Nuriye`s Dilemma: Turkish Lessons of Democracy and the
Transkript
Nuriye`s Dilemma: Turkish Lessons of Democracy and the
Nuriye's Dilemma: Turkish Lessons of Democracy and the Gendered State Author(s): Sam Kaplan Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Aug., 2003), pp. 401-417 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805435 . Accessed: 08/04/2013 09:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Ethnologist. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SAMKAPLAN Ben-GurionUniversityof the Negev Nuxiye's Turldsh lessons dilemuna: of democracy A B S T R A C T In this article,I explorepoliticalconsciousness and its relationto language,action, and powerrelationsamongschoolchildrenand their parentsin a smalltown in southernTurkey.Morespecifically, I drawon Wittgenstein'sconceptof language gamesto examinethe ambiguousand indeterminate linksbetweenpoliticaldiscourseand educational practices,especiallyhowthese linksare refractedin everydaylife. Thus,I showthat the term democracy,as used in the school system, has become a linguistic"scaffold"on whichtownspeople can arrangethe politicaland social self-images they use to narratetheir own life coursesand life strategies.Thissociolinguisticanalysisof a political signifier,whichdrawsout the relationamong officiallyproscribedcanonsof representation,performancesof hierarchy,and differentunderstandingsof polityand society acrossgenerations, lays groundwork for new approachesto the ethnographyof the state. [Turkey, state, democracy, political signifier,schooling,languageandsociety] and the gendered state Nuriye's younger sister opened her social studies book.... Sheread the chapterentitled, "Whatis Democracy?"three or fourtimes. Then she closed the book, looked up at the ceiling and mumbled what she had memorized: Individualfreedom is the basis of democracy.Freedommeans that individuals can do anything they want to do, provided that they don't harm anybody or do anything against the law. In Turkeyone is free to think whatever one wants, to write whatever one thinks and to publish whatever one writes;one can live anywhere and travel any place. One of the foundation stones of democracy is equality. Everybodyis equal before the law. Nobody has any privileges. his passage is from Isll Ozgenturk's "The Dagger" (1988:88) a story that throws into dramatic relief the way that cultural prejudices and gendered social practices in Turkeyrender a young * woman's life precarious.In the story,the heroine Nuriye decides to escape from an arrangedmarriage after her husband prostitutes her to other men. Afterher escape, she becomes the mistress of a wealthy man who helps finance her parents'new home. Yet Nuriye is never free;she lives in constant fear and dependency. She is constantlyworriedthat her father will stab her in her sleep for shaming family honor. She never enjoys freedom of expression or mobility,that is, the rightto an autonomous self. In short, Nuriye cannot experience the democracy described in her sister's social studies book. By describingthe discrepancybetween the promises of freedom and the lived experience of a young woman, the story "The Dagger"points to the complex way that the terms of democracy are configured precisely at the momentwhen privateselves are inserted in public discourses.l Therefore,to understand the efficacy of political rhetoric and its signifiers,it is crucial to consider, as ChantalMouffe (1992:376)argues, how each person articulates an ensemble of contingent "subjectpositions"that correspondto the multiple, historicallyspecific networkof power relationsand diversediscourses in which a citizen is immersed. Mouffe's argument has far-reachingimplications. The multiplicityof subject positions undermines the idea of universal political concepts. Likewise,interpretivevariabilityundermines the idea of a mshort American Ethnologist 30 (3):401-417. Copyright C)2003, American Anthropological Association. This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Ethnologist * Volume30 Number3 August2003 (canonized)citizen-state held in common. Rather,her argument draws out the ambiguous connections of social processes and the use of political language with the fluid social situations that comprise the day-to-day understandings of the public sphere.2 Indeed,how people in a particularlocalitydefine,understand, and interpretpolitical regimes and social action has become a question of great interest to anthropologists. In recent years, scholarshave exploredhow people throughout the worldperceive and experience the state as a majoragent in theirday-to-daylives (e.g.,Anagnost1997;Galand Kligman 2000;Gupta 1995;Guptaand Ferguson 1992;Handler 1988; Herzfeld1992;Taussig 1997;Trouillot1990,2001). Much attention has centered on the different ways political discourses are refractedin the press, politicalparties,voluntary associations, and voting booths and howthey are then taken up in popular discourses (e.g., Appadurai2002; Comaroff and Comaroff1999;Karlstrom1996;Schaffer1998). Centralto ethnographic studies of the state is understanding the operations of power and knowledgethat shape people's everydaylives. This concerted efforthas resultedin an emergent literaturethat focuses on the impact of schooling on children'spolitical sociability (da Cunha 1995;Keyes 1991;Levinsonet al.1996;Marshall1993;Starrett1998).This is understandablegiven the centralityof national education systems in transmittingcore values that promote the basic requisitesof citizenship;namely, childrenmust be disposed to fight on behalf of the country,to obey the law, and to accept the social principlesunderlyingthe state. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu points out, "One of the major powers of the state is to produce and impose (especially through the school system) categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social worldincluding the state itself" (1999:53). The habitual routines, rituals,and discourses to which children are exposed during their years of schooling are all designed to inscribe them with a prereflectivebackgroundto civicaction.Schools, therefore, are critical arenas for the cultural politics of a society, and the curricula within them are intended to mold the political behavior of schoolchildren, the future adult citizens of a country.3 This political socialization is not without tension, however. Mass education has fostered a more critical, self-conscious public versed in alternative systems of social relationsand able to articulatenew aspirations throughthe politicallanguageof rights(Eickelman1992; Fahy 1998;Hirschkind2001;McGinnand Epstein 1999). In fact, we cannot understand the story about Nuriye without attendingto the crucialrole Turkishschools play in disseminating the idea of a close Eltbetween modernityand democracy. As Michel Foucault (1977, 1991) and Timothy Mitchell (1991, 1998) point out (and as the story itself suggests), through the school system, the modern state generates an arrayof rationalitiesof governance that centers on autonomy, self-control, and responsibilityamong citizens.4 A less salient but equally central point to Nuriye's dilemma is how an idealized notion of democracy often assumes the universalityof the male, Westernbourgeois subject. Indeed, for the past two decades, feminist political theorists (e.g., Butler 1992;Fraser1987;Young 1997),historians (e.g., Eley 1992;Hunt 1992;Outram 1987;Ryan 1992; Scott 1996a),and sociolinguists (e.g., Cameron1997;Collins 1998;Gal 1991,1997,2002) have taken to taskthe presumed linguistic and social impartialityof the liberalmodel of politics. Furthermore,they have elaborated three vital points: first,that unspoken assumptions about gender and class are embedded and reproducedin the politicalvocabularyof liberal democracies; second, that a linguistic unity coupled with a singular (male bourgeois) "rational"communicative style have prevented subordinate groups (economic or political minorities,for example) from effectivelyparticipating in the public domain; and third,that this language ideology and associated linguistic praxis together have shaped ways people imagine, experience, and understandpolitical processes. Common to these intellectuallydiverse perspectives is showing how the "universal"terms used to promote the liberalbourgeois nation-state arerooted in a rationalistconception of the citizen-subject, the ego- and androcentric person. And, as a result, this "brother"-hoodof socially responsible adults too often has excluded the plebian classes, women, and children (Benhabib1987:85).5 At the heart of this feminist critiqueis how a public invariablyreconfigurespolitical rhetoricwithin contexts with differenthistoricalpoliticaleconomies, genderregimes, and language ideologies. Thus, to appreciate the role of democratic discourses in national education systems Turkish schools in particular it is criticalto explorehow statesmen, school officials,parents, and childrendirectthe terms of democracy to their own objects, that is, constitute a meaningful relationbetween their public and privateselves. Thus, I take up LudwigWittgenstein's (1953)insightful analysis of language games to explore, first, how the everyday uses of language articulate with social interaction, or "formsof life" (Lebensform),and, second, how differentsocial visions and various forms of socialization together project indeterminate systems of signification in political discourses.fiOf pertinence to these two axioms is that people "experience"the meaning of a word, that is, they constitute their social and political identities in and through different communicative styles. Thus, a key term like democracycannot be reduced to a singular, stable meaning; rather, it evokes "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similaritiesin detail'}tWittgenstein1953:para. 66). In effect, Wittgensteindebunks the rationale of rational,neutral discourse considered emblematic of bourgeois civil society, namely, that the sole function of language is reference. He, in fact, emphasizes the ambiguous and contingent framework("scaffold")underlyinglinguistic practices such 4|2 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions * American Ethnologist Nuriye'sdilemma that new meanings "come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten"(Wittgenstein1953:para. 23). That is, the