Abstract
On January 5, 2010, a group of people attacked Gypsies in the Turkish town of Selendi in Manisa province.1 They stoned their houses, damaged their vehicles, and injured three of them. The reason behind the attack, apart from momentous outburst, was obscure to the wider world at the time. The attack had started from minor individual conflicts, but how and why the local townspeople organized themselves to attack against the Gypsies was unclear. How do individual fights escalate into group conflicts and lead to pogrom-like situations? What motivated the townspeople to attack the Gypsies? How do our ways of socialization enable such expressions of violence? To answer these questions, we have to examine how and why the attacks mobilized discontent through ethnic categories. To explain such attacks, we must grasp not only the socioeconomic context of the moment but also the way the category of Gypsyness has been constructed over time.
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Notes
With slight differences, my multidimensional approach to analyze the case is thus similar to Bergmann. See Werner Bergmann, “Exclusionary Riots: Some Theoretical Considerations,” in Exclusionary Violence, edited by Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann and Helmut Walser Smith (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 161–185.
Jan T. Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941 (London: Arrow Books, 2003).
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
For a good analysis of the interplay between these two, see Dik Van Arkel, “The Growth of the Anti-Jewish Stereotype: An Attempt at Hypothetical-Deductive Method of Historical Research,” International Review of Social History 30 (1985): 270–306.
Everett Cherrington Hughes, “Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status,” The American Journal of Sociology 50, no. 5 (March 1945): 353–359. Hughes describes how some statuses in our societies are determined in relation to personal attributes. These attributes are linked to perceptions through categories and this type of status determining can lead to racial status groups.
Dik van Arkel, The Drawing of the Mark of Cain: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Growth of Anti-Jewish Stereotypes (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 90–92.
Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 6.
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 44. Brubaker stresses that groups can originate as a result of violence, while Bergmann stresses the opposite situation in which groups exist already before the application of exclusionary violence.
For a critique of overestimation of ethnic features in the literature, see John R. Bowen, “The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4 (1996): 3–14.
Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflicts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 20.
E. Boris, E. A. Janssens, “Complicating Categories: An Introduction.” International Review of Social History 44 (1999) 7 (Supplement): 1–14.
For a discussion on how our perceptions follow the idea of enlightenment pertaining to producing knowledge about nature and society and thus restrict the view of many sociologists, see Pierre L. Van den Berghe, “Why Most Sociologists Don’t and Won’t Think Evolutionarily,” Sociological Forum 5, no. 2 (June 1990): 173–185.
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Michael A. Hogg and Dominic Abrams, Social Identification: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes (London; New York: Routledge Press, 1988), 14.
Fredrik Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, edited by Fredrik Barth (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969): 10–11.
Wimmer Andreas, “The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory,” American Journal of Science 113, no. 4 (January 2008): 986–987. For a new understanding of assimilation and changing boundaries, also see Alba and Nee (Remaking the American Mainstream).
Foucault, quoted in Stuart Hall, “Introduction Who Needs Identity,” in Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996), 2.
Stuart Hall, “The New Ethnicities,” in Race, Culture and Difference, edited by. J. Donald and A. Rattansi (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 252–260.
Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondworth: Penguin Books; 1968).
Pierre van Den Berghe, “Does Race Matter?” in Nations and Nationalism I, no. 3 (1995): 359–68.
Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups,” in Facing Ethnic Conflicts: Towards a New Realism, edited by Andreas Wimmer (Lanham: Rowman and Litttlefield Publishers, 2004). 39.
It is also at stake in relations between individuals. For instance, being wealthy, following dominant moral and behavioral codes, wearing certain brands, and way of talking and looking may serve to make people automatically recognize the other as equal because self-esteem is coupled with legitimate categories. These criteria that are shaped in relation to certain categories and groups can be used in negotiations as well. For a similar account, see the “bargaining with patriarchy” concept of Kandiyoti, and for an interesting study on women who use religious values to gather power to accuse men in their community of mistreating their wives, see Nazli Kibria, “Power, Patriarchy and Gender Conflict in the Vietnamese Immigrant Community,” in Asian, American Women and Gender: A Reader, edited by Franklin Ng (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 145–161.
For a research constructing poor people similar as Roma people, see Gyorgy Csepeli and Simon David, “Construction of Roma Identity in Eastern and Central Europe: Perception and Self-Identification,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 1 (January 2004): 140.
Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
See Leo Lucassen, “The Power of Definition, Stigmatization, Minorization and Ethnicity Illustrated by the History of Gypsies in the Netherlands,” Netherlands’ Journal of Social Sciences 27, no. 2 (October 1991): 80–91.
See also Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar, Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups. A Socio-historical Approach (London; New York: MacMillan/St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
Harry D. Harootunian, “The Benjamin Effect: Modernism, Repetition, and the Path to Different Cultural Imaginaries,” in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, edited by Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 67.
Paul Thompson, “The Voice of the Past,” in The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Pecks and Alistair Thompson (London: New York: Routledge, 1998), 21–29.
Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Pecks and Alistair Thompson (London; New York: Routledge, 1998): 67.
Alex Haley, “Black History, Oral History and Genealogy,” in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (California: Altamira Press, 1996), 9–21. Haley argues that how black people’s history has not been written especially for the ones captured and brought to America to work as slaves and the writer explains how he found out about his ancestor and his origins through oral history. In addition to this, Sherbakovaargues that political remembering and memory constituted a “serious threat” as for the Soviet regime;
Irina Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (California: Altamira Press, 1996): 235.
Paul Thompson, The Voice of The Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58.
For the interaction between history and sociology as well as other social sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and geography, see new approaches in historiography by Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Ithaca: New York: Cornell University Press, 1992);
Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society e Decades Later,” in Historic Turn in the Human Science, edited by Terence, McDonalds (Ann Arbor: Michigan State University, 1996), 193–243.
Ibid. Also see Ronald J. Grele, “Movement Without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” in The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Pecks and Alistair Thompson (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), 38–53.
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© 2014 Gül Özateşler
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Özateşler, G. (2014). Introduction. In: Gypsy Stigma and Exclusion in Turkey, 1970. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386625_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386625_1
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