Writing Migration : Lives as Ethnographic Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation is a hybrid academic study, combining the fictional aspects of literature with the culture-oriented perspectives of ethnography. Anthropological materials about the social, cultural, psychological, and real-life experiences of Turkish immigrants in Germany are collected through anthropological fieldwork methods such as interviews and participant observation. All these collections are reshaped, reformulated, recreated, and rewritten within the fictional world of literature. The academic and social scientific side of the dissertation prepared the required background, and the literary or fictional side of it dressed this background in short-stories. This dissertation differentiates itself with some peculiarities of its own and it has its own dynamics in the field of ethnography. The ethnographer of this study and the author of its fictional parts is also a Turkish immigrant in Germany. He doesna t only observe the lives of his subjects, but he experienced the life of a Turkish immigrant in Germany himself. So, there are two faces of this study: the ethnographer is both an outsider and an insider to the subject matter. This gives the dissertation a sense of an autobiographical ethnographic manuscript as the subjective experiences in the field cannot be easily differentiated from my own real-life experiences as a Turkish immigrant in Germany. I used the necessary methods to attain the required input to be able to write about immigrants. In the case of this dissertation, the other and the self are brought together not only to arouse the subjective, creative and relative nature of the anthropologista s craft, especially apparent both in interviewing and writing, but also because it brings an inside touch to all these experiences of the immigrants. This dissertation is not an attempt to cover Turkish migration in Germany from a wide range of perspectives, with a historical analysis supported with statistical facts and sociopolitical intense academic references. Rather, it is an effort to reflect the very personal lives of Turkish immigrants, to deal with their immigrant identities in literary forms and to bring new viewpoints to Turkish migration in Germany by using the alternative perspectives of fiction. Literary texts in this dissertation portray the very human aspects of immigrants as social personae and, along with their individual styles; they capture the struggle in the very center of the daily lives of migrants as foreigners in a host land. The creation of literature out of interviews and short stories written out of the collected anthropological materials are the results of a process that begins first with searching for an appropriate interviewee. It continues with an interview leading to a literarily useful encounter and then concludes with the production of a short story which provides migration-oriented content. This process is commented on and discussed analytically and critically after each literary text. These journals of the short stories give the study the required space to write about the transformation of anthropological materials into ethnographic texts. Instead of loading the study with objective and scientific references and instead of dealing with the term migration only as a concept of social science to draw a generalized picture, short stories within this dissertation put the immigrants themselves in focus and enable the study to deal with the subject matter with actor-centred research practices. These research preferences of the dissertation bestow upon the study an innovative approach, as in both linguistics and anthropology, actor-centred research has had profound impacts on a number of longstanding theoretical issues. In this anthropological and academic context, each short story within the study gives individuals active roles in migration and they are described as active human agents, whose activities constitute whatever migration there is to study in an anthropological sense.