Preliminary Programme

Until the mid-twentieth century, the Finnish Roma, like many other ethnic minorities, supported themselves by small-scale itinerant trade, such as peddling and market trade. For the Roma, the market constituted both an important site of commerce and a significant social venue. Particularly horse trade, carried out on the market, was an important source of income, but the social aspects of the marketplace were as significant as the economic importance. This paper aims at tracing Roma’s experiences of the market and of market trade. In so doing, I analyze interviews with Finnish Roma, carried out by Roma activists (nonprofessionals), and collected by the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura) in the years 1997–2000. I draw upon Michel de Certeau’s (1984/1988) notion of space as “a practiced place” in order to understand Roma’s memories of the market. Here, stories, such as interviews, are understood as being part of the space, and “there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences” (de Certeau 1984, 118). Although research on Roma in the social sciences and the humanities is extensive, often addressing the negative and racist view of the majority population, the Roma’s means of subsistence has received little attention. Even less interest has been paid to spatial aspects in shaping Roma’s feelings of belonging and respectability.
I argue that the market was a pivotal social place in the public sphere, to which the Roma had legitimate access, and in which Roma families could come together and interact amongst themselves. My paper points to different spaces, forms, experiences, and practices of the marketplace. I demonstrate how the Roma experienced the market as a space of livelihood, of collective belonging, of remembrance and nostalgia, and finally as a “Roma space”. I suggest that the market was practiced and narrated as a particular space, in which Roma families felt respected concerning both their livelihood (notably horse trade) as well as in their social relations with the majority population. This respectable agency, involved feelings of belonging, which were intimately linked to the spatial realm. (Show less)

In this presentation, I intend to depict the People’s Houses’s (Halkevleri) authoritatiran cultural/lingusitic practices for the purpose of “Turkified as long as civilising, civilising as long as Turkified” especially towards Kurdish population in Eastern Turkey in early Republican era. More specifically, “the single party” (Republican People Party) government’s major cultural institution’s People’s Houses’s linguistic assimilationist practices, their effects and the responses of the people in everyday and local context in “Kurdish East”, between 1932-1951, is the main subject.

In this frame, I will analyse, the linguistic politics and practices of “Kemalist” state in 1930’s parallel to the quest of the state’s officials “to solving of the issue of Kurdishness” via linguistic assimilation of Kurdish speaking population. At first, I will discusss the research findings about the everyday indoctrination practices of People's Houses considering teaching Turkish and making it the morher-tangue of the locals. It can be said that, Turkish was taught with more sophisticated techniques besides open violence aimed to change their memory and "habitus".

Howewer, it can be argued that the process of cultural/linguisitic assimilation was not simply a “top-down” process. Because, the cultural/linguistic assimilation have been performed by the officials using complex and sophisticated micro and horizontal power techniques in the central and local axes. Also, local actors having diversified different gendered, ethnic and socio-economical backround and subjectivities have also different and changeable everyday complicated responses either culturally or politically throughout micro and macro power networks. Hence, not only the interpretation of institutional practices and cultural techniques of state officials and People Houses’s members, but also the receptors’ responses are deserved to being made visible anymore. Consequently, I will try to reinterprete not only the “voices” but also the “silences” of the entire historical actors in the era that I collected from the different official and non-official sources during my comprehensive research. (Show less)

The paper discusses some aspects of identity formation and expression among Bulgarian-born Turks who migrated en mass to Turkey in 1989. The emphasis is on how the wider public in Bulgaria and Turkey views them as a particular group and how they develop their identifications strategies in response. Their position of an ethnic and religious minority in Bulgaria has constructed them as bearers of a culture differing in many respects from the culture of the national majority and attributed to them a marginal role in public discourses. After their exodus to Turkey, their expectations were that they would share the culture of the majority population, however the situation was quite different. In their everyday contacts with their new neighbors, they found out that they were quite different even in regard with seemingly shared cultural traits like language, religion and custom. Furthermore, they differed in out appearance, food habits, communication patterns, gender roles, etc. these differentiations gave rise to several stereotypes and negative attitudes shared by the local communities among which they re-settled. These attitudes vary along social and generational lines but they invariably define the newcomers as a community with a different hybrid identity and incite discourses of exclusion. The paper discusses how 1989 re-settlers react to such attitudes and build up in response a truly transnational mode of life and an identity in which their perceived hybridity is seen as an advantage. It also reveals the role of the border in these identity constructions. (Show less)

The present text offers reading of an album that contains the visual history of a group of Bulgarian builders, working in the USSR on a contract. Their activity is to assure access to natural gas for Bulgaria. The album is printed as a special edition for only 130 workers. It contains their names and personal photos, images from the working process, as well as from the cultural events of the workers – folklore dances, choir formations, which are subdued to a general ideological discourse. The political manifestations are not forgotten, too – celebrating anniversaries from revolutions, March 8th (the International Women’s Day), as elements of the festivity calendar of the communist societies. The album is a product of ideological propaganda, which displays the achieved communist dream by presenting the desired as real. Within this topic the construction is a key element, because it refers not only to the actual building of facilities and structures, but also to the social engineering – the creating of the “Socialist Man”.
A second plan in the album is the large number of photos from Bulgaria, which have no actual relation to the topic for the gas pipeline and the building works. They are displaying emblematic places of heritage – monasteries, old houses and tourism – new resort and vacation storylines. These are part of the official images of the country in front of the world, displayed as achievement of the communist authority. The images, controversial at first sight, are combined within the general propaganda narrative of the album, which affirms memory within the community of the workers and creates a positive relationship. The participation in construction works outside the country is not only manifestation of the policy of “internationalism”, but also a form of personal benefit, because the payment is different and assures access to various deficit goods, like an automobile for instance. All of this imposes the necessity for the evidences from the period of communism to be positioned within the context that caused them. They are to be examined critically since the photos in the album do not only display reality – they are not a moment shot in time, but are mainly a constructed positive world of a society, which does not offer alternatives in thinking. (Show less)