Abstract
The Gypsy category with all the negative images and prejudices it conveys may blind us to the process and the dynamics that transformed “our Gypsies” into “evil Gypsies.” It is crucial to understand how the people who were considered to be Turkish and included in society more or less became reduced to being only Gypsies. This process of stigmatization, and creating a “master status,” excluded Gypsies from Turkishness. It makes clear how and why the categories become functional and what role they played in the attacks. In this study, I have applied a multilayered analysis, which focuses on the historical constructions of the stigma, on more structural forces, and on the role of agency.
It was like how the grain grew, we did not question it, some conflicts happened and the Gypsies just left.1
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Notes
Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” Annual Review Sociology 24 (August 1998): 428.
Berch Berberoglu, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: Class, State, and Nation in the Age of Globalization (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004).
For a similar critique to the overall idea of ethnic conflict, see John R. Bowen, “The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4 (1996): 3–14. Bowen acknowledges that ethnic or cultural identities were involved in the construction and/or realization of some of these conflicts but argues that they were more about power, land, or other resources (3).
Also see Beverly Crawford, “The Causes of Cultural Conflict: An Institutional Approach,” in The Myth of “Ethnic Conflict”: Politics, Economics, and “Cultural” Violence, edited by Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipscutz (Berkeley: University of California, 1998), 3–43;
and Steven Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
For the construction of ethnicity along with economic and political competition, also see Susan Olzak and Joane Nagel, eds. Competitive Ethnic Relations (Orlando: Academic Press, 1986).
For the adaptation of the approach to ethnic conflicts, see Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflicts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 17.
For a discussion on historical interplay between ethnic status hierarchy, and political and economic empowerment of blacks in the United States, see George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination on the History of Racism, Nationalism and Social Movements (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 90–93. For the specific debate on misrecognition and misdistribution, see Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural?” New Left Review (227) (January–February 1998): 33–45.
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
and 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).
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.
Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 845–877 (especially see 872–873); Olzak, The Dynamics, especially 20–21.
For the emphasis on the fruitlessness of the differentiation between riot and pogrom, see Paul R. Brass, “Introduction: Discourses of Ethnicity, Communalism, and Violence,” in Riots and Pogroms, edited by Paul R. Brass (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 32–34. Brass points at the wide usage of the terms riots and pogroms that assume differences in organization and planning. He himself stresses the mutual presence of “outbreak of active lawlessness” that is connected to the definition of riot and “official planning or collusion” that is attached to pogrom in the realization of many violent acts. Bergmann et al. give clues about how to differentiate exclusionary riots from other collective violent instances: The exclusionary riot may be distinguished from other forms of violence along a range of criteria. The assumption that the minority group constitutes a collective threat makes the exclusionary riot different from a lynching, which, while operating from general prejudice, is directed at a single member of a minority. The extreme asymmetry of power in favor of the rioters distinguishes exclusionary riots from other forms of rioting, such as food or race riots. The low level organization makes them different from vigilantism and terrorism, and the comparative absence of state participation sometimes, but not always, distinguishes exclusionary violence from large-scale massacres and genocide. (Bergmann et al., “Introduction,” 12–13)
Michael A. Hogg and Dominic Abrams, Social Identification: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes (London; New York: Routledge Press, 1988), 26.
Patricia Albanese, “Nationalism, War, and Archaization of Gender Relations in the Balkans,” Violence Against Women 7, no. 9 (September 2001): 999–1023;
Wendy Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 6, no. 4 (October 2000): 563–590; Ruth Harris, “The ‘Child of the Barbarian’: Rape, Race and Nationalism in France during the First World War,” Past and Present, no. 141 (November 1993): 170–206.
Ashgar Ali Engineer, “The Causes of Communal Riots in the Post-Partition Period in India,” in Communal Riots in Post-Independence India, edited by Ali Ashgar Engineer (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984), 36–39; and Brass, “Introduction:”
Tanıl Bora and Nergis Canefe, “Turkiye’de Populist Milliyetçilik,” in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce Cilt 4: Milliyetçilik, edited by Tanıl Bora and Murat Gültekingil (Istanbul: İletişim Publications, 2002), 635–662, quoted Osman Yuksel Serdengecti, a right-wing writer who became known by his populist-nationalist ideas in the 1960s and afterward, 658.
Ibid., 661; also see Tanıl Bora, “Linc Acilimi” (Opening out for lynching), Birikim 249 (January 2010): 3–5.
Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, An Essay it Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2006), 251.
Jan T. Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941 (London: Arrow Books, 2003), 131.
Linda Green, “Fear As a Way of Life,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 2 (May 1994): 239.
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© 2014 Gül Özateşler
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Özateşler, G. (2014). The Forced Dislocation: From Drivers’ Feud to Gypsy Hunt. In: Gypsy Stigma and Exclusion in Turkey, 1970. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386625_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386625_6
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