1Using the example of Turkey, I will suggest that disunity (rather than unity) is a default condition of society. Disunity must continually be kept in check by different means of fabricating stability, for instance, through a curriculum of rituals and performances. Another way is through mechanisms of toleration, but toleration is defined and practiced within different, changing cultural and political contexts and is colored by their instabilities. In other words, tolerance is not a stable, default condition, but must be continually repaired.

2The we-they distinction appears to be a perennial feature of human groups. Humans seem predisposed to distinguish between “kinds” of people in order to create a secure social identity.

3Anthropological understanding of this “difference” generally has taken the form of tribe, race or ethnicity, the latter being a relatively recent term that has become a powerful modern organizer of how we distinguish between our fellow humans. We generally tolerate difference either by integrating people who are different into our community, while allowing them to be different, or by assimilating them, erasing their difference as the price of joining the community. Ignoring a group also can be a form of segregation.

4The anthropologist Fredrik Barth, in his seminal 1969 essay, changed the way we understand ethnicity1. Ethnicity is not, as was thought, a rigid and bounded entity defined by shared “cultural stuff”, but rather a fluid process that is shaped by social and political practices and changes. It is the boundary itself that defines an ethnic group, a boundary that can move and that people can cross. This is the case whether the boundary is drawn between or within religious, language-based, or ethnic identities. We are all familiar with new identities that formed when boundaries developed within the Christian and Muslim traditions, boundaries that resulted in pogroms and bloody wars, most prominently Catholics versus Protestants, and Sunni versus Shi’a Muslims.

5Group identities are the raw material with which societies produce tolerance, integration and stability. Like ethnicity, group identities are concepts, not natural phenomena, nor are they stable. Group boundaries are constantly at the mercy of historical events that elicit change, or subject to decisions of leaders and governments that force changes in identifications. Where is the boundary between being a Catholic and being a heretic? Which beliefs make one a “legitimate” Muslim in a particular time and place? What makes someone a “legitimate” citizen? Globalisation and the market also transform identities, for instance, as societies market an image to tourists in an effort to establish authenticity, a national brand. A nation might advertise the presence of indigenous or minority groups that, in daily practice, are not tolerated as full citizens.

6In other words, the boundaries that define groups, their cultural content and membership, and the positions of those groups vis a vis one another are continually shifting. Turkey, the region I have spent many years studying, demonstrates quite well the difficulty of pinning down any coherent group identity, despite its full-throated nationalist claims to unity. And with each new adjustment of the internal boundaries of identity, with each realignment, another part of the population falls from toleration. More about that later.

7Let us focus for a moment on ethnicity. Richard Jenkins pointed out that anthropologists in their role as cross-cultural advocates – and under the long shadow of structural functionalism – tended to underplay conflict and to celebrate ethnicity as a good thing, a cultural resource2. Even Fredrik Barth expected that, over time, ethnic interaction would lead to symbiosis, accommodation, interdependence, complementarity, or benign displacement, in other words, to stability3. Many liberals expected that after WWII, ethnicity and nationalism would lose significance because global flows of people, money, ideas and practices would dilute the uniqueness of groups and dissolve boundaries between groups and between people.

8But this has not come to pass. Instead, ethnic groups and nationalist exclusivities have continued to assert themselves globally. Some groups have used the international discourse of human rights to assert unique boundaries, often combined with struggle on the ground (see, for instance, Bretons, Basques, Catalans, Tamils, Palestinians, Kurds, Quebecois and so on). Why is this? One reason for the persistence of ethnic difference is that the nation state is an active purveyor and administrator of difference. The state defines the ethnic boundary that demarcates its own majority, using a variety of criteria, such as language, race, religion, and, of course, ethnicity.

