Images of “The Other”: “The Turk” in Greek Cypriot Children’s Imaginations

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Cypriot elementary school children, I describe how national identity is constructed in the classroom through the use of an >us= versus >them= frame of reference, a process which essentializes identity and gives rise to an eternal and primordial enemy. Twenty-six years after the Turkish invasion and occupation of 37% of Cyprus's territory, how do stereotypes about the Turks--the primary >other= against whom Greek Cypriot children construct their identities--become meaningful in their imaginations given the absence of any interaction between the two groups? Similarly, how do these children construct their identities meaningfully given the multiple, ambiguous, and often contradictory messages they receive about the Turks from both within and outside school? In this article, I illustrate how children=s stereotypical constructions of Turks are largely informed by their school learning but are also more complex constructions than the stereotypes themselves suggest.

INTRODUCTION

"There was a Turk, a Greek and an American and they went up a very tall mountain. The American took his shirt off and threw it down. The Turk asked him: 'Why did you throw your shirt down?' And the American told him: 'We have a lot in America.' Then the Turk was jealous and took his watch off and threw it down. The Cypriot [she means the "Greek"] says to the Turk: 'Why did you throw your watch down? It's so nice!' They were all friends. And the Turk said: 'Ouh, we have a lot in Turkey.' Then the Cypriot takes the Turk and throws him down from the cliff and the American says: 'Why did you throw the Turk down the cliff?' And the Cypriot said: 'We have a lot of them in Cyprus.'"

When Elena, a sixth grader, told me this joke she laughed with her heart. It was meant to be a joke, to entertain. But the matter to which it referred was a serious one, for Elena and all the other children I worked with and who at times would tell me jokes like this. The choice of Turks in the punch line is not accidental of course. It is precisely the reason for it being a joke. The Turks are a well-understood problem for Greek Cypriot children. They are the invaders, the occupiers, the enemy. Therefore, as a group they have a unique position in their imaginations.

This article describes and analyzes how Greek Cypriot elementary school children perceive, imagine, and talk about Turks as a people. My attempt is to illustrate the process of ethnic identity construction in childhood as it takes shape in contemporary Greek Cypriot society.

The data I present here were collected during a year of intensive ethnographic fieldwork (July 1996 to July 1997) carried out in the southern part of Cyprus, the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus. The aim of the study was to examine ethnic identity construction among Greek Cypriot children attending elementary school (Spyrou, 1999). The project focused on two communities and their respective schools, one urban community near the buffer zone in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, and a rural community about one hour=s drive south-west of Nicosia. The school emerged as a major site for the study of ethnic socialization but other contexts outside the school were also studied in order to account for the multiple sites and agents that are responsible for children=s ethnic socialization (e.g., the home, the playground, the coffee shop, and the afternoon school). A variety of different methods and techniques were used to collect data including observation, participant-observation, interviewing, sorting and ranking, drawing, essay-writing, picture and poem interpretation, photography and video recording. The data I use in this article mainly come from classroom observations and interviews with children.

CHILDREN AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

The recent academic attention to childhood has brought with it an interest in the social and cultural worlds of children and their lived experiences. Researchers have challenged the assumptions of traditional studies of childhood and socialization and started investigating the role that children themselves play in their own lives and in the lives of those they interact with (e.g., Hutchby and Moran-Ellis, 1998; James, 1993; James and Prout, 1990; Mayall, 1996; Morton, 1996; Solberg, 1990). This shift towards children's agency and away from overdetermined notions of childhood has contributed a great deal to our understanding of children's worlds in context and from their own points of view rather than from the point of view of adults.

Moreover, this new emphasis on understanding children's worlds also led to an interest in exploring issues of major concern to social science in general such as identity contruction and the politics of culture as they intersect with children and childhood. In her study of childhood identities, Alison James (1993) exemplified this approach to studying children as social actors by focusing on their experiences and social relationships as they take place in particular contexts. Similarly, in an edited volume entitled Children and the Politics of Culture (Stephens, 1995), the authors made significant contributions towards the much neglected area of culture and politics in childhood. Though nationalism as a social phenomenon--the focus of this article--has been greatly studied and critiqued in the last three decades (e.g., Anderson, 1986; Calhoun, 1997; Gellner, 1983, Hobsbawm, 1997), childhood researchers have only recently shown interest in it (e.g., Cullingford, 2000; Gullestad, 1997; Hengst, 1997; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Koester, 1997; Okely, 1997; Spyrou, 2000). In ethnically divided societies like Cyprus, nationalism, especially as it manifests itself through the educational system, plays a key role in defining a political sense of "self" in relation to "others." However, studies of childhood and identity construction in such societies are still very few (e.g., Bryne, 1997; Burman & Reynolds, 1990; Coles, 1986; Davey, 1987; Elbedour and Brunce, 1997; Spyrou, 1999, 2001).

