The Turkish Oedipus: National Self and Stereotype in the Work of a 1960s Greek Cartoonist 1
2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/025720042000191037
ISSN1477-2612
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies
ResumoAbstract This article analyzes a particular type of radical political discourse in Greece—namely the articulation of stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness in the work of Mendis Bostantzoglu, a Greek satirist and cartoonist. The author examines a poem and a sketch published in the 1960s, in which stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness are presented and mocked. Relating their production to their specific historical context and current academic discussions in Greece on nationalism and Otherness, the author argues that the ways in which ethnic stereotypes of “self” and “other” are used to discuss political issues have more to tell about internal Greek issues (such as a critique of the government and its policies) than about Greece's foreign affairs. Such analyses, it is further argued, also lead to a greater appreciation of the complex and implicit sets of meanings negotiated by the stereotypes themselves. Keywords: political cartoonBost‘Greek’/‘Turkish’ identitynational impurity‘democracy’ Notes Olga Demetriou is a Research Fellow in Aegean Studies at St. Peter's College, Oxford University. Correspondence to: Olga Demetriou, St Peter's College, Oxford University, Oxford, OX1 2DL, UK. E-mail: olga.demetriou@st-peters.oxford.ac.uk This article was produced at a point when, having completed a project on the Turkish minority in northern Greece, I had begun fieldwork among Turkish-Cypriots in southern Cyprus. Thus, although it ethnographically belongs to neither, it intellectually partakes of both research projects. For this reason, I thank my informants in both sites for helping me form the ideas discussed here, as well as the funders who made both projects possible—namely, for the work in Greece, the Royal Anthropological Institute for its Emslie Horniman award, Hector and Elisabeth Catling for a British School at Athens bursary, the London School of Economics Anthropology Department for a Malinowski Memorial grant; and for sponsoring my work in Cyprus, the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant #6919). I would also like to thank Dimitri Theodossopoulos, Keith Brown and an anonymous reviewer for History and Anthropology for their valuable comments, as well as the participants at the “Suspect Neighbours, Intimate Enemies: Christian Views of Islam in Actors in South East Europe” panel of the 2002 EASA conference, which inspired this article. For his permission to reproduce the cartoon that appears here, I thank Thanasis Kastaniotis. Finally, my thanks to Themos Demetriou for introducing me to Bost's work, sharing his memories of his own fascination with it, and providing comments on my treatment of it, and to Tania Demetriou for her excited and insightful response to both cartoon and article. Whatever errors still remain in the text are solely my own. The collection in which this poem appears contains no page numbers and thus the particular work will be henceforth referred to as “HAP”. Members of the Rum millet were Ottoman subjects who were Orthodox Christian—after the demise of the Empire the word became a reference to the Greek minority of Istanbul and the islands of Imbros/Gökçeada and Tenedos/Bozcaada (and is also used for Greek-Cypriots). This is not to underplay, of course, the importance of the differences between these oppositions, a rigorous analysis of which is to be found in Todorova's (Citation1997) illuminating study. A slightly different route to this argument could be taken through considering the appearance of Ali's daughter in Alexandre Dumas' popular novel The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas, Citation1996 [1844–1845]: Chapter 78, “We Hear from Yanina”), where she narrates how the French colluded with the Porte to kill her father. It is indicative to note that Marko Botsari, who Greeks know as one of “their” greatest heroes of the Independence War, is also claimed by the Albanians. It is also important to note that the Greek Independence “heroes” include both armatolí (arms-carrying rebel-fighting officers who subsequently became guerrillas themselves) and kléftes (guerrilla fighters who were also involved in brigandage). Here, of course, I use “present” to refer to the poem's contemporary government (even though as will be made clear later on, this could also extend to other modern Greek governments as the resonance of Bost's work indicates). This could in fact be a reference to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which Greece joined together with Turkey in 1952, just as it could be a comparison between the “real” fighters of the past and the bureaucrats defending Greece at present (“Pentagon” being also the name given to the Greek Ministry of Defence). The government of Constantine Karamanlis, which was in power in the 1960s (at the time Bost