subsequent

post-1980 hard-line policies of civilian governments on the PKK.19 These

governments quite consistently undervalued democratic solutions to the

problem of the PKK and to the issue of ethnic sovereignty of some groups

constituting the Turkish nation.20 Popular expressions of different collective

selves echoed in proliferating political organizations contesting the meaning

of nationhood, its unitary or pluralist composition and the state’s role to

constitute or represent one or more of those collective selves.

19 A contingent soft-line stance during the last years of the Ozal governments was replaced by Ciller’s hard-line stance during my fieldwork, starting in 1993. 20 See the special issue of Middle East Report entitledTurkey: Insolvent Ideologies, Fractured State, especially articles by Bozarslan (1996), Van Bruinessen (1996) and Kurkcii (1996). 109

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The end of the Cold War and its two-headed global power structure

is another factor which figures b o th in reimagining Turkish national identity

and'm the PKK's nationalist goal. The impact of the break-up of the Soviet

Union on national and ethnic sensibilities within the Turkish nation is

diverse. If PKK activism highlighted the Kurdish component of the nation

and nationalized the Kurdish consciousness, the break-up of the Soviet

Union increased the collective consciousness of the Turkic and other non-

Turkic peoples (such as Cherkess and other Caucasian) within the Turkish

nation.

In 1989, on the brink of the breakdown of the Berlin wall, the intense

assimilation campaign of the neighboring Bulgarian state took a new turn

creating an exodus among its primarily Turkish ethnic minority. The Turkish

prime minister confronted the Zhivkov government’s forced deportation

policy by opening the national border to “all kinsmen” who wanted to “come

home”. In the summer of 1989, almost half a million Bulgarian Turks

inundated Turkey. Whereas official discourse stressed the Turkist

connection by welcoming ‘kinsmen* in the name of the last great Turkic

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. state, public opinion expressed concern about the strains of the immigration

on Turkish nationals. Although indignant about the ordeal of the Bulgarian

Turks, the press and media also expressed resentment at the privileges

given to the newcomers by the state (Tempo 1989). The sudden

accessibility of the Turkic world in Central Asia also contributed to the

discourse of ethnicity in Turkey.

The post-1989 process is thus marked by a full-fledged struggle

among previously muted and marginalized communities in pursuit of

hegemony. By the 1990s, the Turkish public scene had definitely changed.

The historical meaning of Turkishness was now a steady item high on the

public agenda: the Kemalist premise of Turkishness, in many versions, its

historical digressions and its contemporary relevance became the subject

of public debate. Along with passionate discussions about the ideological,

philosophical as well as historically specific practical interpretations of the

Kemalist motto “Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene” (Happy is the One Who Says

S/He is a Turk), discourses also proliferated about the plurality of the one

who w as a Kurd. The political discourse inevitably embraced the complex

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. history of Turkish/Kurdish coexistence and commingling, a history that had

long preceded the Turkish nation-state. How natural or how constructed

were our individual identities? What were the historical circumstances of

ethnic hybridity, assimilation and cultural distance? Who was responsible

for regional variations in these matters, was it individuals, institutions or

dominant ideologies and political practices? The taken for granted of daily

life now was a public issue demanding an attention long overdue.

As the liberal media declared, 'Turkey officially realized the Kurdish

reality”. While some sectors of the ruling bloc perceived this as a decisive

digression from the Kemalist principle of nationhood, a discovery that certain

documents representing Mustafa Kemal's ideas about Kurdish autonomy

had been concealed blurred public opinion. The weekly that published as its

cover article this crucial document and interviews with historians about

reasons for the concealment was banned and confiscated; however, the

post 1970 hegemony of Turkist nationalism had been significantly eroded.

While numerous opinions continued contesting each other in an expanding

field of public discourse, the daily reality in metropolitan areas also rapidly

112

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. changed. Ongoing militaristic measures that the state undertook in the

southeast, and the PKK’s counterattacks to pull the Kurdish locals into their

armed insurgency, expedited the outmigration among Kurdish rural

populations of the region. In many cities in western Turkey sizable Kurdish

populations developed, which led people to experience their distance from

each other and a fear of the spread of PKK activism .21

c. Feminism: in pursuit o f national, personal, conjugal liberation

In a 1987 article, Kandiyoti tentatively affirmed that Turkish women

may be described “as emancipated but unliberated, because signs of

significant political activity by women to remedy this state of affairs [the

double standard of sexuality and a primarily domestic definition of the

female role] have been largely absent” (1987: 324).22 The two points

21 For a discussion of the progress of outmigration from the Kurdish provinces and its socio-political factors see references in footnote 19 above. 22 Kandiyoti’s distinction between “emancipation” and “liberation” is a pretext to think through radical/ western feminists' widespread representations of “Islam as a unitary ideology from which practices related to women can be automatically assessed in any given Islamic society” (1987: 317). The distinction, however, has 113

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. added in square brackets are mentioned by Kandiyoti as crucial areas of

gender relations but untouched by the modernist reforms of the Turkish

nation-state. Kandiyoti’s distinction between emancipation and liberation

underscores political activity as well as its visible “mode” as determinants of

a feminist sense of being (or consciousness, as Kandiyoti uneasily uses the

term). More importantly, she insists on a further “consideration of culturally

defined sexed subjectivity-the very stuff that consciousness is made of.”

(335). A decade after its publication, these two points render the article

significant for my study of the struggle for Cherkess nationhood within the

Turkish national context.

By the time Kandiyoti’s article was published, the national body in

Turkey was already shaken by ongoing and intensifying feminist

politicization, a new and visibly feminist mode of politics, whose effects on

the Cherkess collective identity I will discuss subsequently. By the mid

1980s, the differences between the thus far muted (by ethnicity, class or

been commonly usurped by many, including myself (Ertem 1999), as an ethnographic prognosis regarding Kemalist reforms on gender and family. 114

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. historical experience) (Ardener and Ardener 1975) and recently outspoken

modes of sexuality and its control (modem, Islamic, Turkic or patriarchal—

whatever label deems right) had created collective confusion and

communal discord whose gendered effects were still hidden from the public

eye of the nation. The Cherkess case is but one whosestyle o f control o f

sexuality (both male and female) significantly differs from that which is

presumed to be “Middle Eastern,” “Islamic” or classical patriarchy .23 The

post-1980 gender discord among the Cherkess and its muted public

presence is intimately related to this difference. It is also related to the

potential of the Cherkess gendered order to embrace feminism (or its

Turkish versions), or Islamism (in traditional or modem forms), thus turn

into a stereotypically “Middle Eastern” patriarchic gender order. Before we

turn our attention to the Cherkess case, we must understand the national

context in which Turkish feminism carved a niche for an autonomous

23 The distinction is based on Kandiyoti's discussion of different patriarchies and their expressions (1988). 115

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. female subjectivity whose politics were visibly out to create a difference for

women in a patriarchal society.

The public emergence of feminist politics, or feminism, occurred in

the post-1980 era as an alternative to the egalitarian women’s rights

discourse of the previous decades, retrospectively called ‘state feminism'

(Tekeli 1990), and its off-shoots exemplified by the Turkish left (Berktay

1995). Grounded in the modernist program of Mustafa Kemal, gender

egalitarianism encouraged women to take an active part in the project of

creating a modem nation-state by educating themselves as well as a nd\x\

order to enlighten others (Tekeli 1990; Arat 1998). The civic rights that

women of Turkey gained through the process of nation-formation had

“emancipatedn them; however, by privileging the advancement of the

society and the nation, they kept women’s liberation at bay, as Kandiyoti’s

distinction suggests (1987). Being indignant with the secondary place

women and women’s issues occupied on pre-1980 agendas of leftist

organizations and democratic parties in the political mainstream, a number

of educated, young, urban women formed a feminist platform, publicly

116

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. referring to themselves as feminists and raising their voice through a

number of publications. For these post-1980s' feminists, Kemalist women

were complicit with the gendered legal and social order of the nation-state.

They had enthusiastically participated in the modernization project and, as

mothers, sacrificed their daughters’ aspirations. In contrast to the ideals of

Kemalist egalitarianism, they believed that an autonomous female

personhood, a woman in control of her identity, including her sexuality, was

fundamental to the nascent feminist ‘rebellion*.

Despite their small numbers (Tekeli estimates it to be in the

hundreds), throughout the 1980s feminists continued taking public issue

with the subjection of female identity to the nation and its patriarchies.

They initiated campaigns to improve structural conditions for gender equity.

They were able to mobilize significant numbers of women to protest in

rallies or sign petitions in order to expose the inequalities of the Civil Code

and the contradictions with which the national public sphere was saturated.

The 1926 Civil Code had abolished polygamy and marriage by proxy and

granted all women of Turkey equal rights in divorce and inheritance.

117

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Kemalists also had given civil marriage precedence over religious marriage,

which was thus stripped of all but its symbolic power. In effect and by law,

Kemalist egalitarianism firmly recognized the conjugal family as a seat of

modem power within which, however, spousal authority was granted to

men. If Kemalist egalitarianism facilitated the liberation of the conjugal unit,

the married couple, from the extended patriarchal households as units

directly in contact with the state (Sirman, 1990; Ertem, 1999) post-1980

feminism was intended to liberate female subjectivity from submission to all

hierarchies, including the conjugal relationship that was created by the

Kemalist modernism .24

24 In a recent reflexive history of the radical feminist movement, Yaprak Zihnioglu, one of the founding members of the feminist movement declares that In Turkey, feminism is a rebellion. It’s a rebellion against the oppression of women, against the male-dominated regime and its accompanying society, against class oppression (despite) feminism’s ideological tension with Marxism), and against all forms of oppression and the institutional, political and cultural structures which nurture them (Zihnioglu 1997). Written in 1997, more than a decade after its inception, this insider perspective on the feminist movement as a leftist manifesto raises the question about what is so threatening for the nation's patriarchies about feminism other than the

118

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Turkish feminists’ impact might have been rather limited if their

efforts had been bounded by the intellectual circles of metropolitan Turkey.

However, the Turkish feminist platform quickly proliferated as the issues

were picked by the press and media and circulated among the popular

classes, at least in urban areas .25 The gradual appropriation of a feminist

stance by a monthly women's magazine, K a dm ca (Womanly), is worth

mentioning. K a d m ca ’s style was playful and in stark contrast to the radical

and rebellious style of feminists. K adm ca depicted men as “fellow victims”

who suffered as much as women within male-dominated Turkish society:

“Our men are blind with customs and morals. They never raise their heads

to see the truth. Once they [are] awakened, we will probably be liberated

all together” (Oztiirkmen 1998:281). Nascent radical feminists and

academics were initially critical of K a d m ca 's gentle approach to feminism

and “its consumerist advertisements and occasional use of sexuality on its

independence of female agency. Such a question needs further ethnographic exploration. 25 I am thankful to Nalan Ozdemir for drawing my attention to the extent of such impact through press and media. 119

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. covers” (Ibid.: 275 also Saktanber 1995). Yet these two strands of

feminism grew, contributing to each other’s success, asKachnca gradually

solidified its discursive bridge between the feminist journals and its

increasing readership. Gradually, K a dm ca's role in popularizing women's

issues and circulating them “to circles beyond the reach of the feminist

groups” was recognized (Ibid.: 285). In journals such as F e m in is t and

K a ktu s(Cactus), radical feminists discussed various aspects of male-

domination and feminist theory and politics. And K adm ca, on a special

page, ‘put hot pepper* on lips of public figures to show their disapproval of

discriminating remarks, attitudes or behavior or, ‘kissed’ those whose

behavior or words deserved feminist approval. By 1987, the initially

contentious relationship seemed more like separate realms of a feminist

agenda. K adm ca, in Tekeli’s words, “recognized issues brought up by

feminism, and with its circulation reaching 30,000 to 35,000, it played an

important role in transferring these issues to circles beyond the reach of the

feminist groups” (cited in Ozturkmen 1998: 285).

120

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Kadmm Adi Yok (The Woman Has No Name) a novel by Duygu

Asena, K a d m ca ’s editor, was published and gained record-breaking public

attention during this period. The book, through the experiences of a middle-

class female protagonist, depicts “the basis and conditions of female

ignorance of sexuality, which serves both as the foundation and the

metaphor for the woman’s lack of individual voice" (Erol 1992: 115). Erol

poignantly draws attention to the counter-impact of the potential of such

works for increasing feminist consciousness. In 1988, after the book’s first

year of success with 40 editions,MuzurKurulu, the State Commission that

regulated the dissemination of obscene publications, ordered Asena’s book

to be sold in plastic bags. The plastic bag is symbolic of the state indictment

for the ‘continued necessity of having to speak in two voices” (Erol Ibid.).26

26 “Since there is no direct description of sexual scenes or acts in the novel,” the supposed charge of obscenity can be conceived with respect to the women's double-voice that the novel so powerfully narrates. The nameless protagonist challenges the officially idealized “image of the modem Turkish woman as a bodiless and sexless being, and a self-sacrificing mother, who would endure anything for her children and family” (Erol 116). Erol argues, “Although the evolution of the inner voice is a female triumph, the continued necessity of having

121

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This act is, indeed indicative of the 1980s discursive atmosphere, which,

contrary to its liberal preferences in the economic sphere, also witnessed

the public rise of a religious or culturalist conservatism, or fundamentalism

that scandalized the modernist sectors of the society, feminist and non

feminist alike. The struggle was, to a large extent, about the permissible

public voices and their potential to engender social relations and

subjectivities.

By the 1990s, many women’s reticence to speak up publicly about

inviolably private issues such as domestic violence and sexuality was

broken. Also, many women had put aside their “symbolic shield," consisting

of dark dresses, modestly cropped hair and ‘natural’ unmade and solemn

looks, which was donned for fear that they would be publicly perceived as

seductive and inviting (Tekeli 1990:352 cited in Erol 1992). A sociologist,

Nilufer Gole, was pictured on the cover of a magazine with her long fiery red

to speak in two voices is an indictment of society” (Ibid. 116). Whereas this represents an accurate picture of the society’s preference for ‘its women’, here I wanted to highlight the state's role in forming or reinforcing the ’societal' choices for modem Turkish women.

122

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hair. In between a discussion of her comments on current issues, the

reporter commented on her style stating, in awe, how different this new type

of professor was than those of his own college days. Feminine feminism

was now a public conduct that replaced the sobriety of the Kemalist

‘modemes de robe’.27

W hile K a d m c a 's attractive professional woman, smart and sexy,

made her way in the public sphere, more and more women covered

themselves with various forms ofte s e ttiir, or contemporary Islamic dresses

as a public declaration of their difference. Tesettiir draws boundaries

around public and private spheres of life in two senses. By wearing tesettiir,

women are declaring their commitment to “confining their sexuality to their

husbands"28; however, and more importantly, they also gain the right to

27 I borrow the term from Kadioglu (1994). 28 Kadioglu (1994: 659) argues that women in tesettiir confine their sexuality both to their husbands and to the privacy of their homes. On the contrary, by declaring women’s intention to commit to one man for a lifetime, these women are licensed to have a public life despite being sexual beings. Many Kemalists are shocked by the display of romance by the couples where a woman is wearing a turban. Hand- in-hand, cheek-to-cheek public appearances are simple illustrations of such public

123

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. carry their unavoidably sexual beings to the public places for work or

pleasure. Tesettur isin this sense “an emblem of privacy within the public

realm" (Kadioglu 1994: 658).

The 1980s were also marked by publicity, which increasingly

demonstrated the many oppressive practices that women encountered in

their public and private lives. Two issues that emerged were virginity tests

and women’s battering. 26 per cent of women in Turkey were battered

according to a survey. 72 per cent of these women were battered by their

husbands (Pakeret. al. 1988). The booklet Shout and Be Heard published

by the Women's Circle, a feminist collective actively campaigning against

women’s oppression, drew attention to the possibility of a higher real

number considering the commonsense wisdom expressed in traditional

sayings such as “Kol kirilir, yen i?inde kalir" (The arm is broken; however, it

(ought to) remain(s) in the sleeve). Such sayings strictly enforce the

principle of privacy for domestic abuse and, by implication, enable the

expression of sexuality. They cannot be subjected to the moralizing judgments by the Kemalists, as hypocritical; such interpretations lose sight of the modernist

124

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. reproduction of potentially violent hierarchical relations between spouses,

between genders or between senior and junior members of families united

by the marriage of a man and a woman, such as abuse of women by their

brothers or mothers-in-law. The publicity about domestic abuse against

women also shatters the myth that it is only “ignorant, sick-minded or

drunkard men” who batter their wives and that such violence does not occur

in spousal relations between educated, by implication modem or

enlightened, couples.

The assertively feminist positions on sexuality, domestic abuse, and

on contradictory ideologies about women’s position or value, as expressed

by proverbial sayings or the Islamic teachings, drew reactions from all

walks of life-conservatives, Kemalist women and the small segment of the

Turkish left that survived the coup. In Berktay’s words, since the mid

1980s, “all fractions of the Left are now in agreement on the existence of a

certain ‘woman question’. They also grant, grudgingly, that the present

women's movement has evolved under feminist leadership" (1995: 254).

character of Islamist gender relations.

125

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Feminist politics obviously constitutes a threat for the image of the

self-sacrificing mother-wife-sister that has been cherished by all three

strands of thought. Islamists have been negotiating a Koranic gender

division that criticizes both the customary modes of male domination and

the universalistic discourse of feminist rebellion. Various ethnic groups who

are positioning themselves in the post-1980 hegemonic struggle are not

silent on the issue either. Cherkess communal discourses rely on a notion

of modernity based on indigenous cultural practices of heterosociality, to

use Kandiyoti’s phrase (1998), as a challenge to the westemist images of

modernity as well as a resistance to its assimiiationist framing in the Turkish

national arena.

“Refashioning gender” (Kandiyoti 1998), or more specifically,

regulating women's social conduct and sexuality, as well as terms of

heterosocial conduct are central to hegemonic processes of national and

ethnic identity constitution (e.g., Alonso 1995b, Yuval-Davis and Anthias

1989; Kandiyoti 1994). Imagining women as agents to preserve and

reproduce boundaries of ethnic/national identities, processes of

126

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. communalization enforced by a modernizing secular state often create

paradoxical demands for women's loyalties. Conflicting demands of

ethnicizing and nationalizing processes of communalization may constrain

as well as enable women to pursue their own interest as “enfranchised

citizens” instead of “wards of their immediate communities” (Kandiyoti 1994:

381). More specifically, Kandiyoti (1994: 382) emphasized,

Wherever women continue to serve as boundary markers between different national, ethnic and religious collectivities, their emergence as full-fledged citizens will be jeopardized, and whatever rights they may have achieved during one stage of nation-building may be sacrificed on the altar of identity politics during another.

What happens, if women’s role as boundary markers is defined

primarily and historically by marrying out of their group (in other words,

exogamy by lineage a n d b y social intimacy ),29 as in the case of the

29 Exogamy by social intimacy refers to the Cherkess cultural preference for not marrying with those non-kin men or women who become close to one's family by frequency of social association such as visiting or neighborly assistance. Should feelings between two people turn toward a romantic interest in close social circles, they are expected to put a distance between themselves for an acceptable period

127

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cherkess communal practices? Intra-communal struggles within the

Cherkess of Eskisehir, Turkey indicate that such cultural practices—

marrying out—may create unspeakable paradoxes for men and their

struggle for hegemony. Communalizing discourses, almost

commonsensically shared by nationalists and ethnicists alike, may imprison

men in their own doxic order. While women's continuing culturally

appropriate practices may be tainted with alarmed discourses of betrayal,

the issue of control of sexuality and cultural reproduction almost exclusively

becomes one of agency: Who decides, or has decided whom women can

marry? This is the core of the gendered tension experienced among the

Cherkess community of the 1990s in Turkey and discussed in chapters 4

and 5. First, another aspect of this quest for agency within the unmarked

national terrain is in order.

of time and avoid extensive social interaction with each other before making their romantic interest public.

128

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5. Whose nation ? Whose modernity?

The Austerity measures of January 24, 1980, as discussed earlier, no

doubt signified the beginning of a new era. The post-1980 ‘restructuring’

reputably brought about a tendentious ‘demilitarization and civilization’ of the

polity (Evin 1994) or an autonomization of civil society (Gole 1994). The

September 12 military intervention (1980) crushed the extra-parliamentary

opposition and factionalist wars and, for two years, eliminated the potential

political strife that could have stood in the way of the success of the

austerity measures and the subsequent economic reforms. The war against

the PKK (Partiyya Kurdara Kurdistan) combined with PKK’s coercive policy

of demanding the loyalty and support of oppositional Kurdish villages/tribes

displaced large numbers of people from the eastern and southeastern

provinces. The structural organization of political Islam, in banks, schools,

dormitories, publishing houses, gated communities proliferated and created

its own hierarchies of wealth, life-style and political disposition (Ayata 1993).

In metropolitan areas, confrontation between ‘peripheral and central

cultures’, to use Keyder’s terms, intensified in a comparably prolific manner,

129

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. transforming the urban landscape to such an extent that an emergent

discourse defied: Arabeskle§iyoruz!(W e have become an arabesque

‘culture’).30

The pursuit of democratization, a key discursive concern that has

accompanied economic and political practices since the 1980s (Oncu 1993)

entailed strong feelings of uprootedness and a range of intellectual reactions

to civility and collective identity. Many contended that the nation was

experiencing an identity crisis. Speaking to the weeklyN o kta magazine in

1987, Murat Beige declared, "With the Kemalist revolution we declared our

old identity invalid since we were going to get a new one, but we never did."

In a 1990 critical essay on the national question (Beige 1992) he further

observed

30 Day-to-day passionate coverage of arabesk music and cultural practices invoked unbearable tensions between rural vs. urban dispositions and values with essentializing overtones. Mixed with arabesk typifications, gendered (macho men) and ethnic (Arab or Kurdish) tensions imbedded in Turkish modernity project emerged. For discussions of various aspects of the arabesk debate and so-called culture see, Ozbek (1997), Stokes (1992), Sirman (1995), Markoff (1994) and Gungor (1990). 130

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. We don’t know what is happening outside of us. The outer world doesn't know us either. Compared to our objective significance to the world, we really are so little known. ... Ta$rala$/yoruz(we are becoming provincial). We are watching the world as those townspeople of the provinces would watch the happenings in the Capital. This serves those who are in power more than anybody else. A wider knowledge about the world would have made this people’s objections to certain things easier. Without it, a lot is possibly shielded by the ideological umbrella of “we resemble one another” (biz bize benzeriz). And, all throughout September 12 [the two-year rule under the military regime], the democratic world’s criticisms have been trivialized by the primitive propaganda which asserted that “the Turk doesn't have a friend but a(nother) Turk” (Tiirk’un Turk’ten ba§ka dostu yok) (112-13. Translation mine).

In order to indicate Turkish public opinion’s blind-folded existence,

Beige continued his philosophical ruminations by giving examples on issues

ranging from the principles of justice and constitutional freedoms in Turkey

to covert failures of various world political systems, particularly in the former

eastern bloc. He stands firm that

with our increasing provincialism as such and our distance from the world, we indeed solely resemble “ourselves”, but “ourselves” don’t look like anything (113).

Beige’s commentary is clearly a critique of national leadership on the

one hand, and of Turkey’s socialist ideologues on the other. His usage of

the well known, by now commonsensical, mottoes of Turkish nationalists is

131

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. bound to catch similarly frustrated readers’ attention. The buffer-effect of

such phrases readily uttered by Turkish nationals is undeniable. Especially

at times of national humiliations faced, for instance, in dealings with the

European Community, “the Turk doesn’t have a friend but a(nother) Turk,”

is a soothing comment. “We resemble one another” is indeed handy in

everyday dealings with structural inefficiencies and inadequacies, which

prevail and without failure try every national’s patience and integrity. The

national numbness such a phrase produces would most likely serve those

who are in power. Research on the uses of such phrases since they have

first appeared as nationalist slogans as well as their contemporary

deployment and effects could produce extremely illuminating accounts

about the workings of the Turkish national psyche. My current question,

however, regards Beige's positioning with respect to the national common

sense. Arewe really watching the world as those townspeople of the

provinces would watch the happenings in the Capital? Or, are we so

preoccupied with watching the world that we fail to notice who has camped

132

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. out on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, or what his/her

intentions are?

Beige is a contemporary thinker whose grappling with the

transformation of Turkish society, in the broadest sense, has impacted many

in my generation. As alert as he is to the emerging ethnic, religious and

class profiles in Turkey, I observe that he cannot refrain from asserting that

“we indeed solely resemble ‘ourselves’, but ‘ourselves’ don't look like

anything." Such a dismissal of our contemporary look and outlook is an

indication of the effects of the turmoil on the Turkish landscape during the

last decade. Moreover, it is an expression of the despair felt by many

intellectuals, including Beige. This is a despair felt vis-a-vis the

disappearance of Turkish-Ottoman civility and civilization in the aftermath of

post-1980 economic liberalization, along with what Tekeli calls urbanization

without citizenship (1994), increasing poverty in metropolitan areas and the

triumph of various parochial tastes, concerns, and demands in the public

forums and spaces. In a nutshell, this is the despair felt vis-a-vis what

133

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tekeli (1995) identifies as the victory of an overwhelming populist agenda in

the contemporary nationalist scene.

In a similar vein, from the vantage point of the late 1980s, in an article

entitled, Small Worlds and Grand Projects (1993), Oncu describes “the crisis

of Turkish elite" as follows:

The contemporary Turkish elite, whose consciousness has been molded by the very profound legitimacy of the grand project [of Turkish nation-building], in the name of which their forebears launched a successful revolution, are now being forced to reconsider some of its axiomatic truths. They find the interconnected logic of their own mission dissolving, as Europeans deliberately and self consciously attempt to deconstruct the nation-state which has hitherto been the embodiment of their modernity, and as the latter reach back into history to seek and redefine the parameters of their civilization. In the process, the Turkish elite have discovered that their long pursuit of secularism and universalism in the name of enlightenment and modernity, has been re-defined, almost overnight, as the oppression and internal colonialism of Islam and of the Kurdish people. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the Islamist movement’s bid for state power coincided with the momentum of Kurdish sub nationalism the Turkish elite found themselves plunged into a crisis of moral uncertainty as some of the most fundamental premises of the grand Westernization project came under debate (1993: 260-61).

Oncu’s discourse, addressing the outside world, or perhaps their

elite, is contemporaneous with the new ingredients of the post-1980 national

134

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. struggle for a new hegemony as an alternative to the 70-year-old ‘Kemalist’

one. These ingredients are two of the thus-far unshaken principles of

Kemalist nationalism, namely populism and republicanism. If the above

perspectives are representative of the struggle with populism (in some

aspects), what follows is indicative of the struggle with republicanism and its

binding structural effects as well as a commentary on its populist appeal or

function. The critique of republicanism was expressed as an intellectual

cry/desire for total structural reformation of the nation-state: “the second

republic”. In a tongue-in-cheek cover of the debate, the weeklyE ko no m ik

Panoram a (1992) renamed it as “the second elite republic” by claiming that

neo-liberal elites of Turkey (Euro-Turks, by self-ascription) are trying to

engineer a society ‘for themselves', in their own reflection.

The first republic founded during the old world order was constructed on the East-West distinction. The West and Westernism represented the modem, advanced, scientific and material welfare. On the other hand, the East and Eastemism [meant] backwardness, reactionism, ignorance and poverty. The goal of the founders of the first republic was to stop being eastern, to westernize, to advance to the contemporary level of civilization: “for people [but] in spite of people”. Those elites on top knew what was right or wrong for the people. For instance, they would even implement communism if they saw it fit; only could they, however, decide on implementing it.

135

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. However, “the second republic” that has been desired to fit the new world order is grounded in the North-South distinction. The North represents wealth, as poverty represents the South. “The second republicans” yearn for the North and want to reach there: “for Euro- Turks, in spite of them a g a n d a s(read people) (1992:14. Translation mine).

E ko n o m ik P anoram a! s writers argue that with its elitism, self-

righteousness, and ideological disposition to collide/identify modernity and

progress with submission to western capitalism, the advocates of the

second republic fall into the ranks of the Jeune (Young) Turks of the pre

republican era. And, they have the same barrier against them: people,

despite the different attributions the group has been given all throughout the

history (such as avam, kit/e, zonta, maganda). According to them, the

labels have changed but the dichotomy between elites and popular classes

has not.

From my point of view, these representations of the Turkish elite

(neo-, euro- or old) have one puzzling commonality: the absence ofre a l

people about whom each is speaking. Coming from different analytical

angles (critical and confessional) and speaking to different audiences (other

136

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ‘elites', Turkish and ‘Western’?), they seem to have reduced people’s

participation in historical process in Turkey to nothing. Transformations that

in the Euro-American societies took hundreds of years, but by structural

impositions of the ruling bloc (an ever-expanding and proliferating power

elite) were squeezed into decades and half-decades in Turkey could easily

be conceived as repressive or authoritarian, and some “elitist”.

Nevertheless, the lesson to be gained from the recent crisis of hegemony is

not to appropriate a complex historical process as an elite project, even if it

is to offer an apology or auto-critique. Suppose the Turkish modernity is an

elite project, then how can we understand my father’s desire, at the age of

eleven, to join the revolutionizing force of modernity by running away from

his small town, and the small town future that his father prepared for him? A

childhood adventure? How would his success at managing to register

himself at a free boarding school on his own will and skill be explained?

The argument of ‘class-against-class’ is insufficient in an interpretation of his

life-long struggle with Turkish modernity and its transformation. Similarly,

how can we understand the lonely small enterprise started by the son of a

137

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Kabardin serf in a distant Kurdish province? Shouldn’t we, as social

analysts, pay as much attention to the liberating aspects of nationalizing

processes which enabled that man to run away from local ties of serfdom as

we do to the disheartening fact of his distance from the Kabardin communal

culture? A complex historical process such as the Turkish nation-building

can n o t be reconstituted in retrospect as if a static, totalistic and unified

practice has existed since its initial conception by Mustafa Kemal and his

friends. Nor can the tensions inherited from Mustafa Kemal’s revolutionary

conceptualization and practices be mitigated by elitist renouncements.

Socio-political studies of the Turkish nationalization process, written from all

political orientations, defy such ahistorical outcries .31

Perhaps it is my anthropological orientation and sensitivities.

Perhaps it is the explicatory weakness of the sociological and political

discourses of nationalism. If our search is ethnographically grounded, we

may understand the relationship between the oppressive force of

31 Beige himself, among many others, has made significant contributions to our

historicized understanding of the political process, particularly of the Turkish

socialist movement. 138

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nationhood as a unitary project and its liberating premise of modernity as a

state of aspiration. We can also understand the grounds for struggles that

are repudiating one or both of these discourses, or giving culturally specific,

diverse meanings to them. Even if led by the elite (primarily bureaucratic in

Turkey), people’s struggle to join, to belong, to accommodate, to resist or

adapt to the macro processes of transformation and to imposing structural

reforms will only then be truly freed of their analytical confinement as victims

of the elite or passive agents of history.

Recently three social scientists, Gole, Kandiyoti and Mardin, have drawn

attention, in the same edited volume (Bozdogan and Kasaba 1997), to the

need for microsociological studies as a way to get away from the totalizing

theoretical ruminations or structural analyses driven by “a burning concern

with foundational principles” (Mardin 1997: 64). In Kandiyoti's words,

“’ethnographies' of the modem that deal with the full complexity of the

contemporary cultural landscape [in the Turkish context] are long overdue”

(Kandiyoti 1997: 113). Currently, “the boundaries of the traditional and the

139

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. modem [are] open to both multiple interpretations and contestation. These

interpretations are constructed through the perspectives of social actors

who are differently located with respect to class, status, gender, ethnicity,

and residence” (Ibid: 118). Furthermore, as I have argued so far, the

locations of these social actors are never fixed nor are they always

contradictory. As in every hegemonic process, social actors' positions are

constituted through the struggle itself, transforming each other and

refashioning the terrain of the struggle ceaselessly. In Turkish national

arena, what seems to have remained constant, for now, is the idea of

modernity. The hegemony of modernity as a national or communal goal, as

an individual aspiration, or as a 'desirable state’ seems unshaken. The

attained hegemony of modernity is no doubt a primary end product of the

process of Turkish nation-building, perhaps its only unrivalled aspect.

Another is, however, the Turkish nation, regardless of its complex and

conflictual composition, recognizing itself as “an ethnic group,” understood

by many as a product of centuries-long commingling and inter-

marriage/hybridity. Even if its constitution is less contentious than its

140

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. current political formation, Turkish ethnicity has become a constant of the

hegemonic struggle as well.

Modernity and Turkish ethnicity are then the two contemporary foundations

beneath the slippery and tension-ridden terrain of the post-1980 era, along

with the added impact of the 1989 end of the Cold War. Such a terrain

creates obstacles for nationalist projects of culturally distinct groups such

as the Cherkess. Cherkess hegemonic struggle for ethnicity is not against

an identifiable enemy, historically and steadily outside the ‘ethnic self. The

distinction of the ‘modem’ seems to outshine the distinction of the ethnic

self. How do the Cherkess, then, negotiate their difference at this

conjuncture? What are the core issues that represent threats, as

paradoxical as they may be, to contemporary Cherkess identity? How does

the community engage discursively or in practice in which issues and on

what grounds? The next chapter introduces the Cherkess community of

Turkey, and especially of Eskisehir, against the background of this complex

hegemonic national struggle and the challenges of the post-1989 break-up

of the Soviet Union. Chapters 4 and 5 then follow specifically to address

141

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everyday experiences of the Cherkess people of Eskisehir.

142

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the feelings and sentiments o f actors are largely comprehensible only within specific cultural frames o f meaning and style and larger frames o fpower and discipline.

Appadurai, 1996: 148

The ongoing interest in the history and cultures of the Caucasus and

its peoples started in the post-1980 era of economic restructuring in Turkey

and soared following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989. With the

consequent opening of the doors into the northeast, many Turkish nationals

of Northern Caucasian descent took individual or group tours to visit their

ancestral lands and villages, and search for their distant cousins. Various

members of the mass media, journalists and TV broadcasters, were among

the visitors. Some of these professionals were themselves descendants of

Caucasian peoples; others were simply keen on catering to increasing

143

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. public interest and demand for pre-republican histories of members of the

Turkish nation. 1

By creating a historic opportunity for national elements to bring their

commonsensical understanding of their communities' histories into the

“discursive consciousness” of the nation (Giddens 1979) (via Brow 1996)

the post-Cold War opening into the Caucasus epitomizes the crisis of

modernist Turkish hegemony. The post-1989 interest in and accompanying

awareness of northern Caucasians of Turkey reinforce the historical and

irreducible complexity of the Turkish nation as a fact. Simultaneously, they

draw attention to historic tensions of the nationalizing modernity instigated

and supported by the Turkish state. Most importantly, at the post-1989

1 The publication SAVSIRIKO(Guven 1993), a collection of newspaper and

magazine articles, is an indication of the soaring interest in the Cherkess and their

historical/cultural roots and characteristics. SAVSIRIKO starts with a 1935 article

about Cherkess Ethem. The second piece is from 1970, 35 years later. After the

occasional appearance of an article about an aspect of the history or culture of

some Caucasian peoples during the next decade, in the 1980s the frequency of

press coverage increases. Most of the volume contains articles from 1987

onward.

144

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. conjuncture, boundaries between objects (people) and subjects (the ruling

bloc) of state-affiliated Turkish modernity are blurred in such ways as to

bring about diverse understandings, interpretations and negotiations of

what constitutes modem. To what extent, in what aspects and forms the

post-1989 opening may impact the hegemonic national order, or

alternatively can be absorbed into its renewal, remains to be seen. This

chapter introduces the ethnographic subjects of this study against this

background.

The Cherkess are among the indigenous populations of the

Caucasus whose mass displacement in the 19th century was a cumulative

effect of colonial power struggles in the region.2 Consequently, the

2 May 21, 1864 represents the peak of the exodus and the tragic displacement of

the Cherkess peoples from their homelands in the North Caucasus. First

departures for resettlement in the Ottoman lands were due to the perceived

failures of the decades-long resistance against Russian colonization, started as

early as the 1830s. During this period, about two million northern Cuacasian

people were displaced (Karpat 1980; Shami 1994 and 1995). For the tragic

population losses due to the exodus see, Halasi-Kun (1963), Pinson (1993),

McCarthy (1990), and Tutum (1993). For an account of the Cherkess exodus in 145

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. contours of the contemporary Cherkess identity are transnational and, since

the exodus, have been contained by nationalizing projects of political

entities in the hostile camps of the Cold War era. The Cherkess in Turkey

are now able (or forced) to articulate their historical, social and cultural

origins and relations for themselves as well as to introduce the Turkish

public to their ancestral affiliations in the North Caucasus. In Anderson’s

sense (1991), this is the moment of imagining the northern Caucasian

identity in a quasi-eternal continuum from the past into the future a ll at once,

here and now, in 1990s. Anderson emphasizes that the nation “is always

relation to politics of population displacements during the Ottoman Empire see,

(Tekeli 1994). The exodus from the Caucasus continued through World War I

(1914). During this period Tekeli (1994) estimates, another “half a million people,

including some Turkic groups of the Caucasus (Kazan and Ural Muslims),

emigrated” into the Ottoman Empire.

