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Constructing ‘the Turk’ as an Enemy: The Complexityof Stereotypes in Children's Everyday WorldsSpyros SpyrouPublished online: 02 Dec 2009.

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Constructing ‘the Turk’ as an Enemy:The Complexity of Stereotypes inChildren’s Everyday WorldsSpyros Spyrou

The information presented in this chapter is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork withGreek Cypriot elementary school children and illustrates the process by which nationalidentity is constructed as primordial by teachers and children at school. In this process, the

Turks become the primary Other, against whom a sense of Self is constructed. However,in-depth interviews with children outside the school show that their constructions of the

Turks can be more complex and nuanced, and thus less stereotypical, especially whenthe children are encouraged to reflect on who the Turks really are.

Keywords: Childhood; Nationalism; Identity; Education; Cyprus; Greeks; Turks

Most children in Cyprus, even the youngest among them, if asked to talk about theTurks would readily have something to say. Significantly, most of what they say, at least

on the surface, is likely to be negative: the image of ‘the Turk’ as the barbaric enemy parexcellence emerges with ease and occupies centre stage in their imaginations. For those

familiar with the history of Cyprus, this realization should come as no surprise. Theintercommunal conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s and the

Turkish invasion and occupation of 37% of Cyprus’s territory provide a historicalcontext—strategically accentuated through national education—for the formation

of the undifferentiated Turk as the most negative Other for Greek Cypriot children.In this chapter I shed some light in this process of constructing an Other—the Turks

in this particular case—by Greek Cypriot elementary school children. This process,

rather than being simply a passive indoctrination of children by adults, is in fact anactive process of constructing meaning which results in both the reproduction of

stereotypes about Turks, and the production of new, alternative, and sometimes evencontradictory understandings. A closer look at identity construction processes reveals

ISSN 1360-8746 (print)/ISSN 1743-9612 (online) q 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13608740500470364

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a much more complex and fluid understanding of the Self and the Other, whichproblematizes assumptions about unified and homogeneous stereotypical

constructions.The data presented in this chapter come from an ethnographic study of two groups

of Greek Cypriot children attending elementary school in Cyprus. The fieldwork forthe study was carried out during the period July 1996 to July 1997 in two communities,

one urban community situated near the buffer zone in the old part of Nicosia anda second one in a rural community of the Pitsilia region (Spyrou 1999). In this study,

I paid particular attention to the role of education in children’s ethnic identityconstruction, and I spent considerable time observing what happened in the respectiveschools of the two communities, as well as spending a significant amount of time in

afternoons outside the school with the children discussing issues relevant to theiridentities.

Children’s Agency and Identities

As a topic of investigation, children have been mostly peripheral in the study of

anthropology; more importantly, when anthropologists paid attention to childhood itwas mainly in relation to other social processes such as, for instance, the transmission

of culture. Children’s active participation in the social and cultural worldssurrounding them was more often than not ignored. Similarly, the study of children’s

identities—gender, class, ethnic, or national—and the processes by which theydevelop, failed to capture the researchers’ imaginations.In the last two decades, however, much more attention has been devoted to children

as social actors and to childhood as a social phenomenon. Researchers, among themanthropologists, have focused a great deal more systematically and extensively on the

lives and experiences of children, and have began to explore children’s worlds andidentities from the children’s own perspectives (see Hutchby & Moran-Ellis 1998;

James 1993; James & Prout 1990; Solberg 1990). Identity construction and the politicsof culture are today emerging as new and challenging fields of inquiry in childhood

studies (Stephens 1995), whilst topics traditionally reserved for study only in relationto the political lives of adults—such as nationalism and ethnic identity construction—are now becoming integral to the study of childhood (see Cullingford 2000; Holloway

& Valentine 2000; Koester 1997; Spyrou 2000). Some researchers are also beginning toexamine the intersection between identity construction, nationalism, and education—

the focus of this article—illustrating the processes by which understandings of Self andOther emerge in the early years of life in the specific cultural and political contexts in

which children grow up (see, for example, Bryne 1997; Coles 1986; Davey 1987;Elbedour et al. 1997; Spyrou 1999; 2001b).1 This article aims to contribute to this

limited but growing literature by analysing the process of ethnic identity constructionin childhood as it takes shape in the particular social and political context of post-1974

Cyprus.

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Situating Identity Construction

Though one needs to look at the long duree of Cyprus’s history in order to identify thecultural resources on which contemporary Greek Cypriots, including children, draw in

order to construct a sense of identity, the more recent history of the island isparticularly relevant for understanding identity construction processes in the present.

