Occidentalism and accountability: constructing culture and cultural difference in majority Greek talk about the minority in Western Thrace

Abstract

Drawing upon the notion of occidentalism, developed within cultural theory and critical ethnography, this article explores ways in which explicit and/or implicit assumptions about the West and Western self are implicated, in their conversational mobilization, to accountability management. The data analysed come from a study in Western Thrace (Greece), which included interviews and focus group with majority Greek educators about the Muslim minority historically residing in the region. The analysis presented employs tools from critical discursive social psychology. Building upon discourse analytic treatments within social psychology on the mobilization of national categories and accountability management in talk, it is argued that the banal indexicalization of national categories in talk opens the space for a critical interrogation of the banal indexicalization of an occidentalist cultural imagery that posits a hierarchical distinction between cultures of the West and the Rest.

Parental discourse and identity management in the talk of indigenous and migrant speakers

“…In this framework, talking and positioning oneself as parent functions to (double) inoculate against accusations of prejudice and racism, grounding the voicing of strong views about others on commonplace sensitive topics -children, their safety and wellbeing -and constructing concerns around them as pragmatic. Taking this explanation into account, our article contributes to the stream of research using discursive strategies to analyse (national) identity, otherness, prejudice and racism beyond fact/value dilemmas (Billig, 1989(Billig, , 2012van Dijk, 1987van Dijk, , 1992Wetherell, 2012;Wetherell and Potter, 1992;Condor, 2000;Tileagǎ, 2005: 604; and for studies in Greece in particular see 2006a, 2006bBozatzis, 2009;Kadianaki, 2010 for immigrant identity dialogues and strategies of resistance in Greece).…”

“…In these hierarchies the in-group is preferentially treated in comparison to 'others' who are constructed as worse off in terms of hygiene, socio-economic status and value-system using examples (Extracts 3 and 4) and analogy (Extract 5). It should be noted that in the context of these discussions, 'significant others' for Greeks are immigrants -Albanians in one case -while othering for migrant mothers in London is achieved by reference to colour and race (Bozatzis, 2009 for a discussion of the ideological grounding of the rhetorical articulation of hierarchical distinctions, albeit between the West and the Rest; see van Dijk, 1995 for the normativity of tolerance as a socio-cultural value (of the West) allowing for the expression of prejudice as unproblematic).…”

“Europe” in Greece: Lay constructions of Europe in the context of Greek immigration debates

“…In Greece, this Orientalist thinking takes the form of “Oriental cultural pollution.” (Bozatzis, ) Greece is represented as essentially or historically European (due the historical significance of classical Greece as the “cradle of European civilisation”) but also as tainted by Oriental influences, namely, the Ottoman Empire. This ambivalent positioning represents political projects that, in the history of the Greek state, have favoured either strong ties to the West or to the East.…”

“…Further, this ambivalence has become part and parcel of Greek national identity, entailing a double moral accountability dilemma: avoiding “xenophobia” (i.e., expressing unfavourable views towards others without sufficient warrant), on the one hand, and avoiding “xenomania” (i.e., expressing unwarranted favouritism towards countries and cultural practices of the West), on the other. (Bozatzis, )…”

Unpacking Young People’s National Identities

“…More specifically, a study of national accounting practices (Bozatzis, 1999) of Greek citizens residing in other EU countries has shown the participants to skilfully manage their talk between being positioned as 'xenophobic' and 'xenomaniac'. Bozatzis (2014) in his most recent work on Banal Occidentalism argued about how the national ideological imagery is reproduced via the practice of leveling and disavowal of charges of xenomania.…”