A tale of two fears: negotiating trust and neighborly relations in urbanizing Turkey

ABSTRACT

Using a Turkish empirical case, we show how trust is negotiated among rural-to-urban migrant women as a result of their move from informal housing where they lived clustered with other migrant women, sharing their personal lives (arguably expressing and facilitating high trust), to apartment buildings where it requires life to be shared with a diverse group of residents (rural/urban, religious sectarian, ethnic) and where they are expected to live individualistic lives. Given this socio-spatial transformation, we suggest trusting is understood and experienced by migrant women, as an on-going relational process of negotiating two competing fears to (1) not be alone; and (2) not be harmed by the people they risk/desire to be close to (physically and emotionally). This is significant for migrant women whose conservative values and way of life relies heavily on other women in close proximity to them (i.e. neighbors) for emotional and material support in the rhythm of daily life. This is further complicated by also needing to negotiate competing group identities – part and parcel to neighborly relations in polarized societies like Turkey. The process of trusting, we suggest, entails an on-going relational risk assessment/negotiation through knowing, visiting and sharing over time (in material and emotional ways).

KEYWORDS:

• Interpersonal trust
• neighborly relations
• Turkey
• socio-spatial transformation
• gender and space

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Tahire Erman, Dr. Aylin Topal, Dr. Meral Uğur Çınar, Petra Cafnik Uludağ, Julinda Hoxha, Christina Hamer, Bonnie Erdem, Dr. Elisabeth Özdalga, and Michelle Kim for their helpful comments and encouragement throughout this process. We are grateful to the women who graciously shared their stories, to Lauren and Betül whose adept transcription skills were invaluable to the analysis process, and to the two anonymous referees whose comments and critiques were vital in helping us further develop this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. This article is part of Jermaine Ma’s PhD dissertation research conducted at Bilkent University.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Notes

1. In Turkish gecekondu literally means: ‘settled at night.’ These squatter homes were built by rural-to-urban migrants in the cities’ outskirts. Henceforth, we use the term gecekondu to describe this type of informal housing.

2. All of the respondents in this study were residents in apartment complexes built by private developers; this paper does not address state-driven development.

3. For a comprehensive look at Alevi relationships with the Turkish state, and the various ideological points of departure among Alevis see Bardakçi (2015).

4. Informed consent was obtained from all participants in the study; their names have been changed in order to protect their identities. The primary researcher’s university’s ethics committee also approved the interview questions.

5. The Turkish proverb (‘komşu komşunun külüne muhtaçtır’) expresses the necessity of neighbors and how neighbors are always there to help each other with anything. (Literally: ‘A neighbor needs their neighbors’ ash.’).

6. In Turkish, there are two verbs associated with knowing (tanımak – to know/be familiar with/to recognize; and bilmek – to know intellectually about something). The verb consistently used by our respondents was tanımak, which inextricably is tied to having a (direct or indirect) relationship.