Constructing 'the Turk'as an Enemy: The Complexity of Stereotypes in ...

South European Society & Politics Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 95–110

Constructing ‘the Turk’ as an Enemy: The Complexity of Stereotypes in Children’s Everyday Worlds Spyros Spyrou

The information presented in this chapter is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Cypriot elementary school children and illustrates the process by which national identity is constructed as primordial by teachers and children at school. In this process, the Turks become the primary Other, against whom a sense of Self is constructed. However, in-depth interviews with children outside the school show that their constructions of the Turks can be more complex and nuanced, and thus less stereotypical, especially when the children are encouraged to reflect on who the Turks really are. Keywords: Childhood; Nationalism; Identity; Education; Cyprus; Greeks; Turks

Most children in Cyprus, even the youngest among them, if asked to talk about the Turks would readily have something to say. Significantly, most of what they say, at least on the surface, is likely to be negative: the image of ‘the Turk’ as the barbaric enemy par excellence emerges with ease and occupies centre stage in their imaginations. For those familiar with the history of Cyprus, this realization should come as no surprise. The intercommunal conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s and the Turkish invasion and occupation of 37% of Cyprus’s territory provide a historical context—strategically accentuated through national education—for the formation of the undifferentiated Turk as the most negative Other for Greek Cypriot children. In this chapter I shed some light in this process of constructing an Other—the Turks in this particular case—by Greek Cypriot elementary school children. This process, rather than being simply a passive indoctrination of children by adults, is in fact an active process of constructing meaning which results in both the reproduction of stereotypes about Turks, and the production of new, alternative, and sometimes even contradictory understandings. A closer look at identity construction processes reveals ISSN 1360-8746 (print)/ISSN 1743-9612 (online) q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13608740500470364

96

S. Spyrou

a much more complex and fluid understanding of the Self and the Other, which problematizes assumptions about unified and homogeneous stereotypical constructions. The data presented in this chapter come from an ethnographic study of two groups of Greek Cypriot children attending elementary school in Cyprus. The fieldwork for the study was carried out during the period July 1996 to July 1997 in two communities, one urban community situated near the buffer zone in the old part of Nicosia and a second one in a rural community of the Pitsilia region (Spyrou 1999). In this study, I paid particular attention to the role of education in children’s ethnic identity construction, and I spent considerable time observing what happened in the respective schools of the two communities, as well as spending a significant amount of time in afternoons outside the school with the children discussing issues relevant to their identities.

Children’s Agency and Identities As a topic of investigation, children have been mostly peripheral in the study of anthropology; more importantly, when anthropologists paid attention to childhood it was mainly in relation to other social processes such as, for instance, the transmission of culture. Children’s active participation in the social and cultural worlds surrounding them was more often than not ignored. Similarly, the study of children’s identities—gender, class, ethnic, or national—and the processes by which they develop, failed to capture the researchers’ imaginations. In the last two decades, however, much more attention has been devoted to children as social actors and to childhood as a social phenomenon. Researchers, among them anthropologists, have focused a great deal more systematically and extensively on the lives and experiences of children, and have began to explore children’s worlds and identities from the children’s own perspectives (see Hutchby & Moran-Ellis 1998; James 1993; James & Prout 1990; Solberg 1990). Identity construction and the politics of culture are today emerging as new and challenging fields of inquiry in childhood studies (Stephens 1995), whilst topics traditionally reserved for study only in relation to the political lives of adults—such as nationalism and ethnic identity construction— are now becoming integral to the study of childhood (see Cullingford 2000; Holloway & Valentine 2000; Koester 1997; Spyrou 2000). Some researchers are also beginning to examine the intersection between identity construction, nationalism, and education— the focus of this article—illustrating the processes by which understandings of Self and Other emerge in the early years of life in the specific cultural and political contexts in which children grow up (see, for example, Bryne 1997; Coles 1986; Davey 1987; Elbedour et al. 1997; Spyrou 1999; 2001b).1 This article aims to contribute to this limited but growing literature by analysing the process of ethnic identity construction in childhood as it takes shape in the particular social and political context of post-1974 Cyprus.

