THE MEDIA AND CULTURE

Using the example of Turkish “honor killings” in Berlin, Kathy Ewing focused her presentation on how discourse controlled by powers such as the media can shape cultural meanings, and how culture can operate at levels beneath those of the predominant discourse.

Recently, three Turkish brothers gunned down their sister at a bus stop. The event was first treated as a regular murder by the newspapers. A discussion was held at a local school near where the murder occurred, and several young Turkish boys claimed that the girl deserved to be murdered. The school principal was outraged, and the situation turned into a large media event. The press said this was the sixth “honor killing” in Berlin over four or five months. This series of murders didn’t spark interest until the last one occurred in conjunction with the media event, which was followed by policy recommendations on how to handle the integration of the Turkish community.

Ewing uses this background to explain how powers such as the media can shape cultural meanings through discourse. Ewing defines culture as the practices by which people negotiate meaning, status and action. Therefore, it is more appropriate to use the term “cultural practices”, which captures the processual nature of culture. Like culture, identities are not static. People have multiple identities and shifting selves. Identities are highly contextual and shift from one moment to the next as relationships shift.

Most anthropologists address causality vaguely. Like Foucault, many focus not on the causes of discursive shifts but on their consequence. Instead of searching to isolate individual factors that cause change, this approach seeks to understand the conjunction of factors involved in it.

The media too, cannot be placed in a straightforward cause and effect relationship. The media interacts with a number of different factors to produce sometimes dramatic changes in people’s practices and understandings. In the case of the Turkish honor killings, the media flurry and ensuing open discussion of certain topics that had previously been considered taboo (such as patriarchal oppression and enslavement of women in Turkish Muslim homes) occurred in conjunction with other events that enabled such discussion to occur. The September 11 attacks, the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam, added with the fact that youth gangs have been emerging, plus a movement that made it “cool” to be foreign/Turkish led to surge in honor killings as a means way of obtaining status. The meaning of honor killing has then been transformed from a village tradition to a status-enhancing practice for Turks in Germany. The media, however, discussed the killings as a sign that the Turkish community is not integrating, and is reenacting a village tradition in Germany today.

One of the effects from the media flurry is that political proposals that before had been seen as too conservative are now being presented as the next step that Germany should take in handling integration problems. The media controversy enabled the furthering of a political process that hadn’t been possible before (such as banning girls from wearing headscarves in school when previously only teachers were prohibited from doing so).

Finally, there are some methodological considerations stemming from this perspective. Along with shifting identities and experiences, the structure of people’s memories shifts too. If people have shifting, negotiated identities, in terms that are themselves fluid, the questions asked in an interview must be carefully planned, as each identity evokes different memories. Identities are labels that people attach to themselves or that are attached to them. Discourse analysis involves trying to uncover the layers of what goes into constituting a particular utterance.

Following the presentation, several questions were raised on:

· The relationship between German national identity and media interpretation of honor killings

· Changed meanings of the killings versus the media conflating them

· How ideas on integration have changed from this example

Developmental idealism is important, for this model closely informs our notions of who we are. German national identity formed as it recovered from the Nazi era, and the Turkish honor killings enable them to define an “other”-which they are not. German media links the village tradition with the honor killings in Berlin. Because these events are recent and are still being played out in the media, there have been few long-term effects yet. However, change in what is permissible in talk and policy proposal is already a consequence. Furthermore, the two reactions in the Turkish community have been an expression of outrage to the murders, and worries about the disruption of relationships of Turks to German natives.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 940