During the last fifty years, Cyprus has experienced a history of turmoil and rapid socialchange that has brought into sharp focus questions of identity: an anticolonial waraimed to overthrow the British and attain union with Greece (1955–1959), which,

however, resulted in independence (1960), intercommunal conflict and violence(1963–1964), interference by a Greek dictatorial regime in its internal affairs and

the emergence of terrorist activity by militant nationalists (1967–1974), a coup and aTurkish invasion that resulted in the occupation of 37% of the island’s territory (1974),

and a successful application to become a full member of the European Unionaccompanied by a process of Europeanization in all walks of life (1990 to the present).

In popular imagination, the Turkish invasion and continuing occupation ofNorthern Cyprus stands as the single most important event in the recent history of the

island. That Turks would become the principal Other against whom contemporaryGreek Cypriots construct their identities comes as no surprise; nor is it surprising thatGreek Cypriot children, early on in their lives, become preoccupied with this Other

and construct negative images of the Turks as a people and of Turkey as a state.At school, children learn a history that situates the current situation in Cyprus in

a larger historical framework cultivated by nationalist historiography: they learn aboutthe history of animosity between Greeks and Turks and see the current situation on the

island, with Turkey’s continuing occupation of Northern Cyprus, as another exampleof a long and essentially unchanging historical pattern wherein Turks always emerge as

the enemy par excellence of the Greek nation (see also Millas, this volume).Early on in life, whether at home, at school, or through friends and the media, Greek

and Turkish Cypriot children in Cyprus are provided with ample cultural material on

which to draw in constructing images of one another in their imaginations. However,these imaginary boundaries are not fixed and stable but rather fluid and permeable.

They are erected, collapsed, or permeated in the flow of everyday life, and children findthemselves in situations where their identity is relational and always in flux. In this

article I focus on this issue and illustrate how children’s ethnic imaginations are shapedby the larger cultural realities with which they are confronted, as well as considering

how they retain, at the same time, a degree of autonomy which allows for more fluidunderstandings of Self and Other, ones that go beyond simplistic and superficial

oppositional constructions of the type ‘Greeks are good’, ‘Turks are bad’.

Constructing Turks in the Past and Present

Greek Cypriot elementary school education is to this day largely nationalistic in its

outlook. Given the political situation in Cyprus and the de facto partition of the

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island, a nationalistic framework provides an authoritative and unambiguousexplanation for understanding the past, the present, and the future. As a discourse of

power and authority, nationalism seeks to canonize, to eliminate if possible heteroglotmessages, and to facilitate one authoritative yet often naıve reading of the world (see

Bakhtin 1981, p. 425). If the discourse of nationalism manages to be persuasive aboutthe nation’s sacredness, about its primordial and eternal character, then the nation is

erected in the imaginations of its members as an imagined, yet powerful, communitywhich can demand loyalty and if necessary even sacrifice from its members (Anderson

1983; Alonso 1994; see also Bryant 1998; 2001).Nationalism, to the extent that it can do so, thrives in arousing emotion. After all, a

strong emotional response privileges a particular understanding of identity and

provides it with a sense of meaning that goes beyond the controlled and the rationaland more into the realm of belief and passion. On many occasions, I have observed

teachers in the classroom make such emotional appeals to students in an attempt toinstil in them a strong sense of loyalty to the nation. Turks as a category of people often

provided the necessary Other against whom teachers hoped to centre a sense ofnational identity in children. Thus, when on one occasion a rural teacher described

how the Turks entered Constantinople and ‘slaughtered the Greeks’, he was not simplycommunicating a particular historical event; he was also communicating to studentsa certain evaluative stance for what happened: to slaughter is not simply to kill; it is to

kill in a cruel, merciless manner; it is to engage in barbaric behaviour. The evaluativestance that the teacher encouraged the children to adopt and the emotional

response this promoted is one that coloured Turks as the barbaric enemy of theGreek nation.

In the same manner and on many occasions, some teachers drew on nationalisticmythology to construct a sense of a Self who, in relation to the enemy, emerges as

superior, operating in the realm of the superhuman. When, for example, a teacherrefers to a national hero—in this case Kolokotronis, who fought against the Ottomans

in the Greek war of liberation in 1821—with words such as ‘when they only heard hisvoice the Turks run away’, a heroic, superhuman image of the Greek is activelypromoted. The national hero crystallizes the ideal of ‘Greekness’, demonstrating what

it is to live up to the ideals of the Greek nation. The process by which this isaccomplished is quite familiar to nationalistic constructions of identity. It is a process

where the Self is opposed to an Other or Others, so that its presumed superior qualitiesstand out through the comparison. In such a conceptual framework, Self and Other

are in need of each other; the Self needs its referential opposite to define itself.In a nationalistic framework, the category ‘Greeks’ becomes meaningful when it is

compared with its dialectical opposite, the category ‘Turks’. The primary Other—inour case the Turks—provides a convenient point of reference for any kind ofcomparison, whether in relation to war, or civilization, or any aspect of daily life where

‘being a Greek’ always implies a sense of superiority. The educational system, andteachers in particular, is involved in the task of naturalizing this otherwise discursively

constructed social categorization.

