Longing, Belonging and Locations of Homeland among Turkish Immigrants from Bulgaria

Abstract

The framework of transnationalism has offered a sustained critique of dichotomous understandings of home and host country. Nevertheless, the recognition of immigrants’ embeddedness in more than one nation‐state should not come at the expense of investigating the abiding grip that nation‐states exert on the dislocation experience. Through an analysis of Bulgarian‐Turkish return migration, it is argued in this paper that the framework of transnationalism, while recognizing dual attachments, has to remain attuned to the national contexts into (and out of) which migration occurs. In analysing constructions of homeland among Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria, the tensions between the phenomenological experience of dislocation and the discursive formations of nationalism shape and limit those experiences. This article analyses transnationalism from an anthropological perspective and is based on eighteen months of field research conducted by the author.

Acknowledgement

This article was funded by a Social Science Research Council Middle East and North Africa programme dissertation research grant, a Wenner‐Gren Foundation dissertation research grant (no. 6684), an Annette B. Weiner fellowship, and a Centre of Advanced Study in Sofia regional fellowship. The author would also like to thank Lila Abu‐Lughod, Jessica Catellino, Alexander Kiossev, Susan Carol Rogers and Berna Yazıcı for their invaluable feedback, and Dimitar Bechev, Ruby Gropas and Kerem Öktem for their very helpful editorial guidance.

Notes

[1] An important question here, albeit beyond the scope of this paper, concerns the relation between description and prescription. There is often a slippage, among scholars of both trends, between describing the empirical data and implicitly affirming it. Thus one wonders, for example, how much of the cosmopolitanism is intrinsic to the migrant community studied, and how much an attribute of the projections of the scholar who has a preference for cosmopolitan identities rather than ethno‐nationally defined ones. The same question holds, of course, for the other camp.

[2] Other ways of defining the transnational have been to specify its distinction from a related term. Kearney, another major theorist of transnationalism who studies the Mexican–US border, defines transnational in contradistinction to the global (Kearney 1995).

[3] For more details on the treaties, see the two essays by Kirisci and Tarhanli in a compilation by BMMYK (2000) of court decisions in Turkey concerning issues of asylum, refugees and immigration.

[4] It is extremely hard to give precise numbers for these migration waves because both the Bulgarian and the Turkish primary sources are biased, each reducing or amplifying the figures as would befit their ideological purposes. For reasonable estimates, see Kirisci (1995), Poulton (1989) and Vasileva (1992).

[5] For a more detailed account of the repressive policies directed at the Turkish minority, see Eminov (1997).

[6] ‘Bulgaristan Türklerinin Türkiye Türkleriyle ayrılmazlığı ve bölünmezliği, bir teori değildir. Kim ne derse desin, Bulgaristan Türkleri, Türkiye’deki kan kardeşlerinden bir parçadır. Elma dalından uzağa düşesmez.’

[7] Thus the very notion of homeland ‘suggests that each nation is a grand genealogical tree, rooted in the soil that nourishes it’ (Malkki 1995: 438).