Representing religious discrimination at the margins: Temporalities and "appropriate" identities of the state in Turkey

Abstract

In Turkey during Ramadan in the 2000s, a group of Sunni Muslims attacked a Kurdish Alevi family that was not fasting. The Alevis, Turkey's second-largest religious group, do not fast during Ramadan, creating tensions in mixed neighborhoods in which Sunni Islam is the reigning religion. This article analyzes how an Alevi-run television station covered this event, from its location in a provincial town to related protests in Istanbul, to show how minority media may partake in the reproduction of the dominant norms that perpetuate such discriminatory acts. They do so by producing a "presentist" temporal perspective on discrimination that prioritizes more contemporary problems of the minoritized community at the expense of a longer history of structural violence. In this case, this temporalization portrayed Alevis as exclusively Turks, neglecting, therefore, Kurdish Alevis, and it disguised the state's long-term involvement in Alevis' marginalization. This article presents an alternative perspective on minority media in anthropology, which often interprets state alignments as strategic leverage to defend community rights. The article argues that minority media producers can also be strategic in their alignments with their communities and may use this alignment as a facade when securing their ties with states.