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Examples of such discursive constructions abound. In the following example, theTurks are put into the larger framework of world history and their worth as a people is

evaluated accordingly. In the context of a discussion about the Second World War ina sixth-grade history class, the teacher said, ‘The Turks helped the Germans and the

Italians and the Japanese by not entering the war, thus indirectly helping them. Turkeywas neutral but of course was friendly with the Germans, the Italians, and the

Japanese.’ The teacher also proceeded to discuss the role of Greece, which unlikeTurkey fought against Germany. In this manner the teacher not only taught children

about the moral responsibilities of Turkey in world history and all the evaluativeconclusions that go with this (i.e. Turkey is not to be trusted, Turkey is not interestedin world peace, etc.) but he also taught children a lesson in what it means to be Greek:

to be Greek is to be morally superior; it is to take a stance against aggression (unlikeTurkey’s putative neutrality) and if necessary sacrifice oneself for freedom. By placing

Greek and Turkish history into this larger frame of world history the animositybetween the two groups is shown to be of a larger significance: Turkey is not, in this

sense, simply an enemy of the Greek nation; it is (or should be) an enemy of the worldat large.

In a nationalistic model, the enemy also becomes the unifying force for thecollective Self. As one teacher explained when talking about the siege of Mesolongi in asixth-grade history class, ‘the common element which made all of them [the Greeks]

fight together was the Turk [o Tourkos ]’. The nation comes together when confrontedwith an Other; in the absence of an enemy the nation loses its sense of unity.

So, indirectly and ironically, it is the enemy that gives essence to the nation’s identity.That the enemy in the example above is described in the singular is no less important

in this process where the Self is always opposed to the Other. The plurality of theenemy, the diversity in the Other, is eliminated and replaced by the singular ‘Turk’

who is one and undifferentiated (see also Millas, in this volume). By personifying thenation and eliminating its diversity, national identity is fully essentialized.

This process of constructing an enemy proceeds hand in hand with the constructionof particular images of the Other. One particular image that is prominent in thenationalistic imagination and which teachers help children to erect and sustain in their

own individual imaginations is that of the Turks as barbarians. In the context ofa classroom discussion, the teacher’s references to Turks as barbarians can be clear and

straightforward or more indirect and incidental. In the following example, from a classdiscussion of Egyptian civilization in a geography lesson for the fifth and sixth grades

of the rural elementary school, the teacher constructs by association an image of theTurks as barbarians: ‘From what we read, were they [i.e. the Egyptians] people with

civilization [ politismo ]? Were they, let’s put it this way, barbarians like the Turks, theOttomans, who have always been barbarians?’ Here, the teacher’s questions divertthe students’ attention from the main subject discussed (i.e. Egyptian civilization) to

a reference category, the Turks, with whom they are quite familiar. The teacher’srhetorical questions leave the students with no response. The questions are leading, for

their aim is not to elicit a response but to remind students about a category with which

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they are very familiar, the Turks. The lesson is clear and loud: the Turks are barbarians,of the worse kind; incidentally, the Egyptians were people with civilization.

Another strategy teachers use to construct Turks as the Other is by collapsing timeand decontextualizing identity. Present-day Turks are presented as the direct

descendants of the Ottomans and as having the same basic characteristics. Whatmodern-day Turks are doing is seen as simply a continuation of what the Ottomans

did in the past. So, if the Ottomans, according to nationalist historiography, hadexpansionist tendencies, then so do modern-day Turks; they are seen as the same

people, then and now. By establishing such an essential historical continuity, identity isfully reified; it is fixed and stabilized and transferred into the realm of ahistorical time.In other words, nationalism denies change not only to the in-group, the nation itself,

but also to its adversaries. To allow for the possibility of change is to destabilize thenationalist framework that treats identity as being, above all, primordial.

The recent history of Cyprus provides a key resource for teachers and children aliketo draw on in constructing Turks as the Other par excellence. This is a history that the

children hear about often, not just from their teachers but also from their parents,grandparents, television and a variety of other sources. For some children, like those

who live near the buffer zone, the Turkish occupation of Cyprus is something they arereminded of daily by the sight of Turkish flags and guard posts or the sound of theimam’s call for prayer. Events that take place in the present become illustrative

examples for demonstrating and proving that the Other is indeed eternal andunchanging. Contemporary events are fully incorporated into the framework of

nationalistic history and affirm it. Consider the illustration below, for instance, whichshows how the Turks are constructed by both teacher and student as barbaric, by

making reference to the violence that broke out in the buffer zone in the summer of19962 (the excerpt comes from a lesson in Greek with the fourth grade):

Teacher: ‘How do you feel about the way they [i.e. the Turks] killed them [i.e. theGreek Cypriots], about the barbaric, barbaric way by which they killed them?’

