Geopolitics: Ebru: Reflections of Cultural Diversity in Turkey by Attila Durak
This lady represents just one of the
cultures to be found today in Turkey
When yesterday I wrote of the film ‘Don’t Be Afraid of Life‘, a story about three innocent men forced to encounter todays commercial world I thought about ‘Ebru’ the book reflecting on Turkish Culture by Attila Durak. This book of Durak’s photographic images, which took seven years to make, is enriched by text and comment from a number of additional contributors.
For example Ayşe Erzan writes: “‘Ebru’ and ‘mosaic’ are terms that call forth an overarching design. Such appellations, while they may not point to a particular narrative, nevertheless perform a normative function, as they imply that this spontaneously emerging pattern is not random, but embodies such volitional human values as aesthetics.”
She continues to argue that Attila Duraks photographs are of a humanistic quality, which neither attempts to normalise the suffering inevitable when different ethnicities and cultures must coexist and compete for survival, nor does it attempt to politicise differences.
Just as the England of warm beer and cricket, Agincourt and the Spitfire is a tiny subset of the English identity, so Turkishness is difficult to define. This region was an aggregate long before the Modern Turkish State came into being after the war of independence.
We forget, however, that Turkey is not unique in this regard. Ayşe Gül Altınay, writing in Ebru, states: “Cultural homogeneity, much like national homogeneity is a myth produced and sustained by political, popular, and academic representations of culture. .. it reinforces the notion of essential differences between ‘self’ and ‘others’, whether in the context of national ideologies, racism, colonialism, or orientation. Second, by treating cultures as homogenous entities, this approach conceals power relations and differences within each cultural group. By extension it contributes to the fetishization of culture as the main source of difference between human beings. It is as if people are different from one another solely in cultural terms.”
Seventy years after the French revolution, French was a foreign language to half of its citizens, with twenty five per cent of the people not speaking it at all. Similarly in 1861, the percentage of Italian speakers in Italy was only about 2.5 per cent. The great ‘success’ of nation building processes is that a century later these facts are unknown to all but a few academics.
Attlia Durak’s contribution to the study of Turkish Cultural Diversity would have been impossible were he not a character who is able to live amongst this diversity as an outside with his camera, yet be, sometimes ever so slowly, accepted as a visitor and then witness to the depth of the people he meets.
More details about this book may be found here.