South European Society & Politics 97

Situating Identity Construction Though one needs to look at the long dure´e of Cyprus’s history in order to identify the cultural resources on which contemporary Greek Cypriots, including children, draw in order to construct a sense of identity, the more recent history of the island is particularly relevant for understanding identity construction processes in the present. During the last fifty years, Cyprus has experienced a history of turmoil and rapid social change that has brought into sharp focus questions of identity: an anticolonial war aimed to overthrow the British and attain union with Greece (1955–1959), which, however, resulted in independence (1960), intercommunal conflict and violence (1963– 1964), interference by a Greek dictatorial regime in its internal affairs and the emergence of terrorist activity by militant nationalists (1967–1974), a coup and a Turkish invasion that resulted in the occupation of 37% of the island’s territory (1974), and a successful application to become a full member of the European Union accompanied by a process of Europeanization in all walks of life (1990 to the present). In popular imagination, the Turkish invasion and continuing occupation of Northern Cyprus stands as the single most important event in the recent history of the island. That Turks would become the principal Other against whom contemporary Greek Cypriots construct their identities comes as no surprise; nor is it surprising that Greek Cypriot children, early on in their lives, become preoccupied with this Other and construct negative images of the Turks as a people and of Turkey as a state. At school, children learn a history that situates the current situation in Cyprus in a larger historical framework cultivated by nationalist historiography: they learn about the history of animosity between Greeks and Turks and see the current situation on the island, with Turkey’s continuing occupation of Northern Cyprus, as another example of a long and essentially unchanging historical pattern wherein Turks always emerge as the enemy par excellence of the Greek nation (see also Millas, this volume). Early on in life, whether at home, at school, or through friends and the media, Greek and Turkish Cypriot children in Cyprus are provided with ample cultural material on which to draw in constructing images of one another in their imaginations. However, these imaginary boundaries are not fixed and stable but rather fluid and permeable. They are erected, collapsed, or permeated in the flow of everyday life, and children find themselves in situations where their identity is relational and always in flux. In this article I focus on this issue and illustrate how children’s ethnic imaginations are shaped by the larger cultural realities with which they are confronted, as well as considering how they retain, at the same time, a degree of autonomy which allows for more fluid understandings of Self and Other, ones that go beyond simplistic and superficial oppositional constructions of the type ‘Greeks are good’, ‘Turks are bad’.

Constructing Turks in the Past and Present Greek Cypriot elementary school education is to this day largely nationalistic in its outlook. Given the political situation in Cyprus and the de facto partition of the

98

S. Spyrou

island, a nationalistic framework provides an authoritative and unambiguous explanation for understanding the past, the present, and the future. As a discourse of power and authority, nationalism seeks to canonize, to eliminate if possible heteroglot messages, and to facilitate one authoritative yet often naı¨ve reading of the world (see Bakhtin 1981, p. 425). If the discourse of nationalism manages to be persuasive about the nation’s sacredness, about its primordial and eternal character, then the nation is erected in the imaginations of its members as an imagined, yet powerful, community which can demand loyalty and if necessary even sacrifice from its members (Anderson 1983; Alonso 1994; see also Bryant 1998; 2001). Nationalism, to the extent that it can do so, thrives in arousing emotion. After all, a strong emotional response privileges a particular understanding of identity and provides it with a sense of meaning that goes beyond the controlled and the rational and more into the realm of belief and passion. On many occasions, I have observed teachers in the classroom make such emotional appeals to students in an attempt to instil in them a strong sense of loyalty to the nation. Turks as a category of people often provided the necessary Other against whom teachers hoped to centre a sense of national identity in children. Thus, when on one occasion a rural teacher described how the Turks entered Constantinople and ‘slaughtered the Greeks’, he was not simply communicating a particular historical event; he was also communicating to students a certain evaluative stance for what happened: to slaughter is not simply to kill; it is to kill in a cruel, merciless manner; it is to engage in barbaric behaviour. The evaluative stance that the teacher encouraged the children to adopt and the emotional response this promoted is one that coloured Turks as the barbaric enemy of the Greek nation. In the same manner and on many occasions, some teachers drew on nationalistic mythology to construct a sense of a Self who, in relation to the enemy, emerges as superior, operating in the realm of the superhuman. When, for example, a teacher refers to a national hero—in this case Kolokotronis, who fought against the Ottomans in the Greek war of liberation in 1821—with words such as ‘when they only heard his voice the Turks run away’, a heroic, superhuman image of the Greek is actively promoted. The national hero crystallizes the ideal of ‘Greekness’, demonstrating what it is to live up to the ideals of the Greek nation. The process by which this is accomplished is quite familiar to nationalistic constructions of identity. It is a process where the Self is opposed to an Other or Others, so that its presumed superior qualities stand out through the comparison. In such a conceptual framework, Self and Other are in need of each other; the Self needs its referential opposite to define itself. In a nationalistic framework, the category ‘Greeks’ becomes meaningful when it is compared with its dialectical opposite, the category ‘Turks’. The primary Other—in our case the Turks—provides a convenient point of reference for any kind of comparison, whether in relation to war, or civilization, or any aspect of daily life where ‘being a Greek’ always implies a sense of superiority. The educational system, and teachers in particular, is involved in the task of naturalizing this otherwise discursively constructed social categorization.

