Session 5b: Labels and Identities
5th Global Conference
Friday 9th March – Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
So, What are you? And does this Matter? Second Generation Identities: Formation and Effects
Zsoka Koczan
University of Cambridge, UK
This paper examines the question whether identity is just a ‘label’ or whether it affects economic outcomes, such as education, residential choices or political behaviour. However, before looking at these questions, we take one step back and look at how identity is formed, examining in particular its link to language. As Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Germany in February 2011, his statement ‘our children must learn German, but they must learn Turkish first’ in a speech in Düsseldorf sparked a large social debate in an atmosphere where Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel declared last year that multiculturalism in Germany had ‘utterly failed’. Given the resulting controversy, we may believe that it was not only about the extra resources required in kindergarten to ensure equal chances, but also about a possible implicit assumption that (first) language may have a strong link with future identity and then possibly integration behaviour and political views.
We provide an empirical investigation of (1) the process of identity formation and (2) the effects of identity on outcomes such as education, residential choices and political behaviour using data on Turkish and ex-Yugoslavian second generation immigrants in Austria and Germany. We believe that the key contributions of this paper to the literature on identity are: (1) the reliance on a formal theoretical model of identity formation to assess the link between identity and language, which is of policy relevance per se and (2) the use of these insights for instrumental variables estimation to overcome endogeneity problems in regressions attempting to measure the effect of identity on (economic) outcomes. A cross-country comparative perspective is used to assess the robustness of this identity formation mechanism and the effects of identity on outcomes. City level variation is used to examine the role of local responses to immigration.
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Towards a Pluralistic Vision of Culture in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Cultural Sociology
Iuliia Soroka
V.N. Karazin Kharkiv national university, Kharkiv, Ukraine
Post-soviet societies – Ukrainian in particular – are experiencing recognition of own cultural inhomogeneity (national, ethnic, regional etc.) and legitimation of diversity. But the academic tradition in definition of culture as “best patterns created by mankind”, culture “in singular” becomes a barrier on this hard way. It concerns also the most known concept of polystylistic culture (L. Ionin) which was the one competitor to the functionalistic intracultural hierarchy and subcultures. The concept of polystylistic culture was intended to reflect particular sociocultural situation of Perestroyka and early Independence when totality of soviet culture and its institutional basis were destroyed and many of cultural forms (including previously repressed cultures) were able to free representation.
In monostylistic culture there was one cultural form as representation culture (F. Tenbruck) for all of the society (for example, soviet culture with Marxizm -Leninizm in its basis) and relations between cultural forms were based on the principles of hierarchy, canonization, totalization, consensus, positivity, teleology. But definition of polystylistic culture includes negation of monostylistic attributes and rather expresses an opposition to monostylistic principles than describes polycultural society. Conservative values of monistic cultural domination organize the monostylystic–polystylistic binary and reproduces itself in polystylistic model: within it different kind of cultural forms (cultures) are called according to binary logic, for example, “traditional – abscititious”, “old – new” etc.
Postsoviet cultural sociology (as well as practice of everyday life) requires conceptualization and legitimation of diversity. It is not only an academic issue: it is a moral and public challenge because we need to resist to an actual system of social order based on discrimination (positive and negative). We need to conceptualize in terms of Ukrainian society practice to tolerate the intolerable (Ch. Kukathas), an understanding that Other does not an enemy only, that culture is a dialog of cultures (M. Bakhtin) and the right to be different.
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Battle Over the Formation of ‘Turkish Culture’: Two Narratives of Kemalist Cultural Project Articulated by the Turkish Left
Bilgen Sutcuoglu
Istanbul Arel University, Turkey
A main problematic, in Turkish political life, has been modernization and the forging of a modern ‘Turkish culture’. Briefly, this struggle shaped the political and defined who is a Turk and who is an ‘other’. Those who challenged and reproduced counter-narratives of the modern and the society were positioned at an antagonistic pole. The left, in this picture, has been positioned as an ‘other’.
When the relationship is studied from the view point of the left, two readings of the state project can be traced. Most sections of the left have been sympathetic to the goals and methods of the Kemalist cultural project. They have helped to reproduce the official modernization and nationalist discourse. However, a smaller group reproduced counter narratives. This study is a comparison of these two alternative narratives of the Kemalist cultural project by the Turkish left.
In this article, the case of Doğan Avcıoğlu (1926-1983) as a Kemalist socialist will be studied in comparison to that of Nâzım Hikmet (1901-1963) – an internationalist, modernist poet who was critical of Kemalism. My work will touch upon the dynamics and processes that define the central tenets of a culture and the battles over the definition and redefinition of culture/s. The agents (state officials/intelligentsia), issues (areas of cultural formation) and means (such as newspaper columns and literature) in forging of cultures are analyzed in this case study of hegemonic state projects and the responses by one of the ‘others’ from Turkey.
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