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transcend the elements of crisis” (1994: 140). TIFF’s initiative is thus presented as an
effort to balance the international Mass Media’ representations of the Balkans. It is
another look into the Balkans which puts forward the discourse and the gaze of the
autochthonous (but not only) directors, and as such, it stands as an opposite political
proposition.

TIFF’s opening to the Balkans is an important strategic choice in its effort to
be established in the international competitive festival network. In a period during
which Greece wants to play a leading role in the region, TIFF starts the systematic
presentation of selected films from the annual Balkan production to the Greek and
foreign audience, making the Balkan showcase as one of the main characteristics of
its international identity. The establishment of “Balkan Survey” is based on a desire to
present Thessaloniki as the centre of the Balkans and TIFF as a meeting point and a
place of communication with the wider region of South-eastern Europe, functioning
as “a bridge among civilizations”. At the same time, TIFF connects Balkan with the
rest of the European and international cinema, placing anew the Balkans in an
international scene. For the foreign film professionals in particular, the opportunity to
see a selection of the year’s most important films and be updated with the latest
developments in Balkan cinema is a strong motive to visit TIFF. Consequently,
TIFF’s treatment of the Balkans at the time as “an exciting landscape” (1994: 140)
was essentially an effort to attract the professionals’ interest and a choice that forms
part of its profile. As Horton (2007:48) has commented, “Thessaloniki has cited the
war in Yugoslavia as an impetus for forming its Balkan Survey”.

TIFF’s emphasis on Balkan cinema also stemmed from the interest generated
by living in the same neighbourhood of the world, in combination with the fact that
the Greek audience was essentially ignorant and prejudiced with it. As the
longstanding national disputes among the Balkan countries and the Cold War had
contributed to the absence of a feeling of togetherness among them, this absence was
also reflected in the cinema. Every national cinema in the region has been developed
independently of each other, without – until recently - having a real cooperation
among themselves. In Greece, this cinema had for a long time been an “anonymous”
one, as aside from a few exceptions, such as Dušan Makavejev, Yilmaz Güney and
Emir Kusturica, whose films were screened commercially from time to time, most
Balkan directors or their work were completely unknown in the country.
Consequently, through the films of the new generation of directors as well as through
the systematic screening of their work, TIFF decisively contributes to the overcoming
of the previous isolation and absence of contact that have traditionally characterized
the Balkan national cinemas.

As a result, from 1994 and afterwards, TIFF has managed to create the
conditions that promote it, constituting a meeting place among the directors,
producers, sales agents, film critics, important film personas and the audience. It is the
scene of the annual presentation and evaluation of the cinematic Balkan production.
Although, the last years the most important Balkan films have already been screened
in other international festivals before Thessaloniki, nevertheless, TIFF remains
perhaps the most important festival in the Balkans. This is because it offers a
panorama of the annual regional production, including new films by newcomers,
veterans or other important Balkan directors, while it also organizes retrospectives
and tributes to directors and the national cinemas of the region. At the same time, a
series of industry activities, such the Balkan Fund (Fund for developing Balkan
scripts), Crossroads (Co-production Forum for the Balkans and the wider region of
the Mediterranean), the Film Market and the presentation of Balkan films as work-in-

MYTHS OF THE OTHER IN THE BALKANS · 253

progress, play during all these years a central role in the “establishment process” and
the creation of Balkan cinema.

2. Programming Balkan Films in the Thessaloniki IFF
My involvement with cinema in TIFF has two dimensions: a cinematic and an
anthropological one. Having studied film, I started working there in 1999 as program
assistant in the “New Horizons” section, while I was writing my Ph.D thesis for
Social Anthropology focusing on a film related subject. In 2002, the Festival director
entrusted me with the coordination of the ‘‘Balkan Survey’’, making me at the same
time responsible for the program’s selection. As a film programmer I thoroughly
search the annual regional film production so that to end up with the films that I
consider as the most important and representative ones. My effort is focusing on the
capturing of what’s happening now in the region, through films that present important
elements of the Balkan life and identity, making up a program with aesthetic and
thematic originality. In order to do so, I use all means so that I can be informed about
the films that are being prepared or have been completed, so that I can preview them:
I address to directors, producers, sales agents, film centres, personal contacts, while I
am also receiving films that are submitted to TIFF for preview purposes. I follow the
work of certain directors and I seek for new talents through the festivals and personal
contacts.

The film selection is a very subjective procedure. It depends on one’s
‘‘cultural’’ sensitivities, his/ her ideas about cinema, on the philosophy one has about
his/her work. I choose a film because it moves me or because I consider it proposes
something new aesthetically or because of its originality with which it approaches a
subject of particular thematic or cultural interest. The films selected with the above
criteria offer me a great pleasure as through them I can express myself on an aesthetic
and an intellectual level. Nevertheless, quite often there are other parameters that
influence the final decision, such as, the quality or the size of the year’s production or
policy reasons (e.g. a film that has been financed by our Festival I must usually
support even though it may not be my first choice). A lot of times the program also
depends on the sales agents’ strategy for the film which may not include its screening
in our festival or the Balkan Survey. I can’t screen all the films that I would have
liked to. However, the final result should not be a random concentration of films but
rather to be characterized by a consistency, with the films completing each other in
terms of style and theme, and altogether forming the picture of the Balkan cinematic
landscape.