Chariklia: ‘Miss, the Turks don’t have a heart.’

Here, the authoritative role of the teacher in constructing a very negativeimage of the Turks is clear. The teacher does not pose a question that leaves

open the possibility for an alternative evaluation of the Turks. Rather, she clearlydefines the Turks as barbaric; the student in turn finds it easy to affirm the teacher’s

evaluation and build furthermore on this evaluation by concluding that Turks areheartless.

It is in this sense that nationalist imaginings become powerful and convincing.Where they feed into local history they can easily be incorporated into the largerhistory of the nation. Thus, the behaviour of the Turks in the present is nothing more

than modern-day affirmation of an unbroken continuity with the past, which wantsTurks to be the same, then and now (see also Sutton 1998, p. 163). By incorporating

local, lived history into the larger national history, both teachers and students reify theTurks as a people and reproduce stereotypes about them with ease and consistency.

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The evidence provided by the present is experientially close to the children andemotionally more important than the distant history about which they learn in school

and is ultimately perhaps more convincing to them. In this respect, history asexperienced in the present makes more familiar and more convincing the unfamiliar

past (Sutton 1998).

Implicating the Future

The future is equally implicated in nationalist constructions of Self and Other. In

many ways, what happened in the past and what is happening in the present arepresented as continuing into the future. If the Turks behaved aggressively in the past

and carry on doing so in the present, then they will continue to be aggressive in thefuture. In this kind of nationalist imagining there is no room for change. The Otheris one and unchanging, or, to put it another way, the Other’s identity is fixed and

above all natural. Hence the predictability of the nationalist future which contains nosurprises. This is what Heilman (1992, p. 203) terms ‘traditioning’, which ‘means

never seeing the past as beyond retrieval but rather experiencing it as an ongoingreverberation in the present’ (and I would add here ‘and the future’). By engaging in

dialogue with the past, the nationalist imagination enters the realm of what Eliade(1954, pp. 36, 46) describes as mythical time, where life, instead of proceeding in a

historical contingent fashion, eternally repeats itself (see also Herzfeld 1987, p. 82).This ahistorical framework for teaching about Self and Other is often used by

teachers in the classroom and often referred to by children in their accounts (seeAvdela 1997).

It would be simplistic to assume that all teachers share the same understandings

about identity or that they necessarily engage in such constructions. But many teachersdo so, even when they themselves would be much more critical of such constructions

in other contexts. By following an existing framework for explaining national historyand identity some teachers avoid the possibility of complaints or controversy arising

from a critical look at history. Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising thatlessons about Self and Others often led to negative and stereotypical constructions

about the Turks. For instance, many of the teachers viewed mainland Turks asuncivilized and barbaric. As Harris, a third-grade teacher at the urban school, pointedout to me, ‘in general the Turks, being uncivilized as they are, have a mentality that is

different: it would not bother them at all to kill, to loot a country. . . in general theirmentality is very Asian’. Such statements are in line with the popular Greek Cypriot

discourse about mainland Turks, which identifies them as Easterners or Orientals, andby implication not as civilized as the Westerners with whom Greek Cypriots identify.

Some teachers presented me with more complex understandings of Turks orqualified their responses by attributing their negative statements to certain kinds

of Turks, such as, for instance, the military, rather than ordinary Turkish citizens.Even then, Turkishness emerged as a negative identification, and one that had primacy

in explaining interethnic relations. For most of them, teaching children about ‘the

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threatening’ nature of the Turks is an imperative, especially since they have to instilin children a strong sense of national identity and to help them remember what

the Turks did to Cyprus in 1974 or before. Some of them, in fact, feel that they havefew options but to engage in this kind of ethnic socialization, since the world in

which we live is one where all groups do the same in order to sustain their unity anddistinctiveness in the face of challenges by Others. Hara, for example, suggested to

me that there might be no way around fanaticism, however negative it might be asa pedagogical tool:

While I believe and feel that all people are siblings. . . I also think that this attitudemight be a mistake . . . There is no other way of defence as a state . . . as an ethnicity. . . apart from being fanaticized with regard to your nation and your homeland.There is no other way of defence. How will you defend [your homeland]? You willeither become subjugated or you will resist.

To put it another way, the challenge that many teachers face is how to avoid

constructing negative images of the Turks, while at the same time instilling in childrenwhat they see as a required element of their socialization, namely a strong sense

of ‘Greekness’. The nationalistic model of identity leaves them with little choicefor avoiding negative constructions of Turkey and the Turks.