Determining the exact number of Cherkess who were displaced from the

Caucasus in the nineteenth century is considerably difficult, partly due to the

contradictory interests of the powers involved (Russians, Ottomans or the

Cherkess themselves). Another factor is the totalizing category of the 'Northern

Caucasian' that the Ottoman officials used while registering the incoming displaced

people. 146

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (1991: 16). Brow, however,

has recently drawn attention to the possibility that “communal relations may,

.... possess both egalitarian and hierarchical dimensions” (1996: 19).

As one moves along a scale of communal intensity ... horizontal relations of equality may become more pronounced and vertical ties muted, but the latter are not incompatible with the experience of community, however uncongenial this may be to the purportedly egalitarian temper of our times (Ibid.).

While the post-1989 moment has inclined to dissolve all separations

as if to bring about a Cherkess com m u nita s (Turner 1969), communal

hierarchies prevailed in a struggle to put their seal on Cherkess

nationalizing imagination. Thereby, as it is introducing the Cherkess, the

chapter also foreshadows this struggle and draws attention to the historical

fault lines which distinguish the Cherkess not simply from the non-

Cherkess, but from each other as well. Such an approach recognizes the

deep, horizontal comradeship that defines the Cherkess community vis-a-

vis the other communities in Turkey but it simultaneously explicates the

ways in which the Cherkess nationalizing discourses “embrace the very

imaginary they seek to escape” (Appadurai 1996: 166). The possibilities for

147

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Cherkess community’s survival lie in the very tensions that the struggle

for identity manifests and in its potential to reconcile the hierarchical and

egalitarian dimensions of community within contemporary transnational

relations of power. What follows simply is an outline of the past and present

contours of Cherkess identity and its nationalizing imagination informed by

numerous narratives of modernity such as socialist populism, islamic

egalitarianism and liberal capitalist progress. Within such a historical

framework, nationally, Cherkess is a contingent categorical name for

numerous peoples of the North Caucasus who have historically formed a

unifying identity and now struggle for its legitimacy in diaspora.

1. Naming a Circassian: Who is a Cherkess?

In English, the C h e rke ss people( Q erkes or Q erkez, in Turkish) are

more commonly known asCircassians. Sharkass, Tcherkess and Jarkass

are other variants of this term in Arabic, European and Slavic languages;

indeed, the term Cherkess has been given by those “outsiders whether

travelers or conquerors” (Shami 1994: 190). As Smeets bluntly states

148

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “Actually, there is no such place as Circassia; and a single Circassian state

uniting all Circassians has never existed in known history” (Smeets 1995:

107). Smeets continues, “there are various senses in which the term

Circassian is used. The least ambiguous one is linguistic: Circassians are

people who belong to groups which have Circassian as their first or—

nowadays, in many cases—as a second language” (1995: Ibid). While

linguistic unity m ig h tb e a more unambiguous means to define a Circassian

than any other external designator of community, it is not applicable to the

case in hand. To a large extent, the experiential significance of Circassian

languages has considerably diminished within the 70-odd-year-old

transformist Turkish national context. It is also because this ethnography is

about the Cherkess, a historically constituted larger group, and n o t o n ly

about Circassians who spoke Circassian.

The difference between the terms Cherkess and Circassian draws

attention to the complexity of Cherkess identity in the Turkey of the 1990s.

My discussion below will demonstrate the hegemony of transnational and

national processes of identity constitution and state formation as well as

149

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. their effects for the perseverance and proliferation of this complexity

throughout history. Currently, the term Cherkess has been personally

embodied and politically appropriated to varying degrees. Its negotiation is

an integral part of the transformative process that demarcates socio-cultural

boundaries within the Turkish nation and strives to integrate the Cherkess

communities as an ethnic group with aspirations for nationhood. Therefore,

despite ongoing contestations over the unifying power of the term in the

national arena, the term uCherkessn represents both the affective and

objective affinities of the groups contained by it, while the English term

Circassian cannot be appropriated to represent this complexity, especially

as experienced in Eski§ehir.

A Cherkess intellectual, Berkok, long ago stated the non

correspondence of the terms Cherkess and Circassian by using another

term, Adyger. “Every Adyge is Cherkess; every Cherkess is not Adyge”

(Berkok 1958). Adyge is a term of self-designation among people who are

primarily included in the term Circassian. Circassian and Adyge can be

interchangeably used, as Shami (1994; also 1995) does by referring to the

150

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Adyge group as Circassian; however, Cherkess and Circassian cannot.

Especially in Eski§ehir, the term Cherkess does not exclusively designate

the Adyge. Berkok's broad use of Qerkes as an inclusive term is common

sense only questioned by a politics of difference vis-a-vis outsiders. My

decision to use the term Cherkess in this ethnography is primarily because

of its power as a self-referent in my primary research site, Eski§ehir. It is

also due to the term’s increasing historic and political significance

nationwide, or even, in broader diaspora.

In the Turkish national context, C h e rke ss is the most inclusionary of

these terms and only rivalled by the territorially defined term, N o rth e rn

C aucasian.3 The Cherkess are among the indigenous populations of the

North Caucasus; however, they are only one of several historic groups of

3 Colarusso has recently coined the adjectival form “Caucasic” to refer to the

indigenous populations of the region. His aim is to distinguish northern

Caucasian’s ethnicity from racially connoted, widespread term “Caucasian”

(personal communication). My choice is to keep the term “Caucasian” as an

adjective in an attempt to draw attention to the referent of this most naturalized

anthropological category, which is commonly used in popular and official

discourses in the North American context. 151

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. neighbors or kin. Non-Cherkess inhabitants of the Caucasus (and their

counterparts in diaspora) are marked by their linguistic differences, their

pre-national/pre-diasporic shared history notwithstanding. Thus, Northern

Caucasian, as a competing term of significance to designate the Cherkess

in Turkey, yearns for that “Circassian state that has never existed” on lands

that have been colonized since the middle of the 19th century. As a

Cherkess intellectual, hagur Fahri, suggests

Considering the speed of assimilation, in order to end any confusion that damages the unity of our nation and its future, we must strictly appropriate the principle of ‘one nation, one (home)land'. One land is neither Abkhasia, nor Ossetia, nor any one of the current political organizations. (Home)land is Northern Caucasia which has sheltered all the northern Caucasian peoples including Abkhaz, Adyge, Ossetian, Lezgi, Chechen, Karachai, and Ubykh. In its broadest sense, we can call this Q erkesya (Fahri 1977: 31, translation mine).

Underlying the term Northern Caucasian is, thus, the politics of the

desire for territorial sovereignty as a concomitant for imagining a nation .4 A

northern Caucasian national formation is far-fetched due to external

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. constraints as well as structured feelings (Williams 1977) about identity and

aspirations for its future. The recent war in Chechnya is an example of the

Russian fervor to continue colonization in the North Caucasus. The

Russian desire is clearly as strong as the desire of indigenous populations

of the North Caucasus in diaspora to regain power for a sovereign and

territorially bounded future in their ancestral lands. Post-Soviet reality,

however, also highlights localized pressures that affect individual and social

experiences of collective identity.^ Consequently, diasporic imaginings

regarding the trans-national territorial integrity of the North Caucasus

4 in Turkey, as early as 1908 the Cherkess people of North Caucasus formed

organizations and publications includingO im a l-iKafkas (Northern Caucasus) or

Qerkez \r\ their titles.

5 Encounters in the north Caucasus have increased awareness of the changes

brought about in the course of history in hostile camps of world powers. In

addition, experiential differences were even more shocking with respect to the

sudden deterioration of economic and social life in the Caucasus and to the post-

1980 improvements in lives of the early visitors from Turkey. Hopes for mass

repatriation quickly turned into a debate about who should repatriate (for instance,

the unemployed, under-employed or uneducated Cherkess) in order not to become

“well-to-do internal colonizers” going from Turkey and resettling in the Caucasus. 153

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cannot gain currency. The following pages will demonstrate the historical

constitution of the Cherkess identity in the Caucasus and in Turkey and

highlight the ways in which Northern Caucasian identity and heritage figure

in the current tensions and contradictions of Cherkess identity. Eski§ehir is

a prime site to observe the fragmented and contradictory aspects of the

nascent Cherkess ethnicity. Paradoxically, it is also an atypical

representation of its integrity. The possibility of Cherkess ethnicity, if not

nationhood, lies in this paradoxical fragmentation and integrity observed

among the Cherkess of Eski§ehir. The rest of my discussion will focus,

however, primarily on the national and transnational constituents of the

Cherkess identity and describe the ways in which the term Cherkess

captures most accurately the complexity of the group.

The Cherkess (Qerkes or Qerkez) have for a long time been among

the players who configured the political and cultural mosaic of the Middle

East. The name is believed to have originated possibly from a Greek or

Russian term that meant “those who live on the other side”. As people who

lived on the ‘other’ side of the Black Sea, they have not been isolated. On

154

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the contrary, they have continually formed interrelations of marriage, trade

and other political alliances with those on this side since as early as the 6 th

century Byzantium Empire. Just like Turks, their recorded prominence in

the region’s history is as mercenaries, first for the Latin crusaders and the

Byzantines. Later, in the medieval Muslim armies, starting as slave

soldiers, in Arabic M am e/uks, the Cherkess took and held political power for

almost three centuries ruling the Middle East from Cairo, making Egypt “the

unrivaled political, economic, and cultural centre of the eastern Arabic-

speaking zone of the Muslim world” (Britannica 1998c).6 Cherkess

women’s popularity in the Ottoman court and households is well established

6 The author finds it “curious that the Mamluks-all of whom were of non-Arab, non-Muslim origin and some of whom knew little if any Arabic-established a regime that saved a substantial portion of Muslim territory from pagan domination and established Egypt's supremacy in Arabic culture. The contemporary Muslim historians traditionally break the era of Mamluk rule into two periods and refer to them as the Turkish (1250-1382) and Circassian (1382-1517) periods, in order to highlight the change in ethnic origin of the majority of Mamluks. Mamluks also succeeded in establishing a dynasty in India, “in which the sultans were

155

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (e.g., Davis 1986). A strong indicator of the Cherkess practices of marrying

out (exogamy by lineage and by social intimacy), the long-standing

practices of intermarrying now is a double-edged sword in diasporic

communities’ imagination. Intermarriage with non-Cherkess is such a wide

historical practice that every Turkish national seems to have at least a

Cherkess grandmother in his/her genealogy. Such descent has made a

‘substantial’ emphasis on boundary demarcation quite difficult and leads the

Cherkess to perceive intermarriage as an instrument of assimilation and

communal extinction. Marrying out, nevertheless, is sanctioned by X abze

(or adet), the cultural corpus of the Cherkess, and is a distinct cultural

marker.

The contemporary Cherkess presence in the Middle East, however,

is distinct from interdependence and political power gained by way of

marriage and military service. It is the end product of a long-lasting armed

confrontation between the expanding Russian Empire and the peoples of

necessarily men of slave origin or the heirs of such men” (Britannica online 1998b;

1998c).

156

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the North Caucasus. The 19th century displacement of peoples of the North

Caucasus led to the massive entry of the Cherkess into lands that were

then governed by the Ottoman Empire. “Cherkess” as a homogenizing

name used in diaspora is an effect of this displacement. And the

contemporary Cherkess experience and identity is inscribed by this

displacement {muhaceret) and a sense of loss, which, in the collective

consciousness, has been alternately constituted as s u rg iin (exile or exodus)

or g o g (migration or exodus).

“Cherkess,” as an attributed name, did not have much significance in

local usage before the exodus. Shami states, “James Bell, an English

merchant-traveler-imperial agent, writes that as late as 1839, the term

Tcherkess was “never used by the natives, and even not understood by

many of them”” (1850, vol. II: 53, cited in Shami 1994: 190). It is not clear

whether, in the legendary distant past the term for “those who lived on the

other side” of the Black Sea referred to a specific part of the other side

which was inhabited by one group with one language, or, whether the

various inhabitants of the eastern Black Sea coast were all lumped in that

157

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. category. The second sounds plausible. Nevertheless, in the course of

history, the term Cherkess came increasingly to refer to one group, from the

northwestern part of the Caucasus, namely Adyge. By the time of their

influx into the Ottoman lands in the mid-19lh century, the “people of the

other side”, the Cherkess, were composed of not only the Adyge but

numerous other groups with different languages and dialects as well as

other distinct features of cultural and historic significance .7 However, “Most

7 Knowledge about traditional social organization in the north Caucasus is

fragmented. Mostly based on 18th and 19th century written accounts and oral

histories, popular discourses are quick to point out divergences among groups that

constitute the Cherkess communal identity. These discourses indicate that the

“Cherkess” in the Caucasus had already differentiated with respect to the influence

of monotheist religions, changing class composition and aspirations to transform

traditional social organization. Adyge groups primarily consisted of four groups:

P$/ (prince) class,Vork (bey, or nobles), Tfekot!{free

producers/cultivators/landowners), andP§ft! (serfs). By the 19th century, princely

and noble families seemed to constitute a small minority among the Adyge groups.

Their power was almost exclusively symbolic at communal festivities. By contrast,

Kabardin groups had strictly defined and many more classes of people with

various distinctions and privileges. In the same vein, whereas Abkhaz social

organization was not as developed as the Kabardin, Abkhaz(m princes ar$an) are

1S8

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ottoman officials could not distinguish one Caucasian group from another”

(Shami 1994: 192). Dislocated groups represented many, if not all, of this

diversity; however, in official records, they were registered as being from

“Northern Caucasia” (K u z e y K afkasya), and in everyday usage, referred to

as Qerkes.® Even Chechens and Dagestanis were considered Qerkes

(also in Guven 1993: 138; U§ur 1990). In time, tribal names and

differences among these peoples were somewhat leamt at least by their

neighbors in their regions of settlement in diaspora.

noted to be more privileged than those among all Adyge groups (Aydemir 1988). Traditional class hierarchies broke down to a large extent in the aftermath of the exodus (Habicoglu 1993). Turkish hegemony has inevitably challenged the traditional social organization, primarily to the effect of enabling the emergence of new classes, as well as diminishing the power of traditional leaders if they have not consolidated their power within its modernist order.

8 I have only seen the official registers for the Cherkess in Eski§ehir.Kuzey Kafkasya (Northern Caucasus) is written as the birthplace of the first person who was registered upon arrival. I do not know if elsewhere this registration style accounted for linguistic affiliation. In other words, were northern Caucasian immigrants speaking various dialects of Turkish registered otherwise or simply by

159

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 130 years after the exodus, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, the

contours of the term Cherkess had evolved in different directions,

simultaneously indicating its heterogeneous subcategories as well as being

appropriated to bridge them. Unsurprisingly, peoples of the North

Caucasus who remained at home after the 19th century exodus continued

calling themselves a/7

Adyge, Chechen, Karachai, and such. During the Soviet period, some of

these names were politically recognized by the creation of national

territories. Now in the post-Soviet era, the once-attributed term Cherkess

(Qerkes) is increasingly gaining acceptance among the people of the

ancestral lands. In their struggle for national sovereignty, the

compartmentalized groups in the north Caucasus, who did not experience

their identity as C herkess, appropriated Cherkess as an inclusive

transnational term to designate their collectivity. As is discussed by

Colarusso, during their Third Congress, held in the Nalchik in May 1991,

place of origin? Or how are groups from southern Caucasus, such as those who

are in everyday Turkish usage lumped togetherGurcu as (Georgian), registered?

160

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “the Circassians voted to change their name from the Adyge International

Council to the International Cherkess Council” (Colarusso 1991: 7). The

decision to replace Adyge with Cherkess was accompanied by an article to

refer to Adyge and Abkhaz in parentheses as primary constituents of the

Cherkess identity (Colarusso 1991: 7). Qerkes has thus become “a cover

term that embraces ... all the displaced peoples of the Caucasus. In this

simple change of name the Circassians elevated their society above its

former basis of ethnic aspiration to include all Caucasic peoples who have

suffered displacement, including their kinsmen the Abkhasians as well as

Daghestanis. ... [They] (Circassians, Abkhasians, Daghestanis) are all

‘Cherkess’; [they] have all suffered the same” (Colarusso 1991: Ibid). In this

broad transnational usage, the term Cherkess foregrounds shared historical

suffering and displacement and includes substantially different collectivities

such as Karachai (a Turkic group). Such unity is symbolized by seven stars

that exist “in each group’s flag to represent the seven tribal and linguistic kin

and affines,” says an Abkhaz researcher Hayri Ersoy (Ersoy 1993; TCizun

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1993)—Abkhaz, Adyge, Chechen, Dagestani, Karachai, Ossetin and

Ubykh.9

In the Turkish national context, increased knowledge about northern

Caucasus and their people brought about an awareness of the hegemony

of the term Cherkess, particularly in places like Eski§ehir, while at the same

time creating a counterdiscourse due to its historical association with the

Adyge. Territorially secure “Northern Caucasian (Kuzey Kafkasyali)”

appeared as an alternative to the term Cherkess, as I have discussed

earlier. On the other hand, representations in the national press and

9 The seven-starred flag co-exists with the older 12 starred flag, which was

“designed in 1936 by a Circassian princess of high standing at the Ottoman court.

The green symbolizes the verdant landscape of Circassia, while the stars stand for

the twelve tribes” (Colarusso 1991: 6). The Russian Federation has recently

allowed this provincial flag, called Sangyak Sherif, to be flown in regions.

The debates around the political “necessity” and ramifications of the Northern

Caucasian identity, defined as a political identity with aspirations for a

confederative political formation in ancestral lands, have been left out of this

discussion. They are significant and deserve separate attention. The issue was

discussed primarily in a publication called,Yedi Y O ld O z (Seven Stars), which was

published for a couple of years starting January 1994. 162

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. media indicated the increased popularity of tribal names, as if to contrast

the complexity of the people who were lumped into the category of

Cherkess with the officially sanctioned simplicity of the unitary Turkish

identity (see Guven 1993: 138). Such a celebration of diversity among the

Cherkess is as subversive for the project of Turkish national unity as it is for

the Cherkess community’s transnationalist project. My later attention to the

local experience of diversity and its cultural substance will illustrate the

ways in which such diversity, even in unity as in Eski§ehir, undermines the

politics of communalization as a nation and contributes to the creation of an

ethnic group grounded in diasporic territories in Turkey.

Whereas the collective name Cherkess is widespread all over

Turkey, the Eski§ehir Cherkess have differences from those in other

regions. Of the seven northern Caucasian groups, Dagestanis and

Chechens are absent in the Cherkess ethnic scene in Eski§ehir. There are

no historic settlements, i.e. villages, for these groups. Karacays'

connections to the ‘other’ Cherkess have varied from organic ties through

membership in one cultural association to alliances in separately organized

163

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. associations .11 Abkhaz, Adyge and Ossetin branches of the seven

northern Caucasian groups have resided in the environs of Eskisehir since

1880s and came to constitute a strong community as Cherkess.12 Abkhaz

and Adyge groups were the first group of immigrants to this region who

arrived in the 1860s (Tuncdilek 1974). These early immigrants preferred to

establish their own villages in the hinterland, away from the old city center.

There are 41 Cherkess village settlements in the vicinity of Eskisehir, 29 of

which are within its contemporary administrative borders. The villages were

mostly inhabited by homogeneous linguistic or descent groups; some

11 One such separation occurred during the initial stages of my fieldwork. The Karacays of Eskisehir formed their own separate organization. The Cherkess leadership attended the opening ceremony.

Around the time of the Abkhaz and Adyge emigration, the city of Eskisehir was primarily in the hillcountry. The incoming groups were shown lands in the valley opposite the hills where the native inhabitants resided. In the same flat land, commercial and business activities of the Eskidehir’s native population stood. The city of EskOehir started to grow in the Porsuk valley around 1888 with the arrival of “Tatar” immigrants after the defeat of the Ottomans in 1877 war of Crimea (Albek 1991). Cherkess immigration to the city center has continued since the 1950s. 164

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. contain different groups clustered in relatively homogeneous neighborhoods

of their villages.13 Currently, a significant portion of the Cherkess village

population has moved to neighboring towns or cities. A couple of villages

are occupied by only senior members of a few families. The Cherkess

population in Eskisehir city center is estimated to be around 25,000.14

The Eskisehir Cherkess are known for their firm commitment to the

Cherkess culture,x a b z e, and for their support of traditional leadership.

1 3 I have not extended my research to include a detailed study of village life. The large landowners and the poorest of the groups were among the first to migrate into the city center. Numerous traditionally well-to-do classes are remembered as having lost most of their capital accumulation (in land or real estate) for lavish or generous contribution for communal activities. Ethnic Turks of Balkan descent in neighboring villages and their Cherkess neighbors recalled an agricultural cooperation marked by their ethnicities. Cherkess women would not work in the fields, as opposed to women of their Turkish neighbors. Cherkess men were primarily remembered as absentee owners of the lands they owned. The common practice was to hire villagers of neighboring Balkan immigrants as sharecroppers.

The estimate is based on several privately conducted polls, primarily by political candidates or their campaign teams. The cultural association (demek) has

165

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. X abze is currently used as a term to refer to customs and conventions as

well as beliefs. Observing X a b ze historically implies performing ‘religious’

obligations, too.15 Implications of a strong Cherkess identity, primarily

defined as a commitment to X abze, will be discussed in detail in part two.

In order to understand the transforming hegemony of the Cherkess identity

in the trans-national arena, I would now like to discuss its linguistic, religious

and historic constitution by examining relations with ancestral ‘kin and

affines' in the Caucasus, with each other in diaspora, and present affinities

with other peoples (the political/territorial kin) of Turkey.

2. The Celebration and Containment o f Cherkess Linguistic Diversity

Languages spoken by the northern Caucasian groups, who have

recently rallied under the term Cherkess, constitute a complex language

about a 500-household membership and an ongoing effort to locate, get in touch with and recruit new house hold-members.

15 In Adyge language, no one word corresponds to din (religion, in Arabic cum Turkish). The word Xabze refers to all those practices, conventions, principles and beliefs, which organize interpersonal and intercommunal relations as well as those with superpowers of nature.

166

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. family. None of those languages is intelligible to members of their territorial

and political kin in the Middle East and the Russian Federation. There are

also distinct languages within the Cherkess communities. The following

discussion will describe this diversity with respect to relations of power that

encapsulate their development. In the face of the current state of linguistic

incompetence, particularly among the Cherkess in Turkey, contemporary

Cherkess discourses of community foreshadow the emergence of a

multilingual transnational community, to a significant extent proficient in

non-Cherkess languages while upholding the linguistic difference of

northern Caucasian languages as a referent for signification of their identity.

a. Discursive Differences

As a region, the northern Caucasus is as large as the state of

California. The linguistic diversity of this region finds expression in its

reputation as “the Mountain of Tongues.” In a recent overview article in

Encyclopedia o f Cultures and Daily Life, Colarusso compares the linguistic

and ethnic diversity in the Caucasus to Papua-Nsw Guinea and the Horn of

167

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Africa. He observes, "there are fifty languages indigenous to this region.

The ethnic complexity of the Caucasus is unequalled in Eurasia, with nearly

sixty distinct peoples [of about 4.7 million people], including Russians and

Ukrainians" (Colarusso forthcoming). Since the scope of this dissertation is

restricted to people who have descended from the groups that historically

inhabit the N o rth Caucasus, I limit my discussion to their languages.

According to an ethnographic survey book, Cherkess languages are

a sub-group of the Ibero-Caucasian family of languages. Colarusso calls it

the Caucasian family of languages (Colarusso 1991). Linguists debate their

origins; and investigations of their historical relations continue (Colarusso

forthcoming; and Weekes 1978: 174). For the purposes of this work, I can

list Adygei (Circassian), Ubykh and Kabardian as three major languages in

the northwestern Caucasus. These three are closely related to each other,

each as a language with

enormous consonantal systems, with rounded, labialized (simultaneous p-, b-, f-, v-, or w- made with the sound), palatalized (raised tongue), and pharyngealized (squeezed throat) consonants made at almost every possible point in the mouth and throat. Kabardian is the minimum with 48 consonants, while Ubykh is the maximum with 81 (Colarusso forthcoming: 8).

168

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Northern Ibero-Caucasian languages, which have been spoken

further east and south, include Chechen, Ingush and Abkhaz, respectively

(Weekes 1978). Chechen and Ingush are languages with rich inflective

systems and cases to distinguish different kinds of objects as well as plural

and singular feminine, masculine and neutral beings (Colarusso: Ib id .).

Abkhaz language is spoken by the people (A psw a) in the southernmost tip

of the ethnic complex in northwestern Caucasus.

Distinctions between the people of Abkhasia (Abkhaz, Apswa ox in Turkish Abhaz) and those who split off to resettle further north before 10th century (in Turkish Abazin or Ashwa, or northern Apswa as Colarusso calls them) entered Cherkess popular discourse in the early 1990s during the Abkhasian war of independence that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union (for earlier accounts of this split and relations of Abhaz and Abazin groups see, Ozdemir (1977). Until then, Abaza was the commonly accepted term to refer to ‘the’ people and their language. The new discourse seems to construct Abaza as, at best, a dialect of Abkhaz, spoken by those who resettled in the valleys adjacent to the Adyge and Karacays.

Currently, linguists debate the extent of differences between Abkhaz and Abaza (Apswa? and Ashwa?). The question is whether Abaza is also a distinct language or a dialect of Abkhaz (e.g. Colarusso and Smeets). It is not possible for me to

169

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The linguistic diversity of the region is not delimited to variation within

the Ibero-Caucasian family. Others to be included in the linguistic complex

of northern Caucasus are Ural-Altaic (i.e. Turkic )17 and Indo-European

language families. The first group includes peoples and languages of

discern the relationship between theAshwa and Apswa languages due to the absence of demographic information about them or their communicative skills in Abaza'. How would this discussion find meaning among the Abaza of Turkey who left the Caucasus 130 years ago? According to the Ashwas (the northern Apswas), the difference is one of a dialect. What, then, is the significance of the additional term Abhaz in the Turkish context? It is currently uncertain. Judging from the discursive power of linguistic complexities of the peoples of the Caucasus, the affinity between Adyge and Abaza, the distinction between Abaza and Abkhaz (Apswa), and the linguistic and historical affinities of all three clearly impinge upon imagining the contemporary Cherkess or, northern Caucasian identity. As a language Abaza seems to mediate between territorially defined affinities between Adyge and Abaza and linguistically defined affinities between Abkhaz and Abaza.

17 These are languages spoken by peoples such as Kazaks, Turkmens and Kirghiz across Central Asia and southern Siberia, and, in the west, include Turkish as spoken in Turkey and Azarbaijan.

170

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Turkic origins such as Karachai, Balkar, Kumyk and Noghai. The Indo-

European includes Ossetian, Ukrainian and Russian. 18

Northern Caucasian languages have been contained within the

political boundaries of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the

unitary Republic of Turkey. Their future has been determined by the

scriptural choices of the officials on opposite sides of the border, who were

driven by a desire to regulate, if not always to inscribe, territorial boundaries

as actual differences among people speaking the same language. Through

such official practices of language codification the Northern Caucasian

communities who are now reconciling their unitary identity have been

significantly distanced from each other. Linguistic boundary-demarcation

took place differently on either side of the border; however, in various steps

on both sides.

18 People from both Turkic and Indo-European language families, including Ossetins and Russians, contributed to the “Turkish national stock” and are part of its ethnic composition (for a recent fictionalized historical account of their adjoining to Turkey see, Bezmen (1993). 171

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. During the early years of the Soviet socialist revolution

(contemporary with the Turkish revolution), the Cherkess languages were

written in Arabic; in 1928 a modified Latin alphabet was adopted. In 1928,

as part of its modernization project, Turkey also chose to change its script

from Arabic to a modified Latin, thought to be better suited for the sound

system of the Turkish language (particularly its Istanbul dialect). Along with

other peoples of Turkey, the Cherkess switched to using the Latin alphabet.

The shared symbolic representations of the spoken languages, first through

Arabic, then through Latin came to a halt with the expansion of the Cyrillic

codification system in the Soviet Union. During the Stalinist period, in 1936

the Latin alphabet was dropped in favor of modified Cyrillic alphabets

designed for northern Caucasian Languages. Abkhaz (from 1954), Adygei,

Kabardian, Chechen, Ingush, Avar, Lak, Dargin, and Lezgi (1998a) have

thus been codified as different languages. Such linguistic

compartmentalization on the Soviet side of the border nurtured cultural

distances among Cherkess communities.

172

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. While Cherkess languages in the Soviet Union have decidedly

become literary languages since then,19 those in Turkey, due to the official

national language policy, have been left adrift against the high tide of

modernization and its nation-building project. Lacking the power of the

written word, proficiency and fluency in Cherkess languages in Turkey have

steadily deteriorated. Many younger generation Cherkess in Turkey, for

instance, have not been socialized in their parental or ancestral

language(s). In Eskisehir, most Cherkess in their teens and twenties have

a minimal understanding of their parents’ language(s). The generations

bom after the 1960s are articulate m ore in the knowledge of \he\r languages

than in speaking competence. Many Cherkess cannot produce the

19 Cherkess languages of the Caucasus were not yet literary languages at the time of their exodus. The Cherkess adopted the languages of their political affines or allies (such as Ottomans, Persians, or Russians). According to Online Britannica, “Earlier attempts had been made to provide written forms of some Caucasian languages. In the 18th century an insignificant number of monuments were created (with the use of Arabic writing) in Lak and Avar. Stone crosses with Old Georgian-Avar bilingual inscriptions, dating from not later than the 14th century AD, have been preserved in central Dagestan.” (Britannica online 1998b)

173

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. complex consonant clusters that are so characteristic of northern Caucasian

languages and so different than the harmonized vowel-consonant pairs that

symbolize Turkish. They also do not personally experience the difficulty or

ease of communicating with Cherkess groups other than their own.

However, in discussions about linguistic affiliations of various communities

to each other, the complexity of Cherkess languages due to extensive

consonant systems or tonal aspects continue to be emphasized. These are

now grounds for ethnic or intra-communal pride.

This flourishing discourse strives to establish and maintain cultural

boundaries between Cherkess and non-Cherkess, particularly Turkish,

languages and people. For instance, a satiric piece of lore narrates the

story of the linguistic diversity in the Caucasus, reputably the Mountain of

Tongues as such:

During the process of allocating languages to peoples of the planet earth, God ended up with a lot of extra languages left in the sack. S/he did not feel like making another tour around the world to further enrich its linguistic diversity more evenly; instead, s/he dumped the

174

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. contents of the sack over the formidable Caucasus mountain range .20

I heard this fO k ra (story) from various Cherkess I met during my

fieldwork and also read it in Turkish newspaper articles, which were

increasingly turning attention to these Northern Caucasians within the

Turkish nation.21 its repeated circulation, in Turkish, celebrates Cherkess

diversity. Its presence in modem Turkish also affirms the unity of the non-

20 Since I have translated the story of God's mischievous behavior from Turkish, I refer to God as s/he. Turkish language is not gendered, thus, does not distinguish female or male beings. Nor does it distinguish animate beings from inanimate objects or abstract ideas. All are referred to with the pronoun “O". If the story precedes monotheistic religions, how would God be mentioned? Rather, which God would be the one who distributed languages: The supreme Goddess Seteney? Her son Sosserukoe? Shible, the God of thunder and of war and justice? Or...?

21 For example, in his series of newspaper articles, Fuat UCDur (1990) credits the Dagistani poet and writer Resul Hamzatov as the storyteller. Another series of articles in a major newspaper was published just when the Abhkasian-Georgian conflict broke out Alpman (1992). For a collection of newspaper coverage of Cherkess peoples and history in the Turkish press, from 1935 to 1992, see Guven (1993).

175

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cherkess elements of the nation. In the current state of linguistic

incompetence, the Cherkess imagination is colonized by the ‘Russian’ and

Turkish’ powers represented as monolithic entities who manipulated the to-

be-Cherkess and single-handedly changed the course of northern

Caucasian peoples’ history.

The role ofhistorical amnesia, created by the long-standing national

policies to create one nation within the Turkish territorial state is undeniable.

“Selective retention, innocent amnesia, and tendentious re-interpretation” of

the past are integral for a national community to endure (Brow 1990: 3).

The power of non-national and unofficial renditions of the past have been

significantly undermined and gradually erased from the collective memory

of the Turkish nation. As stated in a 1987 magazine article, "Cherkess

people are known by almost everybody, but so little is known about who

they are and where they come from" (reprinted in Guven 1993: 16; Sardali

1987). Sardali observes, "Cherkess people are assumed either to be

descendants of Turkish-speaking tribes of the Caucasus, or, remnants of a

now-extinct indigenous population of the Caucasus" {ib id .). An Adyge

176

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. intellectual Izzet Aydemir further observes that in order to serve the Turkist

ideals and reinforce national unity,” a systemic policy to reinscribe the

Cherkess identity as (ethnic) Turkish continues. Semantic affinities

between Cherkess and Turkish languages are used to undermine linguistic,

thus historic differences of identity and culture” (cited in UDur 1990). The

recent textbook definition of the Cherkess as “Kafkas Turku," the Turk(ic) of

the Caucasus, invokes laughter among the Cherkess simultaneously

undermining and subverting the early Kemalist non-ethnic definition of the

nation, loosely grounded in Turkish language and a secularized Islamic

faith. Current language loss among the Cherkess is a primary indicator of

the success of Turkish national(ist) hegemony. In its attempt to deny

legitimacy, rightly so, to the Turkist appropriation of the Cherkess as Kafkas

Turku, Cherkess nationalist discourses fail to recognize the historical

choices of its ancestors. The following section will turn attention to the

ways in which Cherkess cultural practices have interplayed with official

assimilatory national practices to foster Kemalist hegemony. But first, the

177

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ethnographic reality of language as an ethnic marker among EskOehir's

Cherkess needs to be described,

b. The Turkish (speaking) Cherkess

While the experiential significance of linguistic competence among

the northern Caucasian peoples in Turkey has diminished, its primary effect

has not been assimilation into a Turkish ethnicity’ but reconciliation among

different Cherkess communities and an emergent Cherkess ethnicity.

Cherkess people’s appropriation of non-Cherkess languages long precedes

the foundation of the Turkish nation-state. As Smeets states, as early as

the 1930s, the Ubykh language in Turkish villages was already near

extinction (Smeets 1986).

many people may be encountered today in Turkey who profess to be Ubykh: these are ethnic Ubykh who either have given up their language themselves, or whose ancestors had already abandoned it. ... Mesziros constructed a list of Anatolian Ubykh villages where the language was no longer spoken (Smeets 1986: 276-7).22

22 Most Ubykh have been recorded as at least bilingual or tri-lingual people speaking Adyge and/or Abaza in addition to Ubykh. "As early as 1862, ... it was hard to find a monolingual Ubykh." (Smeets 1986: 278). Ubykh were a Cherkess group that completely resettled in Turkey. “Dumezil (1965:15 ff.) estimates the 178

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Eskisehir, it is not possible for

me to speculate about the circumstances of Ubykh’s abandonment of their

language. In Eskisehir, the issue of language loss is alive; however, its

representations are contested. Younger nationalists, who lack linguistic

competence in their parents’ language(s), are critical of their parents’

choices as much as the national language policy promoted by the Turkish

state. Parents' responses to such criticism are grounded in X a b ze,

particularly exogamous marriage {akraba di§i evlilik) and respect for elders

as factors circumventing their choices.

Abdullah bey’s explanation, an Ossetin man from Eskisehir, presents

an extreme case of a common problem. He was married to a Kabardin

whose parents spoke different dialects. Abdullah bey’s parents spoke two

different languages (one from the Turkic family). Abdullah bey described

number of Ubykh that emigrated from the West Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire at about 25,000. A large number must have perished during the crossing and in the first years of settling in the Empire" (Smeets 1986: 278-9). Since Tevfik Esenc, the last fluent speaker of Ubykh, passed away in Turkey in early 1990s, the Ubykh language has been recorded as a moribund language. 179

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the difficult choices that parents faced while raising children. Due to the

culturally prescribed distance between fathers and children, in Cherkess

families, early socialization is primarily the mother’s (or women's) duty.

However, until recently, families predominantly lived in patriarchal

households where a young bride’s domain of influence was considerably

restricted. “How can a young bride,” asked Abdullah bey, “teach a child her

own language while her in-laws are overseeing her performance in the

household?” It would be extremely disrespectful of her to privilege her

language as such. Turkish then is the obvious choice for her to

communicate with, thus teach, her children.

