Zehra Ćırak, a well-known German-Turkish poet, writes both in German and in Turkish, explaining very eloquently her state of mind as someone of migrant background living in Germany. In her book, Vogel auf dem RĆ¼ckeneines Elefanten (The Bird on an Elephant, 1991), Ćırak writes the following:
Cultural Identity: What kind of a notion is cultural identity? Is it me finding myself in this notion, or is it the others moulding me into that? Whereas I prefer neither Turkish nor German culture. I am longing for a mixed culture. I feel that I have to live in my own culture, because I neither live in an Alaskan Igloo, nor in an Anatolian adobeā¦ I want to be drunk with other cultures, for instance with the music of Bach and Mahler, with the writings of Tarkovski and BuƱuel, or with the films of Akara Kurosawa. This is the way I identify myself. I would love to be as follows: I would love to sleep like the Japanese in a room with a bed on the floor and transparent doors. Then I would love to have an English breakfast. I would love to be as hard-working as the careless Chinese. I would love to eat like the French and take shower like the Romans. I would love to roam around the mountains like the Bavarians, and dance like the Africans. I wish I had the patience of the Russians. I would never want to earn my money like the Americans do. I wish I had a Swiss passport without the fear of giving the impression that I had a secret account somewhere. The best thing maybe is to be an Indian bird living on an elephant and dreaming about the Bosporusā¦ Then, what am I? Am I able to find myself in what I wish for, or do the others identify me as such? (Ćırak 1991: 94, authorās own translation)
The way she identifies her state of mind is very similar to the self-expressions of hundreds of people whom the author has encountered in his social-anthropological fieldwork, excursions, travels and gatherings in Western Europe, and particularly in Germany. There is a yearning in these expressions for a more accurate and neutral way of being identified by others. There is an evident objection, a sort of protest, to the stereotypical and biased expressions uttered by members of both receiving and sending societies. On the one hand, they are wary of being labelled by receiving states and societies as āeverlasting migrantsā and āconservative Muslimsā unwilling to integrate into the ways of life of their countries of residence. On the other hand, they also object to the ways in which they are treated by their homeland state and society. They no longer want to be perceived as being passive gurbetcis,1 obedient, in need of support, and ācash machinesā making foreign currency for their homeland.
Labelling migrant-origin individuals and their descendants simply as āMuslimsā is very common in many European countries, not only in the spheres of the media and politics, but also in the scientific community. This labelling through a religious identity at both political and societal level seems very reductionist and simplistic, since self-identifications among those being labelled are extremely diverse, oscillating between āMuslimā, āsecularā, āatheistā, āagnosticā and other identifications (Kaya and Kentel 2005, 2008). Such forms of labelling seem to overshadow the processes of individualization, democratization and singularization of Islam among younger generations, who have been raised in EU countries interacting with individuals of different denominations (Kaya 2012; Sunier 2012). The author is aware that the concept of Islam as an identifying force entered public discussion in the last three decades, prior to which there wereāand still are, with nationalist associationsāTurks, Algerians, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Kurds, Arabs and so forth, who were not necessarily defined by being āMuslimā. The fact that all these identities, with their various locations and socio-economic and cultural profiles, have come to be broadly designated as āMuslim communitiesā is a matter that requires careful attention and a willingness to look beyond assumptions of stable, tangible and readily identifiable indices of Islam. This book aims to question, and thus to go beyond, these assumptions, which tend to underestimate the dynamic and complex nature of the ways in which these individual agents identify themselves. Labelling migrants and their descendants simply as āMuslimsā is not only bound up in the ways in which migrant-receiving societies and states identify them, it is also entwined with the ways in which migrant-sending countries identify their emigrant-origin communities living abroad. Hence, this book will also question and go beyond the essentialist identifications of migrant-sending countries, with a special focus on Turkish-origin migrants and their descendants residing in European countries.
Migrants and their descendants are likely to be treated separately from the rest of the larger societies in which they reside. It is as if they are not a part of what is social, bound to remain outsiders in political, social, economic, legal and cultural processes in given territories. It is as if their subjectivities, identities, actions, aspirations, expectations and imaginations are inevitably comprehended in relation to what they brought from their homelands. It is as if they live in the vacuum in their migration context with no interaction with larger society. Based on the authorās earlier and ongoing ethnographic and sociological works, this book offers a different scientific optic, which requires a more complex gaze on the life-worlds of migrant-origin people and their descendants. This scientific optic tends to avoid those earlier perspectives that imprisoned migrant identities in static, essentialist and orientalist boundaries. Instead, this book investigates the life-worlds of migrants and their descendants in their own social, economic, political and legal contexts constrained by a complex interplay of local, national and global dynamics stemming from their countries of origin, countries of settlement, local contexts and global changes. All these different layers, or circles, which constrain their life-worlds constitute what is called transnational space.
