It's days like these that make me love being in grad school. Today I had a wonderful Sociological Theory class on Durkheim and his idea of collective consciousness, the idea that a society shares a set of moral beliefs and values which binds them together. (Side note--if you're reading this Professor Carbine, Ways of Understanding Religion was extremely helpful in this!) According to Durkheim there is no right or wrong, it is only when someone, or a group of people, deviate from their society's class consciousness that they are considered immoral or wrong. So our class discussion was about how there can be either two existing sets of class consciousness (see: a white American class consciousness and a simultaneous large American-Hispanic class consciousness) or a class consciousness that is imagined but not a reality. (see: Americans seeing themselves as "real Americans" or living in the frontier when in reality that is a teeny tiny portion of the population)

It was one of the best classes I've had since I've been here and, as always, the cultural differences made it even better. Eventually the class started talking about the Turkish version of Oprah and how even though she claims to know what everyone loves, she is not representative of the whole society, not even a minority of the society. Then we started discussing race in the US which is always fun when you're the token American in the conversation. Mostly it was about how minorities can fit into a class consciousness that doesn't properly represent them.

The whole thing was very very interesting and it continued into my lunch time conversation with my friends Martin and Dan. One of the best things about being here is the constant multicultural interaction I get from my friends. Martin is from Germany and Dan is from England so when we talk about major issues it always seems to fall back into our culture. Another example of this is when we play the game where you put a card with a famous person's name on your head. Literally every time our GeTMA group has played this game we end up with people who are only culturally relevant to one's own country. Example: I was Michael Schumacher a famous German Formula One race car driver... um what?

Anyways back to my intellectual discussion ha. So Martin, Dan, and I start talking about this idea of competing class consciousnesses and eventually our conversation morphed into how one plays their gender role. As a woman living in Turkey, many people have these assumptions that I'm constantly being harassed or discriminated against and interestingly enough its much much more subtle than that. I think of it as "delicate flower syndrome" on one hand I'm treated like a princess--not paying for cabs, getting offered free seats on the bus, waiting for me to go first out a door, avoiding touching me. On the other hand people blatantly stare, ignore me, talk about me in my presence, cat call on occasion, and I get the feeling that only pushy women are taken seriously in classroom settings which means that when I'm not angry about an issue I feel like no one's taking me seriously. Being a delicate flower is a doubled edged sword.

Dan made an astute observation that is so striking and fitting. He said, people here are constantly playing and reinforcing their gender. Ah and its so true! Every time a man lets me walk out of a door first, or gives me a seat on a bus, they're playing the gentlemanly man role and letting me be a delicate woman flower. An interesting part of this is what Dan and Martin were saying that they've never felt so male in their life. Everywhere they go they are reminded that they are male and therefore must represent that clearly. Dan says he feels it all the time when he's sitting on the bus and women would rather stand than to sit next to him because he's a male. But its totally not just a Turkish thing, its just that gender manifests itself in different ways in the US. I mean how do we define our gender in the US (and England and Germany)? I think the West defining gender intertwined with either not acting like the other gender or being in a relationship with the other gender. It's just our Westernized class consciousness of gender that makes Dan, Martin, and I think of this public genderfied of the world as totally weird.

All in all, I just had a really good class and day and it reminded me why I love traveling, meeting foreign people, class discussions, and school.

Thanks Durkheim!

Georgia! I'm going to Georgia!

This coming Monday is Kurban Bayramı, the commemoration of Abraham's devotion and obedience to God for almost sacrificing his son Ishmael (yeah, not Isaac like in Christianity). So there's a big feast and its a really family oriented holiday and I was going to go with Tugba to her hometown of Gaziantep, but Tugba got a call from work on Tuesday that she was going to INDONESIA for work.

So for a while I was going to be stuck in Ankara while other people traveled around Turkey, but I lucked out and joined my friends on their trip to Georgia! Whoo hoo! In Georgia, a Christian country, we plan on eating lots of pork and drinking the excellent wine that Georgia is known for. We're going to Batumi on the Black Sea(!), formerly the largest beachfront resort in the Soviet Union. Then we're heading to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for lots of old churches and excellent Georgian food.


(click photo to expand, from http://www.map-of-turkey.com/map-of-turkey2.jpg)

Yay! I'm really excited to get out of Turkey for a little bit and see some of the surrounding countries. What's really cool about Turkey is if you look at it on a map it really is the center of the world. It's almost in Europe, Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. I'm going to country that speaks Russian, but right next to it is also Armenia, a Caucus country. Then there's Iraq, Iran, and Syria AKA the Middle East, bordering Turkey as well. And you can't forget that Turkey also borders Europe. What's really cool is that Turkey used to own many parts of these surrounding countries when it was the Ottoman Empire.

Before I came to Turkey I heard over and over again about how it's a mix of East and West, but seriously there is no where else that is so clearly located at the crossroads of so many different cultures.