9The national majority has a narrative of belonging that plays a dominant role in how minorities fit into the nation. As Benedict Anderson has shown, the modern nation state must invent narratives of belonging, sometimes, as in Turkey, out of whole cloth, in order to gain and retain the loyalty of the diverse people that historic events have corralled within a set of artificial political boundaries4. The nation sets in place a curriculum of education, museums, and public rituals and performances that rehearse the national narrative and embed it within individual lives. Citizens thereby become the vigilante wardens of group boundaries – who is a legitimate citizen and who is not5. This begs the question of what minorities have to do or be to be tolerated?

10Let us look at how this plays out in the Turkish case: As a scholar of Turkey, I was curious about how tolerance translates into Turkish. The word commonly used by Turkish scholars is tolerans, from the English term, which translates into Turkish as allowance, latitude, margin and forbearance. Digging deeper into how the concept is expressed in Turkish, I came across a subtle, but telling, difference in meaning. The closest words are hoşgörü (indulgence, leniency, clemency) and müsamaha (forbearance, but also indulgence and negligence in the sense of being willfully blind to an impropriety). Göz yumma: connive at, condone, take no notice of, wink at. Even iptila (addiction, passion) and düşkünlük (excessive fondness, addiction).

11These terms encompass the English meanings embedded in ‘to tolerate’, that is, to endure, to be lenient and long-suffering, to be magnanimous.

12In Turkish, the web of meanings encompasses even excessive fondness for something damaging. By contrast, the English word ‘tolerance’ has come to encompass much more than that. Missing from any of the Turkish translations are liberality or liberalism, open-mindedness, patience, sympathy, and understanding. Until recently, the Turkish vision of tolerance as forebearance and clemency has been primarily associated with Islam. In the Ottoman period before the founding of the Turkish nation state in 1923, many of the social services now carried out by the state were in the hands of Islamic foundations that ran hospitals, schools, and soup kitchens and cared for the poor. Even into the 20th century, Islam was associated with the gentler meanings of hoşgörü and müsamaha.

13The state’s role, by contrast, has been to protect and extract manpower and capital from its citizens. Ottoman society was multicultural and multi-denominational. The state governed by defining and integrating citizens as groups based on their religion. Ayhan Kaya, writing about tolerance in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, suggests that Ottoman multiculturalism, that usually is defined as tolerant, conceptually implies a burden to carry, endurance, a contest or competition and even concealed hatred6. From Ottoman times to the present, the state orchestrated conflicts, deportations, massacres, bombings and assassinations against its minorities, generally with the stated purpose of protecting the unity and integrity of first the empire and now the nation7. Today, the Turkish state defines who is a legitimate citizen (as opposed to a citizen on paper) based on what Kaya calls the holy trinity of Sunni-Muslim-Turk, leaving out non-Muslims and other non-conforming minorities.

14The term tolerans entered Turkish public discourse after the Helsinki Summit in 1999 that offered Turkey the opportunity to join the EU. The term tolerans, with its popular association with Islam and Ottoman institutions, reaffirms the current Justice and Development party (Turkish acronym AKP) government’s Islamist and neo-Ottoman narrative of national identity. Under earlier secular Republican governments, national unity was performed through mass staging of youth and sport events and militarized performances that idolized Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and its military. Some of the rituals openly reviled non-Sunni Muslim citizens, like Armenians, as enemies of the nation. They, like Jews, Kurds, and Alevi, were considered incapable of loyalty to the nation because they were different. The Turkish Republic’s assimilationist policies aimed to completely erase social and cultural diversity. Mother tongues were banned, ethnic minority names were forbidden, place names changed. The state carried out discriminatory economic policies and forced migration. The very term minority has negative connotations in popular imagery.

15Under today’s Islamist regime, national unity is performed and reenacted through rituals that celebrate the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday and the 1453 conquest of Christian Constantinople by the Muslim Turks, part of what has been called the government’s neo-Ottoman revival. But has the post-Helsinki introduction of tolerans and the reliance of the current government on Islamic references led to the introduction of liberalism, open-mindedness, patience, sympathy, and understanding? Ayhan Kaya thinks not. Instead, he writes, it has led to what he calls a myth of tolerance that provides cover for the continued mistreatment in practice of ethno-cultural and religious minorities8.