production, circulation, and consumption of political concepts take part in generating different perspectives within a society, none of which can be subjectedto a simple cause-and-effect analysis. Also, citizens differentiallyunderstandand interpretpoliticalrepresentationsand processes in narratingtheir life courses. Thus, invoking a term like democracydoes not necessarily mean following it either as a way of life or as a set of instructions.Nor is "democracy"a social practice that can be explained solely in terms of rules. Rather, the application of rules rests with practical knowledge and is itself an objectifying moment within larger historical processes (Bourdieu 1977:1-30, 72-93). Members of a (linguistic) community differentially inflect concepts preciselybecause of the liabilityand lability of language and experience. Or, as the historian Joan Wallach Scott (1996b:397)notes, the discursive productions of political reality are enmeshed in contradictorysocial processes that defy easy resolutions. Accordingly,I understandthe production and dissemination of political terms as symbolicallymediated products of communication that are differentiallyinflected according to generation, gender, class, and historical consciousness. Althoughit is true that both citizens and state leadersturn to political terms to understand the circumstances in which they act, I argue that idealized understandings of politics and language cannot adequately describe how people as historicaland social actors make sense of their political and everyday lives. Rather, concepts like democracy must be treated as floating signifiers to which speakers attribute their own meaning and that speakers "translate"into a vernacularpraxisparticularto them. Of course, however much political concepts shift and blur meanings, they are not free-for-all signs. Politically dominant groups working in conjunction with state agencies have the clout to linguisticallydetermine the parameters of collective identity for the entire citizenry, that is, to implement authoritativemeanings of language and thereby mold men and women in the images of canonized politics.7 At the same time, no political concept can delivercomplete orderbecause both the language of politics and the politics of language are deeply entrenched in contingent power relations at all levels of society.8 I thus aim to applyWittgenstein'sconcepts of language to better understand how political signifiers (terms like democracy,freedom,rights,etc.) are constituted in and outside of public schools, how they are made credible and authoritative, and how they are mediated in particularsocial contexts. Moreover, in understanding how differences and unity are simultaneously established within a polity, I focus on the ambiguous and indeterminate links between political discourse and social practicesand how these links arerefracted in everyday conversations. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 1989 and 1991 in the locality I call "Yayla,"a small town of 5,000 in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey,I begin by showing how the curriculumin elementary and middle schools stresses a procedural understanding of democracy over a normative one.9 This is particularlyevident in the national curriculum instituted following the 1980 coup d'etat.At that time, the militaryestablishment directly intervened to constitute the political culture of schoolchildren. Then I examine how schoolchildren and parents in Yaylainterpolatepersonal associations that simultaneously legitimize, displace, and even transcend the more orderlypolitical argumentsdisseminated at school. The older generation, I argue, perceives democracy in terms of the patrimonial regime, the "father-state"that provides materialfreedoms. Pupils, on the other hand, pick up the lessons on individual freedom to discursivelychallenge authorityrelationsin their society. I conclude that democracy has become a master trope with which schooled boys and girls can verbalizetheir individualaspirationsand experiences. The terms of democracy for these youths have become a "scaffold"(touse Wittgenstein'sterm)forexpressing their desire for greaterindividual autonomy. Such a sociolinguistic analysis of a political signifier, which draws out the relation between officiallyproscribed canons of representation, performancesof hierarchy,and differentgenerations' understandings about polity and society, can stimulate new directionsin the ethnographyof the state. Textbookdemocracy:Normativeor procedural? In Turkey,as elsewhere, schools play an important role in socializing children in the desired signs of the civil state. Turkisheducatorsespeciallyemphasize civics class because they believe it is vital for molding politicalbehavior.In civics class, standardcurricularpractices include readingtexts on democracy, such as the one that Nuriye's younger sister memorizedin the story"TheDagger."Thesetextspropagatea positive evaluation of the Turks in world history, which serves as a counterargumentto centuries-long criticism of Turkish political culture (see Neumann and Welsh 1991). They also assume hierarchies of differences that privilege and legitimate the republicanregime of power. Firstamong these hierarchies, democracy has been presented as the quintessential sign of a state's modernity, and, by implication, that of its citizenry.Appositely, non-Westernpolitical and culturaltraditionsare assumed to negate the principles of democratic rule because they result from authoritarian traditions, feudal social structure, or fanatic religious beliefs. Thus, ever since the Turkishnationalist educator Ziya Gokalpasserted earlyin the 20th century that "animpartial historian of the future will admit that democracy . . . originated with the Turks" (1959:303),official textbooks have consistently described the Turkish republic as the ideal, democratic polity. Moreover, Turkish education officials 4|3 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Ethnologist * Volume30 Number3 August2003 place greatfaith in the curriculumfor creatinga democratic political tradition while discrediting despotism as incompatible with national identity. That is, they believe that instruction will persuasively induce schoolchildren the future electorate to adopt democratic principles and thus activelyparticipatein the public sphere.l° But how is the "democracy"defined in textbooks currently used in Turkey?Although textbooks give a great deal of space to the rhetoric of normative democracy, schoolroom education places more emphasis on teaching citizens the correct procedures and duties of democracy. At face value, the curriculumfocuses on norrnsusually associated with the liberal, bourgeois public sphere-freedom of expression and tolerance of differences.Thus, passages from civics textbooks make frequent reference to the prerepublican sultans' abuse of their authority,in particular,their draconian censorship of ideas.l1But in practice,the school system emphasizes procedural definitions of a democratic political system over normative ones. In their civics textbook, third graders,for example, are taught in the text "Democracy"that majoritarianpolitics is the most legitimate mode of organizing political power.l2 This distinction between personal, arbitraryrule and numerical democracy is recursivelyreplicatedin class elections. At the beginning of the school year, from second grade on, pupils elect senior and junior class officers-president, head of the cleanup committee, head of the librarycommittee, and so on. The same third-gradecivics textbookthus states that everybodywho lives in a society has workand responsibilities to carryout. One of these is the duty to manage and supervise.Pupils must participatein managing the classroom and school. They must take responsibilities for class presidencyand duties. The class presidentrepresents the class.A person responsiblefor a task (library; cleaning) is the representative for that branch.... A regime that provides elected offlcers is known as a democracy. Those who want to be class president put themselves up as candidates. Everypupil votes for a candidate she or he sees fit. Everybodyparticipates by voting. The candidatewith the most votes becomes class president. Those who voted for or againstthe class president heed his words. Thus, everybodyrespects the decision taken by the majorityof the class and abides by it. In a democracy everybody respects one another's opinions. [Ilkokul Hayat Bilgisi 3 1991:23] In the above text, both class officerand government official are designated by the same term, yonetici. Here, language and political relations converge in naturalizingas "democratic" the underlying hierarchy inside and outside the classroom. This linguistic articulationof political behavior not only iconicallyindexes the union of school and state but also renders both arenas politically equivalent moral communities and thus erases any differences there may be in their respective social makeup and practices.l3Implicit in this "languagegame"is a hierarchicalrankingof differences in mentality and political culture that dismisses the prerepublican regime and justifies a desired modernity commonly associated with the "democracy"in contemporary classrooms. Despite the educational system's best effortsto impose its notions of proceduraldemocracy,there is a glitch. Not all citizens accept the system's definition, a stance that can draw a sharp reaction from the state. Other citizens jumble the politicalcategoriesto fit their specific understandingsof modernity,social identities, politicalregime, and way of life. Should the state consider certain individuals or interest groups to have transgressedwhat it understands to be the procedural bases of democracy, then in its capacity as guardianof the public orderit will intervene.So far,only the militaryhas taken up this role. The generals' democracy The quote with which I began this article is not without irony.The short story "TheDagger"was written in the wake of the 1980 militarycoup. On September 12, 1980,the commander-in-chiefof the Turkisharmed forces, KenanEvren, and his colleagues overthrewthe civiliangovernment.Casting themselves as apolitical "guardians"of the nation and the legitimate ideological successors of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk(the firstpresident of