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Turkey
By John Meade
You Don’t Know Me At All, Do You?
While I was in Istanbul I decided to partake in a tour of the Bosporus
waterway. The tour takes a group of site-seers up the strait by
ferry and the entire process takes about two hours. As I boarded
the ferry I realized that there was great diversity in the people on
the boat. There was a large group of Japanese tourists, several
British families and couples, a group of Indian men, a large gathering
of Spanish adolescents, and also a great many Turkish people as
well. I’m sure that there were other nationalities represented,
but those were just my initial observations.
The tour itself was very stimulating, but more
exciting than the tour itself for me was watching the people on the
boat. I was walking around taking pictures of the shores, but in
reality I was listening to conversations. Often they were in
languages that I did not understand, but I could really feel the
multiplicity on the ferry. After a few minutes of observation I
decided to approach a younger man, probably in his thirties, who was
sitting by himself on a bench smoking a cigarette. I sat down
next to him and casually introduced myself.
He asked me where I was from and he seemed
almost surprised when I said that I was American. I asked him his
nationality and he laughed to himself as he told me that he was from
Syria. I wondered why he was laughing and he must have sensed
that I was confused because the next thing he said was, “you
Americans…you don’t know Syria…I’m sure that you know Israel, but you
don’t know Syria”. I was shocked. I tried to explain to him
that I did in fact know Syria. I wanted him to know that I was
not just another ignorant American. After a minute or so he
became embarrassed and explained to me that he was not trying to be
offensive. He was just frustrated with the support the United
States gives to Israel when they seem to ignore the rest of the Middle
East.
I’m writing about this experience to
illustrate the point that the opportunity to learn new things about
people and culture is always around. I never would have expected
to get this kind of insight into a Syrian man’s perspective on a
tourist river tour, but I did. Michael Angrosino mentions in his
introduction to Doing Cultural
Anthropology that ethnographic fieldwork can really be any means
of
data collection that gives the researcher information that leads to a
better description and understanding of a people. This was
especially true for me on my tour of the Bosporus. I thought I
was just having a casual conversation, but when I reflected on it later
I realized that I had learned something very insightful about another
cultural point of view.
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