South European Society & Politics 99

Examples of such discursive constructions abound. In the following example, the Turks are put into the larger framework of world history and their worth as a people is evaluated accordingly. In the context of a discussion about the Second World War in a sixth-grade history class, the teacher said, ‘The Turks helped the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese by not entering the war, thus indirectly helping them. Turkey was neutral but of course was friendly with the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese.’ The teacher also proceeded to discuss the role of Greece, which unlike Turkey fought against Germany. In this manner the teacher not only taught children about the moral responsibilities of Turkey in world history and all the evaluative conclusions that go with this (i.e. Turkey is not to be trusted, Turkey is not interested in world peace, etc.) but he also taught children a lesson in what it means to be Greek: to be Greek is to be morally superior; it is to take a stance against aggression (unlike Turkey’s putative neutrality) and if necessary sacrifice oneself for freedom. By placing Greek and Turkish history into this larger frame of world history the animosity between the two groups is shown to be of a larger significance: Turkey is not, in this sense, simply an enemy of the Greek nation; it is (or should be) an enemy of the world at large. In a nationalistic model, the enemy also becomes the unifying force for the collective Self. As one teacher explained when talking about the siege of Mesolongi in a sixth-grade history class, ‘the common element which made all of them [the Greeks] fight together was the Turk [o Tourkos ]’. The nation comes together when confronted with an Other; in the absence of an enemy the nation loses its sense of unity. So, indirectly and ironically, it is the enemy that gives essence to the nation’s identity. That the enemy in the example above is described in the singular is no less important in this process where the Self is always opposed to the Other. The plurality of the enemy, the diversity in the Other, is eliminated and replaced by the singular ‘Turk’ who is one and undifferentiated (see also Millas, in this volume). By personifying the nation and eliminating its diversity, national identity is fully essentialized. This process of constructing an enemy proceeds hand in hand with the construction of particular images of the Other. One particular image that is prominent in the nationalistic imagination and which teachers help children to erect and sustain in their own individual imaginations is that of the Turks as barbarians. In the context of a classroom discussion, the teacher’s references to Turks as barbarians can be clear and straightforward or more indirect and incidental. In the following example, from a class discussion of Egyptian civilization in a geography lesson for the fifth and sixth grades of the rural elementary school, the teacher constructs by association an image of the Turks as barbarians: ‘From what we read, were they [i.e. the Egyptians] people with civilization [ politismo ]? Were they, let’s put it this way, barbarians like the Turks, the Ottomans, who have always been barbarians?’ Here, the teacher’s questions divert the students’ attention from the main subject discussed (i.e. Egyptian civilization) to a reference category, the Turks, with whom they are quite familiar. The teacher’s rhetorical questions leave the students with no response. The questions are leading, for their aim is not to elicit a response but to remind students about a category with which

100

S. Spyrou

they are very familiar, the Turks. The lesson is clear and loud: the Turks are barbarians, of the worse kind; incidentally, the Egyptians were people with civilization. Another strategy teachers use to construct Turks as the Other is by collapsing time and decontextualizing identity. Present-day Turks are presented as the direct descendants of the Ottomans and as having the same basic characteristics. What modern-day Turks are doing is seen as simply a continuation of what the Ottomans did in the past. So, if the Ottomans, according to nationalist historiography, had expansionist tendencies, then so do modern-day Turks; they are seen as the same people, then and now. By establishing such an essential historical continuity, identity is fully reified; it is fixed and stabilized and transferred into the realm of ahistorical time. In other words, nationalism denies change not only to the in-group, the nation itself, but also to its adversaries. To allow for the possibility of change is to destabilize the nationalist framework that treats identity as being, above all, primordial. The recent history of Cyprus provides a key resource for teachers and children alike to draw on in constructing Turks as the Other par excellence. This is a history that the children hear about often, not just from their teachers but also from their parents, grandparents, television and a variety of other sources. For some children, like those who live near the buffer zone, the Turkish occupation of Cyprus is something they are reminded of daily by the sight of Turkish flags and guard posts or the sound of the imam’s call for prayer. Events that take place in the present become illustrative examples for demonstrating and proving that the Other is indeed eternal and unchanging. Contemporary events are fully incorporated into the framework of nationalistic history and affirm it. Consider the illustration below, for instance, which shows how the Turks are constructed by both teacher and student as barbaric, by making reference to the violence that broke out in the buffer zone in the summer of 19962 (the excerpt comes from a lesson in Greek with the fourth grade): Teacher: ‘How do you feel about the way they [i.e. the Turks] killed them [i.e. the Greek Cypriots], about the barbaric, barbaric way by which they killed them?’ Chariklia: ‘Miss, the Turks don’t have a heart.’

Here, the authoritative role of the teacher in constructing a very negative image of the Turks is clear. The teacher does not pose a question that leaves open the possibility for an alternative evaluation of the Turks. Rather, she clearly defines the Turks as barbaric; the student in turn finds it easy to affirm the teacher’s evaluation and build furthermore on this evaluation by concluding that Turks are heartless. It is in this sense that nationalist imaginings become powerful and convincing. Where they feed into local history they can easily be incorporated into the larger history of the nation. Thus, the behaviour of the Turks in the present is nothing more than modern-day affirmation of an unbroken continuity with the past, which wants Turks to be the same, then and now (see also Sutton 1998, p. 163). By incorporating local, lived history into the larger national history, both teachers and students reify the Turks as a people and reproduce stereotypes about them with ease and consistency.