If, as a film programmer, I am mainly interested in aesthetics and cinematic
language, as an anthropologist I am especially interested in – as we are talking about
films that are directed by artists who reflect on their civilization – their subjects, the
themes they choose and the way they approach them. I follow Michael Fischer’s
approach to cinema “as a space where the cultural motifs and processes are expressed
so that society can see and reflect upon itself” (1998: 110-11). As a result, I consider
cinema as a vehicle which describes cultural patterns and social dynamics motifs in a
“present tense”. I look for cinema’s anthropological functions and I am interested in
seeing whether and to what degree, the Balkan films are engaged in cultural criticism
or negotiate the contemporary social dynamics or function as a means for treating
historical and social wounds or for reconstructing the society and the public sphere
after social civil war wounds. And of course, I am interested in “cinema as a vehicle
of its own, in the rhetoric of the film language as it connotes the cultural codes, the

MYTHS OF THE OTHER IN THE BALKANS · 254

narratives and the local innuendos used as a way of thinking by people of certain
regions”.

Moreover, as an anthropologist I have a critical approach to the view which
treats the Balkans simply as a geographical region as well as towards TIFF’s use of
the term ‘‘Balkans’’ as a convention, as we will see below. According to Todorova
(1994: 453), “geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as
‘‘the other’’, the Balkans became, in time, the object of a number of externalized
political, ideological and cultural frustrations and have served as a repository of
negative characteristics against a positive and self-congratulatory image of the
‘‘European’’ and ‘‘the West’’ has been constructed”.

In TIFF’s and Balkan Survey’s case, the countries that are considered as
Balkan are those which have participated in the historical Ottoman reality, including
Turkey but excluding Greece, its films being presented in a separate section. It’s an
absence that although it’s understandable when considering TIFF’S origin, structure
and priorities, it nevertheless refers to a cold war categorization’ reading of the region
in which, Greece is separated from the rest of the countries in the region.

Although to approach the Balkans as a unified culture is considered by many
as not acceptable or at least problematic, a closer examination of the new Balkan
films reveals a great thematic and stylistic consistency. It’s not only the documentary
realism and the use of the same naughty and mischievous humor that is in common in
Balkan films; they also share similar themes which spring from shared history and
socio-cultural space: the Ottoman presence, the resistance to foreign occupiers and
totalitarian regimes, the turbulent history and the volatile politics, the migration from
villages to cities, the semi-Orientalist positioning of the region, the legacy of
patriarchy and economic and cultural dependency (Iordanova 2006: 1).

In reaction to the continuous marginality and the false representation of the
Balkans, Iordanova (2006: 11) proposes the transcendence of the individual national
cultures for the sake of a Balkan mutuality. Her intention is to acknowledge the supra-
national dimensions of the regional heritage and to give boost to an appreciation of a
shared regional identity which will offer a framework for a new, critical examination
of the sense of belonging and a positive thinking about “being Balkan”.

The way that TIFF approaches the Balkans expresses not only a reaction to the
fragmentation that historically has characterized the countries of the region but also a
wish to present the elements that connect them. But by excluding Greece from the
Balkan Survey, it’s not possible to create a real dialogue among the Greek and the
other Balkan films nor to highlight the shared cultural motifs nor to highlight the
Balkan element of Greece. Balkan Survey ultimately expresses Greece’s gaze to the
Balkans.

3. The anthropological perspective of Balkan cinema
Balkan filmmakers’ contemporary interests and orientations give to their cinema a
few of the anthropological uses and functions that Fischer has proposed. During the
last decade, all important Balkan films ultimately deal with the contemporary
historical reality of the region. They focus on stories about the communist years, the
civil war in Yugoslavia, the events of Ceausescu’s fall, the military coup in the 80s or
other moments of social and political tension in Turkey. History is treated as
something to endure, to live through, a process where one doesn’t have agency but is
subjected to the will power of external forces. Priority is given to some memories
while others are neglected or totally eliminated. As a result, according to Iordanova
(2007: 22), “these conditions often result in uneven or choppy narratives of the















































































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28. Non-European ‘‘Others’’? A study on the stereotypical representations of
Eastern Turks by citizens of Istanbul

Nikitas Palantzas
Hellenic American Educational Foundation, Athens

[email protected]

Abstract
This paper examines the emergence of stereotypical representations of Eastern Turkey
among citizens of Istanbul. These stereotypes are expressed through specific
categories, with social and cultural connotations that aim to describe Eastern Turks as
Turkey’s internal ‘‘Others’’. This appears in multiple contexts in everyday local
discourse in Istanbul, including the question of Turkey’s relations with Europe and its
accession to the European Union. I argue that these attitudes are not based on the
negotiation of fixed identities based on oppositional prescribed cultural
characteristics, but they can serve as indicators of the more complex dynamic
relations at the local level.
Keywords: Stereotypes, vernacular politics, Turkey, Europe, European Union

