“There Is an Istanbul That Belongs to Me”: Citizenship, Space, and Identity in the City

Abstract

The citizenship ideal of the Turkish republic has taken shape through the logics of alterity, defined by and through both a paradoxical understanding of Turkishness and the rise of Kurdish identity politics. Citizenship in Turkey represents an uneasy marriage between ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity and belonging. This article develops an analysis of citizenship and everyday spatial practice in Istanbul through the narratives produced in focus group discussions with Kurdish-identified, migrant women. Their stories explore how citizenship, as a hegemonic process that assembles identities, fixes power relations, and disciplines space, is encountered and contested through the spatial practices of everyday life, through what Michel de Certeau calls the tactics of “making do.” Viewing dominant discourses and practices of citizenship as techniques of spatial organization (“strategies,” in de Certeau's terms), this study focuses on how participants narrate their own spatial stories of resistance to and appropriation of dominant codings of “the citizen” and “the stranger” in the Turkish context. This analysis brings to the fore the ways in which focus group participants encounter discourses and practices that position them as strangers and citizens, their use of tactics of anonymity and strategies of identity as they traverse city spaces, and the moments in which they situate themselves as political subjects in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces in Istanbul, through the spatial enactment of the strategies of citizenship and the tactics of everyday life.

Key Words:

• citizenship
• urban geography
• Kurdish identity
• Turkey
• Michel de Certeau

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a University of Kentucky Faculty Summer Faculty Research Fellowship. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Kentucky, Syracuse University, Miami University of Ohio, and the 2002 International Geographical Union (IGU) “Rights to the City” International Conference in Rome, Italy. This paper benefited from the comments and questions of participants in these forums. I am grateful to John Paul Jones III, Don Mitchell, Robert Olson, the anonymous reviewers, and “People, Place and Region” editor Audrey Kobayashi for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. I alone am responsible for all remaining flaws. My deepest debt of gratitude is to the women who shared their stories with me and to all of those who made this work possible in Turkey.

Notes

*Three participants born in Istanbul.

**One participant born in Istanbul.

1. Isin cites here Mahon (1992) and Frijhoff (1999).

2. Turner (2000) points out that the word for citizenship refers to the state, not to the city, in Russian. The same is true of Turkish, where the word vatandas, (citizen) refers to membership within the territory.

3. Focus groups were used because of the strengths of this method for exploring public discourse, meanings and narratives (see Montell 1999; Longhurst, 1996; Goss and Leinbach 1996). In analyzing the focus group discussions, I have not tried to pull out “consistent individual data” (Montell 1999,; 64), but rather to emphasize the interactions, debates, and collaborations that arose through the performance of the focus groups as “social contexts for meaning-making” (Wilkinson 1999,; 23). To this end, I have frequently quoted dialogues between women and elsewhere aimed to contextualize women's narratives within the focus group discussions.

4. Given the relatively small number of participants and the method of selection, this is clearly not a representative sample of Kurdish migrant women in Istanbul. The findings of this study should be taken as suggestive rather than generalizable. The focus group conversations were taped with the consent of the participants and translated by theauthor.

5. It would have been preferable to conduct the focus groups in Kurdish. Most of the women spoke Kurmanji, though some were Zaza speakers and some spoke no Kurdish at all.Unfortunately, having come to this work with Kurdish women only recently, I do not speak Kurdish. This meant that I was unable to speak with women who had never acquired Turkish. According to Gündüz-Hoşgör and Smits (2001), 4 percent of Kurdish women living in Western Turkey do not speak Turkish. Such non-Turkish speaking women tended to be older and to have had no formal education (Gündüz-Hoşgör and Smits 2001).

6. On Alevi identity, see the collection edited by Olsson, Özdalga, and Raudvere (1998).

7. I refer to the “spatial strategies of citizenship” at various points in this analysis. Since I am using de Certeau's notion of “strategy,” this is in fact redundant; strategies are the operations of power that delimit and work through “proper” spaces. However, I use this phrase to remind the reader of the spatial content of concept of strategy.

8. Although Turkey repealed the language law in 1991, the use of Kurdish is still effectively regulated through constitutional articles and laws that enable the prosecution of any expression that might be construed as threatening to state security or integrity (Hassanpour 1998; Kιlιç 1998).

9. For an ethnographic treatment of poverty, migration and religion in Sultanbeyli, see Işιk and Pinarcιoğlu's (2001) case study.

10. Focus group women extensively discussed both gender and class as factors that mediate their access to and engagement with urban life and politics. An analysis of this material isbeyond the scope of this article, except as it relates to questions of ethnic identity.

11. Focus group participants frequently referred to each other as “friend,” though of course they had not met before the group. In this case, the “friend” being referred to is Pervin in the group of older old-comers to the city.

12. I am happy to note that the focus group itself was cited as an example of such a space.

13. This feeling of alienation from the category of “Istanbulite” should not be taken as unique to Kurdish migrants in Istanbul. Discussions with non-Kurdish women have revealed a similar sense of difference, based on class and migrant habitus, from the dominant urban society (Secor 2003).

14. The word yabancı means both stranger and foreigner in Turkish.

15. Gurbet also means exile.

16.  Jeremy Ahearne (1995) also argues that the lines drawn by de Certeau's distinction between strategies and tactics in The Practice of Everyday Life are too clear-cut. While I am suggesting that it is fruitful to see strategic spaces as being tactically created within space dominated by the other, Ahearne argues that those with strategic control of space, “the strong,” may also make use of tactics. Ahearne suggests that “‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ cannot necessarily be set against each other as opposing forces in a clearly defined zone of combat. Rather, as Certeau presents them, they enable us as concepts to discern a number of heterogeneousmovements across different distributions of power” (Ahearne 1995,; 163).

17. Participants told moving and important stories about how their language was policed in the classroom, but since these stories were all set in the southeast rather than in Istanbul, they have not been included in this discussion.