Finally, in recent years critical studies of education have also shifted their attention to cultural production rather than reproduction emphasizing the dynamism and complexity of identity-making as it takes place in both schools and extra-educational contexts (e.g., Foley, 1990, 1995; Hall, 1995; Holland and Eisenhart, 1990; Levinson, 1996; Levinson and Holland, 1996; Luykx, 1999; MacLeod, 1995; Rival, 1996; Weis, 1990). In Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (McCarthy and Crichlow, 1993), a seminal work dealing with the intersection of identity and education, the authors provided critical understandings of the identity-construction process as it takes shape in specific educational contexts. In one of the contributions, Hatcher and Troyna (1993) illustrate, using ethnographic evidence, the dynamics of the racialization process. Much in line with my own argument in this paper, the authors argue that children help to reproduce racist and prejudicial attitudes because racist ideologies provide them with a framework for interpreting their everyday lives in a concrete way. Moreover, the contradictions and inconsistencies of racist ideologies allow children to actively interpret their experiences, not only reproducing existing racist attitudes but also producing new meanings and understandings which contest such ideologies.

CONTEXTS AND FRAMEWORKS OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

Identity construction is a situated process. It takes place in specific social, cultural, and political contexts at a specific point in history. Today the primary >other= against whom Greek Cypriot children construct their identities are the Turks. AOthers@ change through time, enemies come and go, even if nationalist historiography likes to construct them as eternal adversaries of the nation. The interethnic problems of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities during the 1960s, the coup and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and the stalemate in all political attempts to solve the Cyprus problem have helped create and sustain the image of Athe Turk@ as the principal enemy of Greek Cypriots and the Greek nation at large.

The Greek Cypriot children I worked with had well-constructed images of the Turks in their minds. Their understandings were greatly informed by the larger cultural discourses to which they were exposed. In the process of growing up in a society where they are constantly made aware of the Aabnormality@ resulting from the Turkish occupation in Cyprus, they learn that Turks stand as the major obstacle for the reinstatement of peace and tranquility in their country. They come to see the division of Cyprus as an unjust state of affairs, one for which Turkey, above all, is responsible. During this process of growing up and learning who they themselves are, they also learn who the enemies are. Enemies are indeed important in identity construction; they help to concretize the sense of >self.= This dialectic between >self= and >other=--the very process of identity construction--is what I am concerned with here.

Anthropologists, most notably Fredrik Barth, have contributed a great deal to our understanding of identity construction in interethnic contexts. In his Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969a; 1969b), Barth introduced a new way of thinking about ethnicity, drawing attention to its interactional nature. For Barth, ethnicity is a form of social organization, based not on the cultural content of ethnic groups but rather on the boundaries that they erect and maintain between themselves. The ethnic boundaries that separate one group from another persist because there is interaction between the groups, not because they are isolated from each other. The boundaries are thus not cultural but social; cultural differences are important only as long as they help maintain ethnic boundaries through social interaction.

Though Barth's approach tells us much about the maintenance of ethnic boundaries resulting from interaction between groups, it tells us nothing about ethnic boundary maintenance in the absence of social interaction between ethnic groups, as is the case with the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities in Cyprus. The boundary that separates the two communities is not only physical, but also psycho-social. It is a relational boundary (Cohen, 1982, p. 3) which is constantly created and recreated symbolically by the members of the two communities in the process of making sense of who they are. It is essentially an ethnic boundary but one which is erected and maintained through different processes than those outlined by Barth. These processes are those which, broadly speaking, constitute ethnic socialization, that is the cultural learning that allows members of one ethnic group to construct their self-identities as distinct from those of others. What is interesting of course in contexts like Cyprus is that the absence of actual physical inter-ethnic contact implicates both individual and collective imagination in this process.

The role of individual consciousness and agency in boundary construction and maintenance is another aspect neglected in Barth's approach. Though ethnic boundaries are collectively erected boundaries, they are nevertheless erected by individuals. To the extent that they exist it is because they are erected in individuals' imaginations, not despite of them (see Cohen, 1994, 1996)

Similarly, studies of nationalism have not adequately addressed this problem. A most influential study of nationalism is Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983). Anderson defines the nation as an imagined political community: "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, 1983, p. 6). Though highly illuminating about the power of the imagination to constitute a collective reality, Anderson's approach does not account for the dynamic processes by which such imaginings are constructed, contested, and reconstructed. In this article I try to address this question, focusing on how communities are constructed and imagined in the presence of a primary >other,= an enemy. First, I illustrate the process of identity construction as it takes place in the classroom.

