Middle class percept ion of kurds in İzmir: Space, class and urban life

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the social origins of recently increasing anti-Kurdish sentiments among middle class citizens living in Izmir. Based on a field study and 90 in-depth interviews conducted in this city in 2007, this article argues that the middle-class perception of Kurds can be conceptualized as “exclusive recognition” (tanıyarak dışlama). Exclusive recognition implies that in middle class discourse Kurds are recognized as a separate and homogenous ethnic group; however this recognition necessarily includes a discursive exclusion, as middle class citizens construct what it means to be a Kurd through pejorative stereotypes such as “ignorant”, “separatist”, “invaders”, “living by ill-gotten gain” and “disrupters of urban life”. These stereotypes have been long used in Turkish society for different purposes and in different contexts; but what is distinctive in exclusive recognition is the ethnicization of these stereotypes, that is, the deployment of these stereotypes to identify and construct what it means to be a Kurd. As the logic of exclusive recognition is at odds with the mainstream assimilationist discourses of the state and nationalist political parties, it cannot be seen as a typical extension of Turkish nationalism in society. Nor is it a sporadic reaction to the recent political developments in Turkey. A close examination of the narratives collected through the in-depth interviews indicate that such perception carries the traces of the social and spatial relationships between the Kurdish migrants that flooded into Izmir since the mid 1980s and middle-class citizens that live in this city for a longer period. This does not mean that urban social life in Izmir is the cause of exclusive recognition; it is rather the locus of these anti-Kurdish sentiments, that is, the context on which they take their particular form. Therefore, a comprehensive investigation of these sentiments should include an endeavour to unravel the processes and mechanisms through which such a context has been historically formed. In view of this, this article turns its attention to forced migration of Kurds and neo-liberal transformation of urban economy as the structural factors that help us to explain the formation of the urban context of exclusive recognition. The article claims that the specific middle class experience of this transformed urban context is embedded in their prejudices against Kurdish migrants. While establishing such linkages between macro and micro level of analysis, the article examines, one by one, how middle class interviewees justify identifying the Kurds with “ignorance”, “living by ill-gotten gain”, “separatism”, “invasion” and “disruption of urban life”.