Turkey),the juntajustified the coup by claimingthat the civilianpoliticianswere unable to govern the country and effectivelydeal with the breakdown of law and order.l4Even worse, the junta argued, was that the educated youth had become disdainfulof authorityand reproducedparliamentarydisorderon universitycampuses and in secondaryschools. Centralto the generals' rhetoric was the notion that a stable democratic regime had to be restored.The armyhad intervened before, but this time the generals made sure to position themselves as the chief culturalbrokersof the national polity. To depoliticize public opinion, the generals carried their conception of political education into the school system. Thus, before returningpower to civilianpoliticians two years later, the military tightened the institutional links between the armedforces and the national education system, including stricter control of personnel, children,and curriculum.l5 At the core of the new curriculum was emphasis on both discipline and total allegiance to the state. That is to say, the new curriculumsought to prevent at all costs the consolidation of identities that threatened to fragment the nation into a politics of differences whether rooted in socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or religion. To bolster this prohibition, the generals defined which communities of interest were allowed to work out their differences in the political arena. Setting up the terms for participation in 484 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Nuriye'sdilemma* American Ethnologist andexclusion fromthe politicalarenameant firstof all redefining the social parametersof democracy. In the imagined democracy of the generals, there was no room for leftist groups. In fact, the militaryheld "communists"responsible for the political violence that plagued the country throughout the 1970s, that is, for weakening Turkish society by undermining its democratic norms. A year and a half after the coup, the defense secretary attached to the Ministryof Education states in his report on public institutions and national unity that "thereis a point of utmost importance: communism labels ... all democratic views within a democracy as 'fascistic'" (Tebligler Dergisi 1982a:68).The report suggests that the communists were themselves antidemocratic, threatening to impose a totalitarian regime with its "dictatorial ideology" (dikta ideolojisi).l6 Here, communism is more than just another antidemocraticmovement; it is a threat to the established social order.l7The secretary does not stop with the social and economic platform of the communists. He accuses them of accentuating identity differences among the people; as he states, communists are "agents provocateurs" who foment conflicts among the differentMuslim sects and between the "so-calledKurdishcitizens"and the rest of the population (TebliglerDergisi 1982a:68).18 My aim here is not to question the historicity of these assertions.Rather,I drawattention to how the militaryadvisor invokes the rhetoricof democracyto create mutuallyexclusive political categories and, thus, delineate clear, punishable categories of people. In orientingthe school system to those political (and linguistic) distinctions the army supports, the advisor delegitimates and silences any interest group that advocates alternative collective identities and thereby justifies their exclusion from participating in the generals' public sphere.l9 The military,moreover, repudiates those who espouse political directions that considerably divergefrom its version of Turkishdemocracy.And pupils are not excluded from these dictates. Followingthe 1980coup, the militaryappointed its own minister of education, Hasan Saglam.As with his predecessors in the ministry,Saglamexplicitlyconnected democracy with continuous vigilance of schoolchildren's extracurricular activities,including politics. For example, in his keynote speech to open the school year in 1981,he exhortedparents "toclosely follow your children,to protect them from harmful habits and to keep them away from activities that have no relationto their studies"(TebliglerDergisi 1981b:310).To the minister, the means and meanings of democracy are first and foremost the existence of law-abidingcitizens and the inviolabilityof the state. Moralsand discipline take priorityand should repress any behaviorthat can be construed as "divisive."These objectives tapped into the ideological platformof the subsequent civilian governments led by the right-of-centerMotherlandPartyand TruePath Party. Thus, both the militaryand state officialsconsider their task to consist of turning children into law-abidingcitizens. To this end, parents, teachers, and officialsare mobilized to manage, supervise, and control children. Thus, the family unit, the school, and the state are all depicted in the curriculum as constituted by the same rules, regulations, order, and, above all, obedience. In constituting this obedient citizenry, the curriculumpositions parents as surrogatepedagogues. School primersoften belie a naive realism in which "textual"fathersand mothers are endowed with an authoritative voice to impart those civic norms state educators endorse.20Fifth-gradechildren,for example, become silent interlocutors to the moral citizen-father in the story "The Constitutionand the Duties of Citizens." The childAyselwas thinkingabout the policeman taking away a man in handcuffs. His father said, "Myson, we all live in a large society. Above all there has to be order in society. Lawsand some social regulationsconstitute social order.All of us must abide by the laws and social regulations and uphold them. This is the most important duty of a citizen. The State apprehends and punishes those people who do not carryout this duty.When citizens cooperate with the state all of us are happy." [Aydogdu1988:63] Parents are expected to fully cooperate with the state and prevent their childrenfrom runningafoul of the authorities. Should pupils, however, refuse to listen to their parents or to cooperate with teachers, or should they persist in expressingideas that divergeconsiderablyfrom the intentions of the curriculum, they are assumed to pose a danger to state and society. Less than a year after the 1980 coup, the ministry published a detailed list of offenses, rangingfrom disrespect of persons of authority to politically objectionable activities. Until recently, punishment has ranged from temporary withdrawal to permanent ban from the school system (TebliglerDergisi1981a:233-234).2l Moreover, schoolchildren learn what offenders of law and order can expect from state authorities.Although the rhetoricof officialsusuallysuggests that there is no inherent conflict between compliance with the law and democratic values, in practicethe law takes precedence over freedom of speech. Thus, in their religion primer,seventh gradersread that "lawsare . . . for preventingconfusion. We must always abide by them. When we don't, we will be punished" (Tunc 1987:68).This lesson is betterlearned earlythan late in one's education. A first-year student at the Hasanoglan Ataturk Teachers College was caught reading the political scientist Server Tanilli's What Kind of Democracy Do We Want? (1988) during his literature class. The school disciplinary board first suspended him for five days. In their official report, the board members singled out the book as "praising atheism, making communist propaganda and accusing . . . the [junta]leaders . . . of fascism" (CumhurEyet1989b:11). 405 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Ethnologist g Volume30 Number3 August2003 The school board then sent the student's case to the state prosecutor and asked for six months of imprisonment. The court finallyacquitted the student. No school, however,was willing to admit him afterward. Resonances:Indifferent father, cruel stepmother, unwanted children Many townspeople of Yayla welcomed the military intervention in 1980.To them, only the armycould restore order in an otherwise chaotic political situation.Duringthe 1970s, often called the "yearsof anarchy,"politicians had failed to contain civil disorderand provide social and economic justice. A town guard,whom I will call Ramazan,illustratedthe political impasse with a story about a traffic accident: "Whentwo taxi driversbegin to fight, they expect a person of authority to intervene so that they can go on with their business. When nobody intervenes, don't they say, 'Isn't there any man here?' (Burada erkek yok mu)." In other words, the civilianpoliticianshad abandoned their dependent constituencies; they had not lived up to their "manly" duties. Framing polity and governance in gender terms is not peculiar to Ramazan.Whenever one reads about Turkish statesmen in the press, whenever one listens to townspeople and villagers comment on domestic politics, very often one comes across the concept of the devlet baba,literally, the "father-state."The state as fatherfigure is a master trope of power to which many Turkish citizens appeal in making sense of their relationship to the state and government representatives.The Turkish"father-state"conforms to Weber'snotionof patrimonialregimes(e.g.,the Landsvater), which legitimate "the authoritarianrelationship of father and children" (Weber 1968:1107).22 All figures of authority are construed as patriarchal figures who must provide physical and material support to a vulnerable (feminized) nation (Sirrnan1990).In the town guard'sallegory,the lack of effective political leadership implied the emasculation of the state and, by association, that of the democraticregime. And the generals,I suggest here, tapped into this paternalist understanding of power-holders as custodians of the people's welfare to legitimate their intervention.Townspeople of Yaylathus often understood the militaryinterventionnot only as institutingstabilityand orderbut, more importantly, also as restoring the moral bonds linking citizens with the state. In fact, many male adult heads of household willingly situate themselves as dependent on the state for support. This concept of "father-state"remains a centralfeature in the official politics of national culture and finds expression in the curriculum.Thus, children learn that the prerepublican sultan had failedto live up to his "fatherly"responsibilities. During the two