>US= AND >THEM=

Nationalistic discourse aims at what Bakhtin calls canonization or the "process that blurs heteroglossia, that is, that facilitates a naive, single-voiced reading" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 425). Whether it manages to persuade or not, it comes with authority attached to it (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342). Through emotional appeals, it seeks to construct a grandiose community which can only be imagined but never fully experienced through direct contact. As Alonso (1994, p. 388) has argued, "it is through epic discourses, broadly conceived, that the nation is particularized and centered, imagined as eternal and primordial, and that nationalist love becomes sacralized and sublime sentiment, indeed, a form of piety."

It is to nationalistic discourse that teachers have often turned to in the classroom in their efforts to explicate self-identity. On occasion, they would appropriate highly loaded and emotional language full of imagery. In his description about the fall of Constantinople, Christoforos, a rural teacher, explained that after the Turks entered the city they "slaughtered the Greeks." The use of the word "slaughter" conjures images of the killing of animals with knives. The word "massacre" (sfaghi) in Greek when used to describe genocide (e.g., the Armenian genocide--i sfaghi ton Armenion) comes from the same root emphasizing the cruelty involved in the act of genocide. Such language, of course, aims to arouse an emotional response. The image is one of ruthless murderers and innocent victims. The evaluative response is one of disgust: those who do such things are certainly not civilized humans; only barbarians could do such things.

At other times, teachers used the exaggerated discourse of nationalistic folklore to impress in children=s imaginations the superhuman qualities of national heroes. In a history lesson on the 1821 Greek war of liberation, the teacher described Kolokotronis [a national hero] with the following: "When they heard just his voice the Turks run away." The national hero is imagined as greater than life itself. The enemies might be greater in number and have more means but we have heroes. Heroes are central to the building of a national identity; they are those who give the nation the right to see itself as superior to all other nations. The greatness of the nation rests with those few who, unlike the rest, have shown the utmost loyalty to the idea of the nation. Heroes allow the national imagination to dwell into the past but more importantly to imagine, and hope for, a future that will repeat the great victories and accomplishments of the past.

Indeed, the very construction of a national identity is based on this self/other frame of reference where the >self= always emerges as superior to the >other.= It is a kind of logic that seeks to define the >self= in terms of the >other= but in the process both >self= and >other= emerge as two polarized opposites that cannot exist (in that form) but in relation to one another. To put it another way, there are Greeks because there are Turks. This is not to deny the existence of constructions that seek to emphasize primarily the binding elements of the national >self= (a shared language, religion, customs, history, and so on) and less so the >other= as a negative frame of reference. But even then the very process of attributing any evaluative meaning to the >self= is necessarily done in negative comparative terms in relation to >others= whether explicitly or by implication. Such polarized understandings of >self= and >other= were often constructed in the classroom. As the primary >other,= Turks emerged as the defining opposite of Greeks. The logic is one which sees Greeks as civilized, Turks as barbarians, Greeks as peaceful, Turks as warmongers, Greeks as courageous, Turks as cowards.

Consider the following example. During a discussion in the 6th grade history lesson about WWII, the teacher said: "The Turks helped the Germans and the Italians and the Japanese by not entering the war, thus indirectly helping them. Turkey was neutral but of course was friendly with the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese." The teacher then went on to discuss the moral position taken by Greece who, unlike Turkey, resisted the Germans. The lesson is that Turkey is not to be trusted. Turkey has historical responsibilities. Its neutrality during WWII indirectly helped the world=s enemies. But this construction becomes much more meaningful and the lessons much more powerful once the Turkish stance is compared to the Greek stance. The Greeks opposed Germany; they did not remain neutral; they did not side with the aggressors, but--unlike the Turks--resisted evil and in the end won, together with the rest of the world. Hence, they have every reason to feel proud for doing the right thing. Turkey is thus not simply the enemy of Hellenism but also a historical enemy of the world at large for its intentional neutrality provided indirect help to the WWII aggressors. In this formulation, Turkey's national history (and >ours= in relation to Turkey=s) is a non-contingent history. It is a history that one can easily trace backwards given what one knows about the present; the national past contains no surprises.

Or consider the next example where Turks are used as a yardstick for measuring other >others.= The teacher=s comment takes place during a class discussion about Egyptian civilization in a geography lesson for the 5th and 6th grades of the rural school.

