February 6, 2008
I’ve been thinking a lot about a lecture we had with Professor Kubiak a couple days ago, about nationality and ethnicity as “imagined” communities that link people who don’t really know each other. It’s always in the back of my mind as I try to process this new society and culture in which I’ve suddenly found myself. What does it mean for something to be “real” versus “imagined,” anyway? It reminds me of an episode of South Park, of all things, titled “Imaginationland,” where the characters find themselves in an alternate universe inhabited by every fairy tale creature, cartoon, or legendary figure that has ever had a place in human consciousness. In this episode, the government wants to destroy Imaginationland with nuclear weapons (don’t ask), but Kyle eloquently makes a case for their preservation, “These characters might not be ‘real,’ but what is ‘real’ anyway? They’ve had a bigger impact on more people than any of us ever will, and I think that makes them as ‘real’ as you or me.”
All identities are “created,” in a sense, but does that necessarily mean they are as malleable as social theory would have us believe? Take the situation of Kurds in Turkey, now that they’re not really fighting for their own territory, will they still be able to preserve their “ethnic” identity, when the fight has been a central part of that identity for so long? Without that fight, what makes them more ethnically conscious than me, an Irish-Dutch-Polish American? Without some form of an “imagined” identity, there probably would have been no American Revolution! From what I could gather, and I may be misinterpreting, Professor Kubiak’s dream is of a world full of people whose identities are not derived from “imaginary” distinctions like nationality, ethnicity, or even race. He believes this is our best defense against repeating the 20th century’s bloody mistakes.
I’ve had a little bit of downtime at my homestay, so I’ve been doing some reading about Turkey in preparation for our travels. With its hunger for democracy, EU candidacy, and ethnic and religious diversity, Turkey is a country with the potential to shatter all kinds of conventional academic wisdom. If Turkey can begin to follow Professor Kubiak’s vision of a society founded on universal values like human rights and democracy, rather than nationalism and militant secularism, it would fly in the face of the pessimistic prognosis of scholars who believe Eastern and Central Europe are too focused on ethnic and national identity to catch up to their Western counterparts. It reminds me of another article we read, about post-communist society in Poland and how it never really went through the period where bourgeois capitalists where in power, it “skipped steps” to an economic system where social and cultural capital are the most important commodities. If Poland can “skip steps” economically, maybe Turkey can do the same on its path to democracy- perhaps it can do without the nastier periods of democratic development that the U.S. and Western Europe experienced: nationalism, xenophobia, and civil war. I certainly hope so. Whatever the case may be, the more I learn, the more excited I am to check out this place for myself.