South European Society & Politics

101

The evidence provided by the present is experientially close to the children and emotionally more important than the distant history about which they learn in school and is ultimately perhaps more convincing to them. In this respect, history as experienced in the present makes more familiar and more convincing the unfamiliar past (Sutton 1998). Implicating the Future The future is equally implicated in nationalist constructions of Self and Other. In many ways, what happened in the past and what is happening in the present are presented as continuing into the future. If the Turks behaved aggressively in the past and carry on doing so in the present, then they will continue to be aggressive in the future. In this kind of nationalist imagining there is no room for change. The Other is one and unchanging, or, to put it another way, the Other’s identity is fixed and above all natural. Hence the predictability of the nationalist future which contains no surprises. This is what Heilman (1992, p. 203) terms ‘traditioning’, which ‘means never seeing the past as beyond retrieval but rather experiencing it as an ongoing reverberation in the present’ (and I would add here ‘and the future’). By engaging in dialogue with the past, the nationalist imagination enters the realm of what Eliade (1954, pp. 36, 46) describes as mythical time, where life, instead of proceeding in a historical contingent fashion, eternally repeats itself (see also Herzfeld 1987, p. 82). This ahistorical framework for teaching about Self and Other is often used by teachers in the classroom and often referred to by children in their accounts (see Avdela 1997). It would be simplistic to assume that all teachers share the same understandings about identity or that they necessarily engage in such constructions. But many teachers do so, even when they themselves would be much more critical of such constructions in other contexts. By following an existing framework for explaining national history and identity some teachers avoid the possibility of complaints or controversy arising from a critical look at history. Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that lessons about Self and Others often led to negative and stereotypical constructions about the Turks. For instance, many of the teachers viewed mainland Turks as uncivilized and barbaric. As Harris, a third-grade teacher at the urban school, pointed out to me, ‘in general the Turks, being uncivilized as they are, have a mentality that is different: it would not bother them at all to kill, to loot a country. . . in general their mentality is very Asian’. Such statements are in line with the popular Greek Cypriot discourse about mainland Turks, which identifies them as Easterners or Orientals, and by implication not as civilized as the Westerners with whom Greek Cypriots identify. Some teachers presented me with more complex understandings of Turks or qualified their responses by attributing their negative statements to certain kinds of Turks, such as, for instance, the military, rather than ordinary Turkish citizens. Even then, Turkishness emerged as a negative identification, and one that had primacy in explaining interethnic relations. For most of them, teaching children about ‘the

102

S. Spyrou

threatening’ nature of the Turks is an imperative, especially since they have to instil in children a strong sense of national identity and to help them remember what the Turks did to Cyprus in 1974 or before. Some of them, in fact, feel that they have few options but to engage in this kind of ethnic socialization, since the world in which we live is one where all groups do the same in order to sustain their unity and distinctiveness in the face of challenges by Others. Hara, for example, suggested to me that there might be no way around fanaticism, however negative it might be as a pedagogical tool: While I believe and feel that all people are siblings. . . I also think that this attitude might be a mistake . . . There is no other way of defence as a state . . . as an ethnicity . . . apart from being fanaticized with regard to your nation and your homeland. There is no other way of defence. How will you defend [your homeland]? You will either become subjugated or you will resist.

To put it another way, the challenge that many teachers face is how to avoid constructing negative images of the Turks, while at the same time instilling in children what they see as a required element of their socialization, namely a strong sense of ‘Greekness’. The nationalistic model of identity leaves them with little choice for avoiding negative constructions of Turkey and the Turks.

Within and Beyond Established Categories As an anthropologist I am primarily interested in indigenous constructions of meaning, hence my focus on children’s points of view. In this research I have been confronted with a particular challenge, that of uncovering the complexity of children’s constructions of meaning by going beyond the obvious, that which the children readily presented to me as an adult researcher or to their teachers in the classroom, to the less obvious, or that which lies beneath the surface and which offers a more complex, nuanced, and positive understanding of the Other (see Spyrou 2001a; see also Millas, Theodossopoulos, this volume). The surface meaning—that meaning which is often highly stereotypical and uncritical—is constructed and presented in formal encounters, be it in a classroom context or an initial encounter with a researcher with whom familiarity is limited. On the other hand, as I will show later, the meaning that lies beneath the surface, and which is often more critical and complex, is often constructed and offered in less formal, more intimate encounters characterized by what Herzfeld (1987) calls ‘self-recognition’. When Greek Cypriot children presented an official understanding of Self and Other in the classroom or during my initial encounters with them, Turks clearly stood for the most negative ethnic Other. Indeed, they were singled out by the overwhelming majority of the children whom I interviewed as the people who are most different from the Self. In a questionnaire I distributed among children, many of them cited as opposites to the word ‘Turks’ words like ‘Cypriots’, ‘Greeks’, ‘Orthodox’, and ‘good’. In our discussions, children often described to me the Turks with the most negative of

South European Society & Politics

103

attributes, including, but not limited to, characterizations like barbarians, bad, egoists, terrorists, torturers, warmongers, quarrelsome, rapists, wild, murderers, vandals, looters, heartless, revengeful, hateful, malicious, devious, ungrateful, unfair, jealous, illiterate, impolite, dirty, liars, foolish, crazy, and thieves. The language that children often used in their descriptions of the Turks reflected the discourse used by adults, which seeks to arouse an emotional response about the longstanding animosity between Greeks and Turks. Words such as ‘enslavement’ (in reference to the Turkish occupation of Cyprus) and ‘slaughtering’ (in reference to war atrocities by Turks against Greeks) were often used to describe the ‘barbaric nature’ of the Turks. These characterizations flowed effortlessly from their mouths when asked to describe who Turks are. Undoubtedly, the prevailing cultural discourse that sees Turks as the enemy par excellence provided for the children many resources to draw on in their descriptions. The identities constructed in these formulations are clear and unambiguous, those which Eriksen (1993) refers to as ‘digital categorizations’ to be contrasted with ‘analogic categorizations’ that would allow for degrees of similarity and difference between Self and Other. However, not all that children learn at school or from sources outside school follows this black and white model where ‘we’ are good and ‘they’ are bad. Some teachers, sometimes, present the children with alternative formulations of Self and Other. After all, not all teachers have the same ideological positions and understandings: some of them follow closely the nationalistic model outlined above, but others have more critical understandings which allow them to present the children with more complicated images of the Other and open up the space for alternative interpretations. Here is what Apostolos, the principal of the urban school, once told me when I asked him if the teachers try to fanaticize children against the Turks: we don’t do it. Why? Because we are civilized people. And [let me tell you] a simple example. What problem do I have with the poor Turkish child—his father kills himself everyday for a wage—to go and kill him, to go and wound him? On the contrary, I cultivate through the power of religion, as I told you, the understanding that the Turk is my fellow human being, is my neighbour, whom if necessary I will help in a given situation, even if he hates me. I don’t do it [i.e. fanaticize children].