weeks that schoolchildren study the foundation of the republic and its founderAtaturk,they are taught why the currentrepublican regime replaced the former Ottoman sultanate. The sultan's cowardice, selfish- ness, and pursuit of pleasure (all understood as nonmasculine traits) kept the country backward,oppressed, and exploited by foreign powers. These negative traits serve to legitimate the abolition of the sultanate. Furthermore,the curriculum projects a keen sense of the sultans' having abandoned the Turkish people, and this visceral point is emphasized throughout grade school. Second graders,for example, readthat before the Republic . . . there were no roads, schools, factories and ports in our country. Our commerce was in the handsof foreigners.Weboughtallof ourneeds from abroad. All our money went outside the country, too. As a result our people were poor and unprotected . . . The nation was without a head, the countrywas without a protector (millet baSslz, yurt sahipsiz). [Karayigitand Karayigit1986:44,49] National salvation,accordingto this officialhistoricalnarrative, only began when MustafaKemal(Ataturk)led the Turkish people to victory in the War of Liberation, following WorldWarI. Thus, from first grade onward, all schoolchildren are taught to be gratefulto this illustriousleader, who not only expelled the foreign armies that had invaded the countryafterWorldWarI but also began the modernization of their country.Since his death in 1938,he has become the eternal "forefatherof the Turkishpeople" (Ataturk)who had been lackingunder the last Ottomansultans.23Exemplifying this deep-felt respect for Ataturkare the first two verses of the poem "MyForefather"(Atam), which first gradersread out loud: "The Turkish nation with my Forefather/Saved this nation"(Ilkokul Turkfe Ders Kitabl 1 1989:104). It is with this patriarchal rhetoric of leadership that both civilian politicians and the military command have often justified "heavy-handed"governments. Such an understandingof the link between leadership and state resonates with the dominantpatriarchaldiscourseof the Turkish household. And, residents of Yaylafrequently emphasized the paramountimportanceof male leadershipin the household. To them, the greatesttragedythat can befall a familyis to be left "withouta [household]head" (baSslz);widows and their children are then said to be "withouta protector"(sahipsiz). The lack of a household head places the family members in a precarious,dependent state. This uncertainty about the viable reproduction of the household has become a constant concern for people eking out a living in Turkey,where irregularmenial work,high unemployment, and hyperflation since the 1970s have adversely affected the power of the paterfamilias.The short storywith which I began this articleoffersan example of this anxiety. Throughher sexualized body, the daughterNuriye finances the new home forher parents and therebydemotes her fatherto the status of a dependent. Both the reversalof economic roles and the inversion of gendered norms of behavior shame the father into silence albeit a silence that 41C This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions * American Ethnologist Nuriye'sdilemma can erupt into violence against his daughter. After all, in commoditizing her sexuality, Nuriye not only transgresses the social codes of female modesty but also makes salient her father'sfinancial dependence on his child. In short, her actions call into question his masculinity. The moral predicament of the male breadwinner, although not as dramaticas in the short story, is an everJvday concern in Turkey.For about a century, ruralcommunities likeYaylahave undergonewide-rangingeconomic changes, often implemented under the sign of strong male leadership. As in many other countries in the Mediterraneanregion, Turkeylacked a prominent commercial, let alone industrial, middle class at the beginning of the 20th century (Keyder 1987). Since then, the Turkish state has orchestrated a "revolutionfrom above" namely, the transformation of an agrarianbureaucraticsociety into a capitalistone, the formation of middle classes whose structuralposition and loyalty were to be firmlytied to state projects, and the materialimprovementof the countryside (Moore1966:433452). Commercializationhas undermined the old basis of the household economy and forced adults to reorient their productiveactivitytowarda commodity market.The townspeople of Yaylaare only too awarethat they have lost effective control over the means of production and cannot cope with the costly upkeep of a family in a consumer-oriented economy. Today, earning a viable living is difficult,as is securingtheir children'sfuturelivelihood. Onlya generationago, most of the townspeople herded goats and sheep or raised camels; others cut wood and worked as wage farrnhands.Today many families want more secure jobs for their children,which has altered their understandingof the state's responsibilitiesand education. Schooling is now perceived as the means for securing longterm employment, such as clericalpositions in government or jobs in large factories. Parents thus want to ensure a steady income with social benefits for their children, or what they call a "lifeguarantee"(hayat garantisi). The desiredjobs requireeither a high school diploma or vocational training,neither of which is availablein the small town. Parents thus increasingly invest in their children's education and send them to schools in largercities. In turn, sons (and often daughters)are expected to supporttheir parentsin old age. To gain this security,adult members of the community expect much from their state leaders. Indeed, they regard the entire political apparatus as the framework within which economic and social rights are to be obtained. In return for fulElllingtheir "civic"duties and obligations,including payment of taxes and militaryservice, parents demand that the state providesecurityfor its subjects namely, "life, dignity,honor, and property"(can,l rz, namus ve mulkEyet). To many townspeople, the means to this security is education. The promise of a better future through public education has not been kept, however. The lack of equipment and qualifiedteachers in the local primaryschools inadequately preparesthe townspeople's children for the more demanding high schools in the cities. Onlya handfulof childrenever attend university, let alone graduate. Nor do high school and university diplomas necessarily help secure employment. A common complaint among the townspeople is that the "schoolsproduce youth with diplomaswithout a job or a profession." Even competition for menial factory jobs is stiff.At the time of my fieldwork,youth unemployment was estimated to be between twenty and thirtypercent. Understandably, townspeople are apprehensive about the future viability of their households. They are keenly aware of the relationship between the quality of education and the income of households. Students at magnet or privateschools, for example, usually come from wealthier homes and are more likely than those in ruralschools to enroll in prestigious university programs and obtain lucrativejobs. Pupils attending rural schools, thus, are at a clear disadvantage both duringtheir schooling and later on in the job market. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the adult townspeople of Yayla either adopt a fatalist attitude to life or scheme to overthrowthe social and economic order.Rather, they take up the patriarchalmotif of the "father-state"to criticize the current disparities in education and income. Just as the curriculumdescribes the subjects of the late Ottoman Empire as unprotected and vulnerable children, townspeople emphasize the lack of paternalcare on the part of republican statesmen. In their "language game," the "democratic"state no longer acts as the compassionate father figurewho addressesthe economic and educationalinequities in the country.On the contrary,townspeople speak about how the country's political leadership has spurned them, treatingthem as unwanted "stepchildren."They refer to themselves as "orphans"abandoned to their own wiles. This perception of an indifferentstate stems, I believe, from popular notions of kinship and the symbolic language of patriarchy(Delaney 1991).24InYayla,as in manycommunities in the circum-Mediterraneanregion, many older townspeople hold to a monogenetic theory of procreation, specifically, that men engender both males and females. That is to say, the male "seed"alone determines the progeny's physical and moral attributes.Women, on the other hand, are likened to an agriculturalfield. This theory of procreation is best summed up by Nermin Erdentug,who conducted fieldworkin eastern Turkeyin the 1950s: "Women are a field, a soil in which the male seed develops" (1954:69). More importantlyfor my argumenthere, the degree of kinship between siblings affects the children's share in patrilineal rights.Childrenhaving the same fatherbut born from different mothers are considered full siblings (oz kardes); they then equally share the family'spatrimony.25In theory, the stepsibling (uvey kardes)born of a differentfather cannot inheritfrom the household. It is with this patrilinealunderstanding of inheritance that Arif, a truck driverthen in 4|7 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Ethnologist * Volume30 Number3 August2003 his forties, complained about the meager allocation of resources in the local schools at Yayla. I look at the situation of the big cities, and I look at ours here. I saythis much differencein [thequalityofl education cannot be so. A fatherwould not even make such a distinctionbetween his real child and his step-child.... The governmentdoes not act at all as a father.... They, the politicians, only come at election time; between elections they don't take care of us; they don't give us our due [bize bakmaz bize hak vermezl The truckdriversuggested that city dwellersenjoy the status of "realsiblings"precisely because, unlike the ruralinhabitants, they receive state munificence. Here the state is deEmedas a male genitor, its citizens as infantilized dependents competing for patrimoniallargesse. Framingthis competition over resources in education is not limited to the distinction between real and stepsiblings. The use of the syrnboliclanguageof monogenetic