16In the Ottoman period as in today’s Turkey, toleration is an activity, a form of governmentality meant to keep the peace, the administration of segregation. (Tolerance is the associated attitude or virtue.) Toleration may mean the absence of punishment and conditional integration, or it may mean a choice between assimilation and brutal punishment. But in neither case, did or does toleration mean respect or inclusion and acceptance into society as full and welcome members of the community. Non-Muslim, non-Sunni Muslim, and non-Turkish citizens (Kurds, Alevi, Roma, Greek-speaking Rum, Armenians, and lately Syrian refugees) are tolerated only so long as they don’t disturb the national narrative of a homogeneous nation and unitary state. Their position is precarious because they are outside the boundaries of the acceptable citizen, boundaries that are created and patrolled by the state to protect a precarious stability at the edge of the precipice of disunity.

17The strong and stable unitary nation – is it a myth built on quicksand? I would argue that it is. I say this because, as I explained earlier, group identity is fungible, it is changeable. Seen historically, tolerance is less of a stabilizing force than a rollercoaster that sees some groups rise, while others fall in a continual shifting not only of power (who is on top?), but changes even in the boundaries of groups themselves. New definitions, new boundaries, new designations as enemy or friend – we see this happening over time in our own societies. Tolerance is not a concept that can easily keep up.

18There is a disconnect between a social and political understanding of belonging and the unity and stability imagined under the term tolerance. We see group boundaries shifting in ways that continually change the definition of who belongs and who is no longer tolerated. Again, I will use the example of Turkey to illustrate. In a drawn-out process, late 19th-century Ottoman cosmopolitanism (in which religion was perceived to be one form of group identity among others, albeit subject to unequal treatment) changed in the new Republic founded in 1923 to religio-racial exclusion. This was partly a result of the intrusion of European race theories but was also historically contingent. By 1913, the Ottoman empire had lost most of its Christian European provinces in the Balkans and was becoming primarily a Muslim empire. The Ottomans tried to use Islam to unify the remaining population. In the WW I struggle that resulted in the dissolution of the empire and founding of the nation state of Turkey, most people who had engaged in the national struggle for independence from their European occupiers believed that they were defending the nation of Islam, not an ethnic identity – a Turkish nation – that had little value to them. At the time, the term Turk meant peasant9.

19Early Republican leaders were afraid that Islam could become a rival political identity, so they promoted a Turkey of Muslims belonging to the same lineage (in Turkish, soy), that is, Muslims who were different from Arabs and other kinds of Muslims. During this period, members of the Turkish national movement alternately defined Turkishness by race (Turks were white), blood (soy), territory (residing within our borders), ethnicity, culture, language, and religion. Initially, all Muslims were considered members of the Republican community and non-Muslims were told they could assimilate by learning Turkish language and culture. Jews in the early Republic started a “Speak Turkish” campaign. Kurds and Albanians, though mainly Muslim, were considered poor candidates for assimilation to the new nation because of their strong tribal loyalties and different language10.

20The promised equality as citizens, however, was undercut by racism and the Turkification of the economy. The new Republic focused on making Muslim Turks dominant in business (banking, trade, manufacturing) that previously had been dominated by non-Muslims. Non-Muslim Turks were fired, banned, deprived of citizenship, and their businesses were taken over in a series of pogroms. To justify these measures, the term Turk was no longer interpreted as a nationality based on language and, thus, amenable to assimilation, but rather as an amalgam of race and faith, that is Turkish race (soy, bloodline) and Sunni Muslim religion, whether the person was pious or secular. The actual practice of faith was relegated to the private, not the public, sphere. That is, Turkish Muslim citizens were, by definition, Turks, whether they prayed or not. Non-Muslim citizens could not be assimilated, no matter what they did, because they did not have Turkish Muslim blood.