Akraba di§i evlilik (exogamy) did not always bring families from

different language groups (Cherkess or non-Cherkess) together. There

were many people in the Eskisehir community who came from monolingual

family backgrounds and were not bilingual themselves. Nationalist

discourse was often critical of the early modernist beliefs that perceived

bilingualism as an impediment for children’s learning. This belief seems to

have widely circulated in the society and was supported by modernist

180

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. schoolteachers. In the heyday of Turkish modernism, Cherkess women

themselves were strong advocates of it.23 Viislat hamm is an exception to

this. She is a Syrian Cherkess who, in the early 1960s, married with a

Cherkess from Eskisehir. Coming from a multilingual society, and a

cosmopolitan family of noble origins, Vuslat hamm was persistent to teach

her son Kabardian, her native language. She knew that he would leam

Turkish at school and in the street anyway, she said. On this matter, she

argued ceaselessly but in vain with other women in the Eskisehir Cherkess

community who insisted that her son would not succeed in his studies

because of her practice to speak Kabardian to him. “Speaking Turkish was

23 The stories of Cherkess women’s difficulties as brides in multilingual families are common. My own great great grandmother's story has inscribed her in family history as “dilbilmez cerkes" (the Cherkess who did not speak the language) who had made a conscious choice to teach her children Turkish, not her own language. Feride hamm in Eskisehir also remembered her difficulty explaining to her father- in-law that by answering in Turkish to him, she was not betraying her culture. Her Besleney dialect, which the in-laws did not speak, was so different from their Ashwa that she had no other choice. She would, and did, leam their language but it did not come easy.

181

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in vogue in those days,” Vuslat handlm said, "nobody wanted to speak their

language.” More than 20 years later, now she laughs away their scornful

comments, with the confidence of having raised his son, who was not only

bilingual but also one of the few college-graduates in his generation.

Were the other women misled or manipulated by modernist

teachers? Did (or do) they betray their children? These are poignant

questions that Cherkess nationalists today ask while redefining their identity

in a world dominated by national communities whose political hegemony is

in crisis. Any attempt to link an individual or collective agent of history in a

chain of causality to the present is doomed to face others whose historical

experience painfully refutes the credibility of such causation. Janbek bey

was generous to discuss with me the shame he felt for having parents who

spoke Abaza, and not Turkish. When they started to live in the city center

to send him to better schools, he told them to not speak Abaza to him,

especially in public. The structural obstacles set by a unitary national state

are not easily alienable from people’s historically specific convictions about

their necessity or functions. In hindsight, some nationalists may be seeking

182

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for “the guilty party” within and without while grieving the near-loss of their

languages. Such a quest is no doubt underwritten by the concerns of the

present and aspirations for the future of the community. As I have tried to

summarize above, the historical picture does not point in one direction or to

one factor, but to an entangled knot. The Cherkess in Turkey are those

who are unable to untangle the knot to envision their future state, unless

they negotiate their possibilitiesin Turkish, and this justifies calling them the

Turkish Cherkess. While this ethnography indicates that increasing

language loss and shared political experience among the Cherkess has

distanced those in Turkey from their kin in the Caucasus, it has not made

them Turkish in a substantive sense. Turkishness in kin terms is as close to

the Cherkess identity as an e n i$ te (brother-in-law) is to a Cherkess man.

As an eni§te is, Turkishness has earned the right to marry his precious

sister for being so far removed from the bloodline and for having a

comparable status to fit in the Cherkess line. As an eni§te is, he is

expected to be there for the Cherkess brothers-in-law in need. Those

eniDte who did, have remained united as one with their brothers-in-law

183

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (and their families) against the outsiders throughout the history of Turks’

and ‘Cherkess’, regardless of differences in language. Those outsiders, in

return, have remained as potential in-laws orfictive kin regardless of their

differences (or similarities) in language.

3. First Cherkess, then .... M u slim e tc. ...

Today, the Cherkess in Turkey are Muslims. Just like other citizens

of Turkey, their religiosity and its day-to-day public expression, or that

during the holy month of Ramadan, vary. Overall, many Cherkess, clearly

most in Eski§ehir, are steadily practicing Muslims. Many Cherkess also

adamantly declare that religion is always subsumed under Q e rke ziik, the

communal identity that cherishes foremost the timeless traditions

increasingly called X abze. Regardless of the stories that illustrate the

“natural” preference made for Qerkezlik at times of conflictual interests,24

24 This preference is indicated with respect to Cherkess participation during the pre-1980 political turmoil. During that time in Eski§ehir, as elsewhere, Cherkess people were active participants in every faction of the political spectrum, including the Turkist youth movement (with racial supremacist overtones). However, oral history states, even when their political ideologies placed them in hostile camps, 184

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. many Cherkess lives indicate a discursive struggle to balance the two. This

balancing act echoes the post-1980 nationwide crisis of secularist national

hegemony: the impact of recent scriptural Islamism is expressed as a

communal anxiety over survival, especially with respect to gender relations

and marital choices. The national Cherkess discourses tend to isolate

Islam as a totalistic practice historically detrimental to the Cherkess

community’s survival.25 Popular discourses, on the other hand, indicate

when a Cherkess was a potential subject of political assault, loyalties shifted to indicate the supremacy of Qerkezlik.

25 During the 19th century, on the verge of Russian colonization Caucasus was a place of intense missionary activity for both Muslims and Christians. Cherkess nationalist discourse remembers this chapter with disdain: The following account was used as the epigram in a recent chronological history of the Cherkess. The narrative of the encounter between a Shapsegh elder, Arslankeri, and a Polish mercenary, Theodor Lapinski indicates the tension between religiously motivated outsiders and Caucasians worn-out in their dealings with them. (Lapinski came to Istanbul in 1854 with the intention of going to the Caucasus to help the Cherkess fight against Russians. In 1856, he arrived in Tuapse with his friends, some money and ammunition he bought with money that was collected from the Cherkess women in the Ottoman court (Ozbek 1991: 99-106). Ozbek underlines 18S

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. more particularistic inquiries into the compatibility of Islamic faith with

Xabze, even though they share the same critical stance toward religious

brotherhoods and their politics. The ‘ideography’ of contemporary Cherkess

Lapinski's observation that the views expressed here were widespread among the Shapsegh in the Caucasus. You! All Christians and Muslims! It is hard to understand you who speak of one god. You are mistaken in your claims. Nothing that our eyes see on earth is one, but many and diverse. How is it possible that ‘one’ among that plurality and diversity can claim to be the Only One and the Omnipotent One? ... When we had many gods, everything was more orderly and harmonious because every god had a distinct and separate duty. Gods of water, fire, forests, mountains, humans and animals, were separate. How can one god overcome the countless problems that our world faces? Turks have previously come to subjugate us in the name of this one god; then, Russians attempted to enslave us in the name of that one god. In the name of that one god Ottomans incite us to fight against the Russians who, also, try the same for us to fight the Ottomans. In the name of that one god, Russians kill the Muslims and, Muslims kill Christians. Where is the truth in this? Tell me please. And you want to fight with us against the one god, but in the name of another one god. a different one than that of the Turks and Russians. Isn’t it odd? But we will understand what yo u want from us when the time comes (Ozbek 1991:1). In hindsight, Arslankeri’s mistrust is a reminder to contemporary Cherkess who, as the nationalist discourse emphasizes, have been manipulated by various powers and may still be tempted to take part in political causes that can only harm them. 186

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. identity, to borrow Anderson’s term (1991), is thus being re-constituted at

the intersection of secular hegemony, scriptural Islamism and Xabze.

The secular hegemony manifests itself in the Cherkess national

discourse, produced by metropolitan intellectuals and among the educated,

primarily male, members of the Cherkess community in Eskisehir. Much

like the secularist Turkish national discourse which condemns Islam as an

anti-progressive force, Cherkess intellectuals represent the spread of

monotheistic religions among northern Caucasian communities as a

historical cause of discord and a factor that bred dissent and weakened

resistance against colonization in the Caucasian hom elands.26 The

26 Monotheist religions spread among the Cherkess in the Caucasus quite late. Christianity, Islam and Judaism were preached in different parts and with different levels of success. Overall, the 19th century is a period during which monotheist religions spread among popular classes and mobilized diverse communities in wars against the Russian colonization.

Islam initially entered the region in the 16th century, from the west through the Kirim (Crimean) Khanate to the Adyge, and from the east through Dagestan to the Kabardin. Islam was first spread among some princely families or nobles (p § iand vorR)\ however, its appropriation among the people was banned Ozbek (1991) and 187

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Britannica (1998a). Ritte observed, “the Cherkess were indifferent to Islam just like they were indifferent to Christianity. Islam's eventual appeal was due to the discontent among impoverished classes vis-d-vis the oppressive demands of princely and noble families. Its egalitarianism triggered an interest as a tool for salvation. Karpat affirms this development also and attributes the 18th and 19th century conversions to Islam to the “activities of the Nogai preachers from the northwest and as a by-product of the Muridic movement in Dagestan," which was “the precursor of the popular mass movements in Modem Islam. Muridism preached a doctrine of social equality as well as of liberty and resistance to foreign occupation, for it envisaged the abolition of the Muslim villagers' obligations towards their landlords and elders and opposed by arms the Russian expansion into the ancestral lands” (Karpat 1980:10). Shora (1974) notes, however, even when Shariat, the Muslim law, was observed equally among all social classes, social problems were still dealt with according to the Xabze, the age-old traditional rules and regulations (ibid: 24).

These accounts are quick to emphasize that Cherkess adherence to monotheist religious practices has been erratic. The religious practitioners have been in constant struggle to incite an interest among the masses by distributing gifts including symbols of their faith. For instance, Ozbek notes that in order to recruit people back into Christianity, in the 18th century, the church distributed a shirt and a cross per person among the Ossetins (Ozbek 1991: 37). Muslims, in the same century, on the other hand, allowed the Muslim Cherkess to wear crosses as long as they declared themselves devotees of Islamic faith (Aydemir 1988: 21-2). Plu- theist beliefs seem to have survived a 77-year old socialist experience as well. In

188

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nationalist discourses also contest historiographies that represent the 19th

century exodus from the Caucasus as a religious divide.27 According to

such representations, the Cherkess who came to the Ottoman Empire were

coming to the domains of the Caliph, who, as the leader of all Muslims,

reigned in ‘the Muslim paradise’. Cherkess intellectuals emphasize,

however, that at that time, while some Cherkess were Muslim, many others

were not. Oral history provided in Cherkess publications is full of stories

about islamization among the Cherkess after the exodus. Some ancestors

who got aboard ships were wearing crosses, they state, which were taken

post-Soviet Union Republic of Abkhasia, Garb recently observed a revival of old religious practices such as sacred mounds and their ‘traditiona!’ guards as mediators for dealing with community problems (1997, paper delivered at the annual conference on Cultures of the Caucasus).

27 For displacement of Muslims out of the Caucasus, and other neighboring domains of the Ottoman Empire when ceded see, (Franz 1994; Karpat 1985). The Cherkess exodus also raises the question of religion-based exchange of populations during the formation of nation-states in the region. A similar issue certainly concerns the population exchange between Turkey and Greece in the early 1920s. 189

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. off by the ship crews.28 Many Cherkess were ‘socialized’ into Muslim

practice by the religious leaders appointed by the Ottoman/Turkish state.

Widely circulating jokes about flaws in Cherkess Islamic practices,

particularly of the Abaza, attest to this. Stories about early comers’ strong

attachments to plu-theist practices abound: about sacred trees29 about

rituals dealing with their dead, whom they carried back home under any

circumstance and from any distance,30 an(j loyalties to X a bze , the tribal

28 For a sketchy account of such experiences and the continuing existence of symbols of non-lslamic faith in various Cherkess villages in Turkey see, Aydemir (1988: 24, especially footnote 38).

29 K o tij is the name of the sacred oak tree, commonly found in the Caucasus. This tree was mentioned as the center point while performing the communal dance Wic. Wic is still performed in Eski§ehir and its villages at the beginning and end of every community gathering. In the dance couples line up and dance in a circle while subtly holding hands. While in a circle, each couple is taken to the middle for brief solo performances for the group. I have not heard stories of the significance of the tree; however, the dance was mentioned as one occasion for couples to meet and set rendevous for later meetings, or to be seen in public together.

30 Even in recent history, it is said that this Cherkess tradition has constituted a problem for the officers in the Turkish army. If a Cherkess soldier dies while in the 190

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. law. Plu-theistic Cherkess traditions thus discursively compete with the

Islamic scripture for power and legitimacy, at least for permanence of

heritage in Cherkess collective memory.

Such an emphasis on the ‘recent’ non-lslamic past mediates

between the secularist national discourse and the Cherkess X a bze by

simultaneously validating the Turkish secularist project of modernization

and taking a distance from its objects, the ‘uncivilized masses’ who need to

be transformed. As compared with the top-down secularization of the

public life, Cherkess social relations are “naturally’’ suitable for the present

times. The recent ‘learned’ secular practice of Islam is compatible with the

X a b z e, and brings the whole Cherkess community closer to the urban

secular classes in modem Turkey. At the same time, Cherkess secular

practices are authenticated and distinguished from those of the non-

Cherkess masses who, represented asg e r ic i (anti-progressive) ory o b a z

(conservative to the point of fanaticism), have been deservedly objects of

service, the others tend to run away to take the dead Cherkess to his home, regardless of the severe consequences of this act for themselves or, even, for the army. 191

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the modernity project. Cherkess discourse perceives these masses as

Turks, who are understandably subjected to the modernizing ideas officially

borrowed from the West. Turks, as the ‘natural other1 o f the modernity

project constitute a threat to the Cherkess Xabze just as to the secularist

national culture and its individuated practice of Islam.31

Aydemir, a Cherkess intellectual, observes that the Cherkess who

live in diaspora have a reputation for being more devout Muslims than the

people of the societies around them. He immediately substantiates this

“phenomenon of considerable truth” with an admonitory remark about the

ongoing religious pressures that the Cherkess people have to confront in

many facets of their lives (Aydemir 1988: 177). Among the Cherkess in

Eski§ehir, currently such pressure is primarily felt in the realm of gender

relations, particularly the separation of sexes and women’s veiling. As

chapter five will discuss, mixed-gatherings among the unmarried Cherkess

are a primary signifier of Cherkess difference. So is Cherkess men and

31 For a contemporaneous examination of secular national culture and religious practices in a small town see, Tapper 1991. For a critical approach to totalizing

192

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. women's stylish, within their economic means, public attire. The recent

appearance of Cherkess women in te s e ttu r, on dance floors, has therefore

become a communal concern. By masking the contours of a woman's

body, tesettiir's loose aesthetic undermines Xabze whose gendered corpus

is displayed on the dance floor by each man and woman as well as their

relations through dances and courtship on and around the dance f l o o r s . 3 2

For non-Cherkess Islamist women in Turkey,te s e ttu rsignifies “the

zone of transition from the private to the public,” “a ‘home’ that enables the

woman to be a ‘social’ individual” (liyasoglu 1998: 255). For the Cherkess,

however, with full awareness of the Islamic practice, which separates the

sexes at the onset of puberty and controls young women’s cross-gender

interactions to prevent potentially contaminating acts for her or her family,

te s e ttu rsignifies Cherkess women's premature withdrawal from the public.

Cherkess women are prized and integrated members of the community

tendencies to examine ‘different faces of Islam' in Turkey see, Mardin 1994.

32 in the same vein, whereas wearing slacks, even jeans, are common occurrences in daily life, occasional appearance of women who wear them on the dance floor are not tolerated and strongly criticized. 193

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. whose cross-gender relations are restrained only after marriage, delimiting

women’s public relations by her husband’s lineage. Consequently, the

recent appearance of young women who don the Islamictesettur on the

dance floor, although a small group, stirs up discussions about cultural

loyalties and contributes to the communal anxiety of cultural extinction.

Contrary to the totalistic and dismissive approach of Cherkess

nationalist discourses to the past and future role of Islam for the continuity

of the Cherkess identity, local popular discourses strive to accommodate

the two. An Abkhaz elder draws the boundaries between Islamic teachings

and the Cherkess X a b z e as follows:

There is no significant difference between Islam and Xabze. The only difference entails the practice of cousin-marriage. Had Kuran been delivered to the Cherkess, instead of the Arabs, then, marriage between cousins would have been declared ha ram (sacrilegious).33

The elder’s statement considers God’s caring attitude toward

customs of recipients of his/her message as well as Kuran’sre la tiv e

applicability to other groups. It thus validates the supremacy of custom,

33 As examples of the Cherkess Xabze's incompatibility with Islam on the issue of marriage practices see, Aslan (1992), Aydemir (1988: 25). 194

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Xabze, to define Cherkess identity. Until recently, the Cherkess seem to

have observed Islam just like the Abkhaz elder interpreted it—as if cousin-

marriage was unallowedby Kuran.34 Marrying out of their community has

been a historical choice for the Cherkess communities in the Caucasus.

Throughout their history, they have established and maintained ties with the

outer world by marrying their daughters with outsiders. Marrying with

someone from the same lineage, with the same ‘family’ name is still

abhorred. In addition to the lineage, social intimacy also creates bonds

perceived as strong as those of blood relatives.35 Such an expansionary

notion of kinship, formed both by blood and social intimacy, signifies a

34 | thank Waled Hamamey for drawing my attention to the Kuranic expression, particularly pointing out the difference between the Kuranic list ofacceptable marriage partners and its commonplace interpretation as an exclusionary list of potential partners in marriage.

35 in daily discourse, this choice has taken a numerical character for a marriage to occur between two blood relations, they need to be removed from each other by seven generations{yedigobek oteden), provided that the potential couple have also been raised at an appropriate distance from each other and maintained a social distance as well. 195

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. worldly sophisticated pre-national cultural practice. However, especially for

smaller populations, and in alienating national contexts, they take on an

anti-nationalizing power. Currently, the Cherkess are experiencing such a

crisis. Due to the limited pool of eligible people from among the Cherkess

groups, all over the diaspora, the Cherkess are forced to marry with non-

Cherkess in increasing numbers. Whereas the practice is still strongly

cherished among all the Cherkess, nationalist discourse is increasingly

weary about the implications of this trend for the future of Cherkess identity.

Recent cases of marriage, rare as they may be, from among the lineage

members or by social intimates have created much anxiety. With respect to

marriage practices, the Cherkess have consequently beer, caught in a

paradox: continuing to marry out brings about assimilation and gradual

extinction. The end of exogamy is unthinkable and can only be

accommodated by relying upon Islamic teachings. Privileging Islamic

teaching is itself a double bind: it subsumes the Cherkess identity under a

religion, Islam, and distances the Cherkess from national groups for whom

marrying out is a valued sign of modernity.

196

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Communal concerns persist and debates continue. Tribal councils,

as minimal as their powers may be, strive to resolve these contemporary

problems. Individuals’ choices to shape their future are made within the

tensions between Xabze, secular national values, and recent scriptural

Islamic practices. One young man’s search for his life-partner may be

instructive. Janbot is a 28 year-old technician. His life presents a good

example to indicate the ways Islam is both embraced an d repudiated in

daily life.

Janbot is an increasingly practicing devout Muslim. He has grown to

become more and more religious after the active youth of his early 20s,

drinking, speeding, partying carefree with his friends. He has since decided

to live a more reserved and restrained life as a modest Muslim and, also,

started seeking for a wife. During my fieldwork, he was still playing the

accordion, going to all the Cherkess parties in Eski§ehir and environs and

expecting to meet a young woman he could choose as a wife. He had just

quit drinking alcohol. He fasted during the Ramadan that year, but did not

force himself to go to the mosquey for a ts O (x\\qh\) prayers. He was

197

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. outspoken, however, that he would perform them during the next Ramadan.

During his lifetime, he experienced Islam in two distinct ways that may

indicate the difference between ‘oppressive’ popular Islamic practices and

recent scriptural Islam, which has created much concern for the secularist

Cherkess as well as non-Cherkess in Turkey.

Janbot poked fun at the im am (religious leader) of a nearby

Cherkess village in Eski§ehir. Thisim a m was obviously quite upset with the

gender-mixed gatherings, parties and dancing among the Cherkess. He

was trying to make the Cherkess women stop playing the accordion.

Janbot burst into laughter telling me that the imam had told the village

women that in the afterlife, as a punishment their fingers would blow up like

potatoes. “Such ignorance!" Janbot said, completing his story of the imam’s

attempt to fight Cherkess culture by instigating a fear of the afterlife and of

God’s punishments for women’s musicm a k i n g36 . This silly im am figure is

36 observing the accordion players today, one could derive the conclusion that, if not this particular imam, such religio-social pressure has almost triumphed. There are currently few young Cherkess women who play the accordion, especially on the dance floors while they are dancing. Young accordion players are mostly from 198

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a perfect fit to represent they ob a z (ignorant and fanatic muslim) of the

secularist Kemalist discourse who brainwashes the disadvantaged people

in the countryside or the outskirts of the metropoles. For Janbot, however,

unlike the secularist tendency, he does not represent Islam or one of its

inalienable aspects. The story speaks of an ignorant and condescending

religious official that Janbot and I could easily identify by personal

experience and by the modernist lore that bonded us.

A year later, Janbot got married to a passionately Cherkess woman

who, recently, had decided to don tese ttur, the modest Islamic style of

dress for herself. Setenay told me that she was very young (gok kuguktum),

18 years old, when she had first laid her eyes on Janbot. That was ten

years ago. It was at a wedding in her village. They met and talked then.

She liked him. Over the years, they saw each other occasionally, usually at

weddings, but Setenay added she "a lw a ys sent messages and greetings to

among the men. I was, accordingly, struck to hear an older Cherkess woman's (in her 60s) casual remark on this matter. “Is that our lot, too?” The unintended ramifications of giving up playing as a gender protest seemed, in hindsight, to surprise this woman as much as it did me. 199

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. him through common friends and acquaintances.” Last year, after she

donned tesettur, they ran into each other, again at a wedding. He asked

her why she had covered herself. While recounting this moment, Setenay

pressed her index finger at her temple and said mischievously: “he wanted

to understand what was in here.” “And what d id you tell him? I hesitantly

asked. Before I ever saw her, I had heard that Janbot’s fiancee was kap ah,

covered. Some had made a point of stressing, with a note of criticism, that

Janbot was changing, implying a disposition toward islamists. While

explaining her choice to don tesettur, Setenay told me that she had been

restless, was searching for something in life. She started reading a book

written by a contemporary Muslim scholar. As she read it she found hu zur,

inner peace, ... she said after a pause searching for the word. She added

that she had just purchased a mini skirt at that time and, has not put it on

since, not even once. She decided to cover herself instead. She was

aware, Setenay said, that she still has a lot to accomplish on this new route

she is taking. But gradually she will become the person whom her heart

desires, she said. Then she added hastily, “and people around you are

200

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. doing it." She was one of several women in her Abaza village who donned

tesettur, thanks to the young imam of the village, as many Cherkess men

jokingly pointed out.

All during my fieldwork, Janbot seriously searched to find the person

of his heart to get married. On his motorcycle he and his close friend Halim

would go to villages, attend weddings, visit with ‘guest girls’, in order to

meet new people. During youth gatherings in which we both participated, I

heard him express his opinions on gender relations and the institution of

marriage. He complained about the high material demands placed on the

groom upon marriage. The Cherkess tradition ofwase, ‘mother’s right' was

not that widespread anymore. In modem times, gold jewelry that would be

given to the bride, as well as a full-furnished flat seemed to substitute for

it.37 Janbot complained of the gold that was asked for the bride. He

37 Despite regional variations, increasingly, the practice of furnishing a flat for a newlywed couple has become common all throughout Turkey. Commonly, bedroom, bathroom and small kitchen items are provided by the bride and her family. Living and dining room furniture, curtains, refrigerator, stove and, these days, perhaps also a dishwater are provided by the groom and his family. For

201

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. yearned for a marriage based on love and respect without the material

strings attached. For Janbot, a respectful distance ( m esa fe) was key in a

good marriage. It was not acceptable or desirable to have disrespect in the

name of intimacy. Setenay seemed to represent that woman who was

committed to make a marriage work within the boundaries of a respectful

{s a y g ili) and restrained (m e s a fe lio r o lg u lu Cherkess ) couple relationship.

Her choice oftesettur was an indication of her resolve to remain loyal to the

post-marital obligations that many of her peers criticized. On her wedding

night, Setenay danced in her new outfit, a floor-length dress with a turban,

many Turks and the Cherkess, in the old days, (perhaps until the 1950s) bridal trousseau combined with the bride price would be culturally necessary to start a house (or marriage, if the bride moved in with her in-laws), to cover the wedding expenses and to provide security for the bride presented in gold jewelry(be $i biriiR). Considering the expanding needs to start a household one ponders whether even middle class modem marriages are so much outside of the realm of arranged marriages sealed by the presentation of the ba§lik, bride-price. Perhaps the ease of modem marriages is payment by installments as opposed to a sum total which had to be paid before the wedding. Depending on the families and their economic means, it has become customary to purchase the items by a down

202

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which was wrapped around her hairline and dropped to her chest from her

shoulder.38 |n various circles, friends of the groom’s family seemed to want

me to take notice of the limits of incoming bride’s religiosity: that she was

not a ta rik a (religious t brotherhood) member, just a practising pious muslim.

Janbot and Setenay’s conciliation of Islam with Xabze is not typical.

Nor is it commonplace. Secularist Cherkess discourses, popular and

nationalist, are nourished by stories of the exodus and histories of pre-

diasporic religious conflicts. Many Cherkess lives have been saturated with

contrasting images of Cherkess and Muslim ways of being and living while

striving to reconcileX abze with modernist secular ideals. While the biggest

impact of such contrasting images is among the younger generations,

secularist fears concerning the homogenizing role of Islamism among the

Cherkess to the detriment ofX a bze may be unwarranted. If there ever

comes a time at which Cherkess women inte s e ttu rdisappear from dance

floors, can we read this as a sign of Cherkess culture’s surrender to a

payment and transferring the payment of the installments to the couple themselves.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. particular interpretation of Islam. Otherwise, as ever, X a b ze w ill be

reconciled with its historical rivals for hegemony in ways as diverse as the

Cherkess people are. What Xabze precludes at this moment of Cherkess

cultural hegemony may have a complex story by itself. The term’s

contentious status vis-a-vis a d e tis in the air and indicative of the

intracommunal tensions unfolding through the hegemonic struggle for

contemporary Cherkess identity.

4. Going home or staying there ?

The recent literature on nationalism and ethnicism has shown both

nations and ethnic groups to be historically constituted communities in

pursuit of hegemony. Space—rights and claims over a temtory-is crucial in

such hegemonic struggles. In Alonso's words, “Baptised with a proper

name, space becomes national property, a sovereign patrimony fusing

place, property, and heritage, whose perpetuation is secured by the state”

(Alonso 1995: 383). A nation is most fully defined by a state structure

which through a ‘cultural revolution’ (Corrigan and Sayer 1985) transforms

38 For a discussion of Cherkess weddings and gender relations, see chapter 5. 204

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. its subject people and institutions to establish and maintain the hyphenated

unity of nation-state. An ethnic group is distinguished principally by its

differential power relation to a national body, produced by “the

particularizing projects of state formation" (Alonso 1995: 391). The

ethnographic case at hand agrees with this observation just as it does with

Shami’s (1995) cautionary remark about ‘the problematic relationship

between geography and identity'. This ethnography presents a strong case

that nationalism without a state, that is ethnicity, does not preclude the

possibility of nationalist politicization. More strongly, however, it challenges

‘de-culturalized’ representations of nationalism (cf. Shami 1995:2).

Considering the cultural revolution that Turkish state-formation is, cultural

identity itself is an inalienable site of both ethnicist and nationalist struggles,

regardless of their hierarchical relationship to each other within the political

community.

Diasporic communities such as the Cherkess whose dispersal is prior

to the hypermobility which characterizes the age of globalism, a proper

name and a designated territory are not readily available to craft a nation

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. whose heritage is secured by a sovereign state. The distance from the

ancestral territories hinders the Turkish Cherkess’s involvement in post-

1989 political process in the Caucasus. Local conditions in diaspora also

factor into the Cherkess politics of nationhood, often effectively

rearticulating feelings of displacement and loss in unexpected ways. The

discussion below will describe the ways in which territory and politics are

fused and separated in Cherkess nationalist imagination in Turkey, through

a range of structured feelings of belonging fromm uhadrfik (displacement)

or m isafiriik (visiting) to a zO n /O k (ethnic minority) which is an emerging

moment signifying the clash of territorial and political distance, as opposed

to the previously idealized natural harmony of territorial and political

sovereignty with one group (its rightful owners). As surpassing the first

(territorial distance) becomes possible, the significance of the latter (political

distance) in constituting a unified self becomes apparent. In the face of

territorial approximation, then, it is unsurprising that the diaspora Cherkess

are now refiguring their cultural position through the politics of their

diasporic territories both in Turkey and elsewhere.

206

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Prior to visiting the Caucasus in the aftermath of the cold war, in

Cherkess nationalist imagination in Turkey the notion of homeland went

along with a discourse of repatriation (ddnu$). The end o f Soviet

domination in the Caucasus initially provided fresh blood for hopes of

repatriation. In community meetings all over Turkey, missions from the

newly independent 'Cherkess* republics from the Caucasus and the Turkish

Cherkess mutually expressed their desire for such reunion in order to

advance their societies and discussed terms of its realization. Speakers

repeatedly said that the Cherkess people's "130 year long life-as-guests

{m isa fir) in Turkey was over. Turkish state had been a good host (evsahibi)

but now it was time to return home.” The Cherkess community’s concerns

regarding repatriation were, however, diverse. Whereas there was

considerable desire among younger Cherkess to go to the Caucasus, older

generation Cherkess were hesitant at best. The question frequently raised

by the Cherkess men and women in their late teens and early 20s

highlighted the generational difference regarding repatriation: “How can I

repatriate? My father hid my birth certificate so that I wouldn’t leave.”

207

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hiding birth certificates was a precaution taken by the parents, who were

alarmed by Cherkess youth’s involvement in the Caucasian wars and

restructuring, to prevent their children from getting passports to leave the

country. During the previous year some Cherkess men and women, not

more than a couple of dozen altogether, had taken off without any warning

to join the war in Abkhasia. Some returned as veterans, such as Tahir from

Eski§ehir, others sent messages of their health via letters, videotapes of the

war, or visitors. Others did not come back. Kamil’s best friend Bahaddr,

also from Eski§ehir, was among those Turkish Cherkess who died in war in

lands where he felt he belonged. W here was homeland and w h a t m ade it

h o m e ? 3 9

The Cherkess settled in the national lands of the Turkish state at

least 60 years before its establishment. If you consider the fact that the

Turkish nation-state was 70 odd years old during my fieldwork, you may

also ponder: why? “Home is 70/ /where you are fulfilled!” Cherkess

39 For a contemporaneous account of repatriation experience and discourse see, Shami 1995. Also, for a historical fictionalized narrative of the exodus and the

208

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nationalists contest the Turkish proverbial saying, which was pronounced in

good faith by many Cherkess as well.40 a nation’s home, Cherkess

nationalism insists, is originary—the place where the group originated, and

is essentially rooted. The Cherkess, however, were uprooted coercively by

the 19th century exodus and their home vata( n) was colonized. They were

guests (m is a fi/) in Turkey, as the visitors stressed, at best m uh aa rs

(displaced) as nationalists affirmed.41 M u h a c iris a word of Arabic origin,

initial years in the Ottoman domains see, Shynkhuba (1986).

40 The complete version of the saying states: “Vatan dogdugun degil, doydugun yerdir,” in literal translation, Homeland is where your [stomach] is full, n o t the place in which you were bom.

41 in the Cherkess nationalist literature there is considerable controversy due to the choice of words in discussions of the 19th century exodus due to their implications of voluntarism or coercion. Muhacir 'xs preferred due to its connotation of displacement, as a movement out of desperation if not by actual use of external physical force. Recently, Aydemir explained his choice ofGog (migration, exodus) to refer to the Cherkess exodus as such: (Aydemir 1988). Another recent publication, collected articles which discuss various aspects of the exodus, not consistently emphasizing its coercive aspect, was entitled “Exile/exodus”. In his

209

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which in Turkish means immigrant. For some nationalists, however,

m u h a c iriik signified the coerced separation from the homelands in the

Caucasus as much as its traumatic inscription on the communal psyche.

The Turkish word for m uhacir, which symbolizes the same movement,

comes fromg o g m e ka r\6 traditionally connotes the seasonal migrations of

nomads. Its contemporary meaning also implies a change of permanent

residence, often as a voluntary move, from one country or city to another.

By implication, gogm en, the person who migrates, has not only departed

willingly but also has the intention to stay and a desire to belong (or blend

in), by choice, in the land of arrival. By declaring their belonging to the

originary lands beyond the national boundaries, the Cherkess nationalists

article written for the 125th anniversary of the exodus, Tutum (1993), on the other hand, demands to know: Is this immense occurrence ma igration, an exile, or genocide? Why, where and how did it start and how was it implemented? Who was included/effected by it? What were its consequences? What roles did the Ottomans and British play in the resistance and forced displacement of the Cherkess? How does [this exodus] compare to other historically recorded ones? What problems have been inherited from it? These kinds of questions still beg for satisfactory answers (Tutum 1993: 3). 210

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. maintain, and even establish, a distance between themselves and their

territorial kin in Turkey.

Such a distance is manifest in the poetic expressions of

displacement in which the Caucasus is reminisced as the mother from

whose bosom the Cherkess people have been brutally separated.42 Such

feelings ofm u h a c e re(displacement) t could not be alleviated by the

promised political kinship, by way of equal civic rights, within the Turkish

national territory, due to the nationalist imagination's blind-spot to recognize

42 Yearning for the mother Caucasus through prose and poetry is a strikingly male Cherkess representation. An example of such representation is in the letters composed by a schoolteacher in 1970s. As one of the separated sons, he is the recipient of the letters: I haven’t written to you in a long while. Believe me, I have not written to your siblings in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Spain ... either. I don't know why... as if I had lost ail my strength. All my hope was exhausted. I was like a mother with no child. I felt so lonely. No!! No!! I am not alone; your brothers are here. Yes they are ... but I want to seeyou by my side also. You are like my two hands. One hand is in good health but the other ...? You see one hand cannot make it clap, son. Come... Come back and hold hands. Hold hands [with your brothers] so that your voice is heard....

If your mother were not obliged to wait for your return, she would not be the same. And yet... such a strong love ... such yearning... You cannot overlook that love... You cannot overcome the yearning... 211

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ethnic difference either by culture or by history. It was only after the

territorial distance was surpassed, in the post-1989 era, that the naturalized

associations, which conflated culture, territory and politics in the Cherkess

nationalist imagination were reconfigured vis-a-vis history.43 The visits to

the Caucasus have manifested, painfully, the effects of history on the key

cultural values of the Cherkess and the extent of their integration into the

Turkish national culture. The historical distance felt unbearable and

impossible to surpass without the support of Cherkess women, for a

majority of whom the homeland or motherland (ana-vatan) was Turkey,

where they were rooted and their immediate ancestors were buried.44 As

the discourse of repatriation subsided, the Turkish Cherkess turned their

43 in Shami’s words, the experience of post-1989 encounters in the Caucasus can be called “the non-recognition of the self.” For various aspects of this experience see, Shami (1995).

44 Repatriation was dropped from the agenda for a number of complicated reasons. They deserve separate attention. The different attitudes among men and women were mentioned due to its relevance for the Cherkess struggle for identity and difference in the Turkish national context. This gendered struggle is the subject of discussion in the following chapters. 212

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. eyes to their political kin, or hosts, and to their agendas with a renewed

interest.

One of the first markers of the changing attitude was the quiet

appropriation of a new referent to signify the Caucasus. The Caucasus was

now redefined as atavatan ancestral O , lands.45 Culturally speaking,

atavatam is at a safe and respected distance from a n a v a ta n O

(motherland). Atavatam conjures up a generational separation (more than

one) during which significant changes in the corporeal and spiritual body

can occur. However,anavatan mediates by legitimately embodying each

and every substantial element as well as those forsaken by history, having

the capacity simultaneously to transmit them from the older generationsa n d

to accommodate the ambitions of the rebellious younger ones. Through a

discursive move to constitute the Caucasus as atavatan instead of

anavatan, then, the significance of the originary lands was removed to a

respectable distance in a way to reconcile the Cherkess with their political

45 A ta in contemporary Turkish means ancestor. In old Turkish it meant father or, even elder brother, as another paternal figure for a younger brother. 213

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. kin in Turkey as well as with the historical ‘choices’ of their immediate

ancestors. This, I believe, is a turning point for the Cherkess as they

redefine their trans-national sprawl in diaspora and their participation in the

Turkish nation, as much as to envision a nation of their own in ancestral

lands. Such reterritorialization carries the potential for the Cherkess to join

other groups who are transforming Turkish national hegemony since the

1980s. Its effects on feelings ofmuhaartikaxe to be seen.