procreation extends to the unfavorabletreatment children are expected to receive fromtheir stepmother. Should a man remarry,the new wife is assumed to look afterthe interests of her own children, to the point of mistreatingthe firstwife's children.An irresponsiblefather is one who allows his children to sufferwhat is popularlyknown as "treatmenttypical of a stepmother"(uveyanalskmualemesi).Such an interpretation of the relations between a woman and her stepchildren is often inflected in discussions on the inadequateeducation that children receive. Illustrative of this type of argument is the complaint about the local school system that Ahmed, a shepherd in his late forties,made: Whatkind of democracy is this?Aren'twe also children of this country?Yet we don't receive anything from the state.... Why don't they send us enough teachers to educate our children?The father-statedoes not act like a compassionate father should. It treats us as a stepmother would. For Ahmed, democracy entails a personalized contract of rights and duties between households and the nation's political leaders. It does not imply an impersonal government grounded in an individualisticconception of society. What makes the democratic political regime the most egalitarian mode of organizing political power to this shepherd is his faith in the state's abilityto provide physical and economic security to all households, including his own. Should the citizen feel that he has not reaped the benefits expected of the state, he will accuse its representativesof having abandoned him. Or, as an unemployed farmhandput it, "an orphan cuts his own navel-string." Dissonances: Law and order or indieridual freedoms, whither? Whatever their misgivings about the educational system and its democraticregime may be, parents generallyuphold the rule of the law. So does the school system. Democratic practices such as freedom of press and speech must comply with state laws. Recall the second sentence Nuriye's younger sister memorized: "Freedommeans that individuals can do anything they want to do, provided that they don't harm anybodyor do anythingagainstthe law."In fact, all textbookpassages qualifydemocracyby insertingrules of politicalbehavior. Lessons on democracyare more than statements about past and present political systems or, for that matter, class elections. Ideally,they are the means bywhich childrenwillingly consent to (and adopt as their own) rules and regulations. Or, as the program of social studies for fourth- and fifth-gradepupils states, "Pupilsmust acquire feelings and habits that comply with the laws and state authority"(TebliglerDergisi 1990b:458).To ensure such compliance, the school system subjects children to a comprehensive social etiquette that emphasizes self-control, active obedience, and, above all, conformityto routines and rules. Conversely,personal initiativeand independent behavior are not tolerated.At the very bottom of the social hierarchy, schoolchildren are expected to model themselves on their elders, whom they must respect and obey.26Should a child exhibit a too-cavalier attitude toward figures of authority such as a teacher she is scolded for her total disregardfor the moral ties binding her to peers and superiors.To question such authorityis even worse for her;then, she is accused not only of disturbing the hierarchicalrelations between school personnel and pupils but also of questioning the collectivistrationalethat is promoted by Turkish state and society, and, thus, disruptingthe social order.No pupil should try to propagate differences at the expense of the collective will, however it may be defined. As a sixthgrade reader states, "Mutualsupport is 'everybodyfor everybody' not 'everybodyfor himself'; this is both social, national and, in the widest sense, humane thought"(Birkanet al. 1987:144).To think otherwise means that one is selfish, and this kind of behaviorborderson the treasonous. Ironically,the very terms through which the national education system tries to fashion a homogeneous collectivity have become the means for negatively evaluating the prevalent authorityrelations in the society at large. To wit, passages that deplore the lack of freedom of press in the prerepublican regime bring to pupils' minds the want of expression in today's classrooms.WhatI am suggestinghere is that when schoolchildren articulate aspirations for greater democratic practices in the society at large, they displace, decenter, and ultimately implode the political vocabulary they learn at school. In the process, the pupils insert their 4ls This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Nuriye'sdilemma* American Ethnologist privateselves in the public discourse of rights and self-government and thus reconceptualizetheir political selves. Below I present two cases to show how the curriculum has unwittingly provided the "scaffolding"with which schoolchildren reflect on and react to the discrepancy between the linguistic representations of democracy and the lack of democratic practices. This discrepancy emerged in the essays and in-class comments I elicited from schoolchildren while I taught at Yayla.The children'soral and written expressions,however fragmentedin terms of coherence and consistency, constitute synecdoches for political and social consciousness. My first example elucidates how a male youth establishes discursive autonomy vis-a-vis state institutions by appropriatingevolutionary discourse to indict "undemocratic"teaching methods. My second example deals with how a female teenager adopts a "modernist" stance to question the gendered premises of school and society. Both cases evince the inherent tensions between a highly publicized discourse of equality and authoritarian power relations. They also reveal how terms emblematic of the liberal bourgeois public sphere become signposts by which these youths narratemore emancipatinglife courses and life strategies. One means used to instill respect for authority in the classroom is physical discipline. And despite a ministerial directivethat considers such discipline contraryto the "scientiElcand modern" pedagogical methods of democratic countries, physical punishment is prevalent in the Turkish Textbookssomeclassroom (Tebligler Dergisi 1990a:554).27 times acknowledge the violence that children sometimes bear from their parents after submitting a poor report card, but nowhere do they suggest that teachers themselves hit pupils. Yetchildrenare awareof the contradictionsbetween the rhetoricof enlightened education and their experiences of schooling. The textualaccounts taught in class have given the pupils the means to criticize ongoing pedagogical practices. Today children compose their (national) identities through the ideological prism of incremental progress and have come to associate physicalpunishment with the devalued prerepublican school system. To wit, in an essay on "Modernand CulturedPeople," one of my middle-school students, Burak,wrote that "in the past backward hodjas [religiousteachers] . . . taught children . . . And for every error the children made, the hodjas would badly beat them with the rod.We now readmany stories about the education in those times." These "stories"have become part of the school lore from which children draw their collective memory. They also implicitly indict present abusers of authority as living signs of the "backward"and despotic past. Abusersmay include the pupils' current teachers, whom students (privately) accuse of not living up to the democratic norms of the state. This was first brought to my attention in an essay Bayram, then 12 years old, wrote about his education.23 Awarded a scholarship for needy, bright children, Bayram was attending a prestigious magnet school, where much of the teaching staff comes from Germany. In the essay, he drew out the differences in pedagogical approaches between the Turkishinstructorsand their Germancolleagues. Whata shame that . . . some teachersthinkthat they can educate by hitting the students.... In my school there are German teachers. Not one of these teachers even slaps a student. Becausehittinghas definitelybeen abolished in these teachers'country.And a teacherwho hits a pupil [there]even has to go to court.This is the case for almost all Westerncountries . . . I have dwelled on this topic [hitting]because it is widespread in Turkeyand negatively affects students. The main negative influences are truancy, lack of interest in the lesson and dislike of teachers. Impressedwith how well he articulatedhis frustrationwith the currentpedagogical practices,I later asked Bayramhow he coped with the simultaneously differentteaching methods. He associated the German and Turkishteachers with two incommensurable mentalities (zihnEyet),separated from each other by an unbridgeablechronologicalgap. Until the Turkishteachers caught up with their German colleagues, Bayramwould learn to maneuverbetween what he called "democratic"and"despotic" systems. Democracy here is, as it were, an "after-the-fact"appeal to reconsider the pedagogical practices and a prompt to reconfigurethe hierarchicalrelationsat school. It is but one of many discursive means with which Bayram expressed personal angst and reformist longings in short, a poignant renvoi of school-based discourses that reafElrmsa narrativeof emancipation, all the while challengingteachers'violence.29 Despite their criticisms of physical discipline, schoolchildren continue to suffercorporalpunishment, which remains a prerogativeof adult authorityfigures.But my point is not about the incongruitybetween pedagogical ideas and practices in the classroom. Rather,I have sought to elucidate how a perceptive youth like Bayramis capable of engaging with norms associated with democracy to criticize the prevalentviolence at school. This is possible because of the structuralcontradiction inherent in the Turkishschool system: Pupils are simultaneously represented as the temporal culmination of the national narrativeand repeatedly reconstituted as the unfulfilled ideals of the valorized future.30Simultaneously taught "who we ideally are" and "whatwe ought to be,"boys and girlsdeflectthis dilemma to their superiors,in the case of Bayram,to his Turkishteachers. Thus, he is able to reconfigure and inflect the political terms of progress to challenge the undemocratic "modernity"of some of his teachers and, by implication,that of the school system and its state sponsors. 