Teacher: "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, the Ottomans, who have always been barbarians?@

The teacher=s question here operates at a number of different levels. Though its aim is to elicit a response about the state of Egyptian civilization--which is after all the topic being discussed--it simultaneously constructs a particular understanding of Turks, both present-day and historical. It positions the Turks in the unquestionable and undeniable category of Abarbarians@ but it also offers them as a reference point to help the children respond to his question appropriately: Of course the Egyptians had more civilization than the Turks.

It is not surprising that teachers themselves allude to this dialectical construction of >self= and >other= in the classroom. In a discussion about the siege of Mesolongi in a 6th grade history class, the teacher for example pointed out that: "The common element which made all of them [i.e., the Greeks] fight together was the Turk (o Tourkos)." The teacher's comment points to the need for having an >other=: you need an enemy to give your collective existence meaning. The use of the singular term "the Turk" (o Tourkos) is a semantic strategy for essentializing the >other.= "The Turk" as a descriptive term of the >other= seeks to individualize the collectivity in an absolute manner. There are no different kinds of Turks but "a Turk" who is homogeneous, undifferentiated and captures the essential nature of all Turks. As the saying goes "if you have seen one, you've seen them all."

TURKS AS THE ETERNAL OTHER

The history which becomes relevant in understanding and explaining the present is the history of animosity between >us= and >them.= In the classroom, teachers often equate present-day Turkey with the Ottoman empire. The expansionist tendencies of the latter are seen as necessarily being in line with the expansionist tendencies of Turkey today. In this manner, an essential historical continuity is established. History proves the nature of Athe Turk@ who is, in all fundamental respects, one and the same, then and now. If his ancestors were barbarians, he must be too; if his ancestors had expansionist tendencies, he too must have the same tendencies, and so on. Through this process of illustrating the >other= historically, an eternal enemy is constructed; an enemy who, like >us,= is immutable, unchanging, primordial. By collapsing time and historical contingency identity is fully essentialized.

Very often, another crucial connection is made. And most of the children can, quite easily, make sense of it given what they know about Turkey in relation to Cyprus. They know quite well that Turkey invaded and occupied part of Cyprus. In their constructions of Athe Turk,@ they not only have the distant national history to draw on but a much closer and more intimate history, that of their own country. Whatever happens today--whether it is a man killed in the buffer zone while gathering snails or somebody shot and killed for demonstrating against the Turkish occupation--the present provides many examples to prove that indeed the >other= is essentially the same. Indeed, history becomes objective and much more powerful when it is reaffirmed in the present. Who the >other= is may be validated if events in the present--lived history--provide affirmation for the essential, unchanging nature of that >other.= In the following example, both the teacher and the student (during a lesson in Greek with the 4th grade) construct Athe Turk@ as barbaric and heartless by reflecting on the violent events that took place during the summer of 1996 on the buffer zone:

Teacher: "How do you feel about the way they [i.e., the Turks] killed them [i.e., the Greek Cypriots], about the barbarous, barbarous way by which they killed them?"

Chariklia: "Mrs, the Turks don't have a heart."

The children were quite familiar with the violent events on the buffer zone. All of them had seen the events live on television as they were unfolding, and for several weeks afterwards they heard all kinds of explanations and opinions about what happened. The teacher in the above example constructed the Turks as barbaric, an image which Chariklia in turn found easy to reaffirm in her mind and in the minds of her classmates. The buffer zone events became an anchoring experience--an illustrative example--on which she and other children drew from to describe the Turks. Local history feeds into the larger history of the nation where it finds a framework for interpretation; there is, after all, nothing really surprising regarding the Turks= behavior given what children know from history. Lived history is incorporated into the larger history of the nation in a powerful manner; the children have seen what happened and had all the evidence to crystallize in their imaginations the image of Athe Turk@ as a barbarian.

When a few weeks after the violent events of the summer another Greek Cypriot was killed by Turks for accidentally entering the occupied territories while gathering snails, these same children once again reaffirmed their attitudes and feelings towards the Turks:

Athos: "A man who went to gather snails and the Turks shot him."

Minos: "[I feel] Sadness, anger, because the Turks killed another one."

Monika: "I was going to cry because they killed too many, that's why."

For many children these events aroused emotional reactions. Marinos=s [6th grade] comments below are quite revealing; his interpretation of what happened allows him to reinforce his existing views of the Turks as cruel and inhuman:

" . . . I think the behavior of the Turks was inhuman. They went and killed a human being as if he was an animal. That time I was very angry. I was watching on TV and I had a nervous breakdown. A man was there demonstrating for something that he is right about. I believe he was very right, to go and enter the Turkish territories, which are really not Turkish but Cypr... [he was going to say "Cypriot" but changed his mind] . . . Greek. He tried to go inside his house and they forbade him from entering. This is inhuman."