The point of departure of this book is not essentialist; not the idea of understanding the life-worlds of migrant-origin people and their descendants in relation to the cultural, social, political and religious references originating only from their homelands. Rather, it inquires about the production of human existence in changing social, political, economic, cultural and legal contexts. Rather than concentrating on roots and origins, it concentrates on routes taken by migrant-origin individuals and their descendants. This is why, the author prefers here to use notions such as āmigrant-originā, āTurkish-originā and āMuslim-originā instead of āmigrantā, āTurkishā and āMuslimā in order not to essentialize those individuals with their home-driven cultural, ethnic and religious identities, which themselves are subject to a constant process of change over time. To this end, the book opens with Felix Guattariās question in his seminal work, āThe Three Ecologiesā (2000/1989), originally published in French (Trois Ć©cologies) in 1989. The question of how individuals respond to an ongoing period of intense techno-scientific transformations in this age of neoliberal globalization characterized by deindustrialization, urbanization, migration, deterritorialization, securitization, mediatization, automation, transnationalization as well as mobility, social media, international trade, violence, insecurity and ambiguity. In other words, as Felix Guattari eloquently put it earlier (2000: 34) the problem is the production of human existence in new historical contexts. As with all communities or individuals, migrant-origin communities and their descendants tend to generate their own methods of survival to adapt themselves to techno-scientific and ecological changes on a global scale. Guattari developed an ecosophical approach in his book to explain the ways in which modern individuals respond to ongoing techno-scientific transformations constraining their social, moral and environmental ecologies. Guattari maintains that
We need new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self in relation to the other, to the foreign, the strange ā a whole programme that seems far removed from current concerns. And yet, ultimately, we will only escape from the major crises of our era through the articulation of a nascent subjectivity [moral ecosophy], a constantly mutating socius [social ecosophy], and an environment in the process of being reinvented [environmental ecosophy] ā¦ The three ecologies originate from a common ethico-aesthetic disciplineā¦ Their different styles are produced by what I call heterogenesis, in other words, processes of continuous resingularization. Individuals must become both more united and increasingly different. The same is true for the resingularization of schools, town councils, urban planning, etc. (Guattari 2000: 68ā69)
Assessing migrants and their descendants in general, and Turkish-origin migrants and their descendants in particular, through the lens of the three ecologies suggested by Guattari, we may better understand why, and how, they generate various subjectivities in the migration context to come to terms with the techno-scientific and environmental transformations in the age of globalization. To do so, like anyone else, they need to generate a moral ecosophy , in which they can singularize their identities in the form of, say, individualization of Islam, or celebration of ethno-cultural minor differences. They also need to generate a social ecosophy , by which they can form counter-hegemonic expressive cultures such as hip-hop, or construct communities of faith, ethnicity, culture and honour to come to terms with the disruption of asabiyya (social cohesion). Finally, like anyone else, they need to generate an environmental ecosophy , through which they may give up old forms of political, religious, associative and militant commitment, and instead develop multiple identities, transnational political, economic, social and cultural formations and global networks of solidarity.
Over the last 50 years, migrants of Turkish origin and their descendants have constructed a separate space combining their countries of settlement and Turkey, and brought many cultural traditions together. Their cultural products in music, painting, dance and literature bear witness to the fact that they have developed something new en route. Intensive networks of cultural, political, economic and social transactions operating between them and their homeland, Turkey, have served to closely link the two spaces in a way that has mutually shaped the cultural-political economy of both. Today, these people, the Euro-Turks,2 are a recognized and highly active section of the European public space with their hyphenated identities. For instance, more than 60,000 Turkish-origin businesses in Germany currently employ approximately 500,000 workers in one hundred different fields of activity.3 They form a dynamic and flexible business sector that benefits the whole country. On the other hand, civil society organizations founded by Turkish-origin migrants have a strong impact on Turkey. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) put it very well from a feminist perspect...