21Kurds, as Muslims, were defined as Turks, whether they agreed to this designation or not. As for the Kurdish language, the national narrative claimed that Kurds were simply Turks who had forgotten Turkish. Kurds were and are assimilated into the institutional system of Turkish society, but under a disability: They cannot participate as Kurds. Similar to Fredrik Barth’s description of the situation of the Sami (or Lapps) in Norway, the Kurds are pariahs in the Turkish periphery11.

22What were the consequences for identity and toleration of the development of this religio-racial definition of Turkishness. I will give an example. The Dönme (Sabbateans) were Ottoman Jews who in the seventeenth century converted to Islam and developed a syncretistic form of Muslim worship that combined Sufism and Kabbalah. Completely assimilated, they were important actors in the 1908 revolution by the Young Turks against the Ottoman sultan and in the founding of the Turkish Republic. As Muslims, they were forced to move from Salonica to Istanbul as part of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. But, as I explained above, by the end of the 1920s, the national identity narrative had shifted from language and culture to race. Republican elites began to question the Dönme’s Turkish credentials. If their ancestors were Jews, then they couldn’t be “real” Turks. The Dönme were harassed to the extent that they ceased to exist as a corporate group and today hide their roots12.

23The reinterpretation of the national narrative of belonging – who is a legitimate citizen and who is not – is ongoing. Over the last three decades, Islam as faith, rather than blood, has reentered the public sphere, challenging the primacy of the “Turkishness as race” thesis by promoting brotherhood with non-Turkish Arab Sunni Muslims. The current government’s reinforcement of "Islam as faith", where it matters a great deal whether Turks pray or not, challenges the acceptance of Turkish Muslim as a cultural attribute, that is, something that can be combined with a secular lifestyle.

24When seen over the long term, I doubt that Turkey is unique in its continual churn of competing identities and of who is in and who is out in terms of legitimacy. All societies have group identities, and all are subject to historical, social, economic and political forces that elicit change. As with the Dönme, the decisions of leaders and governments force changes in identifications, thereby shifting the boundaries that define groups, altering their cultural content or membership, and the positions of those groups against others in society and polity.

25My most recent work examines the social history of Turkey in the 1970s, a time of enormous social and political polarization, ostensibly between left and right13. The extreme political violence affected the entire country until a coup in 1980 replaced street violence with the violence of the state. Analyzing my interviews, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Turkey today is very different from the country in the 1970s, but the society is again highly polarized and veering into lawlessness and violence. As in the 1970s, extreme polarization, suspicion and mutual hostility have encompassed the entire country at both a personal and political level. Although a single party (AKP) and its leader Tayyip Erdoğan have been in power for nearly two decades, the political field is continually fracturing within and around them.

26This brought to mind something Fredrik Barth wrote in his book, Balinese Worlds: “Divisive politics is a model of politics, not a deviation14.” In Barth’s account of Bali, normative expectations created extensive pressure to conform, obey and to put the family first -- and to suppress self-interest and non-normative desires and differences. This provided what Barth called a “hidden curriculum” that is enacted and confirmed by political discourse and policies, a curriculum that seemed particularly resistant to change. I wondered whether there was a “hidden curriculum” in Turkish social and political life. If one peels off labels (left/right, Islamist/secular, political party names), one sees the same pattern repeating, a recurring phenomenon of hostile group formation in public life, that is, the tendency to polarize and fracture into antagonistic groups and sides15.

27Where does this extreme factionalism come from? One root of political fragmentation and inter-group violence is structural vulnerability. Republican Turkey has always had weak institutions that protect the interests of the state, not the citizen. The lack of institutional protection for individual rights means that people must seek protection and sustenance through group membership. For protection and provision, often of the simplest goods and services, in Turkey you need a family, a community, association, religious brotherhood, political party, or other group that will absorb you into its networks. Despite its enforced nationalist message of indivisibility, the political scientist Umut Özkırımlı has described Turkey as an archipelago of communities held together by force16. This creates sociocultural patterns that consistently undermine attempts at cooperation and unity and foster factionalism. Turkey lacks shared values and institutions, with each community distrustful and intolerant of the other. Its society is characterized by exceptionally low levels of interpersonal trust17. Conspiracy theories continually position and reposition persons and communities in relation to each other and justify shifting hostile boundaries.