1. Introduction
In this paper I am going to discuss the stereotypical representations of Eastern Turkey
by some citizens of Istanbul and particularly their emergence in discussions about
Turkey’s accession to the European Union. Used in multiple contexts and by different
groups, these stereotypical categorizations refer to people living in Eastern Turkey or
to those who have migrated from the Eastern provinces of the country to Istanbul and
other large cities of Western Turkey approximately over the last six decades. In many
occasions during my fieldwork, Eastern Turkey and Eastern Turks appeared in
everyday conversations as a fixed category constituting a kind of Turkey’s internal
‘‘Other’’. While carrying out my research in Istanbul, I was particularly interested in
the way these category-based stereotypes appeared in discussions about Turkey’s
relations with Europe and particularly the country’s membership to join the European
Union. More specifically by doing so, many of my interlocutors gave rise to an
idiosyncratic kind of ‘‘internal orientalism’’ 216 , by which they expressed their
scepticism toward Turkey’s accession to the European Union. I call this kind of
‘‘internal orientalism’’ idiosyncratic in the sense that, in these contexts, it was very
generally based on the wider premise that Eastern Turkey and Eastern Turks represent
the non-European, the non-Western image of Turkey. However, this perception was
generally confronted with discontent by the very same people, in more extrovert and
spontaneous responses, especially when this was received as an external
preconception about Turkey from EU or other ‘‘Western’’ discourses.217

216 Here I use ‘Orientalism’ in the way the term was employed in Edward Said’s famous work (1978).
However, as I will attempt to show in this paper, I choose to use the term here not as an analytical tool
but as the point of departure for my main argument.
217 For example in many occasions different EU leaders, including the French President Nicolas
Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have raised certain doubts about Turkey’s
‘European’ credentials or identity. Statements in this direction are confronted with great discontent by
a significant number of Turkish people.

MYTHS OF THE OTHER IN THE BALKANS · 297

Apparently there is a large literature on stereotypes and the different ways that
these serve as categories of difference in the constitution of the ‘‘Self’’ and the
‘‘Other’’ especially as these appear in the negotiation of ‘‘European’’ identities
(McDonald 1993) where ‘‘Europe’’ as an abstract set of meanings with social and
cultural connotations provides an enormous yet vague framework open to diverse
interpretations of the ‘‘European’’ and the ‘‘non-European’’ (cf. Padgen et al 2002).
Over the last decades through a certain ‘‘politics of culture’’ the European Union has
attempted to incorporate this set of meanings in its self-representation as a cultural
entity rather than a political and economic federation of member-states (Shore 2000).
As a consequence discussions about the European Union are often associated with or
reproduce the existing schemes and meanings of the ‘‘idea of Europe’’ in official
discourses as well as unofficial everyday commentary. This leads to a more or less
conscious proliferation of evaluations and distinctions based on the European/non-
European binary opposition, which appears in multiple contexts and through diverse
and often arbitrary interpretations. It is in such frameworks that stereotypes may
appear as categories that constitute Europe’s cultural and social ‘‘Others’’, often
covering larger geographical regions, which eventually ends up in the imagination of
‘‘Europe’s’’ peripheries as fixed, static entities with social and cultural attributes of
the ‘‘non-European’’ (Todorova 1997). The reproduction of the very same meanings
seems to be at work when stereotypes about Eastern Turkey appear in the
commentary of citizens of Istanbul.

However, my intention is not to discuss the stereotypes as such, but rather to
put emphasis on the reason why these are emerging in discussions about Turkey’s
accession to the European Union in everyday contexts. My intention is to examine
stereotypical representations of Eastern Turks in their specific contexts as they
emerge in everyday life and not simply as constituting elements of labelling by which
one group negotiates its identity towards another. I maintain that an examination of
the circumstances under which stereotypes emerge in local discourses, as observed
through ethnographic research, may serve as analytical tools for the understanding of
social and political processes that take place within a society. My intention is to focus
the discussion on stereotypes beyond the deconstruction of the prescribed identities
they attempt to constitute and examine them as part of a more dynamic dialectic
relationship between local actors. This is an attempt that aims to approach
stereotypical representations of Eastern Turkey, as these appear in discussions about
the European Union among citizens of Istanbul, as part of the examination of the
political in its vernacular manifestations among local actors (Vincent et al 2005).

By looking at stereotypes in their circumstantial contexts, my intention is also
to develop my approach away from a theoretical framework that is exhausted on the
juxtaposition of modernity and tradition, but to highlight instead the complexities that
attributes of both concepts are being deployed between different agents at the local
level (cf. Kandiyoti 2002). My purpose is to detect the multiple and ambivalent uses
of these concepts, as well as the binary oppositions often attached to them –especially
in the case of Turkish society 218 - as these are depicted on the category based
reproduction of stereotypes.

218 I refer to the most commonly used binary opposition Kemalism/Islam that is widely used by both
internal and external discourses about Turkey, which I discuss in more detail in the following sections
of this paper through my ethnographic example.