Four Migration Stories: Four Turkish Migrants, Four Sui Generis Portraits in Germany.

• Author: Cakmak, Alper
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction

This is a case study of the Muslim immigrants living in Germany who maintain a relationship with Turkey either distant or intimate. The study aims to explore the diversity of the experiences of immigrant Turks and seeks pluralism through focusing on the individual cases. By the phrase 'each case,' it is meant that each interviewee is a case to explore diversity sui generis characters and pluralism. The study seeks the peculiarity/subjectivity of the interviewees that cannot be bracketed out by mainstream studies; as such studies are not micro-lenses to reflect upon the very subjectivities. In other words, the purpose is to evaluate and validate a discourse analysis of the Turkish immigrants' reflections on their migration journeys, distinctions and variety in narrating their own stories and the extent of individuated anthropological lenses focusing on each immigrant as a case whose "culture is not a model inside (their) heads but rather is embodied in public symbols and actions." (1) Retrieving from the interpretative anthropology, the study is not an attempt to search for rules that can be proved or falsified by scientific experiments, as Geertz writes, "but an interpretative one in search of meaning." (2) The discourse analysis is expected to assist in revealing the significations, meanings and symbols discursively produced within that particular culture that gives the output for interpretative anthropology. In other words, the outputs of the discourse analysis constitute the input of the interpretative anthropology. The fundamental questions, retrieving from the discourse analysis and interpretative anthropology to study the ethnography of communication with the interviewer, to be addressed in the study are: (a) How does anthropological discourse analysis study of the interviewees reflect the particularities of migrants termed as "individuation"? (b) How can each personality be viewed as a conglomeration of sociological concepts through a discourse analysis study? (c) How does anthropological discourse analysis approach to Muslims living in Germany who have a relationship with Turkey reveal personal backgrounds as a foreshadow of their migration experience?

Turkish immigrants render their disparity in different ways, convening in Turkish coffee-houses, mosques and hometown associations, through which they incarnate their say in the public sphere which also leads to the recreation of a mini-Turkey in Germany practicing the habits, language, tradition and the ways of cultural conduct. These public spheres formed by the Turkish immigrants also play a crucial role in creating a renewed network in the new and unfamiliar habitat, being used as a way of cultural manifestations of objection and disparity to voice their own differences from a dominating and venomous German culture. (3)

Germany urgently needed young healthy men who would form the labor force during the recovery period after the Second World War, hence treating them as guest workers, symbolizing the temporariness of their stay in the host country. Turkish immigrants in Germany are virtual immigrants, as the German governments did not define Germany as a permanent host of immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. Turkish immigrants had been "initially called Framderbeiter, or foreign/alien workers, but were later labeled Gasterbeiter or guest workers, denoting in the German meaning of the term their alien or temporary status." (4)

There is a considerable amount of literature, with examples from several European countries, published by Wodak, Khosravinik and Mral, (5) Mudde (6) and Mudde and Kaltwasser (7) on the typologies of migrants, as a discursive product of populism and right-wing parties, the populist radical right parties' enemy perceptions and even enemy constructions. The current position of the radical right parties with respect to the process of defining refugees as a problem and a threat to the order of the society, their roles in the alienation of the migrants, representations of the refugees as the agents stealing the jobs of the host society, state policies underlining the temporary nature of the refugees' stay in the host country is reflected in migrants' discourse by countering or internalization strategies.

The state of in-betweenness is the alienation from both home and host country. Hence it is not only the state of belonging to the home country but also the state of non-belonging to both that may push them to the margins of not only the host but also the society back home. It is also argued that Turkish immigrants had never been labeled as high-class citizens in the home country, and most of them were instilled with the idea of making money and looking after their families in the home country since the low socio-economic conditions of the Turkish care-takers play a crucial role in the dynamic of the motivating factor for many (8) Turkish immigrants have faced the problems of education, language, adaptation and integration and most of the young Turkish immigrants have been employed in the apprenticeships where the level of supply by the host society is low since more desirable choices are at the disposal of the wider community (9) The lower-class state in the home country has preserved the validity taking regard of the prevalence of "unemployment and income poverty (as the) signs of incipient underclass formation." (10) In the absence of the adequate availability of job opportunities, Turkish immigrants are subjected to "the major form of exclusion." (11) With regard to the individual experiences of being an immigrant, one can appreciate the extent of the sense of exclusion, alienation, belonging and assimilation, which is employed to denote being in harmony with the tradition and lifestyles of the large-scale community (12)

Source of Data

The community does not have a feature of exclusiveness, for this reason it was not difficult to get involved into the public spheres they have established, both formal and unofficially As the variables are complicated, the researcher needs to use the "emic" point of view, interpreting the significations and actors' points of view within that culture: this requires techniques of data gathering in the form of interviews in the field, participant observation that will provide understanding of the actor s perspectives.

Interviews

For this study, 23 interviews were conducted. Most of the interviews were held in the city of Bremen and the remainder in Hamburg, Munster, Lubeck, Leipzig, Osnabruck, and Dortmund. Concerning the ethnic orientation of the interviewees, they were mainly Turkish, including three Kurdish and one of Bosnian origin, reflecting on the social structure of the home country. Hence, the main criterion for the selection of interviewees was being a Muslim/Turkish immigrant in Germany, but exceptional cases were included if they were thought to be useful within the context. Another criterion for the selection of interviewees was the emphasis on the time of the migration. Turkish immigrants show different aspects considering not only their cultural, religious, linguistic and even national characteristics, but also the time period in which immigration to Germany took place. The interviewees were of different migratory generations, however, in this study, our focus is on the last generation.

Most of the interviews were held in Turkish, but there were also a few interviews held in German. Some interviews were conducted both in Turkish and German. While some interviews employed two languages simultaneously, other interviewees switched from one language to another during the interview. The interviewer did not intervene in the process of rhetorical creation, as the main concern was only to collect the anthropological data and the switches from German to Turkish or from Turkish to German were also of a crucial anthropological value revealing their most sincere moments, assisting reader's association. The study is thematically organized, as themes are the prominent factors to reveal the individual accounts of the interviewees countering the mainstream, macro-level and conventional histories. The thematic categorization of each case reveals how the personal backgrounds, as a product of various themes, underlies the account of each migration.

Personal Background as Predictor of Migration Experience

Case 1:Hidayet Coban

The personal backgrounds as a predictor of migration experience means that particular subjectivities are of various dimensions, maneuvers and amalgamations of the past and present opportunities at their disposal. It reflects the extent of their chance to be in harmony with the new habitat. A single category of the socio-cultural, ethnical, economic status of immigrants exerted out of the scientific, long-process, theoretical studies does not always provide a sound ground upon which an anthropological discourse analysis study as such can depend. An anti-case is the figure that is out of the general pattern regarding the push-pull factors. Each of the interviews, as a case, reveals differences in personal backgrounds, migration experiences and responses to the receiving country and society.

Turning now to the empirical data and the notes of participant observation obtained through random interviews, as an anti-circumstance, Hidayet Coban reveals his past:

As I said, I was born in Adana and grew up there. I was a market trader when I was in Adana, Turkey. Everything was fine with my job. Sometimes, I was able to gain so much money in two months that I could buy a car. I remember that once in four months I made enough money to buy a house. (13) These words, uttered as a reflection of his personal background in Turkey, reveal that though semi-skilled, he cannot be evaluated as a low-income Turkish citizen in the home country. One of the generalizations made by the Turkish migrants is that the main reasons for migration are low-income, low-social status, no future...