5. A First Step in the National Arena?

A Cherkess man, Hayri bey, commented on the changing attitudes

among his fellow Cherkess in Eski§ehir following the breakup of the Soviet

Union, particularly after the shocking stories of encounters with the long-lost

kin in the Caucasus had accumulated: “Some people used to harshly

criticize those Cherkess who actively participated in the Turkish political

system,” he said, laughing. “They don't, anymore.” The Cherkess now

have decided to have a say in Turkish politics, in the future of Turkish

society and the place of the Cherkess community in it. To the extent that

the Cherkess political involvement proclaims its communal integrity within

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the nation, this is a new attitude. It is a new attitude particularly for those

Cherkess who historically have lived in the countryside and were able to

maintain a sense of distinct community until the 1980s. Times have since

changed.

The Cherkess have opened up since the boundaries around their

identity could not keep Turkish society out. These boundaries have

become undesirably porous since the Cherkess moved into urban centers.

Turkish culture also penetrated into the local communities as well through

mass media. As the voices of others, Kurds, Alevis and Islamists became

heard loudly in the post-1980 Turkish national political arena, the Cherkess

nationalists were also forced to reevaluate their position in national politics

and its cultural and historical premise.

If the Cherkess nationalists could now make peace with their

ancestors' displacement from the Caucasus and adopt Turkey as home, it

was not in order to forget their cultural difference or its complex historical

constitution in and outside of the Caucasus. On the contrary, it was to re

assess the Cherkess role and membership in the modem Turkish nation-

215

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. state, and to take their deserved place in its historical memory. This meant

negotiating a position as an ethnic group, perhaps a minority ( azm hk), and

challenging the unitary national premise of the Turkish state to the demise

of communal rights for maintaining cultural continuity and historical

specificity.4®

The Cherkess have so far been loyal constituents of the political

parties of their choice without demanding much in return for the Cherkess

communities. They “learned the rules of the game of politics,” as an

emerging Cherkess nationalist leader, Baykan, recently declared. It is time,

Baykan emphasized, that the Cherkess use their voting power to raise their

Such a move brings the official and internationally accepted definition of azm hk (minority) into the limelight. According to the Lausanne Treaty, the definitive document which sealed the Turkish nation-state's establishment, religious difference distinguished a minority from those unmarked citizens, i.e. the majority. The post-1980 identity struggles are then hindered by and contest such a definition. For the Cherkess, the issue appears to be rights for cultural expression as equal partners with the political kin in Turkey, as opposed to the implied secondary status of a tolerated minority. Such a position attests to the hegemony

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. voice and gain their rightful place in the Turkish society. In the introductory

issue of a recent political magazine, M arje (introductory issue, 1992: 3), his

editorial elaborated:

Today, representatives of Rum and Armenian organizations, directors of Alevi organizations and confederations are having meetings with Prime Minister Demire! and Secretary of State Indnu. Kurdish parliamentarians and Democratic People’s Organizations are discussing their issues with people in the highest leadership positions. By means of mass media, they are taking a place in the public agenda. Serials and books in far more than ten ethnic languages are published. And we the Cherkess are stagnating as we have always done in every country we have ever lived and all throughout our history.{Ib id . translation mine.)

Baykan and others advocated that the new position of the Cherkess

in the national political arena should be negotiated in the public sphere by

way of print media. M a rje started its ‘professional’ life in June 1992 eight

months after its introductory issue was published and distributed. In his first

editorial, Sonmez Baykan also stated the primary motivation to publish

Marje as

to inscribe our national and cultural identity among our constituency, in the public opinion of the country we live in as well as in the world;

of the Kemalist nation’s populist egalitarianism and yet subverts its premise of modernity as a track that a unified body of indiscriminate individuals follows. 217

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in order to be on the agenda of the country [i.e. Turkey], and to discuss our problems in a democratic manner on each platform {Ib id .).

Every Cherkess, he adds, needs to make an effort along these

lines. Marje. he hopes, will be a powerful voice in this endeavor.M arje, as

the Cherkess name implies (go ahead, come along now, a little effort) is an

attempt—the first one—to have a professional Cherkess publication in

Turkey.47 Marje’s publication is also the first attempt to legitimately use

the Cherkess language in a public medium in Turkey. The provocative

tone of Baykan's editorial is a radical shift in political attitude compared to

the previous public presence of the Cherkess in Turkey.4® It is in this

47 The Cherkess publication scene in Turkey has actually been very active, perhaps more than that of the groups Baykan mentions in his editorial. However, those Cherkess publications have been limited to Cherkess audiences, written exdusive/yXo address issues of cultural continuity, assimilation and ancestral lands in the Caucasus. They have been distributed through the Cherkess cultural organizations and supported by the few Cherkess who subsidize their publication or the people who volunteer their time and labor to the publications.

4® Istanbul, Ankara and Samsun have been major centers in which important publications were published throughout the history of the Republic of Turkey.

218

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sense that Baykan emphasizes the position of Marje among Cherkess

publications as “the first” and “professional" political magazine. Such an

effort may mobilize the northern Caucasian communities in Turkey around

the Cherkess identity as an ethnic group dedicated to redefine its past and

envision its future position in Turkey. This is a nationwide project whose

primary target is the Turkish national identity as it has been legislated as

well as its popular constructions inscribed upon the national common

sense. However, such a political project also challenges the very principle

o f X a bze (tradition), which cherishes hierarchies of power that are

organized by age and gender.

In the following chapters, I will turn my attention exclusively to the

ways in which the Cherkess identity was experienced and negotiated in

Eskisehir. This focus will enhance our understanding of the localized

concerns in relation to the nationalizing discursive practices of the Turkish

state and of the Cherkess nationalists. If the current moment indicates a

Major serials of the last several decades are: Kamgi, later as Yamgi, K afdagi and Nartlann Sesifrom Ankara, Kuzey Kafkasya and recently Yedi Yildizirom Istanbul and Kafkasya Gerge£ifrom Samsun. 219

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. transition from feeling like guests to owning the home, the terms of

ownership would also entail a negotiation of naturalized Cherkess cultural

values within the broader hegemonic process, providing alternatives for the

community members as much as challenging others. Then, how communal

identity is negotiated within Eski§ehir's Cherkess community would indicate

to what extent and on what grounds Cherkess cultural continuity can be

secured within the boundaries of the Turkish nation-state.

220

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Four: The D em ek. Site Of Urban Cultural Continuity?

1. Initiations: the First Caucasian Youth Night

The ethnographic present is September 1993.

In a developing middle class neighborhood, / am sitting in the backyard o f a two-story house in a wooden chair with its back to the wall. The house is home to the Eski§ehir Kafkas Folklor Demegi.1 The y a rd h a s been cleared o f trees and plants and turned into a platform o f some sort. The 2-3 m eter high whitewashed walls demarcate the boundaries, and presumably add to the feeling o f privacy and o f being separated from "outside"intrusion. Nevertheless, this is an illusion since,

1 The full name of the Cherkess Cultural Association currently is: Eski§ehir Kuzey Kafkas Kiiltur ve Dayani§ma Demegi (Northern Caucasian Cultural and Solidarity Association of Eskisehir). During the time of my fieldwork it was called Eski§ehir Kafkas Folklor Demegi (Caucasian Folklore Association of Eskisehir). The change in its name reflects the recent trends to emphasize 1) the distinctiveness of northern Caucasian cultures from those in southern Caucasia such as Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani; 2) the desire to adopt the name Northern Caucasian in place of the problematic historically attributed name, Cherkess and 3) a statement about not simply being an organization for performing Caucasian foikdances but, at the same time, being engaged in other cultural activities as an ethnic group. As a quick reference I will refer to it as simplydemek, as it was commonly used by its members and clientele, or if necessary, in English, as the (Cherkess) Cultural Association. Communal debates about the name of the association and their historical background are subject of discussion later in this chapter.

221

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ironically, it is the higher walls formed by the six-story concrete "modem"buildings surrounding the courtyard that really enhance the feeling o f being enclosed in the sm all backyard. And yet these walls do not keep the outside world 'out'; to the contrary, they bring it in.

i look up and see a man, leaning out o f one o f those windows. Every body else seems oblivious to being watched. It is only fair for me to fee! uneasy since / am a new-comer, foreign to this kind o f a party in Eskisehir, except for those in the university circles. / don't even know if I am doing the right thing—by sitting, or by sitting by myself. / s e e k comfort in my identity as an anthropologist and in m y decision simply to observe and try to understand what this event is about

A group o fyoung men start playing music in the opposite comer—an accordion and a wooden percussion instrum ent that i later team is a phkechich. The musicians warm up by singing very masculine chants, low chords. A young g irl comes and sits by me and says: —Somebody sent me a messenger and asked to be my 'kaDen,' / said 'no.' Did i do the right thing? What should / h a ve d o n e ? She looks 14 or 15. She is sincerely concerned, and also seems very excited about the prospect, i am not even sure what the 'kaDen' relationship entails, i te ll her "i am sorry. But i really don't know." i hate to disappoint her. She must think that a t my age, obviously i have gone through the experience, i add hastily, —This is the first time i have attended such an event, i really don't know what would be right. Have / told her i was a researcher and was there as an observer? / don't remember.

i am curious about the young girl's experience. / ask, "Who is this guy?" 7 don't know," she says and tries secretly to point out the one wearing a white shirt among the young men gathered in the back comer o f the courtyard opposite us. Despite the m akeshift fights over the walls, it is hard to see. She repeats, 222

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. —He sent his friend who told me that he liked me and wants to be my kaDen. But / am still so young. / am only 14. / suggest, —It sounds like you did die right thing. / wou/dn't worry about it. But ifyou want, you m ight want to ask somebody else like... / name a few people that i have recendy met or can see dose by to be consulted on this matter. She says she already has. 7 asked Setguk abR," she says, also names another person. They told her it was fine. It was not a problem nor was it a cultural impropriety. "Surety," / assure her, in agreement with the others, -a s long as you said it nicety, / don't see any problem. Don't w orry. Now that i have failed to act properly for my age, lacking insight into the culture and the ability to be an eider sister for her, i am free to pursue, —What does it mean to become kagen with somebody? - i d o n 't know . / have never been to a gathering like this before. This is my first time, she says, i haven't either. Nobody has, it seems—in a long time. Last year there was war i was told. A ll the efforts at the demek were focused on collections to support die Abkhazian Independence war-food, clothes, medidne and money. When was the last time they held a night for youth like this? They call this The First Caucasian Youth Night."

L a te r/ go upstairs with Janbek, a Cherkess man (Abkhaz) who seems to be one o f the organizers o f the event. He invited me to come up. He has helped me fit in by introdudng me to various other young women and men, checking up on me occasionally, and by chatting and ensuring that i am having a good time.

^■abiis the short form ofa§abey, a term of address for an older brother. Like many other kinship terms in Turkish, its usage is not limited to a person's actual brothers but denotes an intention for a brotherly relationship, thus framing the intimacy and distance, respect and care between people accordingly.

223

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. There is a balcony looking over the courtyard. A group o f older men are seated on couches at die head o f the room, opposite the balcony and in front o f the windows looking out onto the street. A TV set, placed right in front o f the doors that open onto the balcony, is showing the party in the yard. Every body seems to be proud and excited about the technology deployed to bring the outside fun into the room—fo r the eiders? so they could enjoy themselves? so the youth could be supervised? Are die elders honoring the party? Are they being honored through the dosed drcuit broadcast o f ‘their children ’partying in the backyard? Here in this upstairs room, standing, with m y back turned to the elders, I am doser to the few people who are leaning out o f their bedroom windows and watching the event. This seems to be the preferred entertainment for those neighbors tonight-a few individual heads from die third door on the left, die fifth door on die tight ad watching the party—a party o f the Cherkess youth.

When Janbek asks if I would like to go down to jo in the line, / re a liz e there are no more chairs in the yard. By the right wall, the young women are lined up with their backs against the wall. On die le ft are the young men. The young men's line is not as straight as the women's. In the left back comer, a group o f men are gathered. An accordion player is in the middle; / can also hear the phkechich. The men are chanting to its rhythm. Other than the few who are dressed in costume, / d o n 't notice much about the young men. A few are wearing suits. Janbek is. He looks very sharp. The rest are in jeans, slacks and shirts. The giris are a ll dressed up. A few are particularly striking. One seems to be wearing a long tunic vest with high splits on both sides over a m ini skirt— and a very short one it seems. It reminds me o f the style o f clothing in Ankara in the late 1960s and eariy 70s—mid-calf length kaftan vests over m ini shorts. The style/fashion is back. Quite daring in EskiOehir, / would think. Dednitety so in my neighborhood.

Soon the dancing starts. A young man walks back and forth between the women's line and the young men's. A young man and a g irt form a couple. The young man walks back and forth again: Another young 224

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. man and another girl. Janbek asks me if I want to go down to dance, i can't accept his proposal to dance, i don't know how to do these dances. Couples are now dancing a ll over the courtyard, gracefully chasing, inviting, challenging and/or following each other. Janbek says i t is s o easy "once duz sonra apswa." !!? What does it mean "first the straight, then the apswa"? !!?? I have not seen this dance before, except for sim ilar ones performed as part o f the line dances o f the Kafkas Halk Danslari Ekibi, the Caucasian Folk dance Group, as a regional dance performed by State Foikdance Troupes o f the Turkish M inistry o f Tourism and Culture.

Around midnight the music stops. People start leaving. We hear gunshots. There is a police carju st outside die window. Sanem hanim ? one o f tine organizers, is livid. She screams at the youth: "We know who this person is. He always does this. The police are here. What are we going to do?" The young men are trying to offer explanations, to cairn her down. They look offended but nobody shouts back. They must feel doubly bad for getting rebuked in the presence o f an outsider, a woman most o f them have ju st met. i try to make m yself look scarce, casual about what I witness.

“Has e verybody danced sufficiently," Janbek asks some youth. "Bizde boyie, "he turns to me, "These are our ways, if one g irl says she hasn't danced as much as she wanted, we continue." The police were sent away somehow. After the gunshot and the m idnight curfew, which regulates parties in residential neighborhoods, who can say they want to dance more? Gone am the times o f dancing for days in village courtyards with no sleep. We are in the city. Somebody whom 'everybody knows'tried to break through the walls o f the courtyard with his gun. The forces o f the outside world, o f urban civility and order stepped right in. We need to step outside now and get lost in the

3 hamm is a Turkish term of address which refers to a woman who is socially or

personally not very close to the addressee. It indicates formality and respect.

225

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. streets ofEskiOehir, spread out in twos and threes into apartment buildings a ll over die town.

i am led by a group o f men into a car They take me home— a car fu ll o f men and a young woman. They wonder why / live in a neighborhood away from the d ty center {Wenar m ah alle). / te ll them i wanted to live dose to the Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria. As die car approaches my neighborhood, i try to get o ff on the main street so that they can easily go back. My attempts to dissuade them from dropping me o ff right in front o f my house are in vain. They insist on seeing me get in s a fe ly !

During the previous months o f my fieldwork i have never stayed out this late. My return home at 2:00 a.m. is unusual in itself. Moreover, i am accompanied by four men in their iate twenties to forties who a ll get out o f the car, give me form al farewell with deferential handshakes and pleasantries and then see me off. M y neighbors would perhaps attribute this to my big dty habits o r long-lived life in the United States and, thus, 'modem' ways.

That night the neighborhood was pretty much all asleep. I hoped

nobody saw the ceremonial end of my ride home. Acting like an ostrich

with its head in the sand I rushed to unlock the door of my apartment

building and went in. In my lower-middle income neighborhood, until

that night I had been careful not to stay out very late and not to have

any male guests alone, especially since I lived as a single woman. I did

not know that that night was only the first of many occasions spent with

the Cherkess community, which would start after 10:00 p.m. and end at

odd hours of the morning. And, that I would come home for many more

nights and mornings with similar ceremonial handshakes in the year to

226

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. come. I would have male guests, or large groups of single youth, men and women. I did not know it then but my year of life as a single woman doing research and leading a modest life was over. I did not know about the series of rules and regulations, admittedly crumbling, that the Cherkess mixed-gender gatherings entailed. I did not know the extent to which the demek promised to many a Cherkess men and women to rem a in Cherkess as they lived in the rapidly changing urban landscape of Eskisehir, and observed others in the globe while traveling or on mass media.

2. Legal definition o f the demek:

The EskiOehir Kafkas Folklor Dem eDi was founded in 1967 in

the liberal political atmosphere of the 1961 Turkish constitutional

reform.4 Its legal foundation, however, is the Law 3512 for

4 The initial draft of the 1961 constitution was prepared primarily by a team of professors,Istanbul Bilim Kurulu, in the spirit of ‘scientific objectivism', following the 1960 military coup. Until recently, it was uncritically ‘known’ to be the most liberal' Turkish constitution in the history of the Republic of Turkey. Soysal states, “this document is a tentative compromise between the emergent bourgeoisie of an industrialising and changing Turkey and the bureaucratic elites who have again come to the foreground with the May 27 [1960] movement” (Soysal 1992: 11). 1961 constitution represents a turning point in institutionalizing expressions of 227

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Associations, namely Cemiyetler Kanunu, that was accepted by the

legislature of the Republic of Turkey in 1938. That Law defined

associations as social institutions where more than two individuals unite

their knowledge and power on a regular basis for activities other than

communal and individual wills, their political action and its mediated and unmediated agents/representatives (as directly elected, or appointed by those elected ones) and their respective powers within state structures. From our vantage point, this constitution's reformulation of a principle, integral to the nation imagined by the founders of the nation-state may be worth mentioning. This principle, formulated as, “Hegemony/Sovereingty belongs, inalienably and unconditionally, to the nation’’ (Egemenlik kayitsiz§artsiz milletindir), as a motto, remains unchanged. Appropriation of ’it' by ‘the nation', however, has been legally and institutionally constituted as different from the 1924 constitution (Sosyal Ibid: 90-116). As indicated by the 1971 constitutional reformation and 1980 constitutions, this founding principle and its realization, by law as well as sociologically, are central to the Turkish hegemonic process. National and trans national discourses about the chain of command amongst individuals- communities-nation(s) (and the direction of its order) are worth further exploration with respect to their legal constitutions as well as political implementation. The discursive field of this chapter will illustrate, to some extent, the ways in which such issues emerged at the demek of the Eskisehir Cherkess. I here wish to thank

228

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. making a profit. Membership and leadership were open to anybody

over 18. Demek leadership was on an electoral basis and for a limited

term that was to be determined by each demek’s bylaws. The founders

would prepare the bylaws of the association within the first month of its

establishment and submit it to the local political authorities, including

information about the composition of demek executive committee and

their period of duty (1938, TBMM Zabit Ceridesi). Being products of

‘corrective’ legislative processes that followed the military coups of 1971

and 1980, the revised Demekler Kanunu, in 1972 and 1983, specifically

intended to keep politics out of the associations. These versions of the

Law attempt to clearly distinguish spheres of social, commercial and

political activities of citizens of Turkey. According to this distinction, a

demek is a place for people who intend to exchange their skills and

information in a socially amiable atmosphere for personal and

professional solidarity and improvement. This kind of boundary

Salih Yurtta? for lending me Soysal’s book. Our 1998 correspondence about these

issues has been very helpful.

229

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. demarcation is improbable for a demek such as the EskOehir Kafkas

Folklor DemeQ, which serves a community defined by its ethnicity, not

a membership which is constituted by shared interest or skills.

A critical awareness of Cherkess a d e t(customs)® and a strong

desire for ‘preservation’ of ethnic identity are imbedded in the structural

5 The terma d e t(from Arabic roots) shares the same discursive field with xabze. In everyday use, the terms adet and xabze are sometimes used as signifiers of cultural identity, interchangibly. Their intended domains of influence, however, and historically specific meanings are gendered and fluid. Adet is commonsensical and seems to be effectively residual. It is primarily deployed by older generations (men and women) and, by others, to refer to specific traditions whose meaning for contemporary times is often questionable. Adet, as a residual category, however, carries the force of tradition, is grounded in historical practice and yet, allows for innovation and renewal ('invention') from different vantage points. It is justifiably fluid, flexible and historically specific. In an inter-ethnic context, however, many adet are seen as an instrument and indication of assimilation. As a cultural category, ad et is more female, softer and unwritten. The Cherkess termxabze (from Adygexabze), on the other hand, is increasingly being used in emergent nationalizing discourses of culture. It is peferred primarily by younger politically conscious generations, and men. Xabze is totalizing and codifying, as though to compete with the codified national legal system. More significantly, however, its usage indicates the gendered hegemonic 230

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. organization of the Kafkas DemeQ, in its use of space ancf'm its

representative role. ‘Every’ Cherkess expects the demek to perform a

role continuing traditions; however, opinions about the specific traditions

to follow seem highly negotiable. Like urban EskOehir, the demek

underwent a set of changes during the 12 month period of my initial

research, as different meanings of collective identity and politics, based

on gender, seniority and marital status, (re-)gained currency. In this

chapter, I will explore the contours ofKafkas DemeOias a carefully

landscaped place. Here I am using landscape “as a cultural process

that is dynamic, multisensual, and constantly oscillating between a

‘foreground' of everyday lived emplacement and a ‘background' of

social potential” (Feld and Basso, 1996:6 via Tilley 1994). I hope my

descriptive explorations exhibit the complex ways in which the demek

struggle against the fluidity of unwritten codes of conduct as guiding principles of

identity as well as a desire for solidity, or security, of a codified system of Law. My

usage throughout the dissertation pays attention to the contested terrainadet of

and xabze by using them together or separately, depending on the preferred

231

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was being reconstituted since its early days in 1967, as new voices

participated in or withdrew from negotiations of Cherkess identity in

urban EskOehir.

3. A Safe Haven The major reason for the establishment ofKafkas DemeOi was to provide a central gathering place for the Cherkess of EskOehir who were moving to the city center in increasing numbers and settling in various neighborhoods. Urban settlement was based on individual families' capital accumulations, in wealth, education, class or lineage connections). The community is scattered in different neighborhoods ranging from prestigious sleek boulevards to squatter neighborhoods in the outskirts of the city. As such, the demek was imagined as a place of mutual assistance based on ethnic affinity in an unfamiliar urban environment. Its foundation was based on the spirit of Hem§ehrilik

(communal identity)®, as one of the founding members, now a professor

discursive context, intended specific significations and signifying agents of the

terms.

® Hem$ ehri literally means a person of/from the same city. Organizations under

the rubric of demek have flourished in urban centers in Turkey, especially since

the 1960s. These demeks were typically entitled "Association for Solidarity and

Mutual Assistance o f..." followed by the name of the place of emigration, (e.g.,

Eski§ehirliler Dayani§ma ve YardDmla?ma Deme£i).

232

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. at the university, stated. Just like a Cherkess newcomer to the city, when I developed an interest in the local Cherkess community, I was led to the demek.7 . The demek became my compass while circulating among the Cherkess community of Eski§ehir and beyond, both in

Turkey and, now, abroad. The Demek had organized “The First Caucasian Night” in order to facilitate Cherkess youths' relations with each other, which were constrained by urban life. It was literally the first of its kind, I was told:

an evening at the demek and only for the youth.8 Limited space in

small apartments and restrictions due to proximity with neighbors rendered home gatherings difficult and infrequent. Given the increasing density of the urban landscape, neighbors would have grievances due to the long-lasting music, chants and dances. The difficulties were not only due to spatial constraints. Many Cherkess-of all ages and both genders—expressed the uneasiness they felt explaining the free interactions among their youth to their neighbors. Mebrure hanim, the

7 Demeks have played an important role in networking in the Turkish urbanization

process since the 1950s. Hem§ehrilik, affinity based on common 'rural' origins, is

a widespread form of organization in metropolitan centers.

® As a newsletter from 1991 announcing a "traditional youth night" indicates, this

was not thefirst party organized for the youth. This renumbering can be

understood in the context of the dominant political inclination of the demek

leadership at this time. See section on the demek’s history in this chapter.

233

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mother of a 21-year-old college student expressed a shared frustration: "We can't explain to the neighbors the free flow of young men who visit. It is so hard.Facing moralizing criticism was particularly hard since it was based on a shared quality with neighbors, i.e., religious orientation as both being Muslim. Criticism of neighbors against mingling and dancing among young Cherkess men and women was articulated in terms of Islamic rules. Mebrure hanim, found the grounds of this criticism ironic:

[They have] an arrogance that declares the other person as one who is doomed to go to hell (cehennemlik)! In his prayers the Prophet Mohammed is said to have asked God not to instill arrogance in him for being chosen as a Prophet. What good is it if you are driven with such arrogance and self-righteousness [to perceive yourself] as a person who deserves to go to heaven ( ce n n e t/ik )? They think just because they cover their heads tightly they are destined for heaven. And presumably I am doomed to end up in hell because my hair sticks out o f my scarf on my forehead10

For Mebrure hanim, Cherkess youth mingle with each other since

culturally they act as if they were brothers and sisters; young men who

9 "Kom§ulara anlatamGyoruz. Boyle akin akin delikanlilar gelip gidiyo. £ok zor."

10 "Sen cehennemliksin diye bir gurur. Hz Muhammed Allahim bana peygamber

oldum diye bir gurur verme diye dua edermi§. Ben cennetli$im diye bir gurur

234

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hang out with or visit young women perform brotherly duties and

obligations.11 Like many Cherkess, she offers cultural explanations

that elaborate on the meaning of gender relations. She specifically

emphasizes the 'brotherly' role of men who visit young Cherkess women

at their homes or take them to parties. They—those men—do not look at

those women 'with other eyes'(baqka goz/e).

If a young man picks up a woman from her house to take her to a party, then he brings her back just as he picked her up- regardless of the circumstances. He would give his life so that nothing happens to her. For our Cherkess young man it would not matter how much he may like her. He may be on the verge of death with love for her, but he is like her brother. He would not think to come closer to her.

"A Turkish young man has been raised differently,’’ Mebrure hanim

says.

If he likes a girl, he wants to be closer to her. He wants to treat her differently ba§ka( iuiiu). That's normal for him. That's what he is accustomed to.

olunca ne kiymeti kaldi. Baglarim oyle ortunce cennetlik olduk samyorlar. Benim

almmdan sagim gorununce cehennemlik oluyormugum."

11 For a discussion of Cherkess gender relations see chapter 5.

235

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Neighbors do not consider such 'brotherly* relations among young men

and women as appropriate. Mebrure hanim is confident:

Those who get to enter our community and get to know us like our customs very much. It is not possible to know [them] from afar. It is not possible to understand from a distance.

Social pressure to meld in on the ground of gender mixing is felt

differently. The experiences of Cherkess families who live nearby and

who socialize with modernistT u r k i s h ^families, or older urban families,

diverges from that of those who are socially and spatially closer to

recent urbanites, and/or more conservative families or neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, the discourse of Islam confronts all urbanites of the 1990s

12 Unless specified otherwise, I use Turkish to refer to a national identity and its stereotypicaily understood common dominant culture. This 'culture' is diverse and manifests differences depending on the historical composition of ethnic groups (e.g., Tatars. Kurds, Laz or Arabs) and lifestyles (e.g., nomadic or sedentary). Nevertheless, the term Turkish remains grounded in that presumed cultural commonality and its widespread definition, inside the country or abroad. 236

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in EskOehir, regardless of their ethnic sensibilities, as an identity to be

displayed as well as practiced in historically specific ways. ”*3

Neighborhoods are being reconstructed. With each new

apartment building that replaces a small house, modem amenities (tile

floors, more rooms, hot running water, central heating, balconies, indoor

toilets-and an additional alia franca, too) are gained. Courtyards,

roomy hallways, separate rooms for private visits (for elders, or for

Cherkess women) are usually lost. In this rapid process of

reconstruction, which inscribes cultural meanings through the spatial

organization of the urban landscape in Eski§ehir, the demek is imagined

as a safe haven, it holds the community together, strengthens its

members' ties to one another and serves as a training ground to pass

on Cherkess values of community to younger generations. Mebrure

1 3 Cherkess are not alone in being challenged by recent urban manifestations of

political Islam, which gives voice to commonsensical forms of Islamic practice as

well as actively working through them to shape an Islamic public sphere of

influence. For discussions of political Islam's development and communal

237

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hanim is pleased that the demek organizes activities such as youth

nights. She grew up with two brothers in a village. They would always

go to visit people or would have friends over. Now the demek offers her

daughter an opportunity to have a good time that is comparable to her

own youth. Through the demek, the youth in the urban Cherkess

community get to know each other and have a good time, dancing and

playing games with their own cohorts as Mebrure handm herself did.

4. The Visible Difference: Young Men's Line

Mebrure hanim's comments about differences between Turkish

and Cherkess perspectives on relations among youth matched my

observations in EskiDehir during the previous year of my fieldwork. The

"Caucasian youth night" that was organized by the demek (as well as

many other d u § u n I^ attended later) presented a striking contrast with

concerns in Turkey, see for example, Ayata (1993), Gole (1996, 1997), Mardin

(1994).

14 Among the Cherkess, any social gathering is referred Udu§urfto as a which in

standard Turkish stands for "wedding". These social gatherings could broadly be

conceived as parties for youth since at the center of all of them is the dance floor 238

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. other gatherings I had attended. The difference was conspicuous in

terms of the seating plan, activities and relationship between genders,

especially adult men and women who were not kin of one another. It is

common practice in EskOehir to hold circumcision parties and k O n a

g e c e le ri (henna parties) in the s t r e e t s. 1 5 As an example to illustrate

briefly the visible difference between Cherkess and non-Cherkess

gatherings, I will first describe the typical non-Cherkess form of street

parties.

On summer weekends, secondary streets or vacant lots in the

city turn into rent-free “party halls”: a practice fed by lack of space in

houses or backyards of apartment buildings and aggravated by the high

on which the youth are brought together and in a heavily codified manner are enabled/encouraged to interact through dances, music and flirtation (semerkho). The other generations are on the margins. For a discussion of Cherkess “du^un" as wedding and as a social gathering, see chapter 5.

^5Kina G ecesiis a party thrown by the bride's family on the eve of a wedding. It is commonly a party for women-relatives and friends of the bride. Circumcision parties are commonly held on the evening of a boy's circumcision. Many such parties are held during summer months all over the city. 239

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cost of rental halls in the inflationist Turkish economy. Chairs are rented

and placed in a circle around an imaginary dance floor. Musicians are

hired. Illumination is drawn from the streetlights. Invitations are sent to

relatives, friends and neighbors. However, except for close relatives of

the host family, women attend these parties without their spouses.

They sit in the chairs and mostly watch the dances. The hostess and

her close female relatives invite guest women to dance. Young women

are free to dance as much as they wish, regardless of the hosts'

invitation. They are usually expected to dance in order to keep the

party lively. Outside the circle behind the chairs, the male youth of the

invited families as well as uninvited others hang out. The young men

gaze from the margins; they drink beer, chew sunflower seeds bought

from the comer-store and gaze. 1® Toward the end of the party, the

men of the family join their spouses or children on the dance floor. The

An anthropologist Seteney Shami observed tensions at Cherkess weddings in

Jordan due to Arab youth, who gathered on the walls of courtyards and not only

watched but also commented on the activities turning the wedding into a spectacle.

(Based on Shami’s slide presentation at the University of Texas at Austin, 1990). 240

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. last hour seems to be time for the family and close relatives to celebrate

their son or daughter’s passage into this new stage in their life. Thus

unmarried young men, especially non-kin, do not share the dance floor

or directly socialize with unmarried women at the gathering.

The main difference between a Cherkess and a non-Cherkess

social gathering has to do with the presence or absence of men—

especially unmarried young men—and their related place, position and

role in the event. Among women, this issue is expressed by debating

the appropriateness of the physical and social distance at which young

men are kept. As I have mentioned earlier, cultural concepts of kinship

and religion mediate negotiations of communal difference. The demek,

in this sense, is h‘ o m e ', where a Cherkess is free of obligations to

explain, justify and negotiate his or her identity. However, the demek is

not free of the rapid transformation that the city and its people have

been experiencing except for a blueprint for reconstruction which carries

the city’s seal of approval. In order to illustrate the ways in which social

relations and the politics of ethnic community are laid out in space, I

241

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. must turn to a description of the demek building where the "First

Caucasian Youth Night" was held in September 1993.

5. Demek: a Cozy Urban Hangout?

The two story house which was home to the Eski§ehir Kafkas

Folklor DemeQ was located in a developing residential district of the

city toward the west end of Kutahya street. The building was one of the

few left of that size and style on that street. It looked like a 1950s style

brick-stone house. The rest of the street was almost exclusively taken

up by 5 to 6 story concrete apartment buildings that formed a solid row

on each side of the street. Some of them also housed a grocery shop,

a kahve (coffee house) or a pub on the ground floor. The Kafkas

demeDi was in a house stuck in between these tall buildings. It had a

small front yard. The low wall of the house that was aligned with

facades of the high-rises on each side was split in the middle by the

stairs leading up to the patio on the second floor and down to the first

floor, which was tucked in below street level.

242

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Inside on the second floor, there was a hallway with a door on

the right that led to a room used as the administrative office, furnished

with a desk, bookcases and some chairs. The hall then led to a big L-

shaped room which was furnished with worn out, yet cozy, furniture: a

couple of couches and soft chairs against the walls, a couple of comer

tables, a long coffee table in the middle, and chairs continuing along the

opposite walls. The walls were covered by framed posters with Cyrillic

writing: An imposing man sitting on a horse in traditional Caucasian

outfit: k a lp a kon the head, a cherkesska, knee-high soft boots, and

silver belts around his chest and waist with bullet containers and a

saber. The horseman looks down at a young woman who is looking up

at him with her arms aesthetically stretched out in such a way as to

embrace him from a distance. She is also in costume, wearing a pastel

colored floor-length dress, its fitted bodice separated from the flared

skirt by a silver ornate belt. The front of the dress is delicately

embroidered all the way down. The bodice has silver ornaments on

both sides. Long fitted sleeves are split from the elbow to a flare. The

243

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. edges of the flimsy scarf on her head are flying about in the wind of the

Caucasian highlands in which the couple was pictured. Another poster

pictured a large group of handsome men and women, again in costume,

in open fields lined up facing each other. “Kabardinka” read the Cyrillic

writing, the name of the renowned dance troupe from the northern

Caucasus. The poster was a souvenir from their visit to EskOehir,

while on tour in Turkey in 1992.

The place seemed like a pleasant hangout to visit with friends,

drink tea. and discuss issues of current concern. Usually somebody

would play an accordion. Groups would watch videotapes that came

from the Caucasus, showing the war in Abkhazia and interviews with

the young Cherkess men and women, who had gone from Eski§ehir and

elsewhere in Turkey to fight for motherland Caucasus’s independence.

As such the demek was a social space, which offered homely comfort

for the community. It had a quite different aura than other similar

organizations I was familiar with. The inside was furnished in a

comfortable style that suited the external structure of the old house.

244

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Also, for example, the space was not transformed into a more effective

place with designated cubicles for various activities. There seemed to

be a free flow of people between the two major rooms. Women's actual

presence was not as visible as in the posters; however, the atmosphere

was welcoming for women when they were there. A visiting Cherkess

(Adyge) friend from out of town shared my impressions. He also made

me realize this set-up was different from other Cherkess demeks as

w ell.1 ^

Regardless of the seemingly natural and free flow of people in

this communal space, certain rules were observed in the use of space,

especially in cross-generational company. Cross-generational

treatment was noticeably different for people more or less over 50.

Spatially, the downstairs was reserved exclusively for the youth up to

mid-twenties. Especially on weekends, musicians and instructors of the

folk dance team would practice songs and have their organizational

17 The difference was both in terms of the community’s style of interacting with each other and, consequently, my acceptability as a female researcher and its

245

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meetings downstairs. Upstairs was for the rest: unmarried Cherkess of

the older generation, married younger adult and elder men. Elder men

seemed to come by frequently and were immediately treated as guests

of honor. Everybody rushed to put out their cigarettes or at least hide

them in their palms until they could greet the elders and step out of the

room. Ashtrays full of cigarette ends would be taken out; then,

everybody would sit down, usually after we were invited by the elders to

do so.

The elders’ seemingly casual visits, however, were almost always

in conjunction with a message—an issue of political significance. During

the early days in the fall of 1993, the Abkhasian war was still the main

topic of discussion. Elders would bring messages they received through

the national organization, Abkhasian Crisis Committee in Istanbul, that

was started in order to help Abkhasians in war through collections of

donations of medical supplies, clothes and money. As the official

leaders of the demek, the elders also had power to make decisions

limitations. 246

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. about demek activities, especially in matters that required monetary

support. The discussions would continue in a formal and reserved

manner, which was reflected in our tightly composed bodies—sitting up

straight, legs uncrossed, knees adjoined properly— as well as in our

communicative style. The younger members of the demek showed

great care in formulating their questions or raising opinions. Even

speaking at the other end of the room to others, in a way that could be

heard by the elders was an act of impropriety and disrespect. The

practice of these formal inter-generational relations was almost

inevitably accompanied or followed by its critique. Elders would

deferentially offer me seats next to themselves. After the fact, “Goniil

hanim, please don’t bother getting up” a person of my generation would

suggest for the next encounter. Or my friends would complain about

how unnecessary these formalities were. More generalized critiques

would be voiced concerning observations of these formalities among

people closer in age.

