TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Performing
for the West
Jessica Von Wendel
I walk through the modern city of Istanbul,
Turkey,
and as I wait at the crosswalk I realize its symbolic nature. Istanbul is a
crosswalk connecting East and West, and Turkey is waiting for that
light to
change in order to take that step and cross safely into the European
fold. In Yael Navaro-Yasin’s article “The
Historical Construction of Local Culture: Gender and Identity in the
Politics
of Secularism versus Islam” she discusses contemporary struggles over
Turkish identity.
I
pass under a beautiful stone archway, a remnant of Istanbul’s historic past, and I enter
the
Grand Bazaar which is an indoor city of shops. I
watch the merchants who sit outside their tiny stores
drinking small
glasses of tea while chatting with their neighbors. I take this
as an iconic image of Turkey.
Navaro-Yasin describes that “what the
nativist ethnographer identifies as local or native might only be the
effect of
a (nationalist and/or revivalist) discourse that disciplines certain
‘truths’ about
local culture and nativity and rejects others perhaps as deeply rooted
as
‘authentic.’” The way these merchants
sat and drank their tea while trying to sell sample packs of the same
tea to
tourists raised the question of the merchants' true identity versus
what may be
a performative cultural show used to increase sales.
I
talked with a shop owner from New York
who
retired in Istanbul
and set up her own store to sell her handmade crafts.
She was the only female merchant I saw in the
entire bazaar. She explained that the
men sitting outside of the shops work for commission and that the
actual owner
of the store is rarely, if ever, present. Could
tea consumption, that everyday iconic symbol of Turkey,
be merely a selling strategy? This Turkish
commission system
was similar to the Kahn al-Kalili market in Cairo, Egypt, and I found
many
of these performative
techniques of the Turkish market to be similar. Navaro-Yasin
claims that “Consciously or unconsciously
assumed
identities are lived and felt as if they are real and authentic.” Could this apply to the
Istanbul merchants? In addition to the local tea culture
set on
display, I felt as if I was back in Egypt when the male merchants began
their flirtatious
cat-calling. This raised the same
question I asked in Egypt: Is flirtation
used strictly as a selling technique or as a local mode of personal
entertainment? With all the free time on their hands these merchants
may sit
and chat over multiple glasses of tea and have fun coming up with the
cheesiest
ways to endear customers into their shops. One
yelled, “I’ve seen you before!” I
replied “No you haven’t,” and he yelled back “In my dreams!” I kept walking. One
man casually sitting asked “could I
hustle, opps, I mean help you.”
To enter the European Union, Turkey
itself is obliged to perform to European standards and the country's
identity is
of two minds caught on that crosswalk between East and West. Even on the smaller scale,
the local merchant is a local with native culture and customs, but he
too
must perform for the tourist in order to sell a product.
Trying to distinguish between true culture
and performance is just one of the challenges we face in this
globalizing
world.
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