To be a Abarbarian@ is to behave in an inhuman way; it is to disregard others= humanity. Only a barbarian could kill another human being who is exercising his right to return to his home. A sense of injustice, anger, and frustration characterized many of the children=s feelings about the Turks= behavior. That the present affirmed the children=s historical knowledge made these feelings more intense. They gained first-hand knowledge of history through experience (see Cohen, 1996). After all, this history is repetitive; the present, however, puts it in sharp focus.

But it is not just the present that is being implicated in the history of the nation. Nationalist logic proceeds one step further. And this indeed is the power of nationalist imagination: the adversarial relationship between >us= and >them= is not just a "fact" of history; it is also a "fact" of the future (however speculative such a rhetorical statement may be). In short, what happened in the past between the two groups is likely to happen again and again in the future. For, after all, these are the same people. Thus, the Abarbaric@ nature of the Turks is not just a thing of the past but something they will also exhibit in the future. It is their nature, something that cannot be changed. This "history of the future" is predictable given what is known about the past and the present. The implications for >us= are also quite clear given this kind of imagination: >We= need to do what our heroic ancestors did when they had to face the Turks. >We= need to stand up to >them= and liberate the homeland.

In his study of the Haredim in Israel, Heilman (1992, p. 203) has termed this process "traditioning" which "means never seeing the past as beyond retrieval but rather experiencing it as an ongoing reverberation in the present." By using the past as a strategic symbolic resource, a much more complicated reality is made comprehensible in terms of simple and clear dichotomies: >us= and >them,= good and evil. At the same time, through this constant dialogue with the past history becomes the unavoidable future. Nationalist imagination abolishes profane time and enters the realm of mythical time where life repeats itself eternally. That which is individual and particular in history becomes exemplary in popular memory and in the process loses its historicity (Eliade, 1954, pp. 36, 46). This collapsing of time into an eternal cycle of repetition is a theme that teachers, parents, and other agents of socialization, as well as the children themselves draw upon to center, at least discursively, their identities (see Avdela, 1997).

The negative constructions of Turks in the classroom are, in the majority of cases, initiated and exemplified by teachers, though the children themselves may act as co-constructors during class discussion. Not all teachers, of course, share the same understandings and some of them do engage in alternative (more positive or less negative) constructions of the Turks. But in their everyday practice many teachers find it easy to resort to the stereotypes that a nationalistic self/other frame propagates, even when they themselves do not, in their understandings as individuals, support such a view.

In general, most teachers viewed mainland Turks and the Turkish settlers in the occupied territories very negatively in contrast to Turkish Cypriots who were described much more positively. Harris, a third grade teacher for example, believed that "in general the Turks, being uncivilized that they are, their mentality is different and it would not bother them at all to kill, to loot a country, in general their mentality is very Asian." Harris identifies >difference in mentality= as a defining element of Turkish identity which he integrates into a larger explanatory framework of West=civilized versus East=uncivilized. The East/West polarity allows him to establish identity for the >other= based on assumed difference which is in turn interpreted as inferiority.

Christoforos, another teacher, also had a negative evaluation of Turks but qualified his statements by blaming the Turkish military rather the ordinary Turkish citizens. By acknowledging some of the internal heterogeneity of Turkishness, Christoforos partly deconstructs the stereotype of the evil Turk though his evaluation is still a negative one dependent above all on the fact that these are Turks.

When I asked the teachers whether they thought that children are fanaticized against Turks at school the majority said they did not think so. Their refusal to acknowledge what I termed as Afanaticism@ is, of course, to be expected since the word fanaticism suggests some kind of pedagogical wrongdoing--teachers are supposed to impart knowledge, not fanaticize. But consider Hara=s comment below which suggests that to some extent fanaticism might be inevitable even if undesirable:

"Since this thing [i.e., fanaticism] takes place in all peoples, in all countries, there is no other solution. The same must happen with us. I don't like the world as it is, personally. But since you see the Russian growing up and being a fanaticized Russian, the American the same, the British the same . . . " ( . . . ) "While I believe and feel that all people are siblings . . . but this thing might also be a mistake. But since there is this thing happening, there is no other way of defense as a state, as an ethnicity, apart from being fanaticized with regard to your nation and your homeland. There is no other way of defense. How will you defend [your homeland]? You will either become subjugated or you will resist."