was writing and sketching), had at various points come under attack for its friendly relations to other states, and particularly the United States, and anthropological work has documented the use of this discourse of dependence in the rationalizations of modern Greek history and the practice of current social relations by Greek informants (CitationSutton, 2003: 200–204). In a critique of questionnaire-based surveys used to obtain data about students' stereotypes of “others” Metaxas employs the term “rhetorical haughtiness” to describe a situation where research questions prompt answers that are representative of the interviewees' anticipation of the survey's aims (CitationMetaxas, 2000: 375–379). It seems to me that this can apply in many similar settings beyond the particular student survey with which Metaxas is concerned. It is in this sense important to remember that the nationalism that current social theory criticizes in Greece is the kind of nationalism advocated by Bost's contemporary Greek state, not the state of 2003. The crucial issues are now different, and the question is not that democracy is absent or insufficient as was the case in the 1960s and 1970s in Greece (a point that Bost raised in many of his cartoons), but that the concept of “democracy” has become the primary idiom by which political conduct (domestic and international) is legitimated. This could be seen as a result of the adoption of the liberal democracy option in the 1990s, which Mouffe (Citation2000: 1–16) has convincingly argued is an inherently paradoxical position. In this sense, an analysis of former prejudices is not only condoned, but necessary to the discourse of democracy because it adds credence to it. However, whether it can offer radically different conceptualizations of self and other (whether the latter is “Turkish”, “Albanian”, “Pontiac” or otherwise “immigrant”) that will also lead to different practices (not only by citizens, but also by the state) towards these others is yet to be seen. I here refer to the earthquakes that shook parts of Turkey and Greece in late 1999 and that marked a change in Greco-Turkish bilateral affairs, following the exchange of rescue teams from each country to the other—a change inaugurated by what was termed “earthquake diplomacy”. I have discussed this issue elsewhere: see Demetriou (Citation2004: 112–114). Bostantzoglu (Citation1996c): sketch entitled “Apó tas parastásis tou Tourkikoú Thiásou” ([Scene] From the Performances of the Turkish Theatre [company]). For example, in the comic short story entitled “Paramíthi me Polloús Vasiliádhes” (A Story with Many Kings) of the same collection, which parodies Greece's post-Ottoman history (Bostantzoglu, Citation1996a: SMK). Greek words the cultural significance of which is important to the argument made in the article are treated as “native” and therefore transliterated according to their sounds in Modern Greek in the simplest possible way. CitationYalouri (2002: 192) argues that the Acropolis is both a “summarizing” and “elaborating” sign because it “condenses understandings about Greek identity, while at the same time it is a means through which experiences, feelings, ideas, and actions are ordered”. For uses of gender in Turkish cartoons, see Brummett (Citation1995) and Arat (Citation1991). CitationPanourgiá (n.d.) argues in this respect that instead of his post-Freudian popularized depiction as the mentally disturbed individual par excellence, Oedipus can be seen as the original anthropologist, the one that solves the riddle of human nature. Along parallel lines, CitationButler (2000: 18–25) displaces Oedipus in favour of Antigone as a possible metaphor of radical conceptualizations of kinship. This is of course irrespective of whether Bost himself was aware of this aspect of Ali Pasha's rule, which would be impossible to ascertain. In the Greek original, the demotic “fotyá” was juxtaposed to the katharévousa-form “pirkayá”. In this particular form of Turkified Bostian Greek, this appears as: Vái Allah is ton vezírin tu Dhovlét Evniokrát/dhídhon kalpasí timíon me ipiresiakát. Using the standard form of transliteration from classical Greek: tuphlos ta t'o¯ta ton te noun ta t'ommat' ei. In the text: Is diván rahát xaplóni ke ton thrónon tou kratí, /óstis in ndifós ta óta, dondenún, dadomadí. The selective way in which Greek antiquity was reconstructed by various nationalist governments has been analyzed by Faubion (Citation1993) and Hamilakis (Citation2003). I should here point out the relevance of this to Bakhtin's point about modern satire being, in opposition to older forms, based on “grotesque realism” in a negative, cynical sense (CitationBakhtin, 1984: 12, 18–19). Additional informationNotes on contributorsOlga Demetriou Footnote Olga Demetriou is a Research Fellow in Aegean Studies at St. Peter's College, Oxford University. Correspondence to: Olga Demetriou, St Peter's College, Oxford University, Oxford, OX1 2DL, UK. E-mail: olga.demetriou@st-peters.oxford.ac.uk
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