247

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. That fall, two major events brought crowds of Cherkess people to

the demek. One was a second party for the youth, which was also

attended by some older married women one of whom had a daughter

who was one of the masters of ceremonies. The other was a funeral

rally for a Cherkess young man from EskOehir, an active member of

the demek during the previous years, who died in war in Abkhazia.

Busloads and carloads of Cherkess from all over Turkey came to pay

their condolences to Qetin's family.

The weeks following the funeral/rally were also busy at the

demek, due to frequent visits of various members from the Eski§ehir

community, male and female Cherkess who grieved together, watched

videos of the last days of the war in Abhkazia, and celebrated the

victory over the Georgian armies that came two days after Qetin's

martyrdom. As fall turned to winter and peace continued in Abhkasia,

communal pain seemed to subside. During the days, and even in the

evenings during the week, it was not unusual to find the demek doors

locked. A handful of people who kept coming would sometimes run into

248

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. each other on the streets near the closed demek and then go to bars or

cafes to visit with one another. Even when somebody with a key was

around, the demek did not have the same warmth, in part literally, since

the building was not centrally heated. A wood and coal stove was set

up to heat the place. The casual style of demek management that was

behind the homey atmosphere surfaced as sporadic bursts of

resentments directed at a middle-aged man, one of the regulars. He

was, apparently, paidXo keep the demek open and that included,

according to some, keeping the fire going. Paid work, respect for elders

and need for a professional demek management emerged as issues, as

the days got colder and resentments grew in the cold air.

Ahmet abi, as he was respectfully called by everybody, was a

retired construction worker. He had agreed to keep the demek open for

a small fee, 1,5 million TL a month in 1993, about $ 50.00 steadily

diminishing in value. Ahmet abi seemed to think, as an older man in the

community, he was doing a favor for the youth to have their cozy

hangout going. However, he did not feel obliged to keep the place

249

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. regularly open and start (or clean) the stove. The wage that was paid to

him was not sufficient to expect that service of him. Moreover,

culturally, as an older man, he could not have been at the service of

young people as such, particularly considering his noble roots. These

criticisms, particularly those coming from a younger female officer in the

demek administration strongly offended him and he withdrew his

services. Other younger members of the executive committee as well

as the regulars strove to make up for the female officer’s 'crude

professionalism’. They apologized to Ahmet abi and tried to make sure

that the demek doors would definitely be open during certain hours in

the evenings. This seemed to work for a while, at least with some

regularity.

Especially on weekends, 20-30 people continued coming:

visiting, rushing to and from the folk dance practice, and catching up

with the latest news from the Caucasus or national organizations. The

stove was always on. On weekdays, a couple of other people acquired

250

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. keys or had access to them through Ahmet abi. We sometimes started

the fire ourselves, sometimes kept our coats on.

One evening, at the end of the fall, three elders, the elected

president and vice-president of the demek accompanied by another

older man active in demek affairs, came by. A group of us, men and

women of my generation or younger, were visiting in the L-shaped

room. After the usual ceremonial greetings, we sat down: elders at the

head of the room, and we, the youth seated down toward the other end

of the room. The president expressed his support of a proposal to move

into a new building. The complaints about the irregular hours, the issue

of keeping the place warm in increasingly cold days had taken a serious

turn.

The president said, he understood why the youth liked the

arrangement at this building but it was quite exclusionary here, not

welcoming for the eiders. The place was not big enough to hold a large

group of people, especially considering theadet, social proprieties,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. required when different generations are under one roof. The elders did

not have the freedom to have a relaxed visit here.

Sometimes, when I come here, I cross the street to the other sidewalk in order not to embarrass the youth who hang out in front of the building, leaning against the wall, hands in their pockets, chatting. They don’t see me and I simply walk on without looking,

he added, his eyes still on the floor controlling his discontent and

resentment against the male youth for failing to notice an elder coming

by, not acting properly. He seemed even embarrassed to have to speak

about this issue. He expressed the desire of the elders to be able to get

together casually and talk among themselves. In addition, for practical

concerns in community matters, this place was not suitable. In times of

emergency (such as notifying people of a member's death), it was

difficult to reach the community who hung out at various ka h ve s (coffee

houses) around town. “But why don’t they come here?” the woman

officer of the executive committee reproached: “They shoulda ll come

here!” “Some people like to play cards as a pastime,” the president

commented respectfully his head still slightly bent down. How about the

252

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. finances, the female officer questioned. This building was the demek's

own property. They had already tried having the demek managed by

somebody. Then, profit concerns would be an issue. They would take

all that into consideration, elders said, without specifically discussing the

logistics.

We heard of further developments in search of a better demek

place through different people. Decisions were made by different older,

male, working members in the community. The demek moved into its

new location in December of 1993, right before the New Year.

6 . Demek's Modem Headquarters:

The small old building was left for the rental first floor of a

modem, centrally heated high-rise, conveniently located on a major

street in town. As is customary for these buildings, it looked like the

new quarters were designed to accommodate a clothing store or a

supermarket. The entrance opened into a large hall. At the far end of

this hall, a door on the right opened into a small hallway which led

upstairs and downstairs. Next to this hallway was a small kitchen.

253

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Upstairs there was a mezzanine half the size of the entrance hall.

Downstairs looked more like a basement, a storage space, with pipes

visible on the ceiling. The couches and chairs from the old demek were

placed here as well as some steel closets. The posters of Caucasian

couples facing mount Elbruz, Caucasian horsemen and groups of

women in the highlands of the Caucasus decorated the walls, just like in

the old demek. The basement was reserved for the youth to hang out

and play music. The other two floors were furnished with many card

tables with green felt tablecloths. At the opening ceremony in late

December, an elder expressed his pleasure at the decision to move.

The community had settled in the nice modem quarters that it deserved,

he said. Indeed, there seemed to be plenty of space for the community

to get together and successfully avoid socially inappropriate situations

between elders and the youth when necessary. Within a short time,

however, it became obvious that the issue of a shared space for all

genders and ages to mingle was not resolved. The modem

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. headquarters of the demek seemed to accentuate the cleavage

between genders.

During the opening ceremony about a dozen women were

present; they were seated at one of the tables close to the entrance. I

had not seen most of them before. I was led to that table and seated.

We were not introduced. Whose wives were they? There was not

much of a chance to talk to each other. I did not see them at the demek

later either. My friends from the other building gave me a tour of the

new place. Downstairs, we chatted and played music. When I finally

went upstairs again, the new demek had started functioning, as

indicated by the men gathered around tables playing cards. A few

friends walked out with me. As I myself had recently moved to a

modem apartment on a major street a few blocks away from the new

demek, I crossed the street to take the short cut to my house through

the narrow side streets which reminded me of my old neighborhood with

its small houses and flower gardens, occasional grocery stores,

newspaper stands and children playing in the streets.

255

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In Cherkess social relations, the demek did not seem to have a

place that legitimately brought women and men together, particularly as

my friend Sanem hanDm wished, casually to just hang-out or engage in

political debates. She herself did not enjoy women’s visiting at homes.

During the ensuing months, in her role as a member of the executive

committee, she tried hard to attract women to the demek to no avail.

Those women who were married to the current leaders disappeared

after their quiet presence at the opening ceremony and would not come

back. When I described the new demek quarters to a married friend,

she said, she had come one day, looked at it from the outside, but did

not want to come in, and walked away instead. “People might not know

who I am and, like, do something,... never mind,” she said. What she

refused to put into words was that she might have been subject to a

disrespectful act by men not getting up and greeting her. She was used

to being treated with respect and getting proper attention when her

father was the president of the demek, and all her family were regulars

and active participants in its activities. That was in the 1970s and she

256

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was single. She said: “Women used to go there a lot those days. But

now, who knows,” how she would be received.

Sanem hanim remained a regular, hanging out at the demek as

the living ‘consciousness’ of the Cherkess women she believed to have

lived somewhere in the highlands of the Caucasus. She was a political

patriot concerned about the apolitical stances of her community

members. She would play cards with her close circle of friends,

maintain ties with those who were in touch with the outer Cherkess

world, such as those in the war zone in the Caucasus. Nevertheless,

the centrally heated modem space turned more and more into a men's

space with card playing at nights and on weekends and occasional

visitors in the afternoon.

The cozy hangout at the old demek had concealed the

complicated cycles of interaction and conflicts in the Cherkess

community sanctioned by adet. A young male friend, a 26 years old

mechanic at an industrial plant, opened my eyes to an aspect of my

privileged position I was unaware of, while expressing his curiosity

257

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. about his scattered community in urbanity. I was a researcher and

privileged for that, i could go wherever I wanted, as he stressed—

homes, villages, everywhere. I could hang out with everybody—all

ages, families/lineages, genders. In a similar vein, a Cherkess woman,

a young physician friend, relied on me to go to the new demek, for her

first time. I warned her that it was not similar to the old place; that it

might be discomforting. When we approached the building, she

seemed a little uneasy. Right at the door, she positioned herself behind

me and said “Gdnul'cugum, my dear Gonul, you go ahead first, I will

follow.” I teased her, "you are supposed to be Cherkess and this is your

community.” She motioned me to go on ahead with laughter sparkling

in her blue eyes. I walked in, rushed through the tables full of men to

the first familiar face I noticed, sitting somewhat in the back of the room.

At these moments, for me, the proprieties of greeting people

contradicted the discomfort of interrupting their game by greeting them.

A Cherkess woman was, however, supposed to be and would expect to

be greeted with respect, which her elegant demeanor would demand.

258

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. /refrained from going there at nights, unless I had appointments.

7. D em ek a s S o d a/ and Political Body

Some fathers expressed concern about their sons, who did not come

to the demek or participate in its activities. Fathers complained of their

sons’ lack of interest in community matters. The demek was thought of as

a place to serve the community. Those youth who were there to serve had

to negotiate hard to achieve their hearts’ desire, with variable degrees of

success. Eiders clearly had the upper hand in decision-making and women

were missed by few regulars.

The elders' decision to move the demek, by emphasizing the

needs of their generation, is an indication of their view of the expected

day-to-day mission, or perhaps put more simply, the mundane function

of the demek as a social space. The demek is to serve the men of the

community as 'home', especially for the senior members, who do not

have the means to enjoy themselves in friendly company at their urban

homes, without compromising their families or Cherkess 'adet'.

Apartments are not large enough for men to have a room of their own—

259

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a place that provides enough distance and privacy away from the other

activities and members of the family. Family members are usually

occupied at school or at work, which means that no one is readily

available to wait on senior men to meet their needs. In traditional home

gatherings, it is customary for the women of the household to prepare

the food; however, service is also expected of younger men. In

households where the only person at home may be the ‘mother1 o f the

house, the spontaneity of home visiting among men is hindered.

Younger men, who are customarily expected to serve at senior

men’s gatherings, share the demek space with them. There, cultural

proprieties have turned into refraining from smoking, drinking or

conversing loudly while in close proximity to senior men of the

community. In the old building, the service was performed by a few

men who were in charge of the kitchen. In the modem headquarters of

the demek, a hired Cherkess youth performed this duty. On the other

hand, when a group of us visited a house after a formal speech by a

visiting Cherkess from the Caucasus, a schoolteacher, in his late 30s,

260

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. volunteered his services, as thepse, in the men’s room. This service,

obviously, gives him, or in general younger men, access to the current

state of affairs in the community, in this case close insight into an

encounter between home and diaspora. It socializes them into

appropriate cultural styles. Daily at the demek, however, the values of

modem times that each younger Cherkess brings along prevail. These

values do not privilege seniority by age as a means for access to the

world, of the Cherkess and non-Cherkess. Universal education, and its

monetary and non-monetary rewards that are provided in the Turkish

national context, have ‘prematurely’ endowed quite a few Cherkess with

the wisdom and status that used to come through years of experience.

The demek, as home of the senior men, is a site rife with breaches of

Cherkess ‘adet’ as much as a site of adet’s re-inscription, or of x a b z e£

hegemony.

The expectations of the older Cherkess men for the demek to

accommodate them day-to-day inevitably clash with the aspirations of

younger members who are actively present at the demek. The

261

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. aspirations of the younger members are informed by the post-1989

political developments in the world, specifically in the Caucasus, as

much as by the rapidly modernizing lifestyles in urban Eski§ehir, which

appeal to and at once, threaten the Cherkess identity. For many

younger members, particularly men, the demek is a place for members

of the community to gather and strengthen their relationships with each

other. It is a place wherethey can be without saying and where th e y

can say what is getting lost, even if it often is highly negotiable. This

double comfort and concern extends into a polarity at the demek: One

view privileges the comfort and need for communal sharing in this

space. They assert that the demek’s mission is not to strive for the

continuity of Cherkess culture. Some argue that if the community is

together interacting with proper conduct—the style—the rest can be

achieved in time. Others yearn for a political space for the Cherkess by

nam e that is lacking in the national arena. These positions and their

relative strength can transform the demek space into a ka h ve (or

kdraathane, as I will discuss later), almost overnight, as seemingly

262

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. happened by the move from the small house to the modem quarters in

December of 1993.

Women's relation to the demek is often defined from their

domestic strongholds. For many, the demek’s presence and its social

activities are a source of pride. They want the younger generations to

go to the demek, learn Cherkess dances; however, the primary agent of

socialization is increasingly the nuclear family household, not the demek

community. Mothers have more and more direct authority and power in

raising Cherkess children. They don't come to the demek regularly or

Mothers, or parents, in general were not primary agents of socialization in the old days. Traditional child raising practices favored two arrangements. One was the hala-dayi (paternal aunt-matemal uncle) institution’, in Aslan’s terms (1992). According to this practice, around the age of 7-8, girls were sent to be raised by their paternal aunts, boys by their maternal uncles. They would return to their families around 18-20 years of age. The other was atahk (ancestry). This was more common among the nobility. Children, usually boys, of noble families would be given to a family of a lower class than nobility to be raised until about 18-20 years of age. The shift, I suggest, in primary agents of socialization is not gender- based. It is rather from a variety of significant ’elders' in the extended families to the nuclear family. I have discussed this shift in chapter 5 and in Ertem (1999).

263

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. casually. "Why don't they come," expresses the frustration of the few

female regulars. Their frustration loses sight of the disempowering

maleness of the demek space while imagining it as a public space for a

politics ofan undifferentiated culture o f modernity. This remains an

unattained diasporic dream since the much praised customary

resilience and independence of Cherkess women seem to thrive in non-

Cherkess public spaces more effectively. This non-traditional power

has repercussions for the reformation of contemporary Cherkess

identity. 9

During the recent history of the demek, adet-prescribed female

and male styles clashed with class-informed styles of modem times.

The recent experience of a few Cherkess female college students who

decided to participate more actively in the demek activities illustrates

this conflict. These young women volunteered their know-how to

organize a series of non-traditional social events at the demek. Their

Cherkess women's autonomous personal growth is subject of discussion in chapter 5. See also, Shami (1993). 264

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. presence immediately stirred resentment from certain male regulars.

Men's resentment was expressed in regards to an impropriety, which

constituted these women’s active involvement at the demek as an

active search for husbands. This offended women who were using their

skills gained at college to help the demek reach out to the Cherkess

community more effectively while negotiating their ethnic identity as

educated Cherkess women, at the only public space available to their

ethnic group in the city. They withdrew. Since at least one of the

women was from a former serf family, this clash may also be

understood as the engendering expression of the non-correspondence

of the traditional Cherkess social order with that of modem times in

Turkey. As I will discuss later in this chapter, negotiations of this non-

correspondence among the male members of the community manifest

the demek as a more complicated contested terrain.

The significance of the incessant discourse about the missing

body politic, i.e., women and educated Cherkess youth, can be

captured by focusing on the transforming moment of 'the' Cherkess

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. community and by identifying its agents and their missions. The

demek’s role and mission are being reinscribed as Cherkess modernity

unfolds through the transformation of its social body in urban Eski§ehir

and beyond.

8 . Demek, Kahve or KOraathane?

For women of my generation, or perhaps, more cautiously, I should

refer particularly to those of urban upbringing who came from families of

modernist political dispositions, ka h ve (a coffeehouse) were hangouts for

men exclusively. In our minds, including even some of our male

compatriots, these men were of lower socio-economic means, perhaps

manual laborers or minor government officials, or even unemployed, with

little or no ambition for social or individual progress. They hardly read

newspapers, let alone books. They would spend most of the time on their

hands by playing cards, drinking tea, watching TV, and engaging in heated-

yet-superficial political debates at these kahve. For us women, walking by

a kahve was an unpleasant experience as, oftentimes, one would be

whistled at, called names, or subjected to sexual approaches in street

266

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. slang. We did not want to associate with ‘these’ men; the men of our

dreams, presumably our educated cohorts as well, were nothing like these

men of ‘non-modem’ times. In Ankara, during the mid-70s, several

kahveler opened in the vicinity of university campuses or their shuttle-bus

stops to cater to college students of my generation, men and women. We

played some of those games (such as langirt) as well; but we fared better,

at least we so thought then, due to our ambitious intellectual orientation

and more politicized daily lives.

Debates around the social and political identity of the demek

triggered these gendered images and issues of my college days in Ankara.

By cross-referencing the Cherkess concerns with those of my generation’s,

here defined with respect to agea n d political orientation, I by no means

intend to constitute them in terms of a lag such as a classical modernist

paradigm would. I do, however, align these experiences to expose my own

subjective involvement in similar debates and, thereby, present a broader

perspective on gendered public places and their constitution in political

267

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. imagination in modernist Turkey .20 My generation was most probably n o t

the first to have gender-mixed kahveler. Kahve, as a male hangout, is

certainly not limited to the kind I described a b o v e . 2 1 My emphasis is that,

by the 1970s, as a male space, kahve had already formed certain

20 Kahveler are only one of the public places of casual gendered leisure. Pastahane (Patisserie) and Qay Bahcesi or Qayevi (Tea garden/house) are common places for both genders, as well as a broad range of generations. I limit my discussion to specifically the institution of kahve as a male space due to its cultural constitution among the Cherkess in relation to their demek in Eski§ehir.

21 In Tayfun Akgul’s words, kahveler “are the organization site/place of unorganized masses, whose associational bylaws are unwritten” ( o rg iits u z kitlelerin tuzuOu yaziya gecirilmemiOorgutyen). My 1997 correspondence with gezgin friends indicates the wide variety of coffeehouses with respect to purpose, functions and socio-cultural composition of their patrons as well as their transformation due to the socio-economic flux in physical surroundings and to changing political orientation within their clientele. Dynamics among ‘members’ of coffeehouse 'communities’, following Akgiil’s proposition, echoes those at the Eskidehir demek, especially with respect to cultural codes of conduct by age, economic means—thus ‘hospitality’, as well as their relation to political currents of their times. However, as I stated before, at the demek, scope of concerns and political/communal action are overdetermined by the factor of ethnicity and are more complex. 268

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hegemonic associations with respect to education, work, progress and

modernity. Other types of kahve were known by their proper names, or

with adjectival phrases such as ^airierkahvesi(Coffeehouse of the

Poets).22

In his exquisite historical ethnography on the origins of coffee and

coffee houses in the Middle East, Hattox (1985) traces the adoption of

coffee consumption, from ceremonial consumption through devotional

(d h ik /) services at medieval sufi institutions of m id-IS* century, to non-

pious consumption at places of pleasure and sociability in mid-16th century.

The first emergence of kahveler in Istanbul is from this period. As places of

leisure, the emergence of kahveler in the urban scene of the Muslim world

is intertwined with “respectable men’s public appearance." In Hattox's

words,

Up until the appearance of the coffeehouse, night life in the city was limited either to the tavern or gambling den, where one went at the peril of one's soul, reputation or perhaps life, and various loci of religious activity, either the Sufi meeting, if one belonged,

22 For a nostalgic account of the rich diversity of coffeehouses in the late Ottoman

and early republican period see, Birsel (1983). 269

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. or, on special occasions, the mosque. One did not risk eternal torment through frequenting these latter places, but one found very little in the way of worldly pleasure, either. The coming of the coffeehouse signaled the beginning of an entirely new phenomenon. Perfectly respectable people went out at night for purposes other than piety. Men were now offered the option of going to a semi-respectable establishment and amusing themselves with conversation and diversions of various degrees of innocence (Hattox 1985, 125).

Among the rich literature on gender segregation in the Middle East,

especially those constituting women's worlds as prison houses, Hattox's

historical account of men’s emergence in public for a non-religious reason

stands out.23 | d 0 not intend to establish a direct association between the

emergence of this secular public place almost 500 years ago and my work

at the Eski§ehir demek. I simply want to highlight another aspect of men’s

public presence in such places. Whereas Hattox’s emphasis is on

voluntarism in the development ofkahve, as a public institution for leisure

and sociability, and ’respectable' men's participation in such leisure o u tsid e

23 if kahve, the coffehouse, constituted an urban public space for ‘respectable men' within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire, it was the pastane (patisseries) or gay bahgesi (tea gardens) which contributed to the public sociability of non segregated groups: families, courting couples and youth during the republican era. 270

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the domestic sphere, I want to stress the obligatory aspect of Cherkess

men's mingling at the demek. My argument is based on the gendered and

seniority-based tension at the demek, which I heard about and observed.

The literature produced by Cherkess intellectuals in Turkey supports it as

well. For example, in his depiction of Cherkess gender relations in the

Caucasus, Ayaba explicitly mentions cultural practices that deploy physical

distance as a means to maintain emotional restraint in conjugal relations.

According to him, a Cherkess groom was expected, and usually, sent off on

duty for lengthy periods of time, soon after his readmission into the society

after his marriage cerem onies.24 in urban centers, especially holding jobs

that require daily attendance, this adet is not one to observe easily;

however, the value of emotional restraint in familial ties and physical

distance as its communal reassurance is still held high. Consequently,

demek is a place for Cherkess men to spend time in public among their

gender cohorts when they are not at work or are not preoccupied with

^4 For a discussion of avoidance practices in marriage ceremonies and among

family members, see chapter 5. 271

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. obligatory tasks in the family. Old time versions of men’s gathering places,

as separate structures called oda, selamOk, or mudhif,25 are not within

the means of most Cherkess men in urban Eski§ehir who live in apartment

houses with their nuclear families. As I have suggested earlier, demek has

been the primary place for this male mingling but especially as a safe

haven for them. The period during my entry into the community was a new

and unusual set-up in the history of the demek.

The old demek building on Kutahya street which intimidated the

elders and many regulars who wanted to hang out and play cards, was

bought in 1989. The need to frequently move from one rental building

to another and to face the financial difficulties of administering the

demek had led some members to think that if the building were the

demek’s property, there would also be continuity in administering the

For some recent accounts of usesod of alar (rooms) in homes see. Meeker

(1996) and Ayata (1988); for a comparable case, mudhif, from an Iraqi village see,

Femea (1970).

272

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. demek itself. 26 Sadullah Kaymaz, a younger member, was the first

president at the new building. He was the oldest among the group who

were elected to the executive committee. Therefore, the other

executive members asked him to be the president. There were a group

of politically active young members who suggested that they ban

playing cards at the demek. They wanted to educate themselves and

others, read Cherkess history, and increase Cherkess national

awareness among members. So they did. The demek started to

publish a newsletter with articles on issues concerning the community.

They organized talks, invited Cherkess intellectuals from Ankara who

were writing on similar issues. They presented their research and

opinions. Four such seminars were held. These activities were

welcome; however, the decision to ban playing cards was met with

protest. Those who disagreed with the decision stopped coming, they

26 The demek building was purchased primarily by donations from the

professionals and other well-to-do community members. Also a dinner and

entertainment party was organized. Benefits went into the purchase of the building. 273

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. started going to coffeehouses to play cards. Several coffeehouses

around town were known to be popular among the Cherkess. The cozy

atmosphere at the demek was due to this period of protest. Sadullah

Kaymaz’s term had just ended and the protesters and elders soon re-

appropriated their power through the move to the ‘modem’ headquarters

of the demek.

9. Re-Naming the Demek and its Mission:

The December 1993 move to a new location was one in a series

of many in the 26 years long history of the demek. Since its

establishment in 1967, the demek was often furnished with different

names. The changes in the demek's name accompany trends in

communal politics of representation (both politically and culturally),

which reflect responses of the demek leadership to the political climate

in Turkey. In order to foreground the transformation of local politics with

respect to the political climate in Turkey, I will discuss the history of the

demek in periods. The name issue deserves attention first.

274

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At the time of its establishment in 1967, the demek was called

something likeTurk-Kafkas Folklor DemeQi. I do not have a written

document from that period bearing the exact name. However, that

name was an inseparable part of the discourse that flourished around

the identity and aspirations of both the current and the old demek

membership. The discursively critical part in this name is Turk-Kafkas.

This compound can be translated into English as 1) Turkish Caucasian,

2) Caucasian Turkish and 3) Turkish-(and)-Caucasian. 'Turkish

Caucasian" foregrounds Caucasian ethnicity in relation to a Turkish ness

which may index both ethnicity and nationality, as seen in a continuum.

Thus, it resonates with the Kemalist motto ofNe Mutfu Turkum Diyene

(How happy is the one who calls him/herself a Turk). In the second

sense, as "Caucasian Turkish," the term highlights Turkishness as an

ethnic term and relates it to the Caucasus region or Caucasian race. An

example of this kind of Turkishness (in the Turkish national context, as

ethnicity) would be Azerbaijani (Turks). In the national political platform

of Turkey, this resonates with racist Turkism of the pre-1980 era, which

275

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. privileges Turkish ethnicity and conceptualizes many other ethnicities as

its offshoots. The third form, Turkish-(and)-Caucasian, obviously puts

Turkishness and Caucasianness on equal footing with sufficient

ambiguity about their relationship as signifiers of ethnic or national

bodies. Its indexicality is an open field, ripe for landscaping.

Nevertheless,e th n ic ity would not be a plausible reading of the term

'Turk" in this form, since ethnic Turks, or, rather, non-Cherkess, have

not ever been among the intended membership of the demek. This

explication of the three possible meanings of the compound Turk-

Kafkas is meant to emphasize its hermeneutic indeterminacy.

In Turkish usage, Turk-Kafkas referentially suggests a meaning

along the lines of the first and second senses. In other words, it does

not signify a Turkish ethnicity, especially as a privileged semantic

category, embodying (or encompassing) Cherkess ethnicity. The

happiness in the Kemalist motto mentioned above could foreground the

act of self-referral—calling one's self a T urk a san achieved identity.

Semantically, in a parallel way, K afkas, literally ‘of the Caucasus' or

276

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Caucasian, refers to an identity which does not pin down a specific

ethnicity, but simply an unbounded territorial identity. However, during

the course of the history of the Republic of Turkey, the termT urk (Turk

ish) as an achieved and appropriated identity has lost its mobilizing

power for the nation that was to be constituted in unity. Its national

hegemony has been cut short. As I discussed in chapter 2, with

oppositional discourses of ethnicity, especially since the seventies,

specifically by or for the Kurdish and Cherkess, Turk has become a

concentric term in ethnic connotation. The concentration has paralled a

process in which two national(izing) trends increasingly converged.

First is the constitution of a Turkish ethnicity out of many different

branches of sedentary and nomadic communities. Second is the

increasing dominance of ethno-nationalist Turkism in official ideology

and politics in the Republic of Turkey. Consequently, both significations

o f Turk-Kafkas have come to index a Kafkas Turku, in translation the

Turk of the Caucasus. Currently, in textbooks this indexical category

277

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kin/descendants of ethnic Turks [cultural and racial ?].^7

This interpretation of the meaning ofTurk-Kafkas in the original

name of the demek in EskOehir seems to suggest the obvious: The

officially required seal of Turkish (ethno)nationalism. However, the

Eskisehir Cherkess discourse about the adoption of this name

complicates the seemingly obvious. Their discourse cites a national

legislative process that was entailed in appropriating the term 'Turk" as

a signifier in the name of an organization. The field of opinion regarding

the agency of this act—whether it was voluntary or required (at least by

the force of the concurrent political atmosphere)—is open for

contestation.

27 Based on personal communication with schoolteachers, both Turkish and Cherkess. Also, based on related experience of an Abaza (Abkhasian) teacher whose self-designation as such was corrected by a Turkist ideologue, politician and, briefly, minister of culture Namik Kemal Zeybek, as "Kafkas Turku" in the presence of a delegation from the Caucasus in Eskisehir. During my schooling, Kafkas Turku did not exist in schooibooks.

278

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. With noticeable non-verbal cynicism, some young members state

the factual: That the original name of the demek had Turk in it. Some

extend this critique to include the decision of the founding members, the

elders, to seek legislative approval for the inclusion ofTurk in the name.

Some allude to a Turkist, nationalist political conspiracy. A president in

the recent history of the demek, Sadullah Kaymaz, who was a young

man in 1967 at the time of this choice, offers a historically situated

opinion that among the Eski§ehir Cherkess, Cherkess national

consciousness had not developed yet. At that time, the focus was on

the folkloric, that is, representation through choreographed dancing and

music in addition to having a support group for the community. He also

asserted that the elders used to boast about their ability to have Turk

included in the name. One of the founding members was inclined to

reconsider their intent retrospectively. In light of the current times of

ethno-nationalism, his was no easy task. On one occasion, he stressed

with pride that the term Turkv/as granted to the Cherkess organization

by the Turkish National Parliament. On another occasion, he made a

279

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. brief comment that "in those days, that's how things were." And yet

another time, he stated that according to the law, T urk could be added

to the name of an organization but getting permission for it was hard.

Different aspects of truth, always partially presented to us, were mostly

met by silence in the audience.

Were the founders of the demek forced to adopt such a name by

the oppression they felt coming from the Turkish state? Were they

deficient in nationalistic feeling and so chose to add “Turk” to the name

of their organization voluntarily? These were questions that persisted

among the socio-politic body of the demek. By raising this issue here,

by no means do I intend to set the historical record straight from an

objective perspective. Not only is the issue much more complex than I

have described, but its relevance for my work lies elsewhere. It is

relevant with respect to thenational consciousness of the demek’s

founders and the core of such consciousness, as the Cherkess

constitute it. In other words, did the founders have such consciousness

or were they becoming tools to facilitate their community’s assimilation

280

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. into Turkish national society? Or, has the concept of national

consciousness changed over the years among the ethnic Cherkess,

nationwide, or perhaps even globally? As I have suggested above,

various ways in which this issue emerged in different contexts indicate

the complexity of the decision as well as the difficulty of reconstructing

that part of demek history by keeping the unified, trans-historical

Cherkess body and its collective consciousness intact. Nevertheless,

Cherkess community still prevails when Cherkess nationalists

emphasize the suspicious act of demek’s founders along with other

historical acts of 'betrayal' by the traditional leaders. Thus, the loyalties

of traditional Cherkess leaders who take upon themselves new roles in

the society are questioned. Criticisms oscillate between a culturalism

that privileges the elders’ role in the society and a populist ethnic politics

which mistrusts them. I will discuss this tension and its repercussions in

the Eski§ehir Cherkess community's transformation in the next section.

For now, let me return to the closure of the issue of naming.

281

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The increasingly unappealing addition “Turk” was removed from

the demek’s name at an uncertain point in its history. It was probably

during the late 70s. I presume this change to be a d e fa c to act—simply

a membership decision and a new placard—regardless of legal

cleansing. During my fieldwork, the full name of the demek was

Eski§ehir Kafkas Folk/or DemeQi (Association for Caucasian

Folklore/Folklore of the Caucasus in Eskisehir). The debate around the

name continued as entangled with issues regarding the utilization of

demek grounds, demek's mission and Cherkessness. The debate grew

with the move to the new location of the demek.

Was it appropriate to call it C a u ca sia rR This term stretched the

borders of cultural connections to other non-Cherkess populations of the

Caucasus as well. To foreground the distinctiveness of northern

Caucasian cultures from those in southern Caucasia, such as

Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani, was desirable. Although the

formidable mountains of the Caucasus have been crossed throughout

history, they served to demarcate the line of distancing. Linguistic

282

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North Caucasus from those in the south. However, at least for the

Georgian and Azerbaijani, there are also strong emotional reactions to

affiliation due to historical or current relations of power and

domination.28 Adopting the name "northern Caucasian" as an

inclusionary ethnic term, in place of problematic and historically

attributed names, such as Cherkess, Abhkazian or Kabardian, would

highlight the inter-connectedness of northern Caucasians to each other.

It would also constitute a stronger ethnic/political body in relation to the

aggressive agents of history who threw all these people into diaspora,

and turned those who remained in northern Caucasia into minorities in

their homelands.

28 The Abkhasian war that I have mentioned in the previous sections was fought

against the Georgian state which, during the post-1989 period chose

independence from the Soviet Union for itself but did not grant the Abkhasians'

wish to have their own state independent from Georgia. Azerbaijanis are ethnic

kin of Turks and, in Turkey, Cherkess culture is subsumed under the Kafkas

Folkloric representations as a regional culture—adjacent to Soviet Azerbaijan.

283

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Was it acceptable to call it an association for F o lk lo re ! Was the

demek a medium to instruct and perform folk dances? Was this its

major mission or its raison d'etreI? A desire brewed over card games or

backgammon for engagement in anti-assimilationist activities in order to

enable the persistence and growth of an ethnic sensibility, political

awareness and activism as a group.

In 1995, four months after I returned to the United States, the

demek's name was changed to Esk§eh/r Kuzey Kafkas Kullur ve

D a yan15 ma D e m e g(Association i for Northern Caucasian Culture and

Solidarity in Eskisehir) by a decision taken at the annual general

membership meeting. Additionally, the intended expansion in demek's

field of activities and image required, for some Cherkess at least, a

wider involvement by women in the community. At the same meeting,

the monthly newsletter announced that, it was also proposing to start a

women's caucus {kadinlar kolU), and soon a group of women started

their activities. Debates around the name of demek and the

concomitant changes in their activities also highlight transformative

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So far, I hope to have illustrated the central place gender participation

and seniority hold in community politics at the demek. Now I turn to its

history, which I present in order to highlight intersections of culture,

politics and subjective selfhood in the ethnic positioning of Eski§ehir's

Cherkess.

10. Politics and Culture o f Ethnicity

a. Qerkeslik (Cherkessness)

The history of the demek is overlaid by an honored concept of

Q erkesiik, which is discursively valued above any other personal or

collective mission, ideology or interest. The uncontested, harmonious

format of local Cherkess dances of Eski§ehir is an aesthetically pleasing

sign of the meaning ofQerkesiik ax\& distinguishes the Eski§ehir

Cherkess from others in Turkey. As Janbek described them to me, "first

d u z (straight), then the apswa." Duz\s a figure typical of Adyge

people's dances. A p sw a means Abkhaz, or in Turkish, loosely, Abaza.

D u z is a set of slow, restrained steps performed in harmony with the

285

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dance partner. A p sw a is a more daring and livelier game between the

partners, chasing and turning around each other in such a way as to

almost erase the physical distance at times.29 in Eskisehir, Q erkes

(Cherkess) indicates such a term of e th n icity. It encompasses both

Adyge and Apswa, two linguistically different groups from the Caucasus

each with further tribal and linguistic subgroups of their own. Outside

Eskisehir, as I have discussed earlier (in chapter 3), Q e rke slik

(Cherkessness) is currently being negotiated among the intellectuals as

an umbrella term to unify all northern Caucasians. Cherkess is primarily

a term commonly attributed to the Adyge group, from the northwestern

Caucasus. Whereas the other group is known by its attributed name

A baza. The groups also prefer to use their distinct names. Eskisehir’s

difference in this regard is attributed to their distinct historical

experience.

29 Chechen is even a livelier dance with skilled elaborate feet movements by

men. Chechen is occasionally performed when visitors from outside Eskisehir are

present. Eskisehir does not have a significant Chechen population and dances are

not performed by all. 286

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The ethnicized Cherkessness in Eskisehir is rooted in the pre-

exodus experience of its components in the Caucasus. Eskisehir

Abazas are primarily from the Ashwa group. Ashwas are known to have

gradually migrated north and settled in the valleys near Adyge groups

starting around the 6th century. They are also thought to have resisted

Russian attacks until they were forced to leave their homeland. In this

regard, they are distinguished from their linguistic kin who may have

given up and left the Caucasus before the last battle was lost. Also, a

significant number of EskisehiYs Cherkess seem to have first settled in

the Balkans. Their arrival in Eskisehir, then, is a second exodus, which

took place after Imperial Russia’s demand for Ottomans to push the

Cherkess inland—away from the borders—was requited. Observing

this condition that was pressed in the Berlin treaty of 1888, the

Cherkess in the Balkans were sent to Anatolia and Greater Syria (now

Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel). The Eskisehir Cherkess community

has thus been formed by people with shared experiences of persistent

287

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followed.30

Oral history indicates the early settlers' preference to live in the

countryside. During their immigration into Ottoman Anatolia, due to the

rapid population increase, which resulted from continuous flows of

immigrants from the lost Ottoman lands in Europe, the Balkans, the

northern shores of Black Sea and the Caucasus, the most desirable

areas were already inhabited (Tuncdilek 1974). The Cherkess were

offered land around what is downtown Eskisehir today. In those days

this meant settling in the vicinity of the city, quite close to the central

market area. Elders preferred to settle away from the city in order to

preserve their cultural traditions. They did not want their youth to be

30 This common history that is thought to lie under the current notion of Cherkess

ethnicity in Eskisehir was first put to test on the eve of the Independence War for

Turkey and in smaller strifes in mixed Abaza-Adyge villages during recent history.