Within and Beyond Established Categories

As an anthropologist I am primarily interested in indigenous constructions ofmeaning, hence my focus on children’s points of view. In this research I have beenconfronted with a particular challenge, that of uncovering the complexity of children’s

constructions of meaning by going beyond the obvious, that which the children readilypresented to me as an adult researcher or to their teachers in the classroom, to the less

obvious, or that which lies beneath the surface and which offers a more complex,nuanced, and positive understanding of the Other (see Spyrou 2001a; see also Millas,

Theodossopoulos, this volume). The surface meaning—that meaning which is oftenhighly stereotypical and uncritical—is constructed and presented in formal

encounters, be it in a classroom context or an initial encounter with a researcherwith whom familiarity is limited. On the other hand, as I will show later, the meaningthat lies beneath the surface, and which is often more critical and complex, is often

constructed and offered in less formal, more intimate encounters characterized bywhat Herzfeld (1987) calls ‘self-recognition’.

When Greek Cypriot children presented an official understanding of Self and Otherin the classroom or during my initial encounters with them, Turks clearly stood for the

most negative ethnic Other. Indeed, they were singled out by the overwhelmingmajority of the children whom I interviewed as the people who are most different from

the Self. In a questionnaire I distributed among children, many of them cited asopposites to the word ‘Turks’ words like ‘Cypriots’, ‘Greeks’, ‘Orthodox’, and ‘good’. In

our discussions, children often described to me the Turks with the most negative of

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attributes, including, but not limited to, characterizations like barbarians, bad, egoists,terrorists, torturers, warmongers, quarrelsome, rapists, wild, murderers, vandals,

looters, heartless, revengeful, hateful, malicious, devious, ungrateful, unfair, jealous,illiterate, impolite, dirty, liars, foolish, crazy, and thieves.

The language that children often used in their descriptions of the Turks reflected thediscourse used by adults, which seeks to arouse an emotional response about the long-

standing animosity between Greeks and Turks. Words such as ‘enslavement’ (inreference to the Turkish occupation of Cyprus) and ‘slaughtering’ (in reference to war

atrocities by Turks against Greeks) were often used to describe the ‘barbaric nature’ ofthe Turks. These characterizations flowed effortlessly from their mouths when asked todescribe who Turks are. Undoubtedly, the prevailing cultural discourse that sees Turks

as the enemy par excellence provided for the children many resources to draw on intheir descriptions. The identities constructed in these formulations are clear and

unambiguous, those which Eriksen (1993) refers to as ‘digital categorizations’ to becontrasted with ‘analogic categorizations’ that would allow for degrees of similarity

and difference between Self and Other.However, not all that children learn at school or from sources outside school follows

this black and white model where ‘we’ are good and ‘they’ are bad. Some teachers,sometimes, present the children with alternative formulations of Self and Other. Afterall, not all teachers have the same ideological positions and understandings: some of

them follow closely the nationalistic model outlined above, but others have morecritical understandings which allow them to present the children with more

complicated images of the Other and open up the space for alternative interpretations.Here is what Apostolos, the principal of the urban school, once told me when I asked

him if the teachers try to fanaticize children against the Turks:

we don’t do it. Why? Because we are civilized people. And [let me tell you] a simpleexample. What problem do I have with the poor Turkish child—his father killshimself everyday for a wage—to go and kill him, to go and wound him? On thecontrary, I cultivate through the power of religion, as I told you, the understandingthat the Turk is my fellow human being, is my neighbour, whom if necessary I willhelp in a given situation, even if he hates me. I don’t do it [i.e. fanaticize children].

In the example below, we see the teacher indirectly challenging a prevailingstereotype, in an effort to help the children see the diversity in the Other:

Charitini: ‘In Greece they call the Turks stinky dogs [vromoshilloi ].’

Teacher: ‘Is it good to say these things?’

In mild protest, Charitini said that the Turks did ‘bad things to us’. The teacherproceeded to explain that many Turks had no choice but to follow the orders of ‘those

above them’—their leaders—when they invaded Cyprus.Indeed, there are occasions when some teachers, in some contexts, emphasize the

shared humanity of the Greeks and the Turks. The most commonly used expressionsinclude the obvious observation that ‘we [Greeks and Turks] are all human’ and the

religious motif that good Christians ‘must love everyone’. Though it is doubtful

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whether such statements successfully compete with the more pervasive and muchmore absolute negative evaluations of the Turks, they nevertheless help destabilize the

dominant discourse to some extent, especially given that children might also beexposed to other such critical evaluations of the Turks at home or in other contexts

that facilitate this process. In other words, despite the fact that school education playsa vital role in reproducing nationalist ideology, the information that is made available

to children is, in some instances, contradictory.In fact, the ethnographic interviews I conducted with the children revealed that

most of them, when probed, did indeed have access to alternative discourses and drewon them to construct more complex understandings of the Turks. Despite the fact thatmost of them readily described the Turks with the most negative characterizations (e.g.

