Tyrkisk peber og kanel: Et studie om vekselvirkninger mellem kulturelle idealer, adfærd og selvidentitet blandt etnisk tyrkiske unge i Danmark

Abstract

Turkish Pepper and Cinnamon - a study on the interplay between cultural ideals, behaviour and self-identity among ethnic Turkish youths in Denmark. The focal point of the project is how the self-understanding of a group of Turkish singles is related to the elaboration of external cultural ideals to sexuality, impression management and everyday life behaviour. Methodologically, it is a biographical study where eight life stories are compared and held up against relevant empirical data and theories. According to my findings, the narrators try to maintain order in their life stories by making sense of discrepancies in their lived lives and their narratives. The discrepancies occur particularly when the narrators are experiencing having ambivalent attitudes towards their own sexual identity. Furthermore, they are divided between the diversity of ideals, the structural opportunities and constraints as well as their sexual needs versus their need for recognition in a private sphere. The narrators are socialised in two contexts in which they experience a lack of consensus between the ideals of sexuality. They meet a social norm presenting a tolerant view on sexuality in the society. At the same time, they are primarily socialised by significant others who in general subscribe traditional gender role ideals and can idealise sexual abstinence before marriage. Narrators, and especially the female narrators, possess a higher degree of tolerant attitudes than their parents. However, they have internalised a negative view on sex before marriage. The learning of different sets of ideals is mostly based on unspoken socialising processes because sexuality is a taboo in their families and ethnic groups. This leads to the narrators reproducing some overall sluggish cultural ideals that they themselves ascribe meaning. Narrators end up facing dilemmas between carrying out their own biographical projects based on their own will and needs versus the wish to live up to external ideals and expectations in order to protect the families' total symbolic capitals. They set up different strategies in order to navigate through everyday life with more or less conflicting roles. This leads to the narrators attempting to maintain two normal biographies. Their biographical work consists largely of being able to assume a behaviour that can be adapted to the ideals, for instance through constructing new understandings and definitions of gender roles, values and ideals. They are trying to plan the directions that their narratives take while trying to maintain order between structural developments, sudden events, planned personal goals and individual feelings and needs. Habitus and the need for recognition are central elements in understanding why the narrators’ parents' ideals affect narrators’ behaviour and self-understanding. The narrators are aware of the general developments taking place in attitudes and ideals in practice, yet they refer to sluggish overall cultural ideals that are traditional. Their stories are built up in a modern, contemporary society which celebrates diversity. Nevertheless, it is still not possible to deviate without experiencing or fearing social sanctions. Specific opportunities for expressing sexuality exist in the Danish context. The female narrators have been under restrictive conditions and they are generally the ones who take up the fight for equality. This is also influenced by the fact that women achieve some capitals and positions in the social field which give them the confidence to assume roles that can make it possible to defy the imagined traditional roles. When women’s behavioural patterns change over time, men also redefine their biographical projects. The conclusion of this thesis therefore contradicts understandings of men who demand that women are virgins since there are no homogenous views on this issue. There are no distinctions of female victims and male perpetrators. Women are not perceived as victims of an inequality of which men and parents are the only responsible. Women are not necessarily the only victims of oppression and they may even wish the conditions under which they live. Thus they partly reproduce the masculine dominance. The narrators generally suppress their physical needs in favour of cultural ideals. Their behaviour is often in accordance with what can be defined as legitimate according to those ideals. They are not determined by the ideals, but they are under a symbolic violence and experience a sense of shame. They exercise personal sanctions against themselves by labelling their own actions as wrong because the external ideals and not their own ideals become the frame of reference for what is defined as deviant behavior. Between ambivalent attitudes toward their own biographies, they try to maintain a meaningful narrative.

A master thesis from Aalborg University

Tyrkisk peber og kanel: Et studie om vekselvirkninger mellem kulturelle idealer, adfærd og selvidentitet blandt etnisk tyrkiske unge i Danmark