28What do such group dynamics mean for the possibility of toleration? One result of continual fracturing is that it creates unpredictable cycles of vulnerability and oppression. As groups split, vulnerability is reassigned, often among people with similar backgrounds and previously shared identity. One example is the Hizmet (Service) Movement, a Sunni religious community that follows the preacher Fethullah Gülen. For almost a decade, Hizmet worked closely with the ruling AKP, providing educational and social services and occupying positions within the administration. There was little difference in cultural content between the communities. Both were nationalist Sunni Turks. For reasons I won’t go into here, Hizmet fell out with the JDP government in 2011. In 2016, the government declared Hizmet a terror organization, with the acronym FETÖ, and blamed it for a failed coup attempt that year. Tens of thousands of people have been arrested and accused of being FETÖ, including people who had no cultural or ideological affiliation at all with Hizmet (for instance, leftists and secularists). Those who were accused lost the ability to work and often were shunned by their own families. In other words, Hizmet is a group whose self-ascribed identity was erased, replaced by a new forced identity with enormous personal consequences to its members, and the end of toleration. The group’s boundaries and its membership were redrawn and arbitrarily expanded by state fiat.

29Groups often refer to the cultural content or “cultural stuff” to delineate what makes them different from others. In reality, as Barth noted, cultural content is fluid. Sometimes, the cultural content of oppositional identities doesn’t matter at all. In Turkey, who is the Other is interchangeable. Religious and ethno-religious categories are often used indiscriminately to express fear or to characterize someone as un-Turkish, as an enemy. For example, until the 2000s, Turkey was beset by a fear of missionaries18. The military designated missionaries as the greatest danger to Turkey, even though the number of Christians remaining was small and the number of converts negligible. After the murder of a Catholic priest in Trabzon in 2006, the journalist Ayşe Önal interviewed the gunman’s mother19. She told Önal that her son killed the priest because he was a missionary, but when Önal asked what she meant by the term, the mother responded: “He was going to make him a Jew.” Privately, Önal told me, the mother also accused the priest of trying to make her son gay. In 2007, three Protestants, two of them converts, were tortured and killed in Malatya. There, Önal encountered a similar displacement of meaning. People expressed fear that missionaries would make the country kafir or dinsiz, meaning “without religion”.

30Who were these missionaries? Local people responded that they were “Jews” and “Masons.” Some mentioned Alevis, a syncretistic Muslim sect that they saw as a threat to the nation because they were believed to be easier to convert. The author of a book accused President Erdoğan of being a crypto-Jew, working with Israel and the United States to transform Turkey from a secular to a “moderate Islamic republic” that, the author argued, would be easier for foreign powers to manipulate. Other political leaders have been called Armenian, which they considered an insult and, in at least one case, took to court as libel. In a conversation I had with the former Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan, he called Barack Obama, running for president, Jewish. This not only erased the difference between non-Muslim faiths; it also called upon racism and an anti-Semitic association between the Jewish faith and international power (as in, Jews run the world).

31As we’ve seen, group boundaries are liable to shift often and unexpectedly. It is, rather, the process of dissociation that is reliably stable. There are no stable boundaries, only disjunctions, what I call the disunity default. Under these circumstances, with boundaries fluid and cultural content and even group membership uncertain, how can people fashion any kind of stability, much less tolerance of difference? I suggest that conflict can be a form of boundary maintenance. Identities are artificially created and deployed as weapons in a war over legitimacy and political and economic spoils. The political winner defines the larger national identity – and defines others out of the picture altogether as traitors. Thus, boundaries begin to appear within a group sharing the same culture, language, religion, practices, and allegiances.