as barbaric, cruel, or bad), when I encouraged them to elaborate on their evaluations,they presented me with descriptions that accounted to some extent for different types

of Turks. When I persisted asking whether all Turks are as ‘bad’ or ‘barbaric’ as theyhad previously told me, many of the children qualified their earlier responses by

acknowledging that not all Turks are bad, but that some are indeed good or civilized.As became obvious during my fieldwork, when children have an opportunity to reflect

on the Other, rather than simply state who the Other is, their responses allow, in mostcases, for more complex understandings. Thus, when Neofitos (sixth grade) reflectedon the Turks, he distinguished between the Turkish government and the ordinary

Turkish people:

There are many from Turkey who are good. It is not because they occupied us. Theysay it is a democracy but it is not a democracy. Whatever the president wants, it isdone. It is fascism. It is not the people’s fault. It is the fault of those who toldthem [to do these things]. If they did not command them ‘Go and do that’ theywould not go.

In a similar way, many other children qualified what they had told me earlier about the

Turks and created sub-categories of different types of Turks. Some of them blamed theTurkish state, others blamed the Turkishmilitary, and yet others the Turkish politicians,

whom they saw as the real cause of the Cyprus problem. For most of these children, themajority of the ordinary Turkish citizens were not to blame, for they are forced to obey

what their rulers tell them to do (see also, Theodossopoulos, this volume).

The Turkish Cypriots

A more complex picture emerged when I asked the children to describe the TurkishCypriots. Some of them provided me with the mainstream Greek Cypriot discourse on

the topic, which describes Turkish Cypriots as different from mainland Turks. In thisformulation, Turkish Cypriots are seen as essentially good people who are also, like the

Greek Cypriots, victims of Turkish occupation. Following and reproducing this widerdiscourse, several children argued that Turkish Cypriots are fundamentally good

people; ‘our problem is not with Turkish Cypriots’, they maintained, ‘but with the

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Turks who occupied Cyprus’.3 But even in those cases some children had reservations.They identified what they perceived as paradoxes or ambiguities about Turkish

Cypriots and pointed them out. Marinos (sixth grade), for instance, had doubtswhether all Turkish Cypriots are indeed ‘good’ especially given that at the end of the

day they ‘have the blood of the Turk inside them’. Another boy (Neofitos, sixth grade)had a difficult time figuring out Turkish Cypriot identity and juxtaposing it with Greek

Cypriot identity: ‘They [i.e. Turkish Cypriots] say sometimes, “We are happy we areTurks.” Sometimes they say, “We are sorry we are Turks.” What should you believe?

Which one is it? I think they are more on the side of the Turks.’ These reservationssuggest that some children struggle to categorize ‘Turkish Cypriots’, finding thecategory particularly difficult to grasp.

In fact, for the majority of my child-respondents, understanding the category‘Turkish Cypriots’ proved to be a serious challenge. As I have explained in detail

elsewhere (Spyrou 2001a), ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ identity is a hyphenated identity—rather than an ethnically ‘pure’ one—and poses a thought-provoking paradox in the

minds of some children. Though children learn a lot about the Turks from schooland from sources outside school, when it comes to Turkish Cypriots their

knowledge is limited and fragmented. Ethnic socialization focuses mainly on theTurks as the primary Other—the problematic Other—rather than on TurkishCypriots, who are seen as fundamentally good and not as the real problem of

Cyprus. When it comes to interpreting ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ identity as a hyphenatedidentity, many Greek Cypriot children break it up into its subsequent parts, namely

‘Turkish’ and ‘Cypriot’. In their minds, the former is a mostly negative category, as Ioutlined earlier, while the latter is equated with ‘Greek Cypriots’—much in line

with how many adults also use the term—and therefore is treated as a positivecategory.4 Hence, the paradox created in children’s minds: how can one be both a

‘Turk’ (a principally negative category of people who are very unlike ‘us’) and at thesame time be a ‘Cypriot’ (an unmistakably positive category of people, who are in

fact ‘us’)?Though the paradox is created in children’s minds as a result of their limited

knowledge of Turkish Cypriot identity and history, it is illustrative of how ‘pure’

national identities—being ‘Greek’ or ‘Turkish’—exercise their oppressive power overhyphenated identities in children’s imaginations. Many of these children opted for

resolving the paradox by reinterpreting the category ‘Turkish Cypriots’ in a way thatallowed them to make sense of it. One child who did not know how Turkish Cypriots

came about as a group came up with an imaginary reinterpretation of contemporaryTurkish Cypriot identity:

They are Turks; their mother is Turkish and their father is a Cypriot and they gotmarried and had [gave birth to] Turkish Cypriots. And they are still Turks. But theystay in Cyprus; they are Turkish Cypriots. They are good.

