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Contested Communicative Spaces: Rethinking Identities, Boundaries and the Role of the Media among Turkish Speakers in Greece

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13691830500058760

1469-9451

Mirca Madianou,

Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Abstract The case of the Turkish minority in Greece, a 'beached' diaspora and vestige of the Ottoman past, is a peculiar case where the tensions of transnationalism and nationalism intersect and where boundaries are continuously created and negotiated. In order to understand communication in this politicised environment, this article, which is based on interviews with, and participant observation among, Turkish speakers living in Athens, draws on Barth's theory on ethnic groups and boundaries. The paper argues that the media, both national and transnational, often create boundaries for inclusion and exclusion, and eventually participation in a 'common culture'. The first part of the paper highlights two themes: the first is that gender and generational differences contest the idea of a homogenous Turkish minority and suggest the importance of social change; the second is that media consumption in Turkish households is ordinary, shaped by social rather than ethnic parameters. In the second part of the paper, however, the banal consumption of media is disrupted by instances when tension prevails. Three such cases are discussed as examples of the media raising the boundaries for exclusion from a common communicative space. Keywords: Media and IdentityMedia ConsumptionBoundariesEthnographyTurkish-Speaking MinoritiesGreece Acknowledgments I would like to thank Sonia Livingstone, Roger Silverstone and Allen Abramson who have read and commented on earlier drafts of this paper. Notes Fieldwork started in October 1998 and continued intermittently until May 2001. The sample consisted of 21 in-depth interviews as well as informal interviews with informants. The approach that privileges powerful media is so prevalent that it is almost enjoying a consensus. The majority of media theories of identity seem to fall in this category, although there are differences of degree to the power granted to the media—this is not a homogenous paradigm. There are theories that focus on the role of media in the processes of nation-formation (Eisenstein 1979 Eisenstein E (1979) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe Cambridge Cambridge University Press [Google Scholar]; Martin-Barbero 1992 Martin-Barbero J (1992) Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations London Sage [Google Scholar]; McLuhan 1964 McLuhan M (1964) Understanding Media London Routledge and Kegan Paul [Google Scholar]) and globalisation (McLuhan 1964 McLuhan M (1964) Understanding Media London Routledge and Kegan Paul [Google Scholar]; Meyrowitz 1985 Meyrowitz J (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour New York Oxford University Press [Google Scholar]), while others focus on nation maintenance and reproduction (Billig 1995 Billig M (1995) Banal Nationalism London Sage [Google Scholar]; Scannell 1989 Scannell, P. (1989). 'Public service broadcasting and modern public life'. Media, Culture and Society, 11: 135–66. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The former theories tend to focus on the media as technologies, while the latter focus more on the form or content of the media. Of course, these distinctions are not clear-cut and often theories draw on more than one tradition. A study that has been influential in the strong identity paradigm is The Export of Meaning (Liebes and Katz 1993 Liebes T Katz E (1993) The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas New York Oxford University Press [Google Scholar]), which was intended as a response to the media imperialism thesis and fears of cultural homogenisation. The study showed that different ethnic groups appropriated Dallas differently according to their cultural background. Despite the book's success in challenging the cultural imperialism thesis, it seems that, in The Export of Meaning, differences in interpretations are grounded in ethnicity and culture, with no further analysis of how ethnicity and culture themselves are shaped and determined by other factors. This is the strategy followed by Baumann (1996 Baumann G (1996) Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London Cambridge Cambridge University Press [Google Scholar]) in his ethnography of Southall, a multicultural London neighbourhood. Baumann identified two discourses about culture and identity, a dominant discourse that reifies culture and identity and a demotic discourse that challenges and works against existing reifications. Although these are separate discourses, they co-exist as people fluctuate between the two according to context. Baumann describes how the same people who contest the rigid boundaries of the official discourse will revert to it when it suits their interests. The Pomaks are Slavic speakers who converted to Islam in the seventeenth century. They inhabit the mountainous region of Rodhopi that separates Greece and Bulgaria. A significant number of Pomaks live in southern Bulgaria. The Roma people of Thrace, known as Gypsies, are distinguished from the Roma of southern Greece in terms of religion and language. Most Muslim Roma speak Turkish and only a small group speak the Romani language (Karakasidou 1995 Karakasidou, A. (1995). 