40, This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Ethnologist * Volume30 Number3 August 2003 If male youths like Bayramdiscursivelydisplace the political language of schools to personallychallenge hierarchical relations at school, females cannot escape the social stricturesimposed on their gender, whether as schoolchildren or adults. It is no wonder that many adolescent girls consider personal initiative and mobility desirable social practices. This is the case of 14-year-oldGul, who was finishing her last year at the local middle school in Yaylawhen I met her. The educational system undoubtedly promotes greater participation for women in the public sphere. Yet it also does not shy awayfrom discipliningboth the minds and the bodies of girls. Female pupils are expected to dress in as asexual a manner as possible, and, because loose hair connotes promiscuous sexuality, the school staff makes sure that girlsbraid or tie up their hair (see Delaney 1994).Those who fail to comply with this regulation cannot enter the school grounds. In an essay on her education, Gul saw this ruling as instantiating how "primitive"the Turkisheducational system is as opposed to European "democratic"systems she had seen featuredon television (see Note 29). Her statement should not be taken as an all-out attack on the school system. Gul aspiredto attend a high school in one of the major cities of the region. She is well aware that she enjoys greater opportunities, including coeducation, than women from her mother's generation. Moreover,the curriculumhas, if anything,expanded women's horizons in terms of mobility and their expectations of their society. A1most all girls at Yayla attend one of the local elementary schools; a few have even graduated from universities. Rather,Gul's comments betrayed apprehension about the future.Gul'sparentsand immediate kinwere hesitant about sending her unchaperoned to an urban school. Throughthe school discourse on democraticpractices,she tackledheadon the collective prejudicesof her immediate community. Where's the democracy? . . . We [females] suffer from prejudices. Just think about it. A woman has no say in front of men; she can't meddle in men's business. They think we live in a totally different society. They are always thinking whether we have soiled our honor.... Think about it, why can't a girl go out at night alone? Most boys I know thinkwe're just a piece of hymen (bir zar parfass).... A country can't develop with this kind of thinking. A woman must be economically independent. But how does our society react?While a man can do whatever he wants, all the burden and guilt is dumped on us women.... I too want to be a modern person. Gul's frustration with changing social practices says as much about the excitement of the egalitarianimplications of democracy as about her own exclusion from full participation in her society. It also bespeaks her desire to partake in new gender ideals greatergeographicand social mobil- ity-which she and other local girls associate with modernity. To these young women, the "veil"and other bodily strictures impede sexual parity.3lSpeaking out against the school dress code is the means by which Gul contests the freedom of movement that her male compatriotshave been grantedat birth.32 Her narrative,however truncated, allows her to organize and make sense of her experiences.The link between restrictivedress codes (e.g., bound hair)at school and the limited mobilityof women in publiclyascribedplaces is evident to self-conscious teenagers like Gul:The political and social construction of masculinityis predicated on assuming that women are naturallysexual beings whom men must control. It is this "naturalness"of the structuringof sexual differences, this gendering of her body and that of the public and privatespheres that Gul begrudges.33Tied to a patriarchal subordinationthat is upheld in the family and society at large, she resents being excluded from participation in male-defined social realms and confined to the cloistered perimetersof the home. Not surprisingly,the lessons on democracy appeal to young women who not only demand the right to speak up and move about freely but, more importantly, also challenge patriarchalattitudes that perpetuate inequalities between men and women.34In effect, they undermine the links between maleness and the public sphere, between femaleness and the privatedomestic sphere.As the feminist scholar CarolePateman would argue, Gulwants to "create a properly democratic society, which includes women as full citizens"(1988:123). For both Gul and Bayram, democracy is inseparable from individualism, that "drivetoward self-actualization" that has typically been associated with liberal bourgeois subjectivity(Giddens 1990:124).Neither one belongs to the Turkishmiddle class, yet their respective criticismsof pedagogical practices strongly suggest that they both tap into a progressivehistorythat supports their claims to more egalitariansocial relationsand greaterindividualfreedoms. Conclusion Interpretationsof the world,as SallyFalkMoore has argued, are inherently "contradictory. . . and at the level of action there is evidence of simultaneous conformityand resistance to authority-claims"(1987:735). How these tensions and contradictions structure everyday social relations, on the one hand, and political imaginary,on the other, has been the major problematic of this article. Specifically,I focused on how differentsocial actors-state educators,the military, adult and young townspeople invest the political term democracywith phantasmic meaning (Zizek 1989). In this respect, Wittgenstein'stheoretical insights on language are particularlyhelpful in fathoming the relation between systems of signification and political socialization. The term democracyinvokes multiple crosscutting and overlapping 410 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions dilemma * American Ethnologist Nuriye's meanings preciselybecause persons within a society arepositioned differentlyin terms of life history, gender, age, socioeconomics, locality, and consciousness and thus "fill" this term with their personal associations. It is this discursive indeterminacythat articulatesthe contested nature of a political signifieras well as fuels differentrepertoiresof desire, action, and purpose. Thus, in this article,I have tracedthe organizingprinciples by which various members of a national polity engage in imperfectly repetitive usages of the signifier democracy. Specifically,I looked at how the Turkisheducationalsystem discursively fashions a "democratic"polity of law-abiding citizens and how parents and childrenfrom a Turkishcommunity understandparticipationin such a political regime. I first explored the canons of political representation that schoolchildren work within and against that is, how the national curriculumselectively defines democracy and interprets the rights and duties of citizens. I then examined what tensions and contradictions exist between ideologies of political legitimacy and behavior and their many social contexts inside and outside the school system. Finally,I describedhow men and women, young and old, inserttheirintimate selves in the public discourse of individuated rights and, in the process, reconceptualize their political selves as they reinterpretthe terms of democracy. The variety of social visions can be understood as strategic attempts at reimaginingpower and its representationsin everydaylife. In all nations, there is a give and take between citizens and the state. Citizens sacrifice parts of their private selves to the state. Many part with some of their income in the form of taxes; others, their bodies in time of war; and still others give birthto and nurturethese bodies. Forgingsuch a consensual understandingof state and society has been institutionalizedin the modern era. In Turkey,where there is a strong state tradition, the national school system has set about educating the general population in "democratic" citizenship and thus actively imposes specific interpretations on key social issues that are widely perceived as defining national experience for children. This systematic intervention into children's subjectivities is primarilykeyed to foster allegiance to the nation and obedience to state institutions and officials. Citizens also demand rights.Indeed, the representative signs of political language that the school system disseminates not only coerce the public into political docility but also spur novel forms of action. That is to say, the very modes of representation the state uses to consolidate an obedient citizenry have become forms of knowledge individuals use to asserta varietyof claims.By encoding theirinterests in the language of individualrights and self-government, the townspeople of Yayla assert agency within the context of a political discourse they did not create (see Visweswaran1996). From the perspective of those statesmen and military leaderswho associate democracywith a patrimonialregime (the "father-state"),the citizen must fuse as much as possible his or her privateself to the politicalorder.Individualinitiative is considered selfish individualismand lack of interest in the nation. This perspective taps into an older generation'spaternalisticunderstandingof the relationbetween the state and citizenry;that older generation personalizes government as a benevolent and generous fatherwho helps citizens accede to greatersocial and economic mobility. For members of that generation, obligations that guarantee the future of the household take precedence over individual freedoms, and democracy is synonymous with securing material freedoms, including better educational opportunities that facilitate their children's entry into the labor force. If need be, the older generation will support state officials abrogatingindividual rights and resorting to censorship and violence. Not all citizens of Turkeyshare in this corporatistunderstanding of freedom; some imagine more egalitarian forms of political governance. For years, writers like the feminist author Is1lOzgenturkhave arguedfor greaterindividualism and freedom of expression and mobility, the very capstones of liberal democracy. Intellectuals are not the only