Abstract
In Bayramiç, Gypsy can be distinguished into three main groups: sepetÇis (basketweavers), locals, and muhacirs (immigrants). The sepetçis were not in the town during the attacks, but have settled more recently. Therefore, they are not part of our story, but they are nevertheless important for the perception of Gypsyness in the town. They are associated with nomadism and referred to as “the most/real Gypsy.” Their profession was weaving baskets. While their baskets were used in houses, farms, and workplaces to store and carry goods earlier, with the introduction of industrial products, the profession lost its importance. The sepetçis then shifted to petty jobs, peddling and begging in the town. Now, they are the poorest among the Gypsies and despised by the local Gypsies and muhacirs along with other townspeople because of their poverty and their nomadic past. Some of the sepetçis now live near Çamlik in houses while some still have not settled down. Their numbers are small, and less than a hundred of them live in Bayramiç.
There is no real Roman here although people out there call us Çingene.1
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Notes
Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
See Michael A. Hogg and Dominic Abrams, Social Identification: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes (London; New York: Routledge Press, 1988), for subjective belief structures as social mobility and change.
Lucassen also reports the regular usage of dark skin as a marker to be labelled as a Gypsy in nineteenth century German police journals. See Leo Lucassen, “‘Harmful Tramps’: Police Professionalization and Gypsies in Germany, 1700–1945,” in Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups, edited by Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar (London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1998), 82.
See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
This perception is not only limited to the Turkish case. See Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems, “The Church of Knowledge: Representation of Gypsies in Encyclopedias,” in Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach, edited by Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 45.
Adrian Richard Marsh and Elin Strand Marsh, Proposal for Phase Two of a Study Mapping Roman Communities in Istanbul (Istanbul: International Romani Studies Network, 2005), 2.
Suat Kolukırık, “Türk Toplumunda Çingene İmgesi ve Önyargısı,” Sosyoloji Arastırmaları Dergisi 8, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 11.
For the power of stigma as an explanatory tool for this way of perception. Bauman asserted: “Stigma draws the limit of the transforming capacity of culture. The outward signs may be masked, but cannot be eradicated. The bond between signs and inner truth may be denied, but cannot be broken.” Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 68. As our example shows, although on the basis of their own image and practice, some people would not fall into the category of Gypsyness, they still cannot get rid of the stigma.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1966), 140.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 191.
Stallbrass and White point at the interconnectivity of the feelings of disgust and desire in this relationship. This could be understood better in two different ways of otherizing Gypsies by both romanticization and negative images (also see David Mayall, Gypsy Identities 1500–2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-men to the Ethnic Romany (London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2004), 14–18).
Loic Wacquant, “Decivilizing and Demonizing: Remaking the Black American Ghetto,” in The Sociology of Norbert Elias, edited by Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95–121.
Grosz also points out that there is a gendered hierarchy between body fluids and their connection to impurity. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press., 1994), 203.
Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage Publications, 1997). For the particularities of the Turkish context, the control on female body and sexuality both in state procedures and social practices, see Gul Özatesler, “The Changed Perception of the Concept of Virginity Between Two Generations of Women in Turkey,” (MA thesis, Central European University, 2005).
Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998): 242–251, 244.
Barrington Jr. Moore, Moral Purity and Persecution in History (Princeton; New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2000), 57.
Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Religious Violence in Sixteenth-Century France,” in The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents, edited by Alfred Soman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 203–242 referred in Moore, Moral Purity, 51, 55.
Jeff Weintraub, “The Public/Private Distinction,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Ground Dichotomy, edited by Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 21.
For how social boundaries produce inequality, see Susan Moller Okin, “The Public/Private Dichotomy,” in Contemporary Political Theory, edited by Colin Farrelly (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 181–185.
Donna Sullivan, “The Public Private Distinction in International Human Rights Law,” in Women’s Rights Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, edited by Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (New York: Routledge Press, 1995), 128 quoted in Suad Joseph, “The Public/Private-The Imagined Boundary in the Imagined Nation/State/Community: Lebanese Case,” Feminist Review, no. 57 (Autumn 1997): 75.
See Bahrdt referred in Jan Turowski, “The Dichotomy of ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ as a Theoretical Framework for the Analysis for Social Reality,” in Private and Public: Social Interventions in Modern Societies, edited by Leon Dyczewski, John Kromkowski and Paul Peachey (Washington: Paideia Press and the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994), 8.
See Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy (Saint Pélagie Prison: Charles Kerr and Co., Co-operative, 1883). Available online: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ [January 15, 2011] and also see Edgardo Dieleke, “Genealogies and Inquiries Into Laziness From Macunamia,” Ellipsis 5 (2007). Available online: http://www.ellipsis-apsa.com/Volume_5-Dieleke.html [January 14, 2011]
and Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935).
For hierarchizing the poor with a focus on idleness along with moral condemnations, see Sarah Jordan, “From Grotesque Bodies to Useful Hands. Idleness, Industry and the Laboring Class,” Eighteenth Century Life 25 (Fall 2001), 62–79.
For detailed information on the green card system, see Asena Gunal, Health and Citizenship in Republican Turkey: An Analysis of the Socialization of Health Services in Republican Historical Context (PhD Dissertation, Bogazici University, 2008).
For the usage of fashion in compensation to obstacles and the incapability that an individual experiences see Georg Simmel, “Modanin Felsefesi”(The Philosophy of Fashion). In Modern Kulturde Catisma (The Conflict in Modern Culture) (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayınları, 2003), 103–134, especially 120–121.
Tom Gill, Men of Uncertainity: The Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001).
Anastasia N. Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1997), 32.
Yael Navaro-Yasin, “Historical Construction of Local Culture: Gender and Identity in the Politics of Secularism versus Islam,” in Istanbul between the Global and the Local, edited by Caglar Keyder (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 59–76.
Suat Kolukırık, Dunden Bugune Çingeneler (Istanbul: Ozan Yayıncılık, 2009).
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© 2014 Gül Özateşler
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Özateşler, G. (2014). Gypsyness in the Town. In: Gypsy Stigma and Exclusion in Turkey, 1970. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386625_4
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