The most recent test for Cherkess ethnicity was during the politicization of the pre-

1980 period. The ways in which the demek-ct/m-Cherkess community in Eskisehir

came out intact as a unified body without official scars during this critical period is

most honored by the senior members. 288

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. affected by the surrounding cultures of Tartars, Greeks, Armenians,

e tc .31 This preservationist attitude continued to a large extent into the

1960s, when more and more Cherkess started migrating to the city

center. It was outside their villages, some Eskisehir Abazas suggested,

that they learned of the difference between Cherkess and Abaza. This

assertion is one marker that, regardless of its current state, the sense of

community among the Cherkess in Eskisehir is not natural, that it has

not been naturalized, but is very conscious of itself.

Cultural awareness also emerges as a point of tension with

respect to 1) hierarchies of communalist social order and attitudes

toward and expressions of its current moment of transformation, a n d2)

politics transforming social relations and their communally and

31 As I am restating the accounts about those days, I wonder whether, to what

extent and in what ways elders' decisions may have been linked to the customs

around the practice of marrying out. In other ways, I wonder how this seemingly

'conservative' distance may have signified the style in which cultural hybridization

would be regulated.

289

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issues around which Cherkess hegemonic struggles consolidate,

b. Stepping in and out:

The Turkish national context with its westward looking modernity is

complicit in Cherkess politics of ethnicity in a myriad of senses. Values

of days-gone by clash with those of the modem Turkish society. “Tribal

law has lost its power to enforce," as Kerim beydeclares. 32 Disputed

cases of many years, with no hope for resolution by elders, indicate this.

32 in this sentence, “tribal” is my loose translation of the term forfeudal. In other contexts, I have also used it to refer tokabile “ ." In popular discourse among the educated Cherkess, kabile and fe u d a l axe often used to refer to pre-exodus and to some extent early 20th century relations of power and social organization within Cherkess communities. These people freely use the Marxian evolutionary classification of human societies. According to their understanding, Cherkess societies are defined as feudal whose inevitable transformation into capitalism is associated with nationhood, which was interrupted by the colonization of the North Caucasus. Capitalist relations are not favored, and effects of its recent development are strongly criticized by the Cherkess in Eskisehir. However, its identification with feudalism seems to indicate a preference for gendered Cherkess

290

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sometimes its solutions do not satisfy needs of tribal social order.

Turkish law, nevertheless, is available for those occasions when one

wants to step outside the Cherkess realm of jurisdiction. Cultural

proprieties may be breached, for instance, for the sake of the demek's

survival. During the pre-1980 period, several such events highlighted

the growing cleavage between educated Cherkess and rural elders.

It was 1978 when Cevdet bey came back from Istanbul. He was

a recent graduate from the university, getting ready to marry and start

his business. The demek was closed. The members of the Cherkess

community, i.e. primarily men, were scattered in coffeehouses. Since

the previous demek leadership had incurred a lot of debts for rent,

workers’ insurance, and the telephone bills, its properties were

confiscated and entrusted to an elder of the Cherkess community.

According to Turkish law, if the demek did not pay back the debts within

social order and social conduct (i.e. avoidance practices, respect, generosity etc.

For a discussion of these concepts see, chapter 5).

291

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owner of the items.

The current leadership was debilitated. The elder had taken the

demek's properties to his village and was running a gambling den there.

He was a very bad-mouthed person, Cevdet bey added with profuse

apology for having to say this about a senior member in the community.

Whenever the demek's new leadership went to ask for the items, he

would start bad-mouthing them. They would leave in embarrassment

without being able to talk back. How could they? He was a tham ada,

an elder. Time was running out. The two years would be over. In the

coffeehouse discussions, a decision was made to have an early

membership meeting and elect a new committee who could have the

demek function again. Cevdet bey was elected along with a few

younger members.

After the election results were announced, Cevdet bey gave a

speech, which he started by saying: "I am n o ta Cherkess until I reopen

this demek!" The humming noise in the room carried concerns about

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demek! The misunderstanding was clarified; the committee started its

work. Sparing the reader the details of the fund-raising and completion

of the official procedures to reopen the demek, I will jump to the solution

of the problem that involved the Cherkess elder who was still running

the gambling den in his village. Cevdet bey took legal action to re-

appropriate the demek’s belongings.

Upon being visited with official papers, the elder did not open his

bad-mouth to ward the demek officers off, “feeling embarrassed” Cevdet

bey said. Cevdet bey and his committee were able to get the demek

properties back. Most of them, anyway! They had to leave three tables

and 13 chairs there, in the older man's possession, Cevdet bey said

with a smile of irony. How could they not? They couldn't have got them

because some elders were using them at that time! The rest of Cevdet

bey's story winds down with the preparation of a flat as the demek’s

headquarters. On the day of the opening ceremony, Cevdet bey was

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. welcomed back to the Cherkess community of which he had stepped

out by the honorary president of the demek who was cutting the ribbon.

Cevdet bey's move in and out of Qerkeslik indicates first of all

that, as Kerim bey points out, the tribal order’s hegemonic touch has

been wasted, that currently, the Cherkess who have been socialized

into the modem social order do not feel the power of the old order in

their hearts. This conflict resolution rests on the observation that the

power that resides in the elders is not necessarily used for the

community’s interest. Abusive elders were an integral part of the

Cherkess nationalist/patriotic discourse since before modem times in

Turkey. Stories of diaspora often blame elders for misleading their

communities, or betraying them for their personalinterests. 33 As the

power of traditional leaders has eroded, the notion of “elder” has also

been redefined. Within the discourse of respected elders, leadership

qualities have been replaced by seniority by age. Elders have become

33 As an example for such aspects of Cherkess diaporic experience see,

Shynkhuba (1986). 294

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. people who need be treated with respect because of their age, perhaps

fragility. They are not necessarily respected for their wisdom. The

power that comes from wisdom and financial support for the demek’s

needs is derived from modem means such as education, professional

success and wealth. Families of old nobility have to a large extent

consumed their wealth without reproducing it. Their ‘symbolic capital’

does not go far.

Whereas the discursive hegemony of the 'unquestionable power

and position of elders” continues; in practice, the younger generations

are clear and out-spoken about their aspirations and have the means,

i.e., the larger Turkish society and its institutions, to challenge the

arbitrariness of elders' power. The tribal power system does indeed

privilege the aged groups, however, their power is not arbitrary. In

addition to age, this power is honored in relation to their lineage/class

and wisdom (and wealth). In the Turkish diaspora, the bifurcation

among the elders who have reinforced their familial/lineage privileges in

the old system with the privileges of modem Turkish society are

295

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. unquestionably respected and honored as elders. They also are

supporters of young people such as Cevdet bey who do honor the

tham ade system. Their otherwise inappropriate acts are tolerated and

even supported. The Turkish state and its legal structures have

replaced the old binding rules of the elders' councils, such as exile,

incarceration. Thus, despite the culturalist/traditionalist discourses,

leadership is perceived more and more as an achieved status, which

requires many more qualifications than wisdom that is defined by years

of quotidian experience.

The fractures among the tham ades, are grounded in the values

of both tribal Caucasian societies and the modem Turkish society.

Thus, an elder's position vis-a-vis another elder can be class-based and

lineage-based. As the visibility of adults whose power basis is

grounded in the educational and professional institutions of the Turkish

society, the inclination to distance one's self from the demek may be

observed. Or, more politicized perspectives gain currency.

Consequently, the modernized intellectual leadership of the demek is in

296

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a struggle with the absolutist, old-fashioned expectations to gain power

and status in the community,

c. Pushing the culture’s strongholds

Devalorization of money is a characteristic of the Cherkess traditional

order. Generosity, a commonly valued disposition in tribal societies, is

entangled with a cultural disposition for public display of personal

acquisitions. Generosity requires sharing, for instance, by way of

giftgiving at weddings or treating friends for tea or coffee at the demek.

Such public displays also require grooming to look your best in public.

Jokes abound about the meticulously polished shoes of Cherkess men,

while there are irreparable holes in their soles. The value is cherished

despite an awareness of its irony. The holes in the soles, however,

started playing a role in the demek’s choice of activities for the

community.

Celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the demek revived the

debates around socio-economic differences and, eventually, was

realized as an enactment of the unified community of the Cherkess. For

297

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. this occasion, the current demek leadership was inclined to have a

dinner party at a nice restaurant. During the planning period, an

oppositional discourse questioned this choice by voicing concerns about

the cost. The suggestion of a two-tiered celebration was thrown into the

debate: Two events could be organized. One would be a dinner in a

nice party hall. Music would be provided by a professional band, that is,

non-Cherkess music. This event would increase the personal cost

significantly. The other option was to have a free or low-priced event

called Ha/k Gecesi(People's Night Out).

I attended several such events. Typically, for Ha/k Gecesi, a

modest wedding hall was rented. Tickets were sold for an affordable

price.34 The folkdance teams of the demek performed. Books, pins

and other souvenir items were sold. Small skits were written and played

34 Tickets were around 100,000 TL to 150.000 TL during my fieldwork ($ 4.00 to

5.00). This was two to three times more than the price of a movie ticket.

Considering the fact that several members from each family would come, and once

arrived, there would be other expenses as well, the sum total would easily strain

the budgets of lower to middle income families.

298

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. by the members, and an auction was held to raise extra m o n e y .35 The

room was usually arranged like a lecture or concert hall with the chairs

lined up in rows. Usually the front seats were for women and children.

For a group of elders, tha m ad a, there would always be a reserved place

at the very front of the room, if possible in a visibly separated way.

These elder men, rural or urban, as the respected members of the

community would sit there. Their wives and children, if they were there

aiso, would sit together with other women, children and unmarried

young people in the room. The young men initially sat in the back part

of the room. At each Halk Gecesi, the hall as well as the lobby outside

were always packed with people. Accommodating people in these halls

was extremely difficult; the youth and the men would inevitably leave

their seats to the women and hang out in the lobby, watch through the

35 Usually cakes made by women from different villages are items to be sold. In this case, young men, who want to flirt with them, or haveka$ens among them, are the ones to bid higher and higher. When an item of some value is auctioned, especially a culturally significant symbol such as a Cherkess dagger, it is

299

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. doors. It was even difficult to keep an aisle free of people for the

entrance and exit of the performers. At the end of the night, the youth

who organized the event would usually go out to a bar and drink, dance

and party.

The suggestion to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the demek

with a two-tiered event triggered cynical criticism, which deployed the

parliamentary distinction in the United Kingdom as its metaphorical

medium, as events for the House of Lords and House of Commons.

There was constant teasing about who would go to the party of the

Commons (A varri), or who to that of the Lords. "I certainlyw ill go to the

Lords'," was an embittered but sincere declaration by some, despite

their meager economic means. The dinner plan never materialized.

Instead, they only hosted a Halk Gecesi style celebration through which

Cerkeslik was reinforced as an idealized state for ethnic equals, not

distinguished by tribal or modem differences, but rather, unified in

customary and common to donate the item to the demek. This generosity is

announced and celebrated right there and then with a big applause. 300

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lifestyle, taste, pleasure and a respect for cultural practices and their

harmony. In other words, modem Cherkess traditionalism favored

distinctions based on age and gender and recognized the legitimacy of

only those distinctions for public display. If the strategic maneuvering of

Cevdet bey to re-appropriate the demek's belongings indicates the

removal of the community elders’ power—based on age—to the realm

of the symbolic collective capital, the desire to enact modem Cherkess

familial relations in alternative Cherkess public events indicates the

shaky hegemony of gender distancing as a sine qua non condition of

Cerkeslik in Eskisehir, an integral part of its public display.36 The

following demek activity of 1986 illustrates this point.

In 1986 a dinner party such as the one proposed for the 25th

anniversary of the demek was also planned. This dinner party also

included plans to serve hard liquor that added to the cost tremendously.

During the planning period, however, the major concern among the

36 For a discussion of gender relations in public and private realms, see chapter 5. 301

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. leadership was not about the socio-economic differences of the demek

membership; people were concerned about the power of the Cherkess

ad et. This is how the president at the time, Murat bey, recalled his

concerns about the success of the 1986 event.

Murat bey foresaw problems regarding attendance since the

organized event foreshadowed the public presence and interaction of

married couples, perhaps also parents and children, together. This

would be a major transgression of the Cherkess adet. Adet considered

such public display of sexual partnerships a n d their products (i.e.,

spousal and parental relations) almost incestuous and strictly regulated

them. He was cautioned, Murat bey said, that he would probably spend

the evening with about ten people in his close circles of friends. They

suggested, no Cherkess man would attend such an event with their

spouses, to sit around a table, drink and eat. He took the risk and went

ahead with the organization of the event. Tickets sold out ahead of

time. He recalled the event:

The place was full to the rafters. I said to my wife, "Come on and get up!" But chances are we will be like lonely seedlings [on the 302

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dance floor] until the music ends! Sweat was dripping down my back. And what do I see? There is no room on the dance floor, (pause) We all go to others' weddings with our wives. Separately, we make a blunder! Why don't we do it in our community!?^

Murat bey was pleasantly surprised to see that gender distancing

could be breached that night in 1986; however, in 1994, with the

additional factor of the increasing gap in socio-economic differences

between the demek membership, a similar public appearance was not

possible. In 1986, the event was sold out despite the costa n d th e

cultural impropriety it entailed. The community came together, and

celebrated its 'being', in its unified communal state regardless of internal

differences and a d e tsanctions. Both to themselves and to others, they

performed the collaborative and egalitarian community of their ideals.

Furthermore, the event is significant due to its opposition to the

Cherkess adet’s sanctions concerning concealment of marital

37 "Salon tiklim tiklim. Hamma dedim, kalk. Ya orda yapayalniz muzik bitinceye

kadar sap gibi kaimak var. Sirtimdan ter damliyor. Bir baktim pistte yer kalmami§.

Birinin dugunune gidiyoruz hammizla. Ayri ayn bu haltlari yiyoruz. Niye

beraberken yapmiyoruz."

303

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. relationships from the public eye. Eight years later, Murat bey still

questioned in the present: “We make a blunder(h a /t) separately! Why

don’t we do it in our community?" In Turkish the idiom that he uses to

refer to dancing with one’s spouse in public is “halt yemek.” Its

connotation is unquestionably negative.38 Therefore, while it is a self-

critique of a cultural practice—an awareness of sagging observance of

a d e twhile away from the community—his statement does not reflect a

personal ease with the transformed state of himself or of his cohorts.

38 | am grateful to my gezgin friends and late Nazif TepedelenlioOu for their instructive and pleasurable responses to my 1998 inquiry about the literary, colloquial and experiential discursive scope of the idiom and its variants as h a lt etmek, halt yemek ox halt yedirmek. The English translation, as 'to make a blunder', contributes an interesting intentionality and a sense of awareness to the act of impropriety that echoes Murat bey's usage as h a lt yem ek (literally, to eat halt—a compound, mixture, if edible, with the sense of distaste and impropriety). According to my American Heritage Dictionary (1980), however, the term signifies an accidental or inadvertent act or remark: “a stupid, grave mistake; a clumsy, foolish act or remark." 304

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Five: Dancing To Modernity: Gendered Landscapes

I first met Halide hanim at a wedding, at the marriage ceremony of a

Cherkess young man to a Turk. She stepped on the dance floor around

midnight, escorted by the young master of the ceremonies,p sa ra h , as the

wedding climactically approached to its end. We enthusiastically clapped to

the rhythm of the music and the male performers’ chants, as she gracefully

glided on her toes all over the floor motioning her partner with harmonizing

movements of her arms, her head and eyes; and, as he stomped and kicked

his feet while chasing her to exhibit what seemed like a heartwarming

demonstration of courtship. In reality, theirs was a well-known case of

unrealized yet publicly known courtship from 30 to 40 years ago. The

dancing couple were both in their 70s; and this was a dance which in a

sense celebrated /fte/ircourtship; however, more importantly, it was a

privileged public representation of sexual attraction that is squarely at the

center of Cherkess gendered identities and relations. This is what

distinguishes the Cherkess, including Karagay, from the other ethnic groups

305

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in Eskisehir. Cherkess difference is punctuated, underlined and highlighted

by a d e t(customary practices, or, tra d itio n ) that celebrate unrelated men and

women’s social interactions through communication and in dances. I was

told, again and again, to take note of this. And I did. In my note taking, I

underlined the central importance of another adet, in this context, more

specifically ka^-goQ, which seems to regulate gender relations solely among

Turco-lslamic groups, often, in the countryside by way of avoidance.1

Discourses of kag-gog and gender-mixed gatherings among the Cherkess

1 There is a resemblance between Cherkess avoidance practices and those prevalent among the Kurdish groups. In the Kayalik village, for instance, elders mentioned the similarity as a factor that helped the recent inter-ethnic coexistence. However, culturally ascribed meanings are nuanced differently, and this creates different gendered effects in each ethnic group. I could appreciate the parallels based on my own ethnographic research among the Beritanli nomads in eastern Turkey as well as the significance of differences highlighted by Cherkess people's accounts of their gendered experience in inter-ethnic marriages. Contemporary perceptions/representations of avoidance among the Cherkess of EskOehir will be discussed later in order to explicate what signifies Cherkess difference and what constitutes the grounds for its gendered contestation. See, Smirnova (1986) for a discussion of various kinds of avoidance practices in the Caucasus suggesting strong parallel practices also among Turkic groups of the Caucasus. 306

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. positioned Cherkess and Turkish ethnicities, in their contemporary

stereotyped forms, at opposite poles of the spectrum of modernity and

traditionalism. In the case of the Cherkess, the concept of modem has a

primordialized quality: gender-mixed gatherings are modem and Cherkess

X a b ze or a d e t\s full of cultural practices that bring genders together and

celebrate their interaction.2 Thus, modernity and traditionalism collapse into

one another, become One. In the case of Turks, from the Cherkess

perspective, the concept of modem signifies artificiality and imitation for

having come from the ‘west’ that inspired it. On these grounds, many

Cherkess repeatedly refuted the modem Turkish practices and expressed

concerns that their recent forms have a contaminating effect on 'modem

Cherkess traditions'.3 As I compare engendering practices ofadet anti ka$-

2 See, footnote 5 in chapter 4 for a provisional discussion of the relationship

between adet and xabze. My own usage throughout the ethnographic account,

including occasionally capitalizing the term xabze, strives to remain loyal to

Cherkess individuals' usage of the terms.

3 In order to steadily focus on Cherkess cultural practices in relation to the issue of

modernity and identity, I will not adopt a comparative approach to explicate

avoidance practices that kag-gog and adet indicate. For an ethnological approach 307

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. gog, Cherkess modernity is not inscribed in my consdousness as solely a

public celebration of sexual attraction but, more significantly, its p rim a ry

public recognition a n d terms and boundaries of its representation. In this

chapter, I will take you through the spaces and encounters f have lived

through in everyday discourse and practice, in which Cherkess manhood

and womanhood, Turkishness and Cherkessness, and various adets

(cultural practices) were debated, practiced, performed and refined over and

over in an attempt to pin down modernity ‘at large’(Appadurai 1996), in

effect subjectively identifying and constituting what modem is for

themselves as individuals aspiring to reconcile its contemporary expressions

for Cherkess community and its ‘identity’. This is a journey in the

landscapes of Cherkess Eski§ehir, beyond the walls of the demek. The

inter-ethnic wedding ceremony where I met Halide hanDm is a good point

to start it.

to avoidance practices in the Caucasus see, Smirnova (1986) and Smirnova and Pershits (1979).

308

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The wedding was held at one of the nicest outdoor party halls in the

city, structured in the form of an arena theater. The centrally located dance

floor on which the bands would also perform was elevated. Sets of tables

for the guests were lined up at a direct angle to the round dance floor. A

podium separated the second row of the tables, which were in boxes that

accommodated 10-15 people. Trees and ivy that formed roofs for the semi

private boxes surrounded the arena itself. Tables closer to the stage

seemed to seat sets of conjugal families, men and women together. In

some of the boxes, concentrations of women and children were noticeable.

Around the entrance, the circular structure turned into a wide angular space

where guests freely moved about and socialized, especially when they

entered and exited the wedding site. Most of the young Cherkess men I

knew, teenagers to middle age, occupied this space throughout the

ceremony, except for the period of time they were on stage performing the

Cherkess wedding part of the ceremony.

The Cherkess guests impatiently waited for the end of “the Turkish

wedding” and the beginning of the Cherkess one. During the so-called

309

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “Turkish wedding" part of the ceremony, a professional band played popular

Turkish folk or classic music tunes and guests danced $/ftete//i, slow couple

dances or line dances where men and women of all generations, regardless

of their marital status or relation to one another could at the same time be

on the dance floor. The Turkish band stepped down and Cherkess youth

took their place on the stage. Young Cherkess men played and, next to

them, women stood in line, as usual, facing the guests. After a while, older

men took the stage to perform as players upon invitation. Halide hanim was

invited to come to the dance floor late at night. Just as she stepped on the

dance floor, a man of her age, also invited to be her dance partner, jumped

on the stage from the other end. A noticeable excitement grabbed people

including players and the young women on the stage. We clapped. Men

cheered in low chords. Everybody seemed proud and enthusiastic about

the performance of the handsome couple in their 70s. We clapped to the

rhythm of the music as she gracefully glided all over the floor, and he kicked

and turned around and chased her in -what seemed like a heartwarming

demonstration of courtship. This was during the last weeks of my fieldwork.

310

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Until that night, I had not seen any senior Cherkess woman dance publicly

at a Cherkess wedding. Many women did not dance publicly. Weddings

were for unmarried young men and women. Married family members and

guests facilitated the young people's interactions, preparing food, inviting

the youth in for snacks and even carrying messages between men and

women. Married members, especially women, never took center stage to

dance. When they danced, they did so in the margins—inside, in the

backyard. These weddings had a jocular name—“Kocakari Dugunu," Old

women s wedding. This old woman’ was special. It seemed so.

The older couple's participation-by-invitation at the celebration is one

indication of regulatory aspects of Cherkess adet that still prevail in social

relations within the community, although with variable and diminishing

effects. Its public performance brings gender interactions to the center

while defining Cherkess modernity. Halide hanim and Togan bey used to

be ka O e n , platonic partners, while they were young. Theirka§ en

relationship did not end up in marriage. Most don’t. Now, as they glided

and played on the dance floor, they represented the best of Cherkess

311

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. culture, its civility or modernity as the Cherkess repeatedly and confidently

declare. Halide hanim is a special woman in more than one way; however,

her playful participation at weddings, despite her mature age, is because of

what she shares with the women on stage, which is the public knowledge of

her marital status: Haiide hanim is single. Just like the other women on

stage, centrally positioned, proudly displayed and courted at ‘weddings’, she

has not been married. I would be hard pressed to comment on the ethnicity

of all occupants of concentrated private areas for women and children at

this wedding site; however, I will argue that women’s place among the

Cherkess of Eski§ehir is clearly defined with respect to the social and

physical space that they occupy.

Cherkess cultural practices, as displayed at ‘weddings’, are

noticeably different when compared with, especially, non-Caucasian ethnic

groups in Eski§ehir. Furthermore, Cherkess women’s increased mobility in

urban Eski§ehir, as professionals, students, in the streets or in the privacy of

their homes and households has brought about significant changes. As

Cherkess women appear and disappear in different places in the city, along

312

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. with or without Cherkess men, their self-perceptions have no doubt

significantly altered as much as their relations with each other. It is with

special attention to this fluidity that I intend to describe a n d ta k e issue with

the Cherkess discourse of ethnicism in this chapter. As I discuss in chapters

3 and 4, post-1989 Cherkess ethnicism is marked by a desire to emerge in

the international arena as a nation, a bounded community with its own

political seat of power. The concept of modernity signifies this nationalist

(and nationalizing) aspiration in a double sense. Modernity as a condition is

implicated by achieving the state of nationhood, as in a nation-state,

regardless of the perceived delay created by the forces of history

(colonization and diaspora). Modernity is also authenticated, as an

essential element of the Cherkess xabze, in a way to justify the aspired

nationhood while simultaneously contesting its terms as defined by the

Turkish state. Such modernity is always articulated, as my descriptions

above have implied, in relation to ka^-go?, i.e., avoidance practices that

regulate gender relations, in public knowledge, among Turco-lslamic

populations of Turkey.

313

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Which collectivity observes kag-gog and which collectivity does not

has primary significance in determining modernity as an authentic cultural

trait. The way in which a gendered act or relation is displayed, or its

publicity or privacy, is an integral aspect of its modernity. The Cherkess

ethnicity, then, provides an example with which to explore the ways in which

modernity in the Turkish national context is gendered (Kandiyoti, 1996) as

well as to explicate negotiations over its gender. Appadurai has

emphasized that we “need an account of ethnicity that explores its

modernity” (Ibid: 139). Cherkess ethnicity’s modernity lies in the sutures of

the two senses, as in Hall’s emplacement (Hall 1994; Hall 1996), that I

identified: aspiration for a nation-state and an essentialized cultural

difference. Gendered negotiations that take place between Cherkess men

and women within the sutures foreshadow conflicting terms for cross-

stitching public and private expressions of gendered relations and shed light

on possibilities for the future of the Cherkess community in Turkey, in a way

refashioning its modemity in both senses that I have discussed.

314

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1. A voidance as (Anti-)Modem: Kag-gog versu s Adet

According to Cherkessadet, interpersonal relations are marked by

re sm iye t (or 6 k}ululuK) and sa yg i, in English formality and restraint,

respectively. Resmiyet and olgululuk, as they are interchangeably used,

indicate the style in which saygi (respect), a value of utmost significance for

Cherkess, is displayed. Olgulu as a Turkish adjective clearly associates

saygi (respect) with restraint, or distance, which needs to be variably

observed, depending on the interactive context and interlocutors. Gender

and age are two categorical axes with which cultural proprieties for

displaying respect are bounded. Relations embedded in biological and

social affinity, in other words kinship, intricately free up as well as tighten

people’s obligations and needs for displays of respect-as-restraint in public

or in private.

In kag-gog practices, overall, restraint finds expression in physical

distance, in other words, avoidance. The Turkish discourse of modemity

has stigmatized this aspect of cultural practices which is commonly

observed by populations of Anatolian countryside, while encouraging

315

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. women's participation in the public sphere of the nascent nation-state.

Stereotypically, for Turkish modems (nationally speaking), ka$-gd£ still

conjures up the image of a peasant woman, who is dressed in sh a lva rs

(baggy trousers) and ya zm a s(traditional head-covers), swiftly moving away

from the scene of an encounter or at least making herself unapproachable

by turning her head away. For increased effect, you can freeze this image

zooming in on her motion while covering her mouth with the edge of her

scarf to indicate her reluctance to converse. As is emphasized by popular

Islamic practices, physical restraint may be observed starting at the onset of

puberty and is required always with respect to a man, whose presence is

potentially contaminating for the woman or her family, in the 1920s, on the

eve of the implementation of the modernist reform of attire, this image was

also highlighted by the founder of the Turkish nation-state, Kemal Ataturk,

as a sign of the anti-modem. He said:

In some places I see women throwing a cloth or a towel or something of the sort over their heads, covering their faces and their eyes. When a man passes by, they turn away, or sit huddled on the ground. What is the sense of this behavior? Gentlemen, do the mothers and daughters of a civilized nation assume this curious

316

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. attitude, this barbarous posture? It makes the nation look ridiculous . . .! (Abadan 1967, 83).

Among the Cherkess, references to such a practice of kag-gog

abound, as do the ambivalent views about Cherkess a d e fe association with

it. The childhood memories of Sabahattin bey, now a 45-year-old Abaza

man, during the year he spent boarding with a family in a neighboring

m a n a vvillage as a schoolboy, presents an example of this ambivalence.4

He recalled two relations around two women of different civil status in the

family, namely the mother and the daughter of his manav household.

Sabahattin bey was critical of spousal relations between his manav parents.

The couple's relations were too informal, direct and confrontational.

Husband and wife were lax with each other. Their relationship lacked the

proper demeanor and formality that he had observed between his parents

4 At the time, education at his own village school was limited to the first three years of grade school. Therefore, his father made an arrangement with a m anav family for his son to continue his education. Manav'xs a term used to indicate the indigenous populations of settlements in western Anatolia. They are commonly presented as early settlers of Turkish descent, oftentimes, they are thought to be

317

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and among married couples in his own Abaza village. "We have kag-gog,”

he said while summarizing this point of difference.

While he considered such kag-gog between his parents, implying

respect and restraint, as modem, his narrative about the young daughter of

his m a n a vfamily and her relationship to young men represented an

example of kag-gog as anti-modem, just as in the Turkish modernist

discourse.

Shall we call him her lover or her intended? Whoever he was, he would come and whistle outside, at dark. The girl would then go to the window and look out. That's how they would see each other, kind of ...5

Contrary to this, with pride he added: “Bizde oyle §ey o/maA" "We

don't have that kind of a practice. A young man visits his ka§ en s

freely." The Cherkess discourses more commonly focus on this

aspect of kag-gog and state the freedom of interaction between

unmarried Cherkess men and women, the ka§en relationship

remnants of pre-Turkic inhabitants of Anatolia who eventually were Islamicized and Turkified.

318

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (courtship), as a sign of Cherkess modemity, which is conceived in

stark opposition toTurkish practices.

Sabahattin bey’s observations concerning avoidance, its

presence and absence, in relation to the manavviomen o f his

household draw the line between Cherkess and non-Cherkess

cultural expressions of self and personal relations with respect to

marriage. He identifies the gendered relations of the two women,

one of whom is married, the other not, as different from those in his

Cherkess community. Cherkess difference and its modemity is a

function of gender attraction and sexuality: public expression of

sexuality is a sign of (dis)respect to the community.6 Sexuality’s

5 In Turkish:“yavuk/usu mu diyetim sdz/usti mu diye/im artk, diOarda, o karanhkta is/ik galardi. Kizpencereye Qkarbakar, §te oy/e gdru§urferdi fa/an.

6 I have to emphasize that such regulation of sexuality is not as similar as it seems

to that debated with respect to Islamic practices. Whereas those debates privilege

female sexuality and its potential as a possible cause of strife, among the male

populace, what is private, and what needs to be controlled is sexuality per se,

across the genders. Garb (1994) mentions the same cultural orientation as a

valued preference in contemporary Abkhasia.

319

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. private expression, within the conjugal family, carries the potential of

interpersonal disrespect and, therefore, needs to be restrained.

2. The modemity o f commingling

Cherkess adet prescribes that people whose relations are

marked by sexual intimacy observe public avoidance. Through a

complicated set of practices, which I will describe later, the power of

sexuality, including intimacy with its offspring, is concealed from the

public eye. This, in a word, is re sp e ct, which is displayed at once as

formality a n d self-restraint. A n d respect is the core characteristic of

Cherkess modemity. How, then does respect operate in ‘care-free’

relations, or romances, between unmarried Cherkess men and

women which are, as in couple dances, the utmost representation of

Cherkess modemity? Before turning my attention to this question, a

discussion of a relational Cherkess term, ka$en, that so far I have

defined only minimally, is needed.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a. K a$en: how many is too many? Remember the teenager of the First Caucasian Youth Party

who sought reassurance from me about rejecting the very first

proposal she received to accept a man as her ka$eri? How about the

question on the national college placement test in 1994 and the

subsequent discussions of its meaning at the demek, do you

remember? Both cases, one internal the other external, draw

attention to the boundaries of ka§enlik, this particular relationship

between genders. How actually is ka § e n /ik lived in private between

two individuals, or as chaperoned by a third or fourth party?

Understanding private facets of k a § e n lik is a worthwhile yet difficult

endeavor in urban Eski§ehir, particularly when parties to these

debates reframe in hindsight their individual or familial stories to

speak to the Turkish nation, or to the modems of the international

community. In its public expression, however,ka§en//k is an index of

Cherkess modemity. Cherkess identity discourses are as

impeccable as can be about it.

321

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ka§en, o r p se t/u k, both Cherkess terms, often refers to a young man

who expresses an interest in a young woman. Each literally means an

admirer, or possibly a suitor. As I discussed in the introduction, the cultural

boundaries of the term’s meaning are opaque; however, during the recent

coverage of Cherkess ethnicity and its cultural specificities in the Turkish

press, the term ka§en is among the pick of the crop and has been discussed

extensively. As declared in a newspaper article, a young girl can have as

many ka$ens as 100. The coverage adds that she is allowed or

encouraged to flirt with them as long as she is in the company of others.

Furthermore, in the old days when the Cherkess lived in bigger houses in

the countryside, girls would entertain their ka$ens in the privacy of a room

designated to them, again, as long as the ka$en brought a friend along.

I heard similar accounts of the ka§en relationship as well as criticism

of it during my fieldwork in Eski§ehir. An older Cherkess woman, Gul hala,7

thought the high number ofka§ens cited in the paper was absurd. Her

comments questioned the plausibility of the number 100 in light of two

7 Hala means aunt.

322

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cultural specificities. One of them is the practical impossibility to have such

a number of ka§ens considering the population of available Cherkess. The

more important one is related to the cultural limitations of eligibility based on

lineage, class and status. For a woman of her age, in her 60s, and

belonging to the Cherkess nobility, it must have been difficult to have many

ka§errs of her status,8 whereas the young people’s proud declaration that

earns publicity is a claim for Cherkess modemity. It represents Cherkess

gender relations as suitable to modem times in Turkey, and also carries the

seal of cultural authenticity. It is also part and parcel of a quasi-public

Cherkess modernization project which aspires to complete abolishment of

traditional hierarchies and vase, bride-price payments that men are asked to

present to the potential bride's family.

A kaq en relationship does not always lead to marriage. Nor does

ka§eniik entail an intimate relationship, indicated by a boyfriend-girifriend

relationship. Ka§enlik, as a structured relationship, is a verbal and

8 Cherkess nobility were required to marry from within their own class. I was told

that if a desirable suitor did not exist, cultural preference was to marry a Turk

rather than a Cherkess from another class. 323

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. emotional practice in gender companionship.9 It intimates flirtation by giving

male competitiveness the upper hand in its implementation. Aykan bey, a

man in his late 30s, compared ka$en exchanges of his days to e v c ilik

oyunu, that is to playing house. His adult formative years carried the stamp

of the 1960s’ polarized national context. Starting in the mid-60s debates

over ethnicity, secularism and criticisms of modernist unitary Turkish identity

had sprouted among the Cherkess as well as other communities in Turkey.

For Aykan bey, ka§enlik was nothing more than a feeble performance of a

man and a woman negotiating the terms of an intimate relationship. In this

game, the man's interest, expressed as desire to have her, for life, is

supposed to raise her spirits. A woman's skillful acceptance, even her

acquiescence, in peer-presence, is presumed to boost a man’s confidence

and add to his reputation. Aykan bey would have preferred to have ka$ens

9 My discussion here focuses on the Cherkess public discourses of ka§enlik, on

what various Eski§ehir Cherkess highlighted as appropriate to share with a female

anthropologist and make public by participating in its recording. In my one-on-one

conversations, a sizable number of women and men elaborated on their ka§enlik

324

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. who could engage in political debates. Instead, he chose a woman, not

only as a ka?en but as his wife, who acquiesced in his approaches. His

smile expressed irony, as he recalled her silent demeanor in those mixed

gender gatherings: “I didn’t even see her teeth before we got married.”

Hikmet bey, a man in his early 30s, was remembered as a man of

exceptional poetic prowess. No young woman could resist his poetic

approaches, as he himself was remembered to declare among his cohorts.

No young woman whom he romanced, however, was suitable or agreed to

pursue a lifetime relationship in marriage with him. Gendered post-marital

aspirations broke the magic of ka§en negotiations. He remains unmarried;

his ka§ens spread around the world in Cherkess or non-Cherkess webs of

relations.

Women do and can have many ka§ens. They have more ka$ens

than in Gul hala’s days. They are expected and allowed to choose and

accept men as ka§ens, preferably in subtle and gentle ways. For both men

as also physically engaging. Some discussed their dislike of the ‘sexually

permissive’ gatherings of earlier generations, as they perceived them. 325

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and women, ka§enlik can be, and often is, publicly known. When a man

approaches a person as a ka§en candidate one of the issues that is

discussed early on is who their families are. They may not have met each

other’s families since generations oftentimes socialize separately. Such

information is learned from the parents or elders after the initial encounter.