For this particular child, the paradox of Turkish Cypriot identity was resolved bycombining the two elements of Turkish Cypriot identity—Turkish and Cypriot (the

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latter being seen as equivalent to Greek Cypriot)—through a marriage union. The lastevaluative comment—’they are good’—suggests that in the mind of this child Turkish

Cypriot identity has been transformed from a potentially negative one—since it is afterall partly ‘Turkish’—into a positive one through its ‘Cypriot’ association. During my

fieldwork, I came across a number of other examples of similar reinterpretations. Onechild interpreted Turkish Cypriot identity to mean the Maronites (i.e. the Lebanese-

Christian community living in Cyprus), who are able to cross the buffer zone and visitthe occupied territories (in other words, for this child, a Turkish Cypriot is a Cypriot

who can visit the Turkish-occupied territories). Another child equated TurkishCypriots with the 1974 Greek Cypriot prisoners of war (imprisoned by the Turks),while a third one described Turkish Cypriots as the missing persons from the 1974

Turkish invasion (see Sant Cassia, this volume). In all of these imaginaryreinterpretations the children are producing new meanings, instead of merely

reproducing the categories established by the dominant Greek Cypriot ideology. Withthis practice they challenge, perhaps unintentionally, the sweeping force of

nationalism and its apparent fixity.In the comparative anthropological literature, and in terms of unconventional

strategies very similar to those pursued by my young Greek Cypriot respondents, onecan identify the creative potential of children to reconstruct their own meaningfulworlds independently of those of adults. Christina Toren (1999) has documented how

children engage with the adult world not merely by reproducing it, but also, byreinventing it. She suggests that for younger children it is the sign, rather than the

symbol, which is constitutive of their understanding. Thus, in the Fijian context, whereToren conducted her ethnographic studies, ritual for children ‘refers to nothing other

than itself: “kava-drinking is about drinking kava” and “eating a meal is about eating”’(Toren 1999, pp. 97–98). In her examination of Fijian ritual, Toren discovered that

younger children view status as residing in space, not in the person as the adults wouldhold it. Similarly, Euro-American children first come to understand racial categories in

evaluative terms, in contrast to adult categories, which are primarily perceptual (Toren1999, p. 103). It is only gradually, through a developmental process, that children cometo cognitively construct symbolic meaning. Fijian children come to understand the

symbolic meaning of the kava ritual at the age of nine, but even then they employmeanings that are not identical to those held by adults (Toren 1999, p. 104). The creation

of meaning is thus an ongoing and never-ending process, residing in a continuum thatincludes both sign and symbol and is characterized by ‘cultural heterodoxy’ or, in other

words, by difference and even inversion (Toren 1999, pp. 100–101).

Conclusion

If identities were monolithic and fixed, then stereotypical constructions of the Self and

the Other would have been the only prevailing constructions in contexts like Cypruswhere interethnic conflict facilitates their production. But close ethnographic work

shows that identities are quite fluid and often exhibit a high degree of ambiguity and

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contradiction. The ethnic boundaries erected in children’s imaginations are notdogmatic; they become ‘matters of consciousness rather than of institutional dictation’

(Cohen 1994, pp. 69–70). Children are exposed to the complexity of social life and amultiplicity of voices, which in turn relativize their understanding of the Turks and

allow them to construct different images, some more, some less, stereotypical indifferent social contexts. The resulting attitudes may be characterized by fluidity,

fragmentation, and inconsistency rather than fixity and consistency (see Hatcher &Troyna 1993, p. 123).

In this respect, ethnic stereotypes are convenient resources that individuals draw onto construct particular kinds of ethnic Others. They are widely accessible and helpindividuals reduce the complexity they are confronted with by simplifying the world

for them (Allport 1958 [1954], p. 165; Davey 1983, p. 43). By their very nature,stereotypes aim to concretize that which is fluid, to purify that which is impure, to

make certain that which is ambiguous. Hence, stereotypes can tell us a great deal aboutthe reproduction of ethnic ideologies (Perkins 1979, p. 135). But stereotypes are only

meaningful as parts of particular arguments in particular conversations and areconstantly transformed, along with those arguments, to facilitate the intentions and

the rhetorical strategies of their authors (Theodossopoulos 2003; Brown &Theodossopoulos 2004).