For Hara, fanaticism, despite being negative, is perhaps inevitable. Indeed, for many teachers this is the fundamental dilemma of ethnic socialization: how to instill in children a strong sense of national pride which they see as necessary for >our= survival as a nation and for liberating >our= occupied territories while simultaneously avoiding the demonization of those who have occupied >our= territories and are threatening >our= survival. In their attempts to do the first, which they see as absolutely necessary, many teachers refrain from doing the latter. Or, to put it more simply, Ahow does one paint a humane picture of the enemy?@

The next section examines how individual children construct in their imaginations images of Athe Turk.@ As it will be seen, though much is shared in their understandings, there are also differences in how each individual child comes to imagine Turks as a category.

THE TURKS IN CHILDREN=S IMAGINATIONS

When I asked the children to name "a group of people who are very different from >us=@ most of them mentioned the Turks. And when I asked them to write down the opposites of a number of words, for ATurks@ they cited words like ACypriots@ [equated with AGreek Cypriots@], AGreeks,@ A[Christian] Orthodox,@ and Agood.@ Also, much of what the children told me about their own sense of identity was defined in relation to Turkey and Turks: unlike Turkey, Cyprus is civilized; unlike the Turks who destroy our churches in the occupied territories we do not destroy their mosques in the south; and unlike the Turks who kill those who cross the buffer zone we just arrest them.

In our conversations, many children described Turks as 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 characterization Abarbarian@ as both a descriptive and evaluative term of the Turks was at the heart of most of the children=s explanations. It is to this term that I now turn to illustrate its discursive range and power as a key defining attribute of Turkishness.

As a country, Turkey occupies a unique position in children=s minds. It is unlike any other; it is Athe worst country@ and Turks are Athe most barbaric people.@ But why are they barbarians, I would ask. The children always had responses for what seemed to them in many ways a naive question on my part, especially given that I am a Greek Cypriot myself and I should know. For Kyriakos [6th grade], the Turks "came and terrified Cyprus. They took it with barbarous behavior, they enslaved it, and they killed many people." The Turkish occupation of Cyprus is for many children the primary proof that the Turks are barbarians for to take someone else's homeland is uncivilized. The children readily justified their beliefs with examples from the national history they learned at school. Popi [6th grade], for example, pointed out that the Turks have occupied and still continue to occupy territories that were previously Greek, like Constantinople. But the children also drew on recent Alived history@ which they themselves have experienced. The violent events of the 1996 summer at the buffer zone as well as other murder incidents which have taken place on the buffer zone were common examples many children used to illustrate that indeed the Turks are barbarians. Elena [6th grade], for example, explained: ALet's say they [i.e., the Turks] see a person who crosses the buffer zone and they kill him. Let's say, instead of feeling sorry for him, they will kill him instead. And if they see another person in the buffer zone, if they see him, they will again kill him." Invariably, the children would also point out that "we do not do the same thing to them."

The image of Turks as barbarians went hand-in-hand with their image as aggressors. Indeed, it was this perceived aggression on the part of the Turks which led many children to believe that the Turks are not interested in solving the Cyprus problem but rather want to occupy the entire island, as well as other countries. In Popi's [6th grade] words: "They make wars."

( . . . ) "With the Greeks, with anyone." ( . . . ) "They want more territory." ( . . . ) "To gain more power from the rest." The language that some children used to describe the Turks= behavior was itself emotionally loaded, harsh, and very often connoted a sense of extreme cruelty: the Turks did not just occupy Greece and Cyprus, they enslaved us; they did not simply kill us, they slaughtered us. The implications are, of course, clear: to enslave and to slaughter is to exhibit barbaric behavior for no civilized people would engage in such acts. Finally, some children like Neofitos [6th grade] pointed out that Turkey is not just creating problems with other countries but it also creates problems for the Turkish people themselves: "Its inhabitants might not complain but I know that the Turks do not live well. It is not a democracy."

GOOD TURKS, BAD TURKS AND THE DEPTH OF STEREOTYPES

Though most of what is said in the classroom is clearly ethnocentric and aimed to erect and sustain a boundary between >us= and >them,= occasionally some teachers present children with other kinds of understandings. Teachers come from a variety of ideological backgrounds and their own personal beliefs and understandings do, on occasion, even if mostly in a low-key manner, enter the classroom lesson. Ethnic socialization does not take place in a vacuum. It is informed by the ideological dispositions of those who engage in it, sometimes overtly but more often through subtle, indirect means (e.g., by what they choose to talk about and what to ignore, by the tone of their voice, and so on). Consider the following example where the teacher is careful to draw a distinction between governments and people, between politicians and ordinary citizens:

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 teacher proceeded to explain that many Turks had no choice but to follow the orders of those above them--their leaders--when they invaded Cyprus.