In the example below, we see the teacher indirectly challenging a prevailing stereotype, in an effort to help the children see the diversity in the Other: Charitini: ‘In Greece they call the Turks stinky dogs [vromoshilloi ].’ Teacher: ‘Is it good to say these things?’

In mild protest, Charitini said that the Turks did ‘bad things to us’. The teacher proceeded to explain that many Turks had no choice but to follow the orders of ‘those above them’—their leaders—when they invaded Cyprus. Indeed, there are occasions when some teachers, in some contexts, emphasize the shared humanity of the Greeks and the Turks. The most commonly used expressions include the obvious observation that ‘we [Greeks and Turks] are all human’ and the religious motif that good Christians ‘must love everyone’. Though it is doubtful

104

S. Spyrou

whether such statements successfully compete with the more pervasive and much more absolute negative evaluations of the Turks, they nevertheless help destabilize the dominant discourse to some extent, especially given that children might also be exposed to other such critical evaluations of the Turks at home or in other contexts that facilitate this process. In other words, despite the fact that school education plays a vital role in reproducing nationalist ideology, the information that is made available to children is, in some instances, contradictory. In fact, the ethnographic interviews I conducted with the children revealed that most of them, when probed, did indeed have access to alternative discourses and drew on them to construct more complex understandings of the Turks. Despite the fact that most of them readily described the Turks with the most negative characterizations (e.g. as barbaric, cruel, or bad), when I encouraged them to elaborate on their evaluations, they presented me with descriptions that accounted to some extent for different types of Turks. When I persisted asking whether all Turks are as ‘bad’ or ‘barbaric’ as they had previously told me, many of the children qualified their earlier responses by acknowledging that not all Turks are bad, but that some are indeed good or civilized. As became obvious during my fieldwork, when children have an opportunity to reflect on the Other, rather than simply state who the Other is, their responses allow, in most cases, for more complex understandings. Thus, when Neofitos (sixth grade) reflected on the Turks, he distinguished between the Turkish government and the ordinary Turkish people: There are many from Turkey who are good. It is not because they occupied us. They say it is a democracy but it is not a democracy. Whatever the president wants, it is done. It is fascism. It is not the people’s fault. It is the fault of those who told them [to do these things]. If they did not command them ‘Go and do that’ they would not go.

In a similar way, many other children qualified what they had told me earlier about the Turks and created sub-categories of different types of Turks. Some of them blamed the Turkish state, others blamed the Turkish military, and yet others the Turkish politicians, whom they saw as the real cause of the Cyprus problem. For most of these children, the majority of the ordinary Turkish citizens were not to blame, for they are forced to obey what their rulers tell them to do (see also, Theodossopoulos, this volume).

The Turkish Cypriots A more complex picture emerged when I asked the children to describe the Turkish Cypriots. Some of them provided me with the mainstream Greek Cypriot discourse on the topic, which describes Turkish Cypriots as different from mainland Turks. In this formulation, Turkish Cypriots are seen as essentially good people who are also, like the Greek Cypriots, victims of Turkish occupation. Following and reproducing this wider discourse, several children argued that Turkish Cypriots are fundamentally good people; ‘our problem is not with Turkish Cypriots’, they maintained, ‘but with the

