Project Description

Before 1989, the topic of national minorities was practically expelled from the professional and cultural debate. Expressing (ethnic or other) identity became possible only after the fall of the communist regime (which aimed, among others, to general levelling), under the circumstances of a democracy which respects and recognizes otherness and the right to belong to a different ethnic group than that of the majority population. In a first stage (starting with 1990), the historic minorities represented the object of debates in cultural and daily mass-media, which preceded theoretic research in the domain of ethnocultural diversity. The last decade especially marks a progress in studying the cultural, historical and social dimensions of these groups, with many other directions of study remaining underdeveloped or underexplored. If we take into account that more than 11% of Romania’s population declared, at the 2001 Census, that they belong to an ethnic minority, we consider that mapping the dynamics of such groups is necessary and useful, both for the academic community and for widening the knowledge regarding cultural identity and diversity. As well, as some of these groups are obviously shrinking (due to permanent or partial migration, other options of ethnic claiming, negative demographic growth, acculturation), investigating and patrimonializing their culture and analyzing the means already used for its conservation by its creators is imperative. We believe that the results of such enterprises help in completing the image of cultural otherness (and thus in understanding it in the right way), especially when it comes to its reception by the wide public: this translates in increasing the degree of intercultural communication and, subsequently, of tolerance. In this context, the project we propose is intended to be a study of the cultural similitudes and differences, constructed around the identity of particular ethnic groups which are less visible within the minorities of Romania. Placed at the crossroads of several types of discourses – characteristic for cultural anthropology, history of mentalities, imagology, ethnopsychology, oral history – the main aim of the project is to obtain an up-to-date and detailed image of the Turkish and Tatar community in Dobroudja, on the wider background of socio-economical transformations in the Romanian society, and on a particular background, defined by the rediscover and revaluation, after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, of its own cultural identity, under the impact of the mentioned changes. Being particularized by its ethnic, confessional and cultural specificity, the Turkish and Tatar community from Dobroudja has not been in the focus of systematic scientific investigation, which would lead to an exhaustive evaluation. A review of the scientific literature indicates the preponderance of the approaches connected to factual, descriptive history: the relation ethnic identity – alterity (or otherness), which we intend to approach in our study, has not represented one of the main concerns of the specialists. The history studies and articles on the Turkish and Tatar minority signed by authors from the community offer positivist approaches –9 precious and necessary, without question, for such an understudied topic – but not enough for the methodological and structural exigencies of present interdisciplinary research. The best known studies on this subject are, as follows: Tahsin Gemil, „Tatarii in istorie si in lume”; „Tatarii in istoria romanilor” (coord. M. Cojoc); T. Gemil, „Romanians and Ottomans in the 14th-16th centuries”; Mehmet Ali Ekrem, „From the history of Dobroudja Turks”. „The Muslim community from Dobroudja” focuses on two coordinates: religious life and education in mother tongue, but also offers abundant historical and demographical information. The work of C.C. Bodea, “Romanians and Ottomans in the Romanian folklore”, analyses the minority’s relationship with the majority population, as it appears in the oral creation. We must also mention the informative presentations of the Turkish minority from the databases of Barometer on Ethnic Relations. Kozak Gyula’s research, “Muslims in Romania: Integration models, categorization and social distance” (in “Working Papers in Minority Studies”, no. 18), is of the same type and was compiled under the patronage of the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities. The project of the above mentioned institution (“Regime change in politics concerning minorities. Chronology of national minorities in Romania”), whose objective was the history of national minorities in Romania between 1989 and 2009, made a valuable contribution to the chronology of the Turkish minority in the post-communist period (signed by Mictat Ahmet Gârlan). Accordingly, we can say that, in spite of the relatively extended bibliographic material on the proposed topic, there are no complex, interdisciplinary, exhaustive studies. There is an obvious disproportion as far as the chronologic period under study is concerned: the studies which prevail are researches on the situation of the Turkish minority after the retrocession of Dobroudja in 1878, until the instauration of the communist regime. Last but not least, as the only attempt to a unitary analysis was made almost thirty years ago, we believe that, apart from using the information subsequently introduced in the historiographic network, the revaluation of the research methodology is also required, by the proximity to cultural anthropology, imagology and oral history approaches.