Though the teacher's statement denies the Turkish people of real political power--that is, Turkish people are seen as being coerced into carrying out their government=s wishes--at the same time, it suggests that ordinary Turks are not, as they are often presented in stereotypes, bad people. Such a construction, of course, has to compete with the more negative constructions of Turks, but it nevertheless constitutes another construction that children may be exposed to--one that many adults, both inside and outside the school, will voice from time to time.

Similarly, though children often resorted to absolute, negative evaluations of Turks (e.g., Turks are bad) when asked to elaborate most of them had a more critical understanding of who Turks are. Thus, when I asked them whether all Turks are bad as their previous assertions implied, many of them explained that Athere are both good and bad Turks.@ Some of them distinguished between ATurks@ [i.e., mainland Turks] and ATurkish Cypriots.@ Much in line with their teachers and parents, these children described Turkish Cypriots much more favorably than Turks: Turkish Cypriots are good people who also suffer as a result of the Turkish occupation while Turks are bad because they invaded and occupied Cyprus (see Spyrou, forthcoming). This attitude is in line with attitudes held in Greek Cypriot society at large: Turkish Cypriots are a different kind of people than mainland Turks and they are not the real problem in Cyprus; it is Turkey and its illegal occupation of Cyprus which is >our= problem.

But though their overwhelming attitude was that Turkish Cypriots unlike Turks are good, some children had reservations. Marinos [6th grade], for example, explained that not all Turkish Cypriots are good and even those who are good are "not entirely good" because they still "have the blood of the Turk inside them." Similarly, Neofitos [6th grade] had an ambiguous attitude towards Turkish Cypriots: "They [i.e., Turkish Cypriots] say sometimes: 'We are happy we are Turks.' 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." What these two children are doing is to partly deconstruct the stereotype; however, they simultaneously fail to acknowledge heterogeneity for what it is (i.e., some Turkish Cypriots are good and some are bad) but look to homogenize their evaluations by having all Turkish Cypriots lean more in one direction than the other.

Despite some of the ambiguity in their responses, one Turkish Cypriot stood out as clearly disliked and hated: the Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash. In fact, many children did not see Denktash as a Turkish Cypriot but rather as a Turk. For the children, it makes much more sense to label Denktash as a Turk rather than a Turkish Cypriot because unlike other Turkish Cypriots he is seen as evil, similar in that sense to the Turkish occupiers. This process of reassigning an identity makes it easier to retain one's attitudes towards a group as a whole. The children can continue to view Turkish Cypriots as essentially good rather than reevaluate their attitudes towards the whole group based on one individual.

Labeling and stereotyping are not immutable attributions as they might initially appear to be. Rather, they are discursive strategies that take place within specific conversational contexts. They can be shifted and reassigned to account for the complexity of categories if and when necessary. Thus, for example, the same child who in one context labels Turks as evil may present a different understanding of Turks in another context: as a group made up of both good and bad people, for example. Neofitos [6th grade], drew a distinction between the Turkish government and the Turkish people:

"There are many from Turkey who are good. It is not because they occupied us. They say it is a democracy but it is not a democracy. Whatever the president wants, it is over. It is fascism. It is not the people's fault. It is the fault of those who told them [to do these things]. If they did not command them 'Go and do that' they would not go."

Many other children pointed out that they dislike or hate the Turkish state, the Turkish military, and the Turkish politicians who are interested in making wars with other countries and who force the ordinary people to obey their orders. Even when the ordinary people were blamed, it was made clear that it is not all of them but some of them. Elena [6th grade], for example, pointed out that she only hates "The bad [Turkish] soldiers and the bad [Turkish] citizens."

It is important to recognize that children's understandings of an >other= (and the >self=) are often much more complex and less stereotypical than initial inquiry might suggest. In the context of some conversations (e.g., at school or when discussing certain issues during an interview) children may readily resort to stereotypes: homogenized evaluations of the >other= that completely ignore internal variability. In other contexts where they are required or are asked to be more critical, the children may present more complex understandings of the >other.= Drawing on Bakhtin's notion of ideological voicing (see Bakhtin, 1981), we may say that children are indeed drawing on different voices at different times and in different social contexts. These voices are, at times, contradictory and ambiguous. The demands of the conversation may necessitate the use of different voices to explicate identity. Stereotypical voices are not the only voices that children draw on to construct their identities. In certain contexts, they may draw on critical voices which challenge the stereotypes they themselves help reproduce in other contexts. In Bakhtin's terminology, they use Aauthoritative discourse@ at one moment but turn to Ainternally persuasive discourse@ at another moment when the situation--including the thematic focus and the participants in the conversation-- allows such a shift.