ones to demand more individualrights.Mass schooling has had the unintended effect of makingindividualrights a desired end in itself. Throughthe curriculumand pedagogy, political discourses have become a part of the educated youth's social consciousness. The written and oral expressions I elicited from the schoolchildren reveal more than their relativesocial and physicalvulnerability;they drawout the existential dilemma between expectations of equality and the social conventions that discriminate against age and gender. Exposureto the rhetoricof democracy induces evaluativejudgment of one's society, which in turn makes possible comparative assessments of different ways of thinkingabout one's life in terms of both immediate and potentiallyvery differentsocial practices. The philosopher Jean-FrancoisLyotard(1989:102)has long touted the demise of all emancipatory narratives,including modern democracy. Yet to those who feel socially and politically marginalized-women, children, ethnic minorities,religious-mindedmodernists,and staunch secularists-the lessons on individual freedom are the very channels for articulatingand resolving their grievances. For this public, concepts like "citizenship,""egalitarianism,"and "democracy"are phantasmic,discursivemeans to reflecton power and social relations, and, thus, they become the very linguistic elements that bring about changes in people's day-to-daylives, which develop more open public spheres. Thus, this "languagegame" evinces the close links between language, action, and power relations.This is clearly the case in contemporaryTurkey,where divergent uses of the term democracyappear in how state agents understand 4ll This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Ethnologist * Volume30 Number3 August2003 education, how older citizens conceive of the task of government, and how young men and women describe their limited opportunities.In fact, multiple meanings of democracy oscillate between local ideas about the contract between rulers and ruled and a more global concept of the universal rights-bearingsubject. This oscillation occurs as men and women, young and old, the schooled and the unletteredformulate within local, context-specific semantic and pragmatic frames their understanding of political participation as they tryto make sense of their day-to-daylives. And, for sure, the national school system in Turkeyhas consciously worked at inculcating a "school-mediated, academy supervised idiom" of intragroupcommunication that legitimates a particularunderstanding of social order (Gellner 1983:57).All other interpretations of society and polity are denied both objective authorityand authoritative objectivity.These pedagogical intentions have come to inhabit the linguisticconsciousness of pupils but inways the curriculumnever intended. If some observersof Turkishsociety maintain that home and school succeed in socializing children into "coreauthoritarianism"(Kagitc,ibasi1970:444; Mardin1978:242;Shankland1999),many of the schoolchildren whom I taught thought otherwise. Far from wholeheartedlyacceptingauthoritariansocialnorms,theyaspiredto more egalitarian social relations, to more democratic life courses and in large part, this was a result of their education. The proceduraland normative understandings of democracy they acquire at school value a selfhood that subverts and (partially) unhinges the moral links between collective identity and obedience to the state. Democracy has become both a desirablemeans and end forthose young men and women tryingto exertsome degree of autonomy in otherwise constraining social and political relations. Here the ambivalentand vacillatingrepresentationsin the political sphere open up the possibility of alternativelife courses for constitutingselfllood. Less clear is how the fictional younger sister of Nuriye would have applied her academic studies in real life. I recall here that she closed her eyes as she was committing to memory her lesson on democracy.Whatwas she thinkingat that moment? Was she associating a democratic regime with the "father-state,"with the rule of the law, or with individual freedoms? We shall never know. She only appears briefly in the story to bring into sharp relief the tragic life story of her older sister.Whatwe do know is that the evaluations of polity and society that the schoolchildren Bayram and Gul articulateddo not reflecttheir realityper se. Rather, such understandingsof democracyare provisional,if shaky, linguistic "scaffolds"that these two youths and like-minded Turkishboys and girls use to imagine alternativesocial and politicalideals. Notes Acknowledgments. Field research for this article, conducted from 1989 to 1991,was supported by the Fullbright-Hayesfellowship. The SpencerFoundationsupportedfurtherwriting.In its long history,this articlehas benefited from the input of many listeners and readers.I first want to thank Michel-RolphTrouillot,without whose collegiality,encouragement,and insights this articlewould not have been possible. An earlierversion of this article was presented at the conference "NewChallengesto Democracy:Perspectives fromthe Periphery,"Ben-GurionUniversityof the Negev, May 21-23, 2000. Since then, this articlehas benefited from close readings by GadiAlgazi,Ye$imArat,Nathan Brown,CharlesTilly,Yishai Tobin, Dror Ze'evi, and especially AlejandroPaz; I am gratefulto all of them. Special thanks to the editor Carol Greenhouse and reviewersof the American Ethnologist; their encouragingand collegial comments helped me sharpen my argument and situate it for wider anthropologicalconcerns. Last, but most important, I wish to thank those citizens of Turkeywho kindly shared their knowledge and hospitalitywith me. 1. This is not the place for a full review of scholarly work on democracy.Very briefly,democracy is often regardedby scholars either as a power divested to naturallyautonomous subjects who limit the effects of the state on civil society (e.g., Bobbio 1987;Dahl 1971,1992;MacPherson1977),or as an associationof citizens, each possessing certainrights(e.g.,freedom of conscience) that the state should guaranteeand safeguard(e.g., Hindess 1996;Holmes 1993). These definitions only tell us how a liberal participatorygovernment ought to function or how an ideal citizenryshould participate in the politicalprocess that is, if all societies could replicatewhat JurgenHabermascalls the "liberalmodel of the bourgeois public sphere" (1989:xviii) the absence of social coercion, the rational exchange of informedarguments,the freedom to exercise individual choice, the extension of politicalfranchise.In effect,proponents of both approachesunwittinglyreproducethe categoriesand logics of a historical discourse that articulatedemocratic forms of participationwith the consolidationof capitalistsociety in Europeand the emancipation of the male bourgeois individual. 2. Mouffe'sperspective reflects a shift from a consensual equilibrium model of political society and primordialidentities (e.g., Geertz 1973)towardapproachesthat emphasize more fragmented and contested readings of national societies (e.g., Bhabha 1990; Eickelmanand Salvatore2002). This shift in paradigmhas arisen as scholars question the salience of methodologicalindividualism and empiricism, both of which privilege the idea of a coherent, self-identicalsubject (i.e., reduce a person to a single social or political identity)and treat language use as an objective realityindependent of human will. See Nettle 1997. 3. In other words, a child ought to completely identify her political self with the citizen-state (see Althusser 1971). As Etienne Balibar(1991:93)suggests, states interpellateeach citizen as homo nationalis, a member of a national community who is everybody and nobody-in-particular.That is, citizenship transcends specificity. 4. It is important to note that, although their analyses of the historicalconsolidation of 18th and l9th-century capitalistsociety are insightful, both Foucault and Mitchell (mistakenly)presume that a normativeideal of the bourgeois public sphere is integrated into the behaviors and discourses of citizens. 5. Similarly,LouisePratt(1987:49)criticizesBenedictAnderson's "fraternal"notion of the nation, which is congruent with a fixed, bounded culture. 6. Myanalysisof Wittgensteindrawsprimarilyon his discussions of language grammar,scaffolding,and familyresemblances:paragraphs 23, 43, 66-69, 77, 92, 102, 139, 185-190, and 210. 412 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions dilemma * American Ethnologist Nuriye's 7. Or as Michael Silversteinand GregUrban state, "Politicscan be seen ... as the struggle to entextualize authoritatively,and hence, in one relevantmove, to fe certainmetadiscursiveperspectives on texts and discourse practices"(1996:11). 8. Thus, "hegemonicpractices,"as Laclauand Mouffenote, "are suturing in so far as their field of operation is determined by the openness of the social, by the ultimatelyunfixed characterof every signifier.This originallack is precisely what the hegemonic practices try to fill in" (1985:88).And, of course, it is the historicity of language and society that brings to bear this tug-of-warbetween filling and emptying out political signifiers. 9. This articleis based on my doctoralresearchinto the relation between political movements and modern state formation,on the one hand, and multiple understandingsof nationalism and modernity, on the other (Kaplan1996). My multisited ethnographyof a local school system provided an ideal field of inquiry of two interrelatedissues: (1) how competing interest groups broker their respective culturalpolitics in the highly centralizededucation system in an attempt to define both national and local experience for schoolchildren;and (2)how parentsand pupils activelyreconfigure these competing forms of knowledge in their own terms. This research was considerablyfacilitatedby my role as teacher of conversationalEnglishduringthe summer of 1990.My classes brought together children from different (secularand religious,public and private,academic-, magnet-, and vocational-track)school systems. To prepare for in-class dialogues, I assigned essays in Turkishon various topics, from "the family"to "modernity."Through these essays and follow-up conversationswith both pupils and parents, I was able to probe how these social actors made sense of political terms such as state, democracy,and human rights.To substantiate my arguments on the curriculum, I use written "ministerial" sources (textbooks, circulars).In this article I frequently refer to the biweekly TebliglerDergisi (CommunicationsJournal),which has reportedall of the decisions of the Ministryof Educationsince 1939.It is beyond the scope of this articleto discuss the ambivalent roles that teachers play in the nexus of state and society. This dimension of state political culture is discussed in my in-progress book manuscript. 