Adam McConnel
In the previous column I related how Edward Said, in the opening paragraphs of the third section of Covering Islam, described how oblivious traditional Orientalist scholarship remained to a key methodological question: how objectively might a knowledge of their subject be obtained or constructed? In conjunction, I also noted the overtly political circumstances under which U.S. studies of Turkey were initiated in the aftermath of WWII.
After Said explains why Orientalist protestations of “pure intellectual curiosity” should not be taken seriously, he turns to the “prior circumstances” which brought “the Orient” to the attention of Western scholars. Noting that the ability of any scholar to study another culture or society suggests already existing conditions which must have preceded and facilitated that study, Said asks: “… [W]hen was a Western scholar ever in a non-Western country except by dint, however symbolic and indirect, of Western power over that country?” (1)
The prior circumstances that have enabled U.S scholars to study Turkey for the past seventy years are not obscure. Canonical studies such as Ekavi Athanassopoulou’s Turkey: Anglo-American Security Interests, Bruce Kuniholm’s The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East, and Melvyn Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power give us the Cold War background in Grand Strategy. (2) And the statements of the U.S. sponsors of postwar academic work on Turkey, such as those that I mentioned in my previous column, provide the immediate justifications. (3) The intentions of U.S. academic studies on Turkey were clearly good, but the entire situation was framed by America’s emergence as a global power and the political imperatives stemming from that reality. The end of the Cold War did not change the essence of U.S. strategic goals in Turkey’s region, as was illustrated by the First Gulf War, which occurred even before the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union.
(I also readily acknowledge that my own status as a U.S. citizen, which means a reality of power, greatly facilitates my ability to work and live in Turkey. Basically, it is much easier for an American to travel to Turkey and gain employment or engage in research than for a Turkish person to travel to the U.S. for the same purposes. I try to remain conscious of this fact, and conduct myself accordingly and respectfully. Although, at times, Istanbul’s taxi drivers do severely strain my ability to behave properly.)
Said goes on to assert that Oriental studies are anything but politically neutral, and that protesting otherwise is disingenuous at best. He briefly discusses an effort from the mid-1970s by a group of Middle East Studies scholars to define the state of the field, and notes both that study’s open admission of political interests, and its much more negative assessment of the field than that supplied by Bernard Lewis (also mentioned in the previous article). However, even that project declined to delve into the heart of the difficulty, which is where the authority, the power that makes Oriental studies possible in the first place comes from. (4)
At this point Said again returns to the essence of his text, reminding the reader that it is Western cultural, military, and political power that has provided, and continues to provide, Orientalist studies with their authority. Orientalism’s original function was to interpret non-Western societies for Westerners:
… “the field” — and not, it must be noted, the Orient itself or its people — has
always supplied Western culture with all that it needed to know about the
Orient…. the disciplines, not the people of the Orient, state the normative issues
in general terms; the disciplines, not the desires of the people of that area nor
the morality of everyday life, “present us with methods for exploring those moral
issues which arise in the context of the area.” (5)
In regard to Turkey, too, the situation has never been dramatically different from what was described by Said. In the socio-anthropological studies that I mentioned in the previous column, the authors at least implicitly recognized the political aims of their studies. Many of the studies performed by U.S. academics on Turkey in the 1950s and 60s proposed to examine the ideas and mindsets of Turkish people, but the aim was not to allow these Turkish peoples’ ideas to affect policy. Rather, the hope was that scholars could evaluate Turkish peoples’ ideas and mentalities in order to better aid and manipulate the Turkish modernization process. Ultimately, both the U.S. and Turkey, it was hoped, would benefit. The norms utilized to establish the goals were those in the minds of U.S. scholars, not those in the minds of Turkish people. (6)
In response to Said’s criticism, one might point out that, ever since he wrote Covering Islam, scholars from non-Western societies which previously were the subject of Oriental studies have begun to migrate to the West in larger numbers, and with greater visibility than in the past, in order to study and to work. This definitely has had a positive impact on Oriental studies (as did Said’s works), but some deeply ingrained problems have not been entirely solved by this phenomenon.
In specific reference to the Turkish context, for example, in the past twenty or thirty years a stream of Turkish academics, coming overwhelmingly from the elite, private school-educated, and Kemalist or ulusalcı sector of Turkish society, have gone on to higher educational institutions in the West, mostly the U.S., and then entered the academic, journalistic, and political commentary professions. (7) This has meant that those Turkish academics who have thereby gone into the humanities or the social sciences have often professed ideas similar to those of the Orientalists or have readily adapted to them. Consequently, the studies produced by those Turkish academics often display the same problems as those of the Western academics. (8) Because many of these Turkish academics become part of the Western context, they also benefit from the cultural and political power provided by the institutions they study and work in.
Here, I want to state the issue more clearly. I am not condemning Turkish academics going to Western societies to study or to work. Just the opposite; one can even argue that, it is because of the existing power dynamics that Turkish academicians are forced to go to the West in order to further their careers. (9) However, if Turkish academics do not examine their own assumptions or their received knowledge and ideas about Turkish society, and then use the prestige they acquire from academic work in Europe or the U.S. to bring forth studies that display the same modernist, even Orientalist conceptions that Western academics often utilize, then there truly arises some room for critiques of such imported-internalized Orientalism. Modernist prescriptions for Turkish society expired decades ago, but much of the academic work composed about Turkish society remains mired in various types of antiquated modernist ideologies.