'Vestiges of the Ottoman past: Muslims under siege in Greek Thrace'. Cultural Survival Quarterly, 19(2): 71–5. [Google Scholar]: 71). Thus to assume that 'Rum' equalled Greek, as reinterpreted by Greek nationalists, is flawed (Clogg 1992 Clogg R (1992) A Concise History of Modern Greece Cambridge Cambridge University Press [Google Scholar]; Danforth 1995 Danforth L (1995) The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World Princeton Princeton University Press [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Similarly, it would be equally flawed to assume that language corresponded to ethnicity; for example, Greek was the language of trade and would be spoken by all those involved in commerce or holding administrative positions. During the Ottoman period terms like 'Greek' or 'Bulgarian' were not used to designate different ethnic or national groups but rather broad socio-cultural categories (Danforth 1995 Danforth L (1995) The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World Princeton Princeton University Press [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 59). What is interesting is to observe how these socio-cultural categories came to acquire political significance initially through the development of Greek nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that led to the war of independence in 1821. As were the Greeks of Istanbul and the islands of Imvros and Tenedos. The criterion for the exchange was religion, rather than language or ethnicity. The last Greek census to give data on religious affiliation and mother tongue was in 1951. It seems that only the name Turkish is controversial. The attitude towards naming this group has depended on the quality of Greek–Turkish relations. In the 1950s, the policy of the Greek government was to call the minority Turkish (Human Rights Watch 1999 Human Rights Watch (1999) Greece: The Turks of Western Thrace New York and London Human Rights Watch Report [Google Scholar]: 2; Minority Rights Group 1992 Minority Rights Group (1992) Minorities in Greece and the Political World Athens MRG (in Greek) [Google Scholar]: 4), providing yet another indication of how ethnic categories are shaped historically and politically. During the Cold War there was considerable sensitivity surrounding the Pomaks because relations with Bulgaria (where the majority of Pomaks live) were tense. Since the deterioration of Greek–Turkish relations after the events in Cyprus in 1974, it is the name 'Turkish', and the minority itself, that have been perceived as threatening. The name Turkish is the one that most people from the minority choose for self-ascription. Published in the daily newspaper Eleutherotypia (10 April 2002). This number is also given by Avramopoulou and Karakatsanis (2002 Avramopoulou E Karakatsanis L (2002) 'Identity trajectories: from western Thrace to Gazi' Theseis Quarterly Review 79 127 61 (in Greek) [Google Scholar]). The Greek media system is characterised by 'an excess of supply over demand' (Papathanassopoulos 1999 Papathanassopoulos, S. (1999). 'The effects of media commercialisation on journalism and politics in Greece'. The Communication Review, 3(4): 379–402. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]: 381). 'By the mid 1990s there were about 160 local, regional and national daily newspapers, 800 popular and special interest magazine titles, 150 national and local television channels and 1,200 radio stations for a market of 11 million inhabitants'. An unusual feature of the Greek broadcasting system is that a number of satellite channels (including CNN, MTV, Eurosport and the Cypriot public channel) are re-broadcast terrestrially for free. Apart from these, satellite penetration is very low (around 2 per cent). There is no cable television and digital television only began transmitting in December 1999, so it was not available during my fieldwork. There is one subscription channel with a decoder (showing films, sports and children's programmes) that reaches 9.5 per cent of households (AGB Hellas 2000 AGB Hellas (2000) TV Yearbook, 1999–2000 Athens AGB Hellas [Google Scholar]: 30). In Thrace there are numerous local Turkish-language media including newspapers and radio stations. Turkish satellite television channels started broadcasting in 1990. They were initially based outside Turkey and were targeting the home market which was then monopolised by the Turkish public service broadcasting channel (TRT). As Aksoy and Robins (1997 Aksoy, A and Robins, K. (1997). 'Peripheral vision: cultural industries and cultural identity in Turkey'. Environment and Planning A, 29: 1937–52. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) have noted, the introduction of private channels opened up the opportunity for a shift from official Kemalist culture to real culture, i.e., a culture that reflected more the diversity within Turkish society. This is equivalent to 173 euros, or £110. The price today is higher, but still affordable. There is no Turkish-language school in Athens. A pilot programme has started in the last few years in the primary school in Gazi to which pupils of different ethnic backgrounds go (Turks and also children of immigrants who live in the area). Pupils follow the Greek curriculum and have some courses in their mother tongue. However, this encouraging development only affects children who started school after 1996. This was particularly common among older women, some of whom had never been to school. Younger women, however, have attended high school although not all have completed the nine years of compulsory education. Television's aural use is quite prevalent in Gazi households, especially during daytime and among women. This is partly explained by the lack of Turkish radio. In order to listen to Turkish language or music, people have to switch the television on. This is also a common pattern among Greek working-class women—although not because of the lack of Greek radio (Madianou 2002 Madianou M (2002a) Mediating the Nation: News, Audiences and Identities in Contemporary Greece London University of London, unpublished PhD thesis [Google Scholar]a). A suggestion is that the aural use of television has more of a gender and class pattern than an ethnic one. News was the most heavily watched genre on Greek television in the late 1990s—see AGB Hellas (2000); for a discussion see Madianou (2002 Madianou M (2002b) 'Global crises: local worlds: the mediation of the Kosovo conflict in Greece' in Savarese, R. (ed.) Communications and Crisis: The Media, Conflict and Society Milan Franco Angeli 246 68 [Google Scholar]b). For a discussion on the nationalised coverage of the Kosovo conflict in Greece, see Madianou (2002 Madianou M (2002b) 'Global crises: local worlds: the mediation of the Kosovo conflict in Greece' in Savarese, R. (ed.) Communications and Crisis: The Media, Conflict and Society Milan Franco Angeli 246 68 [Google Scholar]b). Of course, Arendt makes this point about totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. I am indebted to Eugenia Siapera for providing this reference. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMirca Madianou Mirca Madianou is Lecturer and Director of Studies at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.