CONCLUSION

The children=s stereotypical presentations of Turks serve a function. Like other kinds of stereotypes, ethnic stereotypes help them to simplify their worlds by reducing the complexity of the information that they are confronted with (Allport, 1958[1954], p. 165; Davey, 1983, p. 43). They allow them to make sense of the world without challenging their already existing frameworks for understanding it. Stereotypes, of course, in the end also Ashort-circuit critical thinking" (Perkins, 1979, p. 155); they make it harder to imagine a more complex and perhaps more contradictory world where not all is either/or.

Ethnic stereotypes are indeed quite powerful and a major obstacle to constructing a more positive ethnic >other.= They often reflect a dominant nationalist ideology which seeks to erect a clear and unambiguous boundary between >us= and >them.= As such, they can tell us a great deal about the processes by which ideologies are received and practiced (Perkins, 1979, p. 135). But, as I have illustrated, there are other voices that children access to construct and reconstruct Turks as >the other.= These voices reflect contradictory ideological positions which, at times, compete with the dominant ideology. Thus, there is a voice which likes to distinguish between leaders and followers, the ones who have power and those who don=t: it is the Turkish political leaders and the Turkish military who are to be blamed, not the ordinary Turkish citizens. Or, there is a religiously-informed voice which argues for the brotherhood of all human beings: Awe are all brothers irrespective of our national identities.@ These are the voices that some children access on some occasions to construct alternative kinds of >others.= That they are able to access and use such voices suggests a much more complex process of ideological reproduction.

Though it would be naive to suggest that such voices compete effectively with the much more powerful dominant ideology on identity they are nevertheless suggestive of a certain degree of heteroglossia which creates a dynamic. As Bakhtin (1981, p. 342) would put it, it is this struggle between the authoritative word and the internally persuasive word which gives rise to the ideological becoming of a person.

Cohen (1994a, pp. 69-70) has argued for a view of boundaries as "matters of consciousness rather than of institutional dictation." In their internalized form boundaries are not definite and dogmatic but fluid and ambiguous. Similarly, ideologies of >self= and >other= are not necessarily consistent but are often ambiguous and contradictory. In daily social practice, children reinterpret such ideologies in ways that make sense to them and which fit the interactional context (Hatcher and Troyna, 1993, p. 118). A crucial methodological issue is to make sure that the researcher explores the whole range of voices that children might draw on to construct their identities. Of course, this requires a theoretical reformulation of the very notion of identity. It requires that we see identity not as fixed and permanent but rather fluid and permeable, constructed and reconstructed as one moves from one context to another. From this perspective, contradiction and ambiguity are the very thing of identity, not its pathological problems.

Greek Cypriot children=s constructions of the Turks, given the specific historical circumstances in which they are growing up, are not surprising. The Turks are directly implicated in their country=s past, present, and future. At school, they learn about a past where the Turks have a prominent role: they are the enemy of the nation. The current situation in Cyprus with a significant part of its territory under Turkish occupation helps to legitimize even further the history of animosity between >us= and >them.= For the children, and Greek Cypriots at large, Turkey is directly responsible for the situation on the island: It is Turkey which is responsible for the thousands of refugees, missing persons, and the destruction of cultural heritage that takes place in the occupied territories. And though Turkey is responsible for the situation on the island, it is not willing to negotiate in order to solve the Cyprus problem. As long as there is some fundamental reason to believe that it is Turkey which is >our= problem, and currently there is (i.e., the continued Turkish occupation), it is unlikely that Turks as a people will acquire a more positive image in children=s minds.

What is perhaps interesting to note is that categories, especially stereotypical categories, are not what they appear to be on the surface. They have depth, even if their depth, is still to some extent stereotypical. As I have illustrated, for many of the Greek Cypriot children I worked with, the category of ATurks@ they refer to in their stereotypes is a minimized category which includes only those Turks they perceive as being >bad.= In other words, the stereotypes shrink to the Aworst@ of the group. In discursive practice, the national category itself (i.e., Turks) becomes a label for the negative of the >other,= not a label for the nation as a whole. If the stereotype fails to communicate that, it is because it is a stereotype after all; it is not meant to deconstruct or complicate a category but to simplify it.

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