South European Society & Politics

105

Turks who occupied Cyprus’.3 But even in those cases some children had reservations. They identified what they perceived as paradoxes or ambiguities about Turkish Cypriots and pointed them out. Marinos (sixth grade), for instance, had doubts whether all Turkish Cypriots are indeed ‘good’ especially given that at the end of the day they ‘have the blood of the Turk inside them’. Another boy (Neofitos, sixth grade) had a difficult time figuring out Turkish Cypriot identity and juxtaposing it with Greek Cypriot identity: ‘They [i.e. Turkish Cypriots] say sometimes, “We are happy we are Turks.” Sometimes they say, “We are sorry we are Turks.” What should you believe? Which one is it? I think they are more on the side of the Turks.’ These reservations suggest that some children struggle to categorize ‘Turkish Cypriots’, finding the category particularly difficult to grasp. In fact, for the majority of my child-respondents, understanding the category ‘Turkish Cypriots’ proved to be a serious challenge. As I have explained in detail elsewhere (Spyrou 2001a), ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ identity is a hyphenated identity— rather than an ethnically ‘pure’ one—and poses a thought-provoking paradox in the minds of some children. Though children learn a lot about the Turks from school and from sources outside school, when it comes to Turkish Cypriots their knowledge is limited and fragmented. Ethnic socialization focuses mainly on the Turks as the primary Other—the problematic Other—rather than on Turkish Cypriots, who are seen as fundamentally good and not as the real problem of Cyprus. When it comes to interpreting ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ identity as a hyphenated identity, many Greek Cypriot children break it up into its subsequent parts, namely ‘Turkish’ and ‘Cypriot’. In their minds, the former is a mostly negative category, as I outlined earlier, while the latter is equated with ‘Greek Cypriots’—much in line with how many adults also use the term—and therefore is treated as a positive category.4 Hence, the paradox created in children’s minds: how can one be both a ‘Turk’ (a principally negative category of people who are very unlike ‘us’) and at the same time be a ‘Cypriot’ (an unmistakably positive category of people, who are in fact ‘us’)? Though the paradox is created in children’s minds as a result of their limited knowledge of Turkish Cypriot identity and history, it is illustrative of how ‘pure’ national identities—being ‘Greek’ or ‘Turkish’—exercise their oppressive power over hyphenated identities in children’s imaginations. Many of these children opted for resolving the paradox by reinterpreting the category ‘Turkish Cypriots’ in a way that allowed them to make sense of it. One child who did not know how Turkish Cypriots came about as a group came up with an imaginary reinterpretation of contemporary Turkish Cypriot identity: They are Turks; their mother is Turkish and their father is a Cypriot and they got married and had [gave birth to] Turkish Cypriots. And they are still Turks. But they stay in Cyprus; they are Turkish Cypriots. They are good.

For this particular child, the paradox of Turkish Cypriot identity was resolved by combining the two elements of Turkish Cypriot identity—Turkish and Cypriot (the

106

S. Spyrou

latter being seen as equivalent to Greek Cypriot)—through a marriage union. The last evaluative comment—’they are good’—suggests that in the mind of this child Turkish Cypriot identity has been transformed from a potentially negative one—since it is after all partly ‘Turkish’—into a positive one through its ‘Cypriot’ association. During my fieldwork, I came across a number of other examples of similar reinterpretations. One child interpreted Turkish Cypriot identity to mean the Maronites (i.e. the LebaneseChristian community living in Cyprus), who are able to cross the buffer zone and visit the occupied territories (in other words, for this child, a Turkish Cypriot is a Cypriot who can visit the Turkish-occupied territories). Another child equated Turkish Cypriots with the 1974 Greek Cypriot prisoners of war (imprisoned by the Turks), while a third one described Turkish Cypriots as the missing persons from the 1974 Turkish invasion (see Sant Cassia, this volume). In all of these imaginary reinterpretations the children are producing new meanings, instead of merely reproducing the categories established by the dominant Greek Cypriot ideology. With this practice they challenge, perhaps unintentionally, the sweeping force of nationalism and its apparent fixity. In the comparative anthropological literature, and in terms of unconventional strategies very similar to those pursued by my young Greek Cypriot respondents, one can identify the creative potential of children to reconstruct their own meaningful worlds independently of those of adults. Christina Toren (1999) has documented how children engage with the adult world not merely by reproducing it, but also, by reinventing it. She suggests that for younger children it is the sign, rather than the symbol, which is constitutive of their understanding. Thus, in the Fijian context, where Toren conducted her ethnographic studies, ritual for children ‘refers to nothing other than itself: “kava-drinking is about drinking kava” and “eating a meal is about eating”’ (Toren 1999, pp. 97– 98). In her examination of Fijian ritual, Toren discovered that younger children view status as residing in space, not in the person as the adults would hold it. Similarly, Euro-American children first come to understand racial categories in evaluative terms, in contrast to adult categories, which are primarily perceptual (Toren 1999, p. 103). It is only gradually, through a developmental process, that children come to cognitively construct symbolic meaning. Fijian children come to understand the symbolic meaning of the kava ritual at the age of nine, but even then they employ meanings that are not identical to those held by adults (Toren 1999, p. 104). The creation of meaning is thus an ongoing and never-ending process, residing in a continuum that includes both sign and symbol and is characterized by ‘cultural heterodoxy’ or, in other words, by difference and even inversion (Toren 1999, pp. 100– 101). Conclusion If identities were monolithic and fixed, then stereotypical constructions of the Self and the Other would have been the only prevailing constructions in contexts like Cyprus where interethnic conflict facilitates their production. But close ethnographic work shows that identities are quite fluid and often exhibit a high degree of ambiguity and