Greek Cypriot children’s stereotypical constructions of the Turks may not

necessarily reflect the depth of understanding they have of the Turks, but rather theirchoice for such constructions, given the contextual parameters and the discursive

strategies they choose to adopt.5 The ethnographic evidence presented in this articleillustrates that constructions of the Turks in daily social practice are fluid and complex,

and at times contradictory, much more so than they appear to be on the surface whenchildren are asked to simply describe the Other. Thus, a child may describe the Turks

as evil and barbaric in one context, only to present a more complex picture (i.e. asa people with both negative and positive attributes) at a different moment, especially if

encouraged to expound and reflect freely about the subject. Contextual parameters areultimately very important in constraining or facilitating this process of reflection(see also Theodossopoulos, Kirtsoglou, this volume). In this sense ethnic categories

such as that of the Turk are fluid and permeable; they are constructed, collapsed, andreconstructed according to the situation.

When Greek Cypriot children are asked to reflect upon the Turks, they distinguishbetween ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Turks, between Turkish politicians or the military and

ordinary citizens. They are also able to imagine the Turks as ‘brothers’ and fellowhumans, by drawing upon discourses that emphasize a shared humanity for all (see

also Millas, Theodossopoulos, this volume). And when they portray the Turks as ‘evil’they simply describe those Turks who in their imaginations happen to be the worst ofthe group—the politicians or the military—not all Turks in the world. The children’s

creative interpretations of the ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ hyphenated identity attest to thecreative potential of their imagination and their ability to produce alternative

meanings. In most cases, Greek Cypriot children appear capable of accessing both the

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authoritative discourse of nationalism, which facilitates the reproduction ofstereotypes of the Other, and an internally persuasive discourse, which could be

more nuanced, adapted to particular conversations, and influenced by the participantsof social processes (see Bakhtin 1981, pp. 346, 427).

The world in which children find themselves is a heteroglossic one, exercisingdifferent demands on their identities. The availability of alternative voices does not

necessarily succeed in seriously undermining the dominant ideology on identity. Thesocial-historical circumstances that Greek Cypriot children grow up in are such that it

is ultimately very difficult to construct positive images of the Turks. Certainly thecontinuing Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus leaves themwith few resources forseriously reconsidering their negative attitudes towards the Turks; the current

situation, and its interpretation by Greek Cypriot commentators, politicians, teachers,and parents, is one that affirms all they learn at school about the history of animosity

between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Nevertheless, the ethnographic evidence suggests that thereare destabilizing elements that work subtly beneath the surface and which may be

strengthened if and when circumstances change and alternative voices, which are nowweak, become more fully integrated into popular imagination. The complexity arising

with regard to Turkish Cypriot identity, and the Greek Cypriot children’s creativeapproach towards it, is indicative of this process. Their attempt to fill in the gapbetween the known and the unknown with imaginary constructions illuminates the

limitations of nationalist ideology and the possibility for a more creative space toconstruct the Self and the Other.

Acknowledgements

The fieldwork for this study was generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation

(Grant No. 6062) and the Maxwell Corporation (USA), which provided significantmaterial support, which is highly appreciated. I also wish to thank Dimitris

Theodossopoulos for his very productive comments on earlier drafts of this article. Fortheir helpful feedback, thanks and appreciation are also due to the participants in theconference ‘Friends and Foes’ (St Peter’s College, University of Oxford, 11 May 2002),

where I presented this work.

Notes

[1] See also Bryant (1998; 2001) for a critical discussion of nationalism and education in Cyprusfrom a historical perspective.

[2] In the summer of 1996, violence broke out in the Dherinia buffer zone, following ademonstration by Greek Cypriot and foreign motorcyclists on the right of free movement on theisland; two Greek Cypriot demonstrators were killed by Turkish and Turkish Cypriot counter-demonstrators.

[3] One interesting exception to this pattern is the case of the Turkish Cypriot leader, RaufDenktash, who was clearly disliked and hated by many children. In this case, the children

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re-categorized the Turkish Cypriot Denktash as a Turk. This strategy enabled them to explainDenktash’s behaviour and personality, but still retain their overall positive attitudes towardsTurkish Cypriots.

[4] Of course, this reinterpretation of the term ‘Cypriot’ is suggestive of a form of discursiveexclusion based on assumptions about national purity (i.e. ‘Cyprus is Greek and hence onlyGreek Cypriots are Cypriots’, however paradoxical such a statement may be). The Enlightenmentconception of nations as homogeneous, sovereign, and reified entities makes it particularlydifficult, given the role of nationalistic education, to allow for the existence of ethnic minoritieswithin the nation.

[5] Children’s accounts of events may, as Davies (1982, p. 58) has argued, ‘form a mosaic ofexplanations and reasons rather than mutually exclusive accounts’. In other words, children maypresent different accounts of events to the researcher based on their perception of what might beacceptable to the researcher.

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