Back to Said. He then includes another paragraph that is remarkable for its direct applicability to the situation that confronts Turkey today:
For the general public in America and Europe today, Islam is “news” of a
particularly unpleasant sort. The media, the government, the geopolitical
strategists, and — although they are marginal to the culture at large — the
academic experts on Islam are all in concert: Islam is a threat to Western
civilization. Now this is by no means the same as saying that only derogatory or
racist caricatures of Islam are to be found in the West. I do not say that, nor
would I agree with anyone who did. What I am saying is that negative images of
Islam are very much prevalent than any others, and that such images correspond,
not to what Islam “is”… but to what prominent sectors of a particular society
take it to be. Thos sectors have the power and the will to propagate that
particular image of Islam, and this image therefore becomes more prevalent,
more present, than all others. As I said in Chapter One, this is done through the
workings of a consensus, which sets limits and applies pressures. (10)
I can make two observations about this paragraph. The first is that the word “Islam” can be replaced in each and every instance with “Turkey,” whereupon it becomes a fully accurate statement of the present situation. Secondly, a key problem with academic studies on Turkey is that the mass of Turkish society has largely been silenced by both the Turkish Historical Bloc and by those academics — both foreign and Turkish — who study various aspects of Turkish history, politics, or society. The exceptions, anthropologists or sociologists such as Mübeccel Kıray, Şerif Mardin, Elisabeth Özdalga, Paul J. Magnarella, Cihan Tuğal, or Jenny White, are striking because of how rare they are. Nevertheless, as intellectuals they are still basically interpreting Turkish society for an elite domestic and foreign audience or intelligentsia. When the direct voice of Turkish society has emerged, especially in politics (the Democrat Party, Turgut Özal and the ANAP of the 1980s, now the AKP) but also in art (the arabesk musical style), observers both foreign and domestic, instead of trying to understand, have generally reacted against what they were confronted with, and have ended up condemning various aspects of a phenomenon that they clearly did not accept or comprehend. (11)
NOTES
(1) Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 131.
(2) Athanassopoulou, Ekavi. Turkey: Anglo-American Security Interests, 1945-1952 (Frank Cass: London, 1999); Kuniholm, Bruce R. The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J., 1994); Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
(3) 18 October 2015, “Knowledge, Power, and the Turkish Republic.”
(4) Said, op. cit., pp. 132-134.
(5) Ibid. pp. 134-135.
(6) A striking example of this tendency is George Helling’s 1959 University of Minnesota PhD thesis: “A Study of Turkish Values by Means of Nationality Stereotypes,” which was regularly cited in the socio-anthropological literature on Turkey during the 1960s. In the conclusion to his thesis, Helling makes observations on “the Turkish character” according to data compiled from personality questionnaires filled out by Turkish villagers in 1954. The study, which was funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation, concludes with observations that clearly had policy implications. Information on Turkish village life compiled by George Helling and his wife Barbara, again with support from the Ford Foundation, was utilized to train Peace Corps volunteers heading to Turkey in the later 1960s; see: Helling, George. “The Turkish Village as a Social System.” Draft of Untitled Manuscript Provided for Trainees in the Peace Corps Training Program Number 13, for TEFL, Turkey, Occidental College. Los Angeles, California, 1966.
(7) Only the size of this stream has changed in recent decades since the phenomenon began even before WWI. In the 1950s and 60s the Turkish “brain drain” was such a concern that studies were composed on it. See: Franck, Peter Goswyn, “Brain Drain from Turkey”; in: Committee on the International Migration of Talent, The International Migration of High-Level Manpower: Its Impact on the Development Process (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 299-373; Robinson, Richard D. High-Level Manpower in Economic Development: The Turkish Case. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 87-96; Taylor, Carl E. et al. Health Manpower Planning in Turkey: An International Research Case Study (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 276.
(8) Several Turkish academic figures are important exceptions to this general situation. One is Kemal Karpat, now a professor at İstanbul Şehir University, who has produced erudite studies on Turkey since the 1950s that largely avoid the Kemalist-modernist paradigm. Şükrü Hanioğlu is another – Hanioğlu’s studies of the Committee of Union and Progress have, in the past 25 years, revolutionized our understanding of the Turkish Republic’s ideological foundations. There are other Turkish academicians working in the U.S. or Europe who have escaped the modernist mindset, but they are few in number.
(9) This does not deny that the professional training that Turkish social scientists and humanities scholars may receive in Western institutions was and is often superior to that obtainable at Turkish institutions. That is a separate issue.
(10) Said, op. cit., p. 136.
(11) The second point in this paragraph is not a new or original assertion. Şerif Mardin, for instance, identified this issue two decades ago in his essay “Projects as Methodology: Some Thoughts on Modern Turkish Social Science,” which was included in the now-canonical collection Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, eds. Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1997; see pp. 64-80). The same text also features an interesting and problematic essay on the arabesk musical style by Meral Özbek, in which the author notes that arabesk was generally treated with disdain by Turkish cultural elites. See “Arabesk Culture: A Case of Modernization and Popular Identity,” pp. 211-232 of Rethinking Modernity.