South European Society & Politics

107

contradiction. The ethnic boundaries erected in children’s imaginations are not dogmatic; they become ‘matters of consciousness rather than of institutional dictation’ (Cohen 1994, pp. 69–70). Children are exposed to the complexity of social life and a multiplicity of voices, which in turn relativize their understanding of the Turks and allow them to construct different images, some more, some less, stereotypical in different social contexts. The resulting attitudes may be characterized by fluidity, fragmentation, and inconsistency rather than fixity and consistency (see Hatcher & Troyna 1993, p. 123). In this respect, ethnic stereotypes are convenient resources that individuals draw on to construct particular kinds of ethnic Others. They are widely accessible and help individuals reduce the complexity they are confronted with by simplifying the world for them (Allport 1958 [1954], p. 165; Davey 1983, p. 43). By their very nature, stereotypes aim to concretize that which is fluid, to purify that which is impure, to make certain that which is ambiguous. Hence, stereotypes can tell us a great deal about the reproduction of ethnic ideologies (Perkins 1979, p. 135). But stereotypes are only meaningful as parts of particular arguments in particular conversations and are constantly transformed, along with those arguments, to facilitate the intentions and the rhetorical strategies of their authors (Theodossopoulos 2003; Brown & Theodossopoulos 2004). Greek Cypriot children’s stereotypical constructions of the Turks may not necessarily reflect the depth of understanding they have of the Turks, but rather their choice for such constructions, given the contextual parameters and the discursive strategies they choose to adopt.5 The ethnographic evidence presented in this article illustrates that constructions of the Turks in daily social practice are fluid and complex, and at times contradictory, much more so than they appear to be on the surface when children are asked to simply describe the Other. Thus, a child may describe the Turks as evil and barbaric in one context, only to present a more complex picture (i.e. as a people with both negative and positive attributes) at a different moment, especially if encouraged to expound and reflect freely about the subject. Contextual parameters are ultimately very important in constraining or facilitating this process of reflection (see also Theodossopoulos, Kirtsoglou, this volume). In this sense ethnic categories such as that of the Turk are fluid and permeable; they are constructed, collapsed, and reconstructed according to the situation. When Greek Cypriot children are asked to reflect upon the Turks, they distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Turks, between Turkish politicians or the military and ordinary citizens. They are also able to imagine the Turks as ‘brothers’ and fellow humans, by drawing upon discourses that emphasize a shared humanity for all (see also Millas, Theodossopoulos, this volume). And when they portray the Turks as ‘evil’ they simply describe those Turks who in their imaginations happen to be the worst of the group—the politicians or the military—not all Turks in the world. The children’s creative interpretations of the ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ hyphenated identity attest to the creative potential of their imagination and their ability to produce alternative meanings. In most cases, Greek Cypriot children appear capable of accessing both the

108

S. Spyrou

authoritative discourse of nationalism, which facilitates the reproduction of stereotypes of the Other, and an internally persuasive discourse, which could be more nuanced, adapted to particular conversations, and influenced by the participants of social processes (see Bakhtin 1981, pp. 346, 427). The world in which children find themselves is a heteroglossic one, exercising different demands on their identities. The availability of alternative voices does not necessarily succeed in seriously undermining the dominant ideology on identity. The social-historical circumstances that Greek Cypriot children grow up in are such that it is ultimately very difficult to construct positive images of the Turks. Certainly the continuing Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus leaves them with few resources for seriously reconsidering their negative attitudes towards the Turks; the current situation, and its interpretation by Greek Cypriot commentators, politicians, teachers, and parents, is one that affirms all they learn at school about the history of animosity between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Nevertheless, the ethnographic evidence suggests that there are destabilizing elements that work subtly beneath the surface and which may be strengthened if and when circumstances change and alternative voices, which are now weak, become more fully integrated into popular imagination. The complexity arising with regard to Turkish Cypriot identity, and the Greek Cypriot children’s creative approach towards it, is indicative of this process. Their attempt to fill in the gap between the known and the unknown with imaginary constructions illuminates the limitations of nationalist ideology and the possibility for a more creative space to construct the Self and the Other.

Acknowledgements The fieldwork for this study was generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant No. 6062) and the Maxwell Corporation (USA), which provided significant material support, which is highly appreciated. I also wish to thank Dimitris Theodossopoulos for his very productive comments on earlier drafts of this article. For their helpful feedback, thanks and appreciation are also due to the participants in the conference ‘Friends and Foes’ (St Peter’s College, University of Oxford, 11 May 2002), where I presented this work.

Notes [1] See also Bryant (1998; 2001) for a critical discussion of nationalism and education in Cyprus from a historical perspective. [2] In the summer of 1996, violence broke out in the Dherinia buffer zone, following a demonstration by Greek Cypriot and foreign motorcyclists on the right of free movement on the island; two Greek Cypriot demonstrators were killed by Turkish and Turkish Cypriot counterdemonstrators. [3] One interesting exception to this pattern is the case of the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, who was clearly disliked and hated by many children. In this case, the children

South European Society & Politics

109

re-categorized the Turkish Cypriot Denktash as a Turk. This strategy enabled them to explain Denktash’s behaviour and personality, but still retain their overall positive attitudes towards Turkish Cypriots. [4] Of course, this reinterpretation of the term ‘Cypriot’ is suggestive of a form of discursive exclusion based on assumptions about national purity (i.e. ‘Cyprus is Greek and hence only Greek Cypriots are Cypriots’, however paradoxical such a statement may be). The Enlightenment conception of nations as homogeneous, sovereign, and reified entities makes it particularly difficult, given the role of nationalistic education, to allow for the existence of ethnic minorities within the nation. [5] Children’s accounts of events may, as Davies (1982, p. 58) has argued, ‘form a mosaic of explanations and reasons rather than mutually exclusive accounts’. In other words, children may present different accounts of events to the researcher based on their perception of what might be acceptable to the researcher.

