Meeting with Joe Biden sheepishly

Following his visit to Davos for the World Economic Forum, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden paid a two-day official visit from Jan. 2123 in Istanbul where he met with top government officials and civil society representatives. No one knows how his meetings had been arranged before he finally met the Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. One can only assume that some people tried to feed him myths about the current situation in Turkey. He met with some deputies from Parliament and apparently questioned them about the current debates on the presidential system to replace the existing parliamentarian one. The next meeting was more controversial, as he met with some journalists who continuously oppose the government. It was controversial because he missed the opportunity to hear arguments from the other side. If he did not meet Davutoğlu and Erdoğan, it would have been more likely that he would have left Turkey with a one-sided and biased story.

In anthropology, a local informant is a very important source of knowledge about a specific culture and lifestyle. When an ethnography is being evaluated, this native voice is sought as if the locals speak throughout the account, and only then is the work considered ethnographically rich and worthy of reading. One of the central criticisms directed at anthropology is to convince the reader, who has never been in that specific society, of the authenticity of the account and that the ethnographer has not fabricated anything. So in order to eliminate this criticism, an ethnographer is required in the monograph to include the native voices. This problem, of course, is not exclusive to anthropology, as the same criticism could also be directed at so-called experts of specific societies and cultures like foreign correspondents or foreign investment counselors. If we continue our anthropological example, many anthropologists have been very careful to avoid some specific models that had been set by earlier anthropologists for specific cultures and regions. For instance, anthropologists doing fieldwork in Africa are confronted by an implicit set of approaches such as that stateless societies do exist and can be found everywhere in Africa. So-called Mediterranean anthropology should struggle with the patron-client relationship or the concept of honor and shame that are supposed to exist in all Mediterranean societies.

There is a continual conflict between social scientists and the reporters who cover the events happening in their regions. This is probably the consequence of a fundamental tension between the media's desire for novelty and the scientific method used by experts. However, these conflicting results have most of the time been against the local peoples. Anthropology, which claims to report the culture as impartially as possible, also falls into the trap of an unequal relationship between academia and the local people, that is, the educated authority versus the uneducated native. Another important problem the "high-status" anthropologist can encounter in the field is a lack of knowledge of local languages. To overcome this problem they usually turn to "local elites" who can speak the language of the anthropologist. The end result is inevitably the account of these local gatekeepers' interpretations of the culture for the anthropologist.

As natives and locals of this country, we have been suffering from these biased approaches toward Turkey. Westerners who study Turkey have been busy trying to find out the tension that Turkey is supposed to suffer from as a result of modernization attempts that started with the establishment of the Republic. The most recent example of such a biased account can be found in a text by Slavoj Zizek, a well-known Marxist philosopher who regularly writes opinion pieces for newspapers in the West. One wonders what compelled him to write such a scandalous piece on Turkey. As a prominent academic figure he must have known that just searching the Internet and finding a couple of sites that give some distorted information that support his argument should never be sufficient to produce any piece. Having been blamed of plagiarism several times, he was alsoaccused by presidential spokesman İbrahim Kalın of not troubling himself with the ground facts. In response, Zizek defended himself by admitting that he was misled by "his friends," probably in Turkey, who requested he write such a frivolous essay to get Western academic support in their fight against President Erdoğan. These pseudo-intellectuals like Zizek and Noam Chomsky should stop serving their big brother by pretending as if they are also criticizing the current corrupt system in the world and get into the serious job of finding the facts. This hard work takes time, but eventually it pays off with respectability. A prominent academic is respected only when they present all aspects of the reality rather than meandering and twisting it for their and/or their bosses' benefit.

Little will to learn the facts also misled Biden in getting the whole picture during his visit to Turkey. Instead of meeting only with journalists who oppose the current government, he should have invited other journalists as well to get a relatively objective idea about Turkey. It is understandable that he was a guest in Turkey and he was seized by the local actors to engage in these meetings, but he must also be bored and fed up with hearing only one aspect of the facts, and he should have asked to hear other voices. It is also perfectly understandable that foreigners, be they correspondents or state officials, want to meet people with whom they can easily communicate. In the past these local people used to only be local elites who were educated in schools founded by Westerners or completed their education at Western universities. These local elites with their Western attitudes were also intellectuals who had been alienated from their own culture in opposition to Antonio Gramsci's concept of organic elites. These estranged elites of Turkish media also displayed such shameful acts by sharing their selfies with Biden, and they were so happy that his wife Jill saluted them by using their first names.

If we go back to the anthropological analogy, an ethnographer can hire a local informant who speaks the ethnographer's language, and with their assistance, they could conduct research by reaching out to different segments of a society. Otherwise, like the case of Zizek, journalists run the risk of fabricating biased accounts. It is also a well-known fact that in non-Western societies there are many Westernized elites who have lost their ties with their own societies. Finally, I repeat my recommendation that foreigners, more specifically Westerners, should be more careful about choosing their local informants so as not to fall into the trap of biased narratives produced according to pre-conceived images of Turkey.

*Professor of anthropology in the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema at Marmara University