Families matter for a number of reasons. First of all, despite recent

concerns raised in publications or private gatherings about its demise,

exogamy is still a highly valued and commonly observed rule in marriage.

The best partners in marriage are 7 generations, gobek, removed from each

other. Any knowledge to the contrary will change the nature of theka§en

relationship by delimiting it to a game of complimentary teases eventually

obliging the man to take the role of the safeguard or escort for the young

woman in her outings. Also, while their effects have considerably

diminished, historical conflicts, old blood feuds or lineage hierarchies still

play a role in choosing marriage partners. Consequently, some ka§ens are

bound to remain as just public ’flirts'.10 Flirtation with old ka§ens may

10 Cherkess people oppose using the Turkish term for flirt (‘flort’) for any aspect of

326

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. continue after marriage. This is more common when the woman is married

to a non-Cherkess. She could then freely engage in joking courtship with

Cherkess men using ethnic difference as a booster in her repertoire.

For a community which values formality in all social relations, the

ka§en relationship is a cultural zone where intimacy is negotiated and

formality does not necessarily prevail. Temporary removal of formality is

publicly mediated by the cultural construct of sem erkho (in Turkish §aka, or

joking). Such informality is most prominent at highly regulated social

occasions called zexes, as well as commonly held d u g u n s .^

ka$en relationship. In Turkishflo rt implies actively dating or seeing someone. It is

a one-on-one romance, which may involve physical intimacy. For more discussion

of the issue of flirtation, see the section entitled semerkho.

11 Dug tin in standard Turkish is used for parties that signify a man and woman’s

union in marriage. The term is used more broadly among the Cherkess to refer to

all occasions that bring young men and women together. 327

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. b. Zexes (and Dugun):

K a$ert relationship may be initiated at ze xe s gatherings.12 Most

commonly, these days M uhabbet, a Turkish word of Arabic roots, is used for

this gathering for games, dances and talk.13 The Turkish term implies

heartwarming, intimate and entertaining interaction. These gatherings,

which in the villages would last until the early hours of the morning with

games, music and food, only to be repeated at the house of another very

soon, were a fond memory for many youth who grew up in the city center.

As Mebrure hanim reminisced (see chapter 4), they were honest and

12 Agw a/\s another Cherkess term for these gatherings. 13 My usage of the Turkish termoturak following its deployment by a middle-aged Cherkess woman was met with giggles of surprise and disapproval by the young men, due to its close resemblance to the men's nights out, which involved entertainment by hired professional women as entertainers to dance and sing in presence of men while they drank and ate watching the women's performance. This old practice of late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey, namely O turak A/emi, was obviously found unsuitable to describe the reserved and subtle courtship that takes place at Cherkess youth gatherings. For a description of oturak a/emi, see Davis (1986, especially, 160-162). 328

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. innocent gatherings of mixed gender that are now subjected to moralizing

judgments by non-Cherkess neighbors in urban Eski§ehir.14

In the old days, in villages, the most common occasion for such a

gathering would be a visiting girl from outside the village. The young

people, usually between the ages of 16 and 22, would gather as soon as

they heard of the presence of such ma is a firk iz; guest girl, in the village and

pay a visit to her at the host family's house. As the Eski§ehir Cherkess still

maintain strong ties with their villages, most of which are easily accessible

even by regular chartered taxi services (do/m u§), this is not an extinct

cultural practice or occasion; however,ze xe s'm urban Eski§ehir has

changed considerably in the last generation.

14 A Gurcu (Georgian) woman recalled the weddings during her childhood in the

Duzce area, which is heavily populated by peoples of the Caucasus. She recalled

that in those days at Gurcu weddings men would dance outdoors whereas women

danced inside. The Cherkess, on the other hand held parties at which both sexes

mingled and danced. With time, such a practice seems to have been adopted by

other Caucasian populations as well. As Hikmet hanCHm said, “Gurcu people

learned mingling from the Cherkess."

329

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As a highly stylized form of socialization, z e x e s provides an

opportunity for culturally prescribed courtship. Through zexes, men and

women are constituted as individuals driven by mutual attraction. They also

“practice” and develop specific styles to demarcate boundaries around their

personhood. In the village version, guests are seated in the guest room.

An older member of the group is seated at the head of the room and takes

the role of thetha m ad e, the wise one.15 Seating shows some variation from

one Cherkess tribe to another, and these days, even from one village to

another. In some, young men will be seated on one side of thetha m ad e,

girls on the other. In others, they will be mixed. Usually the conversation

and interactions are guided by the tham ade. He opens the floor fo r the

youth to express "feelings" and "thoughts" about the guest girl, initiates the

game of ‘playing house’, as Aykan bey called it. Men’s competitive

compliments to the guest girl and her responses (properly indicating her

15 A Cherkess term which refers to the elder men in the community. As

this usage indicates, it is also a relative term to refer to any man who is by

age, wisdom or experience qualified to be in charge of a group, an activity

or a ceremony to oversee that traditions and proprieties are observed.

330

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. difficult choices) increasingly turn to joking strategies of eloping, starting a

family and ever after. Thamade mediates, maintains the cultural boundaries

if propriety may be breached. Games are played to facilitate people’s

interactions with each other or as a break from dancing and playing music.

We played such a game with the younger generation Cherkess when

I was taken to a z e x e s gathering in urban Eski§ehir. This once popular

game is called Caps. While Cherkess friends in their late 20s or 30s, who

took me to thisze xe s, were somewhat sarcastic about the meaning of this

game, the younger generation seemed to participate in it for the sake of my

research. The game is a simple exchange of names accompanied by a

touch of hands. A person gets up and points to another person to come to

the middle of the room for the exchange. They exchange names while the

first person softly slaps the other in the palm. Then s/he sits down. Now

the invitee is to choose a person to join him/her in the middle of the room.

Again they exchange names as s/he hits the newcomer’s palm. The game

continues as such perhaps until everybody in the group gets to know each

other’s name and relaxes in each other’s presence through the touch of

331

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hands. Or perhaps, it lasts until people exhaust puns and gestures as the

simple exchanges take place. This, however, seems to belong to the past

so that even people in their late 20s remember it mainly through stories

about earlier generations. Their remembrance is subject to today’s morality,

as was obvious in a friend’s dislike of the jokes that she had heard made on

such occasions in her great aunt’s time.

Our zexes was different. The obvious difference was our presence

as we were considerably older than the group who had gathered on their

own to party. Upon our arrival, the deferential hesitance and surprise of the

youth were visible. In the crowded apartment, we were immediately taken

to the guest room and seated at the head of the room. This definitely was

not a z e x e s that I had heard of from the older people. Neither special foods

prepared by the hosts, nor thamades, nor carefully guided conversations

and games were in sight. There were a few younger women and many men

who seemed to overflow from the apartment. We probably arrived too early

(around 10:00 p.m.) for the music to start. One of our friends took upon him

the role of the thamade and asked ‘the youth’ what was the occasion for the

332

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. zexes. A group of men from a nearby Abaza village responded that their

friends in the city had visited them a while back and that they were returning

the visit. Then, our thamade suggested we play Caps. Preceding the

game, we had a discussion about astrological signs. A friend in our group,

a young physician, was particularly into this topic and led the conversation

with expertly persuasion. During this conversation, she had obviously

offended a young man whose sign of Leo, she declared, was The worst sign

possible in a man." While playing Caps, he picked her as his partner each

time he was called up. His playful slaps were ‘respectfully’ strong to make

my friend complain incessantly, to no avail, except by invoking laughter.

She ended the evening with a mildly swollen red palm. It seems we could

overcome the restraint that our presence imposed on the group.16 Such

inter-generational zexes could bring to the fore tensions that are difficult to

16 My own hesitant participation at the same zexes brought me in touch with a young Cherkess man. His surprise at our awkward encounter in the middle of the

Capscircle is ingrained in my memory. During the writing of this dissertation, Tahir

waskilled in war with Kurdish guerrillas in eastern Turkey while doing his military

service. I remember him fondly. 333

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. authenticate as anything but perceived gender asymmetry and its

individuation. Gender asymmetry is, however, not part of the identity

discourse of the Cherkess. indeed, the Cherkess discourse is based upon

‘the myth of female value and place/position (kadmm de$eri veyeri)’.17

Semerkho is a medium, through which women’s relational value and

position may be negotiated by young Cherkess women themselves.

The rest of this chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Cherkess

women negotiate their value within the Cherkess community and with

respect to the values flourishing within the modernist Turkish hegemonic

order. Cherkess women’s voice, a “soft-spoken feminism” as I called it

elsewhere (Ertem 1999), is often heard as an impediment to nationalizing

Cherkess imagination and its aspirations. Nationalizing Cherkess

discourses isolate the Turkish hegemonic process as influencing Cherkess

women without acknowledging its overall communal effects or, discursively

engaging cultural foundations of gendered oppositions. My ethnographic

17 Spinning off of Susan Carol Rogers's concept of “the myth of male dominance” (1975). 334

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. account takes issue with dismissals of any oppositional stance as foreign to

Cherkess cultural identity, or as contaminating xabze. S em erkho is a fertile

concept with which to start tracing gendered aspects of hegemonic struggle.

Constitution of Cherkess cultural identity can thus be grasped in all its

complexity and with respect to its contested historical signifiers. Possible

insights for imagining its future may also emerge through such an

exploration.

c. Semerkho ($aka):

Zexes creates an opportunity for culturally prescribed courtship

during which formality is temporarily removed. The removal of formality is

mediated by sem erkho. Most gendered interactions, games, conversations

and courtship are framed as sem erkho. Semerkho is usually translated into

Turkish as §aka, that is joking or teasing. Under the rubric of semerkho,

unmarried Cherkess men and women, and to a certain extent married men,

are allowed to verbalize cross-gender attraction. Semerkho operates in the

emotional borderlands of interest, attraction, and desire through ritualized

335

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. simulations that foster gender ideals among the Cherkess. It is the primary

medium through which a person expresses emotions and thoughts, dares to

cross boundaries or builds walls around his/her inner self.

Outside the particular settings in which semerkho is performed, such

as zexes and other gatherings, formality prevails. In public, say on the

morning after a zexes, there is no clear indication that a particular young

woman and a man flirted the night before. The two people resume a

respectful and formal relationship. As a cultural practice, through which

sexual desire and its expression are legitimized and reinforced, in platonic

and chaste form, se m e rkh o is a joking courtship and flirtation. In English,

the term “flirting” has the power to evoke this practice; however, the

Cherkess vehemently argue against its use in Turkish asHort, to describe

the tradition. In Turkish H ort implies dating or seeing somebody specific. It

is a one-on-one romantic relationship between the two people and may

336

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. include physical intimacy whereas physical intimacy is not approved of by

the Cherkess in Eski§ehir.18

Semerkho constitutes Cherkess men and women as sexual beings

whose potential union is cherished and jokingly negotiated at zexes.

Women who are astute and exhibit strong will in s e m e rkh o encounters are

valued; however, in Eski§ehir their success may not go beyond prominence

18 A contrast in this respect was established between the Cherkess and

Karagay-Balkar group, who are another northern Caucasian population of

ethnically Turkish origin (speaking a dialect of Turkish) and yet, closer in

terms of their cultural practices to the Cherkess people. Many Cherkess of

Eski§ehir who participatedze at x e stype of gatherings of the Karagay

recalled their shock at the relaxed interactions among the youth and their

freedom to have intimate romantic talks dispersed in various parts of the

host's house. This is contrary to the formal ritualistic interactions of their

own zexes. Theirs required everybody to sit in the same room and young

women to be escorted when they needed to go out for any reason. This

kind of intimacy is not approved of by the Cherkess in Eskigehir. However,

they also distinguish themselves from the other Cherkess sometimes by

referring to them in terms of the larger settlement areas such as Duzce,

AdapazarD and sometimes by naming certain villages or lineages that tend

to tolerate or allow intimacy among young men and women. 337

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. at zexes gatherings. A woman who in the 1970s was an active and

engaging participant at zexes, and who wanted to marry into the Cherkess

community, said “Perhaps we became too familiar for each other. None of

my relations went beyond semerkho.” She then agreed to marry someone

whose father was Cherkess but who had been raised in a Turkish cultural

context. Another woman of the same generation remembered her own

verbal ability to challenge men by repeatedly saying, with a mischievous

smile, “I was good!" She could not find her heart’s desire either, and prefers

to remain unmarried.

The public representation of gender attraction is highlighted most

distinctly in Cherkess dances. Cherkess dances are couple dances and

simulate sexual (and heterosocial) unions in which chastity, elegance, pride,

and respect prevail. Women smoothly glide over the dance floor, like

pheasants, approaching and guiding the men with their eyes, heads, and

hands. Men, like eagles, turn the women around, always following them

attentively with, again, their eyes and heads. Men’s arms guard and

attempt to redirect women, while their stomping and kicking feet express

338

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. feelings of passionate interest. Dances also allude to the boundaries of a

couple’s relationship. “Do whatever you like around the girl,” a young

friend’s father had advised him while growing up, “but never fall down on

your knees for her.” Since socio-economic cleavages among the youth

have increased, due especially to women’s education and work, dance

floors are frequently not the place where women lay eyes on their potential

spouses. Dances have increasingly become competitive performances—

“just fun,” as many women state. Women often resent, however, that in

dancing men go off on their own, turning their backs on women and

performing for the community instead of harmonizing with them. Older

women criticize younger ones for dancing like men by jumping and kicking

around instead of gliding with subtle steps on their toes. Regardless, non

segregated gender relations, as in zexes, semerkho, and couple dances,

are the backbone of Cherkess culture. They publicly signify and

authenticate ethnic difference. On every occasion, even while resting on

road trips, the ever-ready accordion comes out of its box and the dancing

and semerkho begin.

339

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3. Avoidance as Modem? Respect Within the Conjugal Family

The Cherkess do not make a distinction between the subject of

attention by semerkho and the beloved that one may visit personally and

considers having as a marriage partner. In both cases, the person is called

a ka§en. However, today, neither traditional nor modem demands assist

potential unions evoked by semerkho or on the dance floor to materialize.

So, dances that invoke sexual unions, in which chastity, elegance, and

respect prevail, remain as simulations. Cherkess dances and courtship

seem to have turned too yu n (play, fun) for many of the young women

involved and are devoid of strong implications of long-term commitment.

Disparate post-marital expectations are often cited as the basis for gender

discord. Respect as restraint within the conjugal family has become a point

of contention between the genders.

Speaking through the idiom of modernity, both Cherkess men and

the women of Turkey proudly point out the mixed-gender relations, courtship

practices, and lack of domestic violence in their communities. However, in

smaller zexes, gender tension is an ongoing issue. Women constantly

340

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. challenge men’s inadequacies and reluctance to share life in heterosexual

unions beyond semerkho. They refer to old books, to stories of conjugal

intimacy they have heard from previous generations, and seek rational

explanations to bring the issue to men’s awareness. In their frustration with

Cherkess men’s avoidance of intimacy, younger women often marry out of

the Cherkess community and are blamed for doing so.

Marriage is a significant turning point in the lives of both Cherkess

men and women. The potential couple does not see each other from the

time of their decision until they are married. The young man who has

decided to marry avoids social contact with family members. He is reserved

and shy in his interactions. Similarly, the young woman whom he will marry

does not display joy or excitement about her marriage, especially in front of

elders. Cherkess emphasize and value the platonic/romantic aspects of

cross-gender attraction and relations. Sexuality beyond romance is publicly

repressed and completely private, usually exclusively confined to the

couple's relation in their marital chamber. (Social) Abstinence starts with

the decision to marry.

341

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. After they get married, Cherkess women are expected to devote

themselves to the domestic sphere and the well being of their new extended

families. While married men continue to participate in weddings by

accordion playing or dancing, newlywed women join the ranks of married

women whose participation in such occasions is definitely off the dance

floor. Many Cherkess couples observe codes of avoidance, which conceal

displays of spousal affinity in the presence of lineage elders. The breaking

away of conjugal families from the rural homesteads of extended families

may have intensified re s m iy e tor formality in order to assure a respectful

relationship between young Cherkess husbands and wives. On the other

hand, it may have created an opportunity for the young couple to have a

more relaxed relationship. The favorable opinions young men express

regarding the practice of formality between spouses and with children, the

diversity of personal accounts, and women's highly critical opinions about

men’s emotional distance in the family make it difficult to account for

historical change. An 80-something years old woman’s one unfulfilled wish

in life was to have a meal together with her late husband, which he had

342

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. firmly refused. Was this particular to their tribe? How strong and

widespread is avoidance within the nuclear family? These are difficult

questions to answer; however, women’s will to redefine their relationship

with their husbands is hard to miss.

The culture's grip on public displays of love and sexuality is reflected

in weddings. Weddings are almost exclusively for p o te n tia l marriage

partners to interact verbally and dance. Traditionally, the couple that is

getting married does not get together during the marriage ceremony. The

groom hides at his best man's house, and only his friends are permitted to

visit him there. The bride, on the other hand, is brought to the groom’s

house, and stands behind a curtain in complete silence, only 'to be seen' by

female guests. Mamed couples come to the festivities separately: men

alone or a little distanced from the group of women which includes his wife;

women together with her female in-laws (other brides in the family). There

is hardly any interaction between the married couples at the event. Mamed

women do not dance. Older married men are only marginally present.

Food is served separately to each age group or gender. This feature can be

343

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. associated with the practice of exogamy by lineage affinity among the

Cherkess. Even the slightest public expression of love and intimacy outside

one's age group before marriage, including the married couples united

legitimately by the institution of marriage, is regarded with contempt.

For the Cherkess,gender attraction, as subtly expressed in dances,

verbalized by way of semerkho, and lived among one’s peer group, is a

cherished and essential aspect of personhood. Nonetheless, sexuality

beyond chaste romance is publicly repressed and completely private. This

privacy is expected from the time of a couple’s initial courtship. Once a

couple commits to one another, they are expected to maintain a complete

physical and emotional distance in public. S em erkho continues with others,

especially for males whose culturally prescribed identity is to bring gender

attraction to the fore.

Among all people whose relations entail sexual intimacy, respect is

expressed as formality through practices of avoidance. Avoidance keeps

the existence of sexual intimacy out of the ‘public’ eye. This ’public',

however, is kin, primarily the lineage of the husband. According to Xabze,

344

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. couples are expected to refrain from interactions with each other as well as

with their children while in the presence of the husband’s lineage,

particularly its male members. Strict regulation of social interactions,

especially verbal communication, between fathers-in-law and daughters-in-

law are vivid in the collective memory, and at least symbolically observed.

Younger women are increasingly critical of familial formality. A woman in

her twenties sadly observed her newly married uncle and his bride during

their short visit before their honeymoon. They acted as if they were

strangersshe commented.

It is also ye m u ko (immodest) to interact with one's child or spouse in

a way that suggests parental intimacy while in-laws are in the vicinity.

Although urban public spaces provide considerable flexibility to a family in

this regard, chance encounters with a person who needs to be avoided are

not improbable. A young man remembered in tears of laughter such an

encounter from his childhood. His father had taken him to the hospital due

to small injuries from a bike accident. He and his father were walking to

their car, he in his father's arms, enjoying the special attention from his

345

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. father and the care that he had just received from the hospital staff.

Suddenly, he said, his father dropped him upon seeing his uncle come

around the block. The uncle then reprimanded his father for dropping an

injured child in order to observe respect, but the deed was done.

Brothers and sisters avoid participating in the same social events that

bring their sexual identities to the fore. However, modem public spaces do

not always accommodate avoidance between siblings, who in the past

would live their sexualized identities exclusively at zexes or in private rooms

where Cherkess young women received their male guests. A Cherkess

friend and I once ran into his sister while looking for a shady table in a cafe

on the river. She was sitting with a young man, one of her ka§ens, at one of

the tables. We awkwardly exchanged greetings due to physical proximity

and moved to a table further down the strip. They soon left.

Such a web of restrained relations among members of the nuclear

family has created an effect of public autonomy for all its female members

since, in the ethnically blind Turkish public sphere, they can interact with

others as autonomous individuals, personally and professionally (cf. Olson,

346

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1982). Cherkess residential units in urban Eski§ehir are commonly

occupied by nuclear families, sometimes with an additional senior parent.

This enables Cherkess women who work in the domestic sphere to weave

through neighborhoods to visit various family members and friends. Given

such freedom of movement, for most Cherkess women individual autonomy

has not emerged as an aspiration. For them, the asexual public sphere of

the Turkish national context is accommodating, if not liberating. Cherkess

women's struggle, in contrast, resides in matters of the private sphere. And

this is where the gender of modernity is negotiated.

4. The Fall o f Cherkess Modernity, or New Grounds for (another) Modernity

In urban Eski§ehir, men’s distance from the conjugal family and its

private space, as well as the gender-blind egalitarianism of the Kemalist

public sphere, has allowed Cherkess women, especially those who work

outside the home, greater autonomy and freedom as individuals. However,

Cherkess women’s struggle for more intimate relations within the domestic

sphere has been intensifying.

347

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Marriage creates a sudden and drastic difference in women’s lives.

This can be seen in three aspects: The young bride is completely

separated from her kin. Given the Cherkess practice of lineage exogamy,

Cherkess women's separation can be very alienating and is contrary to the

case of Arab women.19 As a young woman stated, a woman's "family

distances itself, as soon as you say 'yes.' Even your brothers completely

withdraw themselves from you after marriage, both physically and

emotionally." “In the old days,” another young woman states,

you couldn't, wouldn't visit your family even during the b a yra m (holidays), if you lived in another village. If you were in the same village, you would visit them on the third or fourth day of the

19 While marrying from within one's own village or a neighboring one is a possibility,

a woman may also be given in marriage to another country. During my fieldwork I

met women who had come from Syria and the Caucasus to Turkey or gone from

Turkey to Jordan or the United States upon their marriage. The young woman

quoted in the following sentence was recently married to a Cherkess in the United

States and will come here as a bride soon. Her previous prolonged relationship with

a Cherkess from Eski§ehir ended due partly to the man's preoccupation with/

absorption in ancestral nobilities (of which he is one, whereas the woman is from a

serf family) and partly due to his fear in establishing a family.

348

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. holiday.20 Even now, everybayram this is an issue. Whose family will you visit first, on the first day! Even the woman's family finds it odd, if you were to visitthem first.

In a Cherkess man's words, "A woman's family is like an appendage

you can't get rid of but you cannot take or keep it in either."(Atsan atilmaz,

satsan satilmaz). For younger women, however, the families are to

maintain after marriage as well. The issue is how to make this become a

respected reality.

Secondly, upon marriage, unmarried Cherkess women's relatively

independent, socially fulfilling lifestyle (going on trips and to weddings,

attending parties, entertaining friends) has to be left aside for the primarily

work and service-oriented life of married Cherkess women.21 Traditionally,

Cherkess brides are expected to serve all the members of their husbands'

patriline—waiting on them by standing demurely, hands clasped before them

divan tutar(\n complete deference). Old age (maturity) is preferred.

20 The last day since one of the two major religious holidays is three, the other four

days long.

349

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cherkess women do not usually marry until past their mid-20s. Thus, a

woman is expected to observea d e t by having matured in order to manage

the complicated and trying relations on her own will. In a family of six

sisters, two women were mentioned as “preferring to go to (read=marry)

Cherkess men” with some irony detectable in remarks of those who did not.

One of those sisters who preferred to marry a Cherkess man, on the other

hand, had sparkles in her eyes talking about the romance and love between

her older sister and her Cherkess husband of 25 years.

The third difference concerns the extreme restrictions on a bride's

physical and emotional intimacy with her husband. A girl might have chosen

to marry the man out of love; but now, she has limited time with him, and

that mostly in the privacy of their marital chamber. Furthermore, a couple is

expected to maintain a formal relationship, in public, to the extent that even

21 The young women complain, "After you accept the proposal, you cant say a

thing! You cant choose the household goodsyou will use all your life. You simply

shake your head in approval." 350

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. referring to each other by name is considered a transgression,22 as are

public expressions of love and affection to one's progeny. This formality in

the family is praised due to its power to control outward expressions of

familial conflict. However, younger generations are also critical of it due to

the lack of emotional bonding it evokes. In the words of a young Cherkess

woman, "parents do not reveal their troubles to the children. You don't feel

any conflict between your parents. But you don't see any expression of

love, either. This is one of the reasons we marry late. Our sexual feelings

are dormant. We don't see love. Turks do.”

Married men feel pressured by their peers and other community

members to maintain distance from their families. A Cherkess man

apologetically explained to his teasing friends at the Cherkess cultural

association his reasons for spending evenings at home with his family: he

22 This traditional practice has relaxed in the last two generations. However, even

among currently middle-aged couples there are many who observed naming taboos

{adetyapmak). According to thisadet not only the husband but also all other

members of his family are assigned a name by the incoming bride in order to assure

351

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. had to be there so that th e children would feel his authority and keep on

task. (Observing the custom, he avoided publicly referring to his son and

daughter as his own.) Another man was embarrassed while talking to me

about the special warmth he felt towards his younger child. The first child

was bom and raised while the couple lived with his family, which would

often require the father to stay away from his child and home, especially

considering the close living quarters of urban living. Yet another man

recalled the cold sweat that chilled his back while he danced with his wife to

western music at a party that was organized for the Cherkess community in

Eski§ehir. At the time he was the president of the Cherkess cultural

association and was afraid that no other Cherkess couple would follow them

to the dance floor. This was undue apprehension, it seems, since many

couples actually did. These are a few of the men who expressed their

ambiguities and fears while treasuring their new power as heads of conjugal

families.

proper deference to each person in usage of their names. The bride is often

addressed by her family name. 352

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5. Modernity against hegemonic Cherkess cuituraiism P

The current tension between Cherkess men and women is entangled

with the sudden radical change that marriage represents for Cherkess

women. In terms of hardships, marriage brings with it manifold

responsibilities, obligations and constraints. Women's strength stems from

the autonomy in their pre-marriage social relations and the strong-willed

persons that they turn out to be. Contemporary Cherkess women would like

to extend the freedom of their youth into their married lives and be sharing

partners. Therefore, leaving Turkey and repatriating in the Caucasus for the

cause of Cherkess nationalism is not on their agenda.

These younger women agree that personal integrity and social

manners are important qualities in a potential spouse as they are privileged

in the Cherkess society but, not sufficient or necessarily comparable to what

23 In addition to numerous discussions in mixed gender groups at zexes as well as

in individual conversations, this section is based on a get together suggested and

organized by a young woman at which a group of young women discussed with me

their viewpoints on cultural issues. I appreciated their interest and am grateful to

353

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. education, work and economic means, and attitudes toward them, can

provide. A woman critical of Cherkess men’s attitudes toward education

and work says: "It gives me the creeps to hear that 'a Cherkess man has a

high-school degree by birth.'"

Women want responsible and hardworking partners/husbands. They

want men to be at least promising, responsible, partners in marriage. As a

23 year-old Cherkess woman said:

Cherkess women are strong hearted. They have compassion, and endurance... Cherkess men are on the run. Men are scared. They've retreated. Then they blame women: Blame them for getting an education. ' You prove yourself to me.’ ‘Educate yourself. Make yourself.' Cherkess women are veryc e fa k a(persevering). r They bear with men. They take it all in.

Cherkess women want to continue being part of their own families

after marriage. They are in agreement with their families about the

expectations from a potential spouse. As a response to the heavy demands

by a girl’s family from the groom, women argue,

The girl’s family is observant too. They have to protect their daughter. He gets married late anyway. If he hasn’t accomplished

Canan who hosted a wonderful gathering and invited other young women, some of whom I would not have met through the demek. 354

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. anything until that age, he never will. If he were a promising man, the girl's family would not object to him.

Women are critical of men's squandering habits, lack of interest in

education and attitudes toward work. All Cherkess men are (act like) bey,

princes.

This society thinks of work as shameful. What Cherkess man would hoe crops? We (she comes from an ex-slave family)24 achieved our current standard of life by working hard. Let him work, too. He should have ideals! All men care about is showing off. Spendthrifts, they are... They think being frugal is shameful. On top of that, a Cherkess man is notorious for eating up what has been earned (whatever is available) {Haz/rda olam yem eyisever) It is the Cherkess woman who takes care of everything in the household but she dresses the man up and pushes him forward as the success. The success and its reward (should) belong to both.

If women think Cherkess men are not offering a promising, fulfilling

life they would rather marry out of their community.

24 I use the word ex-slave hesitantly. In Turkish the wordkote, is which does not

distinguish serf and slave. It is unclear to me whether the families who were in

hush-tones identified askote families were descendents of prisoners of war, as

manykd/es were, or of those propertyless classes in northern Caucasian tribal

organizations. 355

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In the old days the Cherkess man fought for land. He succeeded. Why shouldn't he succeed now in the war with modem life? Let him win that warf\xs\. Then I will marry him. Why shouldn't I marry him, if he were successful? Men’s families are in shock, too. Why didn’t she ‘go to’ (read-marry) a Cherkess, they say. He descends from a ‘good’ family. Why did she choose a Turk?

Thus, at the current historical conjuncture, the traditional practice of

exogamy is the woman's individual choice not the choice of their families or

lineages.

Younger Cherkess women’s criticisms were never acknowledged or

even discursively honored by men. At our meetings, they would often listen

quietly or express their concerns about cultural extinction and retain a firm

position as if they were the keepers of the cultural code,Xabze. A few

individual remarks in p a s s im on other occasions, however, indicate that

women’s criticisms were taken to heart. One young man, 28 years old,

referring to his small group of peers told me:A b“ ia, elder sister, we broke

the chain”. This was the chain of irresponsible, non-committal Cherkess

men who in their populist nationalist stance turned themselves into frugal

beys of old times in contempt of work, even if they were from old peasant

356

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. classes. Kemal himself is a hardworking man with a regular job at an

Eskifehir industrial plant. He has been transferring some of his income into

a housing cooperative in order to own a flat. In a year, he asserted, he

would be ready to pursue the idea of marriage and would be a desirable

candidate.

6 . A cultural space for pfay?

In 1995,1 attended a meeting of the women’s group at the cultural

association for the Cherkess community in Eski§ehir. A year had passed

since my fieldwork, and now I was back primarily to discuss with various

people in the community how I was beginning to interpret what I had learned

and experienced during my fieldwork in 1993-94. My inquisitive attempts to

understand the meaning of Cherkess modernity, and the elevated position

and freedom of the Cherkess women of which I was constantly told during

my fieldwork, in contrast to traditional Turkish women, must have disturbed

one of the women in the room. Her sudden shrilling utterance pierced the

restrained analytical tone of our chat: “We have our (many) cousins and

357

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. brothers, isn't this liberating?25 Nermin hanim's outburst begged

contemplation for a number of reasons. Since the sudden accessibility of

ancestral lands following the breakup of the Soviet Union (1989), the

Cherkess community had been excited about the prospect of establishing

Cherkess sovereign states in the North Caucasus. This was a historic

opportunity for the Cherkess to end their ‘muted’ existence in diaspora (E.

Ardener, 1975). Many Cherkess increasingly felt their fundamental values

erode due to the prevalent effects of modernist structures and ideologies in

Turkey as well as the politicized Islamism that has, in the last decade,

reached young Cherkess minds.

During my fieldwork, repatriation discourses had flourished, aspiring

to make ancestral lands in the north Caucasus home again, where the

Cherkess would be One and sovereign. Many Cherkess women in Turkey,

25 In Turkish, the relations that I here translate as ‘cousins' and ‘brothers’

correspond to at least four kin relations, since each maternal and paternal relative

has a designated term, as well as to fictive kin relations that are strongly valued

among the Cherkess. They are also widely used in the Turkish public sphere

(Ertem 1999).

358

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. however, especially the younger ones, were particularly reluctant to

repatriate. Patriotic feelings towards the Caucasus became an issue in

courtship. Young adult males wanted to see at least traces of a historical

consciousness of the surgun (the Cherkess exodus) in their female

counterparts. Men walked away from their ka§ens, disheartened due to the

women's determination to stay and build their future in Turkey. Cherkess

women increasingly married out of their ethnic group on their own will and

with the support of their parents. Social relations promulgated in

contemporary Turkish society seemed to constitute strong competition for

the X a b z e, the corpus of Cherkess tradition that carefully coded

interpersonal relations and the spatial and social boundaries and styles

through which power and authority (by age, gender, lineage, or merit) are

exerted. Without the structural support of traditional institutions,

Cherkessness was now primarily defined with respect to its non-segregated

public sphere and its coded rules of respect and restraint.

I was nevertheless momentarily puzzled by Nermin hanim's outburst

since the relations she listed (all males) to indicate the liberated status of

359

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cherkess women were based on kin ties. They were not relations

established by the free will of women but as members of an extended family

or lineage. In what aspects of their gendered lives in their community did

Cherkess women feel fulfilled with those relations, in what others they did

not? In what aspects of their communal lives did Cherkess men and women

feel most distanced from nationally expressed concerns, or identified with

them?

As I have descriptively explored in this chapter the gendered

Cherkess social order,a d e tprovides two significantly diverse grounds for

the intracommunal gendered order to transform itself: The pre-marital

freedom of women practiced in traditional Cherkess society enables women

to expand their horizons. In modem Turkey, women are becoming

educated and working outside the home, as perhaps they would in a

predominantly Cherkess contemporary society as well.26 Women argue that

26 Here it is pertinent to note the shock that Cherkess men experienced while

visiting “Cherkess" countries of the north Caucasus. The shock was due to their

realization that Cherkess men worked in menial jobs such as sweeping the streets. 360

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. men should also, as independent individuals, have to prove their

commitment to the economic and emotional well-being of their future

families. In this respect, post-marital adet, primarily as marked by

avoidance practices, is seen as incompatible with contemporary times.

Post-marital adet, on the other hand, restrains the married couple’s

relationship to each other, especially by distancing men from the domestic

sphere and his conjugal family. While this creates an effect of autonomy for

women; more significantly, post-marital adet creates a paradox for men’s

parenting, especially when relatives, aunts and uncles, who are supposed to

take care of children are not within easy reach.

While speaking through the idiom of modernity, both men and

women, nationalist or not, are inscribing their personal and familial

experiences into the history of the modem within the Turkish national

territory. Men’s struggle for communal identity and its future is concerned

with macropolitical aspects of modernity: nationhood and sovereignty.

A Cherkess woman remarked on their reaction with a muffled laughter “Who did

they think would sweep the streets when they had their own state?”

361

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. While the struggle goes on, ambiguously challenging whatever is left of the

traditional hierarchies within the communal territory of the demek, such

struggle remains distant from the day-to-day experiences of modernity.

Challenges to reconcile the two, however, cannot be held outside the doors

of the demek, even if/when their agents are not physically there.

362

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Six: Reflections

With the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the unexpected

opening of the doors into the Caucasus, Cherkess peoples’ interest in their

mysterious and previously unreachable ancestral lands soared. Many

visited the northern Caucasus in search of distant cousins, ancestral

hamlets or villages, or to satisfy curiosities about stories stashed in

Cherkess social memory. Was there something behind the Kaf Dagi

(Caucasian mountains?) that could amount to anything other than a fairy

tale setting? The encounters affirmed, Yes. What these visitors found

included a lot of tangible and intangible proof of Kaf Dagi’s reality, in the

form of people in bone and flesh who shared stories of the traumatic 19th

century exodus, specifics of families' or lineages' separation or tragedies of

political subjugation, who produced an exact copy of a ring, for example,

that carried their family stamp, or who carried the same enthusiasm and joy

about their reunion. Those visitors whose fairy tales were more removed

from their family histories were especially surprised about the extent of joy

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. expressed by fellow Caucasians upon arrival. Kaf Dagi was not an

accidental or mythical setting for fairy tales. It was ... seemed to be ...

History.

At the same time as encounters in the Caucasus have “brought this

space back into time,” as Shami (1995: 79) puts it, “the timeless qualities”

of Cherkess identity were challenged through “shock” and “estrangement”

experienced “at all levels of this encounter.” What did this all mean? My

findings concur with Shami’s keen observations and propositions that this

phenomenon of “ethno-nationalism”

cannot be situated only in the ideological sphere but also needs to take into account the shifting of borders and boundaries and differential access to territory. ... [It also] has to take into account the contemporary configurations of past diasporas and population dispersals (Ibid: 5-6).

The significance of historical process in the constitution of collective

identity is undeniable and integral for our analysis. Our understanding of

post-1989 struggles for Cherkess identity will certainly be enhanced if the

pro ce sse s through which ‘contemporary configurations' emerged and

evolved are taken into account. The politics of shifting boundaries and their

364

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. socio-political effects on the present need to be understood within the

context of hegemonic struggles in individual sites in diaspora as well as in

the Caucasus. It is through the struggles for hegemony that fragmented

groups of ‘Cherkess’ peoples—in diaspora (in Turkey and elsewhere) and

those who remained in the Caucasus—have been constituted as both

separate from each other and integrated into one another, in diverse and

complex ways. The idea o f‘hegemonic process,' following Brow’s (1996,

1990) revisions, aptly highlights and embraces Cherkess peoples’ complex

positioning and involvement in historical processes of 19th century empire-

building as well as of 20th century nation-formations accentuated by the

Cold War.