10. Historically,this belief has meant that the state must first teach unletteredcitizens to read and write so they may participate. In the earlysixties, a ministerialdirectiveon adult education stated that "a significantportion of our people are illiterate,and most of them are beyond the age of mandatory schooling. Literacyis a necessary condition for living in a democracy" (TebliglerDergisi 1962:199).Associatingschooling with political education has characterized republican regimes worldwide (e.g., l9th-century Canada; see Corriganet al. 1987). To wit, the sarcastic comments of the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, who wrote that "foremost among the dominant ideas of the present epoch is . . . the notion that instructionis capable of considerablychanging men, . . . and even to make them equal. By the mere fact of its being constantly repeated, this assertion has ended by becoming one of the most steadfast democratic dogmas" (1960:90).Likewise,teaching Turkish youths democratic forms of political participation became widely accepted following the introduction of multipartypolitics afterWorldWarII. Duringthe 1950s and 1960s,the "TurkishPeasant Survey,"a series of studies sponsored jointly by the Turkish government and the U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment (AID),explored how to "modernize"the political behavior of the peasantry.JeffersonN. Eastmond,one of the members of this joint effort, affirmedthat "one of Turkey'smost crucial problems continues to be the development of a population that is educated enough to allow democratic processes to function" (1964:11).See also Frey 1963 and Lerner1964. Of all printed media, textbooks play an inordinate role in fashioning a national identity.What makes primersso effective is that there is no semantic space to question privilegedrepresentations. Simple and straightforwardlanguage, strict boundaries between voices, and unambiguous narrativesconstrain interpretationsto a predeterminedfield of associations. Schoolchildren(and, for that matter,instructors)rarelyexplorethe framingand wordingof ideas, in other words, scrutinizethe linguistic and ideological knowledge constituted in the curriculum.As Willie van Peer points out, texts in school primers"say what they mean and mean precisely,neither more or less than, what they say" (1989:127). 11. Eversince the establishmentof the Turkishrepublicin 1923, textbooks consistently portraythe late-19th-centuryOttoman sultanate as a period of moraland politicaldecline. On the otherhand, the republicanregime is supposed to embody the regenerationof the "Turkish"nation. 12. Thewordingofthe textis the following:"Byvoting,the nation brings to power the party that it desired.... An election shows that the [political]regime is a democracy.... One of the foundations of democracy is to show respect and abide by the decisions the majorityhas taken. In this sense, democracy is both a type of regime and a way of life. In democracies, duties are just as important as rights"(Ilkokul Hayat Bilgisi 3 1991:93). 13. On the ideological effects of such usages of language, see Gal and Irvine 1995:980. 14. This was the third military intervention in civilian politics since the establishment of the republic (1923);the other two occurred in 1960 and 1971. 15. On how, after the 1980 coup, the militaryforged a new national consensus through the curriculum,see Kaplan2002. 16. This discourse on "totalitarian(totaliter) mentality"and "anarchist ideologies" as "enemies of freedom" has been standard practice in Turkishpolitical rhetoric since the Cold War. See, for example, Prime MinisterRecep Peker'sspeech to Parliament(Tebligler Dergisi 1946:75-81). 17. As a materialistideology that focuses on economic inequalities and class conflict and that identifies the country's economic underdevelopmentwith large landowners and the industrial and commercial middle classes in short, with the capitalist mode of production that the military and political establishments support- communism is perceived by the militaryas threateningthe foundationsof the state. Thus,mentioning differentsocial and economic classes let alone class conflict is taboo at school. To suggest otherwiseis to challenge the meritocraticideology that is used to classifyand differentiatestudents and that legitimates class differences and ensures the coexistence of different socioeconomic life courses and political unity (see Baudelot and Establet 1971; Bourdieuand Passeron 1977).Pittingan "immoral"and "artificial" communism against a "moral"and "natural"democracyresonates with recent scholarship on the metaphors used in describingpolitical transitionand identity in postsocialist EasternEurope (Berdahl et al. 2000; Gal and Kligman2000). 18. Since the establishment of the republic and even more so after the 1980 coup, there has been a long-standing debate about defining certain citizens as Kurds,as part of a separatistnational movement. In infusing "minorityracialism,"communists try to call some of our citizens who are spotlessly clean and completely Turkish"Kurds"and thus instigate them against Turkish-nessand the Turkishstate. They also foster "majority racialism":they instigate some of our citizens citizens.... Also,commuagainstthe so-called "Kurdish" nists have convinced some of our [heterodox]Alevi citizens that our Sunni citizens are "right-wingbackward 413 This content downloaded from 206.192.69.159 on Mon, 8 Apr 2013 09:41:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Ethnologist * Volume30 Number3 August2003 fascists";they do the same with our Sunni citizens claiming that the Alevi citizens "areleftist communists."They arethus tryingto foment an ideological"strugglebetween the left and the right,"between the two religious sects. [TebliglerDergisi 1982a:68] 19. Such rhetorical tactics instantiate what Myers-Scotton (1990:25)calls "eliteclosure,"namely,the means by which persons in power maintain their political ascendancy through language choices. 20. Such narrativerealismconstructsa normativeconsciousness incumbent on all schoolchildren.Throughthe explicit use of "wevoicing,"textbooknarrativespragmaticallyframea singularworldview made up of all-encompassingsignifiers(see Silverstein2000). 21. Of course, how school administratorsand state prosecutors follow these guidelines is subject to interpretation.In 1989, a 16year-oldstudent, M. C,., servedfourmonths at a maximum-security prison forwriting"leftist"ideas in his notebook. On M. (;.'s release, the state prosecutor wanted to incarceratethe youth for another 15 years (CumhurEyet 1989a:1). 22. Takinga top-down approach to forms of political domination, Weber links patrimonialregimes to a culture in which "the most fundamental obligation of the subjects is the material substance of the ruler" (1968:1014).Missing in his analysis is what these "subjects"expect from their ruler, that is, how consensus over relations of dominance and subordinationare forged. 23. When the Turkishparliament legislated mandatory family names in 1934, it recognized Mustafa Kemal's leadership in the countryby bestowing on him the last name Ataturk,which means "fatherof the Turks." 24. That is to say, for many adult heads of household, these "archaic" images provide meaningful frames of reference for understanding the contemporarypolitical economy (see Williams1973). These images may likewise arouse novel forms of opposition or give free rein to reactionarynostalgia. 25. To wit, the saying bir tohum ayBotarla (one seed, separate field). 26. The military advisor to the Ministry of Education insisted that teachers prepare children to be "obedientto the laws and to commanders, and respectful to their elders and superiors" (Tebligler Dergisi 1982b:74). 27. Newspapers such as Hurriyet printed summaries of the directive. 28. One of the essays he composed formy conversationalEnglish class; see Note 9. 29. It goes without saying that any analysis of verbalinteraction must consider the social context of the speech acts. Clearly, Bayram'scomments were gearedtowardme; I was both his English teacher and a representativeof the "modern,""democratic"West. At the same time, his ability to interpret and act on a political language presupposes contexts that precede and supercede my presence (Irvine1996:135,151; see Volosinov 1986). 30. On the pedagogical and performativeaspects of historical narratives,see Bhabha 1990:297-299,308. 31. The curriculum,moreover, constantly associates the use of the "veil"(pefe) with the lack of participation of women in the public sphere, both metonymically representing backwardness. Overarchingnarrativesof progress and emancipation saturate so much of children'shistoricalconsciousness that schoolchildrenrelate individual lives and experiences in terms of modernist discourses about dress. Clearly,periodization(as in linkingsocial mores with standardhistoricalperiods primitive,medieval,modern) is a rhetoricalmeans of breakingaway from a devalued past. It is also a means of defining and evaluatingcontemporaryrelationsof power. 32. Such speech acts are strategicresponses to positions of relative powerlessness;see Abu-Lughod1986;Ong 1990. 33. In effect, Gul contests the corporealizationof her identity, that is, deeply entrenched social norms that assume the female body preexists its culturalinterpretationand can thereforebe assimilated to an immutable "nature"or cosmos (see, e.g., Butler 1987;Nicholson 1994:83).Rather,this young woman seeks to take control of the interpretationof her body and thus of the (androcentric) gender norms that constrain her ability to participatein civil society. 34. Although the curriculum advocates equality between men and women, it neverthelessendorses the ideal of a patriarchalfamily. 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