32What signals membership in the Turkish community? What signals exclusion? After the 2016 coup attempt, many people were swept up and accused, including participating soldiers. The bodies of those who were killed during the coup attempt initially were buried in a mass grave marked only with a sign that said ‘Traitors’. Those who died defending the government were called martyrs. In the Martyr’s Orchard, the name of a deceased person is posted on each tree.

33Those who are loyal are legitimate citizens; the identity of traitors is effaced. The border between them is thus clearly marked. This provides a third choice beyond integration or assimilation, that is, effacement or disappearance, which is the lot of those believed to be disloyal.

34Finally, in the dialectic between who you think you are and who others say you are, the ability of the government, the nation, and even the global economy to create and transform identity should not be overlooked. There are two kinds of change, forced and elicited. Forced change generally is put in place by governments or states or brought about through political, institutional change. The Lausanne Treaty that created the Republic of Turkey recognized only “non-Muslim minorities” as internationally protected minorities. Kurds, Alevis, and Roma, who are Muslim, were not listed, so have no special status. As they are not minorities, no special policies govern their status or, more importantly, protect them20. The Roma are further deracinated as slum dwellers. Elicited change is change under the influence of the market and globalization. These processes are enhanced and scaled up by the media. In my book, Muslim Nationalism, I show how the meanings of being Turkish and being Muslim have changed over the previous three decades as a result of all these forces acting on these identities21.

35What are the implications of the disunity default for the possibility of tolerance? Moving away from Emile Durkheim’s still seductive focus on unity as the default condition in society, how would our understanding of society change if we posed disunity as the default, on a range between peaceful disunity to hostile divorce? What if we see structure as inherently unstable? Culture, in the sense of the production of shared meanings, might be seen as a continual attempt by people to inject stability into their circumstances, to manage divisiveness or at least to freeze the boundaries. One cultural concept that has been deployed in the ongoing struggle for stability is toleration and its associated value of tolerance. For instance, would any of this discussion of Turkey apply to Sweden? Sweden does not seem unstable or divisive. Social interactions tend to be impersonal. Social structure nowadays is strongly defined by the state (a result of strong labor and women’s movements). What is the difference between Sweden and Turkey? In Turkey, group belonging is always personal, whether ethnic or political. An argument that I develop elsewhere is that this extreme personalization provides a hidden curriculum that makes groups brittle and prone to hostile factionalism22. Swedes, on the other hand, are individualistic. They believe in institutions and trust that the regulations will ensure that they are treated equally. Does this mean Sweden is immune to disunity?

36In Sweden, where I live, I observe individual dissociation relieved by a variety of widespread, shared rehearsals of cultural unity (daily fika, choir participation, Midsommar celebrations). These are promoted through society’s institutions. Divisiveness is kept in check by what one might call Sweden’s hidden curriculum, a pervasive culture of “don’t see, don’t say” divisive things. This is another form of toleration, though not necessarily tolerance. To quote a Swedish friend: “As a collective nation, we have a picture of how things should be and we hold on to it, even if there’s a discrepancy between how we perceive ourselves and the reality. That discrepancy has to reach a certain gap before we’re forced to confront it and change.” The resulting tensions, he added, increase support for the far-right party that is more willing to make unpleasant judgments.

37Sweden’s peaceful disunity is at the other end of the scale from Turkey’s hostile divorces, but in both cases social structure is unstable, perhaps for different reasons, and identity work, like toleration, serves to contain and make sense of shifting boundaries and repair unity. The Swedes have an admonition for what must be done for society to work, for unity to be continually achieved, for people to tolerate one another.

38Dra sitt strå till stacken. Drag your straw to the stack.

39In other words, unity is an active process, not a given, whether in Sweden or Turkey. The performance of unity implies toleration and, if unity can be maintained, it nurtures the possibility of tolerance.

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