References Allport, G. (1958 [1954]) The Nature of Prejudice, Doubleday, Garden City, NY. Alonso, A. M. (1994) ‘The politics of space, time, and substance: state formation, nationalism, and ethnicity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 23, pp. 379– 405. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London. Avdela, E. (1997) ‘Xro´no6, istori´a kai 1unikh´ tayto´thta sto 1llhniko´ sxol1i´o’ [Time, history, and Greek identity in the Greek school], in ‘Ti 1in ’ h patri´da ma6?’ Eunok1ntrismo´6 sthn 1kpai´d1y sh [‘What is our motherland?’ Ethnocentrism in education], ed. A. Frangoudhaki & T. Dragona, Alexandreia, Athens, pp. 49– 71. Bakhtin, M. (1981) ‘Discourse in the novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin. Brown, K. & Theodossopoulos, D. (2004) ‘“Other” Others: talking about stereotypes and constructions of Otherness in Southeast Europe’, History & Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 3– 14. Bryant, R. (1998) ‘An aesthetics of Self: moral remaking and Cypriot education’, Comparative Study of Society and History, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 583– 614. Bryant, R. (2001) ‘An education in honor: patriotism and the schools of Cyprus’, in Cyprus and Its People: Nation, Identity and Experience in an Unimaginable Community 1955 – 1997, ed. V. Calotychos, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, pp. 53– 68. Bryne, S. (1997) Growing up in a Divided Society: The Influence of Conflict on Belfast’s School Children, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Press, Madison and London. Cohen, A. (1994) ‘Boundaries of consciousness, consciousness of boundaries: critical questions for anthropology’, in The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries’, eds H. Vermeulen & C. Govers, Het Spinhuis, Amsterdam, pp. 33 – 58. Coles, R. (1986) The Political Life of Children, Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston and New York. Cullingford, C. (2000) Prejudice: From Individual Identity to Nationalism in Young People, Kogan Page, London. Davey, A. (1983) Learning to Be Prejudiced: Growing up in Multi-ethnic Britain, Edward Arnold, London. Davey, T. (1987) A Generation Divided: German Children and the Berlin Wall, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Davies, B. (1982) Life in the Classroom and Playground: The Accounts of Primary School Children, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

110

S. Spyrou

Elbedour, S., Bastien, D. & Brunce, A. (1997) ‘Identity formation in the shadow of conflict: projective drawings by Palestinian and Israeli Arab children from the West Bank and Gaza’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 217– 231. Eliade, M. (1954) The Myth of Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Eriksen, T. H. (1993) Ethnicity & Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, Pluto Press, London and Boulder, CO. Hatcher, R. & Troyna, B. (1993) ‘Racialization and children’, in Race, Identity and Representation in Education, eds C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 109 –125. Heilman, S. (1992) Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry, Schocken Books, New York. Herzfeld, M. (1987) Anthropology through the Looking-glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. Holloway, S. & Valentine, G. (2000) ‘Corked hats and Coronation Street: British and New Zealand children’s imaginative geographies of the other’, Childhood, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 335– 357. Hutchby, I. & Moran-Ellis, J. (eds) (1998) Children and Social Competence: Arenas of Action, Falmer Press, London and Washington. James, A. (1993) Childhood Identities: Self and Social Relationships in the Experience of the Child, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. James, A. & Prout, A. (eds) (1990) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, Falmer Press, Basingstoke, England. Koester, D. (1997) ‘Childhood in national consciousness and national consciousness in childhood’, Childhood, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 125 –142. Perkins, T. E. (1979) ‘Rethinking stereotypes’, in Ideology and Cultural Production, eds M. Barrett, P. Corrigan, A. Kuhn & J. Wolff, St Martin’s Press, New York, pp. 135– 159. Solberg, A. (1990) ‘Negotiating childhood: changing constructions of age for Norwegian children’, in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, eds A. James & A. Prout, Falmer Press, London, pp. 118– 137. Spyrou, S. (1999) ‘Small ethnic worlds: identity, ambiguity, and imagination in Greek Cypriot children’s lives’, PhD dissertation, Anthropology Department, State University of New York at Binghamton. Spyrou, S. (2000) ‘Education, ideology, and the national self: the social practice of identity construction in the classroom’, Cyprus Review, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 61– 81. Spyrou, S. (2001a) ‘Those on the other side: ethnic identity and imagination in Greek Cypriot children’s lives’, in Children and Anthropology: Perspectives for the 21st Century, eds H. Schwartzman, Bergin & Garvey, Westport, CT and London, pp. 167– 185. Spyrou, S. (2001b) ‘One and more than one: Greek Cypriot children and ethnic identity in the flow of everyday life’, disClosure, vol. 10, pp. 73 – 94. Stephens, S. (ed.) (1995) Children and the Politics of Culture, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Sutton, D. (1998) Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life, Berg, New York. Theodossopoulos, D. (2003) ‘Degrading Others and honouring Ourselves: ethnic stereotypes as categories and as explanations’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 177– 188. Toren, C. (1999) Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography, Routledge, London and New York.