The constitution of identities is central to hegemonic processes. The

unfolding of a given hegemonic process constitutes and re-constitutes

identities while simultaneously engaging people in struggles to enact an

aspect or a version of their constituted selves.1 The ongoing struggle over

1 Anthropological analyses of hegemonic processes are rich. A few recent

examples are Alonso (1995a), Brow (1996), Danforth (1995), Gordon (1998), and

Woost (1990). 365

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cherkess identity in the post-1989 era signifies a new moment, which

forces us to strive also to account for the ways in which different Cherkess

groups and their individual members have constituted th e m se lve s through

the complex dialectics of a hegemonic process. The 1989 break-up of the

Soviet Union marked the sudden expansion of the terrain of hegemonic

process beyond the boundaries more or less contained by the Turkish

nation-state and its territorially defined hegemonic aspirations. As such, it

was a decisive moment of trans-nationalization of the hegemonic process

that can only be understood in terms of the ways in which it was unleashed

in Turkey of the early 1980s. As I have explicated throughout my account,

this ethnographic moment provides a particularly salient site at which to

address the subjective component of the hegemonic process and reflect

upon the question of identity, ‘constituted’ ‘in crisis’ especially with respect

to its collective expressions. Having said that, I first would like to reflect

upon the ethnographic contours of my narrative with respect to the initial

conceptual framework I deployed. I will then reflect upon new theoretical

366

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. venues that my narrative suggests concerning how ‘the question of identity’

can best be understood and further explored.

1. (Tjrkish) National(ist) Hegemony as an Ongoing Process

As I have shown, especially in chapter 3, Cherkess identity

discourses in Turkey have been intricately formed, informed, enabled and

limited by the hegemonic process of Turkish national identity constitution

and its multiple discursive strands. Contemporary ‘Cherkess identity’ is

itself a product of the 19th century exodus from the Caucasus and

concomitant historical processes in diaspora as well as at ‘home’ in the

North Caucasus. The post-1989 conjuncture seemingly provided a window

of opportunity for the realization of Cherkess nationalist yearnings, a

historic reunion to erase the effects of gaps and fissures instigated by the

forces of history. Intra-communal negotiations about repatriation and

identity, however, brought the Cherkess peoples’ complex involvement with

their respective societies across the divide of Cold War boundaries into

discursive consciousness. Based on the evidence of my fieldwork, I thus

367

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. approached Cherkess nationalizing discourses by exploring their

articulations with and oppositions to various discursive practices within the

Turkish national terrain. I have specifically delineated the ways in which

Cherkess identity is negotiated in Eski§ehir, through cultural practices as

well as mundane discursive positionings vis-a-vis Eski§ehir Cherkess

peoples’ overlapping worlds, accentuated as Turkish, Islamic, Cherkess,

Caucasian or even American (if only implicitly, in relation to the idea of

modem and to aspects of my persona).

As an anthropologist, all these complex discursive and experiential

articulations make overall sense to me as the intricate dynamics of

hegemonic processes. As a person, I felt my ethnographic encounters

besiege my own constituted being, my ‘identity’, in ways that were hard to

imagine while writing my research proposal and conceptualizing the

hegemonic constitution of national identity in Turkey. The complexities of

situating myself as an anthropologist in the field enforced me to craft my

ethnographic narrative accordingly. As I wrote in chapter 1, the narrative

form has to explicate textually the methodological and epistemological

368

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. positioning, or distancing that occurs among the ethnographer, the

community under examination and ethnographic practice. With this

contention, I remembered, discovered, described and discussed aspects of

my personal and professional identity as also subjected to the workings of

hegemonic process—constituted by and through its dialectics, just like my

ethnographic interlocutors (chapter 1). Needless to say, my narrative was

restrained through the extended process of writing in the United States

where I, as the privileged author of the ethnography, gradually and uneasily

seated myself as an anthropologist in order to move onto the next level of

analysis and its abstractions about ‘identity’. The rest of my reflections

hence draw upon my pre-fieldwork understandings of hegemonic process

and its further elaborations as they became available during the writing of

this ethnography. I then continue reflecting upon the whole experience of

my fieldwork and its narrated text in my quest to situate ‘identity’ in the

anthropological discourse of our times.

369

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci’s writings and their subsequent

elaborations by others, Brow (1996:24) suggests that hegemony is to be

understood as "a continuous process rather than a fixed state of affairs."

The attainment of hegemony, in the sense of a “state of ‘total social authority’ which, at certain specific conjunctures, a specific class alliance wins, by a combination of ‘coercion’ and ‘consent’, over the whole social formation’’ (Hall 1980: 331) is very rare. But the struggle for hegemony, understood as the process whereby the interests of other groups are coordinated with those of a dominant or potentially dominant group, through the creation of “not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity" (Gramsci 1971: 181) is continuous (ibid. 24-25).

As discussed in chapter 2, the seeds of aspiration for Turkish

hegemony’ were sown during the last century of the Ottoman Empire. The

Turkish nation-state emerged in the aftermath of World War I with a mission

to ‘civilize’ its target populace. The Kemalist cultural revolution aspired

particularly to bring the ‘muslim’ populations ( m ille t) of the Ottoman Empire

to ‘the level of contemporary nations’ and, to this end, confined public

expressions of indigenous cultural practices to the privacy of individual

communal or familial settings, construing their role for national progress as

‘regressive’ and ‘obscurantist’. Turkish national culture was imagined to

370

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. flourish through ethnically blind institutions and their power to turkify diverse

populations, as a nation corporately engaged in the struggle for progress.

Despite the relaxation of political discourse to religious expression since the

beginning of the multi-party period (in 1946), ethnicity and religion continue

to constitute two points of tension, embedded in the hegemonic process for

Turkish national identity, challenging the premise or character of its

‘turkification’ process. Gender, on the other hand, or women's

emancipation, has been crucial for the imagined nation's race for

‘civilization’. Women have not only been objects of nationalizing

discourses, a key target for their civilizational mission, they are also

discursively conceived as instrumental to the success of this mission.

Since hegemony can be most aptly understood as a process, it

follows, as Williams (1977:113) has emphasized, that “at any time, forms of

alternative or directly oppositional politics and culture exist as significant

elements in the society." At some conjunctures, however, oppositional

currents may assert themselves with considerably more force than at

others, thereby signifying the moment as a discernible turning point for

371

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. social analysis. The military intervention in Turkey in 1980 was such a

historic moment for the hegemonic process of Turkish identity constitution.

As I discussed in chapter 2, the discursive atmosphere after 1880 indicated

a palpable moment often identified as a national ‘identity crisis’. The crisis

was shaped against the background of economic liberalization programs

supported by the September 12 military regimea n d initially within the

political void that it had temporarily created. The most discernible actors of

the post-1980 cultural opposition were feminists, Kurds and Islamists.

From their respective vantage points, they challenged the structural

foundations and ideological premises of Turkish national(ist) hegemony

discursively as well as through activities ranging from public protests to

outright armed struggle. In my discussion of the issues and venues of

struggle that continued throughout the 1980s, I attempted to highlight their

impact on the collective consciousness of the nation. For instance, as

feminist challenges to the gender hierarchies of the nation's patriarchies

gained strength, Islamist women inevitably partook in the debates. As

Turkish nationals groped about the undeclared war in the southeast, ethnic

372

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. identity and its contemporary significance in Turkey became a subject for

chats in coffeehouses, at women’s receptions or marketplaces.

Such a discursive vivacity has had a strong bearing upon the

Cherkess collective consciousness as well. Its public representation and

discursive engagement in struggles of the post-1980 era, however, were

cautious. It was only in the latter half of the 1980s that in the national press

(primarily weeklies and journals), Cherkess intellectuals began to challenge

the Turkist historiography that by then had subsumed Northern Caucasians

under the category of “Kafkas Turku” (the Turks of the Caucasus). Starting

with the 1989 ethnic war in Georgia (between Abkhasians and the

Georgian state) and the break-up of the Soviet Union, communal concerns

flared, discourses about them flourished, and national press and media

coverage about Cherkess peoples, cultures and histories proliferated. The

Cherkess difference was hardly ever expressed as an opposition that would

directly challenge the Turkish political hegemony. Since unitarist

discourses continued confining rights to nationhood to a designated

territory (vatan), and a state, as a totalistic (or monolithic) political structure,

373

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a political climate that would enable a cultural pluralism within Turkish

national territories appeared unforeseeable. Cherkess intellectual leaders

turned their attention to the newly accessible ancestral territories in the

Caucasus. The persistence of such a conflated vision of 'peoplehood’ with

territory and politics appears to have distanced the Cherkess from

hegemonic struggles within Turkish national territory. It has also worked to

constitute a difference between the Cherkess and Kurds, for instance, as

many Cherkess in the early 1990s adamantly asserted that they did not

have territorial claims; the Cherkess homeland was outside the national

territories.

In Cherkess nationalizing discourses, hopes of cultural survival were

firmly transplanted in the Caucasus, where rights for peoplehood

inalienably overlapped with territory and an originary identity to be

advanced through political sovereignty. The contemporary expression, or

even possibility, of such an identity, however, did not seem easy. The post-

1989 conjuncture obligated the Cherkess of Turkey to reassess imagined

historical continuities of their identity as primordially “attached to a delimited

374

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. territory” (Foster 1991: 236). Communal fragmentations and discursive

struggles over the integrity of ‘Cherkess (or northern Caucasian) identity',

as discussed primarily in chapter 3 (and to some extent also in 4 and 5),

unfolded along with reunions (and its shocking affects) with long-lost

cousins in the Caucasus. The ethnographic moment provided ample

evidence that Cherkess participation in hegemonic struggles was taking

root not only at different sites (e.g., national, trans-national or local), on

different platforms (e.g., political or representational) and through different

media (e.g., press and media, dance floors, or association ‘meetings’) but

also along gender, lineage and generational lines as well as that of social

class. This complexity indicates the multitude of current articulations that

occurred during the 130 year long historical process and underscores the

ways in which such articulations may further unfold. That, however,

requires further research and analysis. For now, I would like to stay

focused on what I have described in my ethnography, as summarized

above, and reflect upon the significance of that moment for enhancing our

understanding of the ‘question of identity’.

375

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2. Struggles for Cherkess Identity

In 1990s’ Turkey, there is an overriding concern with Cherkess

identity. Cherkess people from all walks of life—industrialists, small

agriculturalists, workers, professionals, metropolitan intellectuals,

government functionaries, village elders, men and women—are engaged in

ongoing debates about cultural practices, societal constraints and

pressures, conflicting moral values and possible collective action to stop,

reverse or prevent assimilation through ’alien’ experiences. If analysis

remains confined to positioning these numerous discourses as against

each other within a given moment of hegemonic struggle, we may be

unduly dismissive of the hegemonic process itself, or more specifically its

affective in-roads as far as they can be ethnographically ’identified’.

Attempts to understand the vivacity and to capture the heart of

Cherkess negotiations of identity need to account for the moment of

conjunctural pressures by specifically recognizing and acknowledging them

as historical effects of the hegemonic process. Thus what I have, in

general terms, called ‘intra-communal tensions’ or negotiations demand

376

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. further analytic examination. Their complexity cannot be grasped without

also considering individual wills that have been constituted through long

term volitional or inadvertent subjections to categorically ‘oppressive’ or

external’ modes of existence. TheD em ek, the cultural association of the

Eski§ehir Cherkess, is a site where diverse individual wills with their

complex historical luggage, negotiate the ins and outs of their

contemporary connections to one another and to others. The historical

effects of hegemonic processes include the constitution of subjects as

much as outward expressions or institutionalization, i.e. formal, ‘objective’

aspects of their constitution. As I have discussed in chapter 4, while the

dem ek, as an institution, seems to contain Cherkessness within its

structural boundaries and mediate its future articulations with non-Cherkess

worlds, it inevitably appears as an expanding ‘frontier’. Even when the

physical setting shifts with intended effects on boundary-maintenance, by

bringing more families or married women in, by enabling more men to

gather under one roof, or by successful institutional continuity over 25

years, what the demek intends to leave out isin , what it wants to contain is

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ceaselessly regardless of the composition of its body inside its walls at a

certain moment in its history.

These observations can be linked to Brow’s description of a

hegemonic process (1996: 25) as “one that is typically uneven,

heterogeneous and incomplete, and that operates at other levels of

consciousness beside that of ‘mere opinion or mere manipulation’ (Williams

1980: 38). [Moreover,] ’hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies’

traverse all levels of consciousness." Indeed, in the same vain, as Williams

had earlier emphasized (1977: 110), the concept of ‘hegemony’ tackles

the relations of domination and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living—not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships.

Practical consciousness, understood as “different from official

consciousness [and defined as] what is actually being lived, and not only

what it is thought is being lived" (Williams Ibid: 130-1), underscores the

affective aspect of any hegemonic process. The significance of practical

378

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. consciousness in hegemonic process is best recognized through Gramsci’s

concept of common sense which, in Hall’s formulation (1986:20), serves

both as “the terrain of conceptions and categories on which the practical

consciousness of the masses of people is actually formed ... [and as the

ground]... on which more coherent ideologies and philosophies must

contend for mastery.” Whereas nationalizing discourses—both Turkish and

Cherkess—act upon the premise of penetrating Cherkess people’s

common sense as though consent can be or needs to be unidirectional and

effectively absolute, popular discursive practices defy their totalizing

framework. If the reality of diaspora—as the traumatic separation from

ancestral lands, and as nationalizing Cherkess discourses emphasize, is a

crucial constituent of Cherkess historical consciousness, hegemonic

incorporation over roughly 70 years, incomplete and uneven as it has been,

is a crucial constituent of practical consciousness, including those of the

nationalists. “Common sense," as Woost (1993: 516) elaborates, “is also

the site where multiple forms of consent and dissent compete and overlap.”

Contemporary configurations of Cherkess identity cannot be accessed

379

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. without acknowledging the simultaneous operation of ‘the vector of

similarity and continuity’ and ‘the vector of difference and rupture', to use

Hall’s terms (1994: 395). The former provides ‘some grounding in, some

continuity with the past’, the latter serves as a reminder of ‘a profound

discontinuity’ that is shared with all those who seek grounding in that past

(Ibid). Quotidian struggles over Cherkess identity, at the demek, at

weddings or ‘out in non-Cherkess worlds’, that cannot be reconciled with

authoritarian nationalizing discourses, ridden with accusations of cultural

betrayals across gender, lineage or generational lines, can thus be grasped

by striving to account for the saturated process of living, or the process of

saturation itself. This may be our point of entry to approach the question of

(cultural) identity.

Stuart Hall entitled a recent article, Who Needs Identity (1996)? The

title draws explicit attention to the multitude of debates around the

concept.2 The article itself, however, argues that such debates are hardly

2 I am grateful to James Brow for drawing my attention to this article and more

generally for his incisive comments on the ways I have tried to apply Hall’s 380

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. exhaustive. Deconstructive critique may have ‘erased’ identity as a useful

concept, Hall states, along with other essentialist concepts; however, “the

line which cancels them, paradoxically, permits them to go on being read,”

since there is no other concept to replace it (Hall, 1996: 1). In addition, it is

“in its centrality to the question of agency and politics” that the concept of

identity is irreducible (Ibid: 2).

It seems to be in the attempt to rearticulate the relationship between subjects and discursive practices that the question of identity recurs—or rather, if one prefers to stress the process of subjectification to discursive practices, and the politics of exclusion which all subjectification appears to entail, the question of identification (Ibid.).

Let us not dwell on the highlighted processual form of the term,

identification, for now, except for stating that it is meant to in fle c t

concept of identity as an unbounded, nonessentialist, ‘strategic and

positional one’ (Ibid: 3), foregrounding the analysis in the dialectics of the

hegemonic process and its power toconstitute agents. This requires a shift

from the objective constitution of subjects through the hegemonic process

arguments to the Cherkess situation. Needless to say, the final narrative reflects

my personal take both on his comments and on Hall's article. 381

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to an understanding of subjective self-constitution within the hegemonic

processandW\Xh respect to its various dimensions, or as Hall puts it

(1996:13), ‘the production of the self as an object in the world’.

a. Identity—subjectification:

If the intensity of narratives about encounters in the Caucasus and

concerns over collective identity among the Cherkess peoples in Turkey

indicate the specificity of the historical conjuncture, of a discernible

transformative moment in the hegemonic process, the wide range of

narrated meanings point to the diversity of ways in which the Cherkess

have been constituted through the vicissitudes of history. Contemporary

struggles over Cherkess cultural identity, its paradoxes, cannot be grasped

by privileging one or more of the discursive strands as representing the

true self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’ which a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (Hall 1990) and which can stabilize, fix or guarantee an unchanging ‘oneness’ or cultural belongingness underlying ail the other superficial differences (Hall 1996: 3-4).

382

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anthropologists have been trying to understand and theorize identity

constitution through historical process for a while now. Hall’s emphasis is

refreshing, however, and his search for ‘novel repertoires of meaning with

which the term [identity] is now being inflected’ opens particularly exciting

possibilities to expand our conceptual horizons and understanding.

By tracing the ways in which the relationship between subjects and

discursive practices have been theorized, primarily by Marx, Althusser and

Foucault, Hall (Ibid: 13) argues that

since the decentring of the subject is not the destruction of the subject, and since the ‘centring’ of discursive practice cannot work without the constitution of subjects, the theoretical work cannot be fully accomplished without complementing the account of discursive and disciplinary regulation with an account of the practices of self- constitution. His assertion draws specifically upon ‘the double-sided character of

subjection/subjectification (assujettisementj that Foucault’s genealogical

works powerfully reveal. People, individuals, are not only “constructed as

different and other within the categories of knowledge” of the dominant

discourses and the power they exert on their subaltern status. Such

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compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm’’ (Hall: 1994: 394-5).

Thus, whereas subjection emphasizes the ceaseless flow of discourses in

search of subjects, and their power to summon individuals to fill particular

subject-positions (by ‘interpellation’, in Althusser’s terms),subjectiHcation

zooms out to capture subjects’ responses to such hailing. The post-1989

conjuncture for the Cherkess signifies a tension between these interrelated

processes of subject-formation and invites us to pay particular attention to

significant moments of subjectification both at open fields of hegemonic

struggle and at contained sites such as the d e m e k a r\6 Cherkess weddings

(as ze xe s o r youth nights) (chapters 4 and 5).

Subjectification, understood as a process, aptly addresses the

dialectics of discursive flow and challenges representations of subject-

constitution as though it was solely an act over passive (docile) bodies, as

in Foucault’s earlier archaeological works. It also counterposes itself

forcefully against transcendental formulations of ‘agency* and the knowing

subject. Subject-ification, in other words, understood as b o th being

384

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. subjected to a discursive practice a n d experiencing one’s self as “that

subject” is crucial to any hegemonic process. It also forces social theory to

tend to the active role individuals play in the process, constituting

themselvesth ro u g h subjectifying discourses and disciplinary practices. Not

only are people subjected to the knowledge of themselves differently, to

differing extents and at different sites and moments in hegemonic process,

they subject themselves to such ‘othering’ differently, and not always

according to the ways in which discourses suggestively or coercively hail

them. Subjectification also entails the dynamics of ‘selfing’ a s m uch a s

‘othering’ by regulatory and disciplinary discourses a n d by subjective ‘con

formation to the norm’ or to the rule. It, then, is a process, which shelters

‘the capacity and apparatus of subjectivity’, nourishing and enabling as

much as regulating and constraining the emergence of ‘agency’.

Hall’s explorations of theoretical terrains of “the subject" persistently

seek for accounts both of “what might in any way interrupt, prevent or

disturb the smooth insertion of individuals into the subject positions

constructed by these discourses,” and of “the corresponding production of

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a response (and thus the capacity and apparatus of subjectivity) from the

side of the subject,” and specifically for “a theorization of the psychic

mechanism or interior processes by which ... automatic ‘interpellations’

might be produced, or—more significantly—fail or be resisted or

negotiated" (1996:12). Such questions carry tremendous significance for

analytically approaching or reaching the affective in-roads of any

hegemonic process, as well as for understanding why individuals’

involvement in hegemonic struggles is so very tenacious and yet varied in

its contingencies and conflictual expressions. But while Hall’s explorations

carry him, justifiably, into the realm of psychoanalysis, I shall here remain in

the very moment of such explorations and continue to reflect upon the

ethnographic challenges that Cherkess identity struggles present.

Cherkess identity struggles present a challenge for anthropological

understandings of collective identity constitution, particularly in light of the

post-1989 conjunctural pressures and their specific national and trans

national articulations. Analytic frameworks that emphasize hierarchical

relations between nations and ethnicities, for instance, suggesting

386

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undertake the challenge of situations where the correspondence between

class or socio-cultural differences and ethnicity is insignificant.3 Cherkess

nationalizing discursive practices attest to the impossibility of transplanting

anthropological terms of analysis such as etnik kim lik (ethnic identity),

diaspora, milli kimlik (national identity) ahistorically, to express entrenched

feelings of loss, estrangement and all else while imagining the community’s

future. People who, in post-1989 era, rallied or strove for all to rally undera

Cherkess identity have themselves been subjectifieda n d have experienced

their subjectification in diverse ways as members of different social classes

(traditional or modem), as inhabitants of different settlements (metropolitan

3 Comaroff and Comaroffs insights (1992) are instructive for understanding

"asymmetric incorporation of structurally dissimilar groupings into a single political

economy” (Ibid: 54). Their historical perspective tends to gloss over or

underemphasize the dynamics of the subordinated groups’ involvement in the

process. Subaltern subjectivity seems to be endlessly subjugated to the whim of

externally enabled incorporation. My critical stance on this is no doubt due to the

specificity of the Cherkess ethnographic situation, which seems to fall outside of

387

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. areas, cities, villages), and as gendered subjects, always maintaining ties,

to varying extents, with ‘other Cherkess worlds’ as well as with ‘non-

Cherkess worlds’ both within and beyond the boundaries of nation-states.

As much as being grounded in socio-political processes before the exodus,

contemporary diversification is an effect of diaspora. Since the mass

exodus from the Caucasus in the 19th century, various Cherkess groups

and their members, as (gendered) individuals, lineages or linguistic groups

endowed with diverse resources and visions, engaged in the hegemonic

struggles that gave birth to the Turkish nation-state. All throughout the

history of the nation-state, they took part in political struggles in numerous

ways, at various sites and through different media. They positioned

themselves differently at critical moments vis-a-vis the Turkish hegemonic

process. Cherkess communal differences also proliferated as rapid socio

economic change had significant effects on the transformation of traditional

social hierarchies. Only a historical perspective enables us to grasp the

the ‘ statistical frequency’, that “ethnic groups continue to be predominantly

associated with particular class positions” (Ibid: 64).

388

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tangled dialectics of subjection to cross-cultural, cross-generational or

gendered subjectification processes (provisionally distinguishable as

selfing, othering or hybrid becomings) through extended discursive practice

with real effects on the present. Only a historical perspective enables us to

traverse the realm of subjectification in an attempt to capture the complexity

of (cultural) identity at a particular moment of its processual advance. As

an integral aspect of any hegemonic process, subjectification is never total

or homogenous. The heterogeneity of subjectification must invariably be

understood historically, recognizing changing subject-positions and

changing contingencies of subjective responses as well as changes in their

outward expressions.

The D em ek, the cultural association of the EskOehir Cherkess

community, provides a prime site where the workings of hegemony and

limits of Cherkess subjectification are fully revealed in all their historical

complexity, despite the physical absence of certain constituents of

Cherkess community, often, married women. The demek is a place where

Cherkess cultural identity seems to be contained. It is also a site where its

389

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. present and past are negotiated (chapter 4). Through demek activities,

youth nights, anniversary celebrations, couple dances and incessant

discourses about them, the process of subjectification and its currently

diverse articulations with the hegemonic process in Turkey are displayed

(chapters 4 and 5). As the community attempts to solidify itself through

in/discriminate participation of men and women, young and old, rich and

poor, noble and not-so-noble at these occasions, the contingencies of

Cherkess identity seem to replicate the playful rapprochements of a

Cherkess couple on the dance floor, moving up and around each other

almost touching, then swiftly turning their backs on one another displaying

their individual skills to those watching. Through such events

Cherkessness is subjected to not only the test of history, arguably

replicating age-old traditions, through the individual touches of each couple

who is dancing, each generation who is playing, it simultaneously subjects

itself to the ‘age-old’ diverse articulations with other modes of being and

becoming. The concept of subjectification by itself, however, may not

effectively carry us through the workings of hegemonic process, particularly

390

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on ‘the hegemonic sway’, to borrow a phrase from Brow (1996), of

homogenizing discourses or the ways in which countertendencies may

unfold. But perhaps it is through discernible moments of subjectification, or

points of identification that we can attempt to capture individual wills

activating their subjectified beings while simultaneously ‘recognizing’ their

becoming.

b. Identity—Identification

As Hall (1996: 4) puts it, ‘Identity’, inflected as ‘a strategic and

positional' concept, is

never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. [Identities] are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation." Just as I have elaborated through(out) my ethnographic

narrative, Hall emphasizes,

Though they seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continue to correspond, actually identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we came from”, so much as what we might become, how we have 391

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. Identities are therefore constituted within, not outside representation. They relate to the invention of tradition as much as to tradition itself, which they oblige us to read not as an endless reiteration but as ‘the changing same’ (Gilroy, 1994): not the so- called return to roots but a coming-to-terms-with our ‘routes’. They arise from the narrativization of the self, but the necessarily fictional nature of this process in no way undermines its discursive, material or political effectivity ... (Ibid.)

As my narrative account indicates, contemporary Turkish-ness and

Cherkess-ness both beg to come to terms with their routes. An

engagement with ‘our routes’ is certainly in order and necessitated by the

reductionist official (and institutionalized) imaginings of ‘our roots’ and,

especially, their hindrance for ‘us’ to imagine ‘our future(s)'. This assertion

should in no way be understood to reduce the Cherkess ‘question of

identity’ to a politics of recognition, “a struggle to come into representation”

(Halil 996: 442), or be construed as an effect of the “‘postsocialist’

condition” (Fraser 1997). It needs to be understood, however, in order to

account for the contemporary paradoxes of Cherkess collective imagination

and its entrapment in an ahistorical narrative about gradual death. As I

have discussed throughout my ethnography, anxiety-ridden ahistorical

392

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. narratives of the collective self do not simply focus on what-used-to-be,

what-is-not and what-will-not be, they also seek and find historical subjects

as inevitably located outside of the self that is doing the searching: An

inept, debilitated or ignorant lineage elder in an act of ignorance agreeing

or concurring with the hegemonic constructions of the Cherkess self, for

instance as Kafkas Turku; a metropolitan intellectual whose nationalist

discourse is incompatible with Cherkess codes of conduct, for instance in

connection with respect to respect and resource-sharing; the marriage of a

woman of her own will to a non-Cherkess, regardless of the incontrovertibly

celebrated cultural practice of exogamy (by lineage and social intimacy)

and its contemporary demographic bottlenecks. It is precisely because of

the wide range of such discourses and their competing meanings that the

problematic Cherkess cultural identity needs to be understood in the plural

and theorized with respect to the subjective effects of the vicissitudes of

history.

Just as subjectification implies a dialectical process, so may the term

identification. It inalienably entails ‘being identified as' the subject of a

393

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. particular discourse, ‘being invited’ to respond to its hail; however, I would

like to argue, it delineates with more force the moment of subjective

proffering. Whereas subjectification and identification occur on the same

terrain within hegemonic process and vis-a-vis its discourses of history and

culture, the latter is more apt to signify a particular moment of

subjectification—an intersection as a stitch in/of the suture.

“In some sense, every moment is such a moment of identification,

but some are more highly charged than others” (Brow, personal

correspondence) and reveal subjectification in the act of occurrence. Just

as at that moment of interpellation between a police officer and the

impromptu subject of his/her hail, as Althusser described, at certain

moments of hegemonic process, or in its specific ‘encounters’, a given

social actor may be caught in the act of regarding or reckoning with

investing in the subject-position thrust upon her/himself. Construed as a

stitch, such momentary activation of agency may not reveal the ensuing

mode of stitching, or process of suturing. It marks, however, the point of

394

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of suturing.

An Abkhaz elder’s articulation of Cherkess xabze and Islamic

teachings implicating God as the caretaker of the customs of recipients of

his/her message, shall we say respectful of their agency, is a discernible

engagement in hegemonic process. Such engagement speaksthro ug h

subjectified being to the particular moment of process of subjectification.

Articulation may fully occur, however, when the same Abkhaz elder, for

instance, speaks out his concerns about the afterlife as it is rooted in the

present. It is at that moment when his ‘age-mates’ nod in agreement that

identification is revealed, that the stitch holds. It is also the very same

moment at which some youth may conceive the afterlife as beyond

themselves and slip away from 'the stitch.' Or, perhaps identification occurs

at that moment when a Cherkess man stops referring to dancing with his

wife as making a blunder, whereas the communal public performance of

married couple dances at that occasion may signify their engagement in the

dialectics of subjectification more so than an ongoing identification. Or,

395

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. perhaps a moment of identification is the embarrassing silence that follows

a Cherkess woman’s question to the young man “what makes him as a

man superior to her as a woman?” Or, perhaps also it is the question itself.

Identities, then, recur as momentary effects of subjectification

processes when a subject is obliged to invest in a position, in affirmation or

negation, or an act of negotiation. They stick up as those moments of

intersection between subjects and particular discourses. The effectivity of

such articulations, however, lies in ongoing discursive work, repeated

stitches, or in suturing and its mode. Starting with the uneasy native

ethnographer and her guest-girf role, I have been consistently emphasizing

the fluidity of the Cherkess struggles for hegemony and their national and

trans-national contingencies. My ethnographic representation and the

questions it raises meet only provisional answers coming from the

anthropologist author of the text. I only hope to have captured the spirit

and dynamic of the ways in which Cherkess identity may unfold through

diverse individual and communal expressions, which vex observers and

insiders alike. Pausing to reflect upon how my ethnographic representation

396

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. plays into the unfolding of the hegemonic process it described takes me

back to the very first months of my return from the field, when I took the first

bite out of that experience for a conference paper in 1995. I seem to be

vexed with the same issues regarding that role, as the section I cite below

describes:

«W ho Listens? A Preliminary Attempt

During the second h a lf o f my 27 months-iong fieldwork, / was invited

to write articles for the bimonthly supplement o f a major local newspaper. /

strategicallyjuxtaposed the Turkish and Cherkess ethnicities, from a

critical perspective, in relation to the Turkish national identity o f the 90s.

One lengthy article had to address the centrality o f gender in the

constitution o f ethnic and national identities. When / personally submitted

the articles to the editor, he asked: "Are you Cherkess or have you done

an objective study?" A government official, who had helped me meet

some families and also provided me with documents on the 1989 exodus

o f ethnic Turks from Bulgaria, commented on the articles: "Gonul hanOm,

we gave a ll the help to you and you go ahead and praise the Cherkess."

397

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publication in the local newspaper, but not for the contents o f the articles.

Many other Cherkess men declared, laughing, that in their reading, they

skipped the parts about the Turks. A young Cherkess woman i didn't know

well called me early in the morning o f the day the insert was published and

thanked me with lengthy comments about each article. A married

Cherkess woman said: "it is good fora beginning. But somewhat

superficial." However iater, having reread and discussed them with her

Tartar and Turkish female officemates as she told me, she thanked me and

said: 'The articles are great. AH the women loved them ." These

comments force me to think, if ! were to situate m yself as a "haifie" or an

insider mediator, who would listen? How is an "accountable" subject

position constituted when "ethnographic others" are actively engaged in

the process o f enacting their identities, embracing or disowning the

anthropologist with the same fervor o fparticipation in the hegemonic

process? To who does an anthropologist, speak? And how can s/he

398

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. speak, particularly if s/he wants to go beyond dose-circuited dialogues with

fellow anthropologists ? »

The next question that comes to mind may be “to what effects?” does an

ethnographer speak? Can the effects of an ethnographic project, spoken

or written, be less vexing than it seemed to this anthropologist in 1995?

399

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Appendix A: Through Humor: Uses of Attire in Representations of Identity

400

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. K U T U KUTU I Salih MEMECAN

/ * s s £ £ *

O e K tS j£ l_ B ie . HDV6 0 6 JU R tliK V D ife

(MOK t A

1. Here is obscurantism. Com’on, don’t exaggerate. 2. She should wear it at her home, man! You cannot interfere in anybody’s faith and devotion. 3. But recently, they have really increased. Democracy is a regime of tolerance. 4.

401

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Covercaption: (V£U' SuKbC.i« “We are not European”: Entering European Market is not the end of it

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Appendix B: Maps

403

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1. Geographic Contours o f the Middle East including the Caucasus and the B alkans 404

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. *

)p %i

T o <=k *-J. ^.iTipt p .e //:■ •77/i

2 . The Expansion o f the Russian Empire in the Caucasus V, 1801-1855 1855-1904

405

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3. Contemporary Political Boundaries in the Middle East

406

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Glossary:

abi, agabey older brother abla older sister adet customary practices, tradition agwal mixed gender gathering where joking courtship takes place, see, zexes akraba digi evlilik exogamous marriage anavatam motherland agiret a social organization based on webs of relations among lineages, “tribal confederation” atavatani ancestral land azinlik m inority bey mister, a term of address, or title (archaic) bigim form (n) gargi downtown gay bahgesi, gay evi Tea house, tea garden

gerkeska men's outfit: a knee length fitted jacket, flailing from the waist below giftetelli a popular Turkish dance demek association dolmug chartered taxi donug repatriation; (lit.) return dugiin wedding, party flort flirtation gerici anti-progressive

407

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. go? (-mek) migration, exodus; (to migrate temporarily or permanently) go?men im m igrant hala aunt, commonly father’s sister hamm a polite term of address for women, as Ms. since it does not imply information about her marital status hem§ehri a person from the same city/region as the speaker imam a religious leader ka?-go? observation of physical avoidance to refrain from moralizing judgements Kafkas Deme§i Caucasian Association kahve Coffeehouse{ p i Kahveler) kalpak a cylindirical headgear made of fur ka§en chaste partner, suitor, admirer kina gecesi “henna night”, a gathering for a woman held on the eve o f her wedding kocakan diigunu old women’s wedding Kuzey Kafkasya Northern Caucasus laik(ier) secular (pi. for people who adhere to it as the principle of social organization) manav a member of indigenous populations of settlements in central-western Anatolia. Marje! go ahead! Come along now! misafir, -lik guest, visiting misak-i milli national territory muhabbet gathering, pleasant talk

408

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. muhaceret migration, displacement muhacir, -lik displaced, displacement mesafeli restrained olgululuk restraint pastahane Patisserie psarah the man who serves as master of ceremonies at dances psetluk Besleney word for a suitor, admirer or chaste partner resmiyet form ality §aka joke saygi, -li respect, respectful semerkho joke surgun exile, exodus §alvar baggy trousers tarikat religious brotherhood tesettur loose cloaking garment designed with the principle to cover a woman's body and hair. thamade elder or wise man vatan homeland xabze tradition, culture yazma head-covers made of flimsy cotton and finished with beaded lace borders yedi gobek oteden seven generations removed yobaz conservative to the point of fanaticism zexes a mixed-gender gathering where joking courtship takes place

409

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. zonta an unrefined person

Notes regarding other textual usages:

1) Small lettered names in front of capitalized personal names are C herkess

lineage names which are being used in Cherkess publications. As part of the

nationalist restructuring in the Turkish republic, by law (in 1928) people were

asked to adopt a last name as in the European world. Thus males in families

either severed or reinforced their ties with their families by choosing to have

their names as last names or by deciding to adopt a last name of their choice

for their family. Cherkess lineage names have made a come back and are

used in small letters b e fo re the first name of the person, and I have followed

this practice.

2) Terms o f address such as hanim, bey, abla, abi are used afterX he first

name of the addressed and written in small letters. I have applied the same

convention in my text.

410

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. VITA

Bayan Gonul Ertem is a native of Turkey. She is the daughter of Samiye

and Mustafa Zeki Ertem. She grew up and completed her primary

education in Ankara. After the completion of her high school education in

Ankara Kiz Lisesi, in 1972, she began her studies at the Middle East

Technical University. In 1978, she received her Bachelor of Science

degree in Social Sciences with High Honors. During the following years,

she worked first at the Ministry of Village Affairs and Cooperatives on a

number of rural development projects, including the settlement of the

Beritanli A§ireti, then, as an English instructor at the Higher School of

Languages in the Middle East Technical University. In the meantime she

continued her studies at the Department of Political Science and Public

Administration. In January, 1984 she entered the Graduate School of the

University of Texas at Austin. In 1988, She completed her Master’s Degree

in Anthropology.

Permanent Address: Yucetepe mah. C Blok 18, No6 , Daire 8

06580 Ankara, Turkey

The dissertation was typed by the author.

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