Things You Should Watch

This week's video is a bit of a commitment, but I strongly recommend it if you find yourself with an hour to kill. For those of you who have not yet been enlightened, a vast chunk of the BBC's documentary catalog is accessible on YouTube. While there are numerous titles which I would suggest, this particular film surveys the career of Nile Rodgers, one of the most influential minds in American pop music.

For those of you who do not know Niles by name, he is a founding member of the American R&B band Chic, and is responsible for some of the most successful songs, sounds, and bands that have dominated the US pop charts since the 1970s. He's not a bad guitarist either.

Things You Should Watch

This weeks video comes to us from video blogger CGP Grey who, over the past few years, has produced numerous videos explaining and exploring various political and legal oddities that can be found throughout the world. In this video, Mr. Grey (or Mr. CGP, I am not sure) uses an eloquent and subtly arrogant narration to explain the alternative voting system.

We often think of voting in a republic strictly in terms of the democratic system that we have in America, where each person gets one vote and whomever gets the most votes in an election is the winner of that race. Alternative voting is a system where voters can rank candidates based on their desirability in the hopes that the candidate with the highest desirability for the maximum number of people will become a representative. I will let Mr. Grey explain the nuances.

Alien Lands

 

Seeing as I am roughly half way through my residency in Turkey, I feel that now is a proper time to discharge many of the reflective thoughts that have been floating around my head recently. Being abroad is a strange experience. It takes place both up close, spontaneously unfolding right in front of your eyes, and from afar, solidifying slowly in the back of your head. You assume the limbotic identity of both a participant and an observer, struggling to embrace the society you are surrounded by while simultaneously asserting the culture you brought with you.

Fortunately, Turkey does not lend itself well to this dichotomy. The inescapably affable nature of many Turkish people and their communities creates an environment of constant invitation so conducive to eating, drinking, and talking, that I feel a tinge of guilt when not participating in some combination of the three. The subtle beauty of Istanbul's sun stained mosques and cramped streets do nothing to remedy this ever swelling desire to explore, and though the city's sprawl carries on in all directions in a seemingly infinite stretch of terracotta, stone, and cats, it has a way of wrapping you in the warmest bear hug you have ever received, reassuring you that you are exactly where you need to be.

But it is imperative to remember where this perspective is coming from. As impartial as we would like to be, our preconceived notions of any foreign country hinder our ability to experience their communities in a truly unadulterated way. This obstacle is not only present when traveling in other nations: even when traveling between states in America it is hard to shake off the stereotypes that are associated with different regions and their people. When these prejudices are inevitably challenged and you are forced to confront the unexpected, it can lead to a brief, yet potent, feeling of isolation.

It is usually under these circumstances that I retreat to my enclave of fellow American expatriates. By no means would I suggest that these friends are anything but some of the brightest and most genial people I have met on this trip, but there is an indefensible peculiarity about surrounding yourself with your own ilk during an experience that is supposedly motivated by a lust for the unknown. Seeking out the familiar in a new environment is completely natural and healthy, but a reliance on the comfort of the known can easily devolve into apathy, keeping you from going out and absorbing the greater world around you.

The quiet struggle of the abroad experience is between finding a home within a foreign community and continually thrusting yourself beyond what you have already become acquainted with. This push and pull plays out both externally, in the host society in which you are a guest, and internally, as you strive to get the most out of your brief time overseas, and the caution that accompanies this realization is why I now find myself both inspired and reserved.

This dualistic relationship can perhaps best be explained through my recent trip to Cappadocia: a region of Central Anatolia with a topographical personality similar to something out of a Dr. Seuss book. The landscape, with its elaborately carved cliff-face fortresses and towering natural stone obelisks, was wholly alien to me. After a few days, however, the small town in which I was staying had become an oasis of familiarity surrounded by the extraordinary terrain. This affinity was most likely the result the hospitality of the town's inhabitants as well as the high concentration of tourists that were staying there, which lead me to ponder a seemingly appropriate question: was the "authentic" Cappadocia experience to be found in the tourist hub of Göreme, or was it out amongst the strange pillars and labyrinthine canyons of the countryside?

Ultimately I realized that the question was irrelevant. Trying to find some sort of authenticity in any experience implies that there is a wrong way and a right way to go about it, that there are rules by which the experience is governed, and, most damaging of all, that there is a possibility of failure. You cannot fail going abroad. Your experienced is measured by no standards except your own, so if you "fail" it is your own doing. Everybody who makes the decision to uproot and place themselves, physically and culturally, into a different society does it for their own unique reasons. I will admit, sometimes upon hearing those reasons I am forced to bite my tongue, but in the end, you are the final judge of what you gained on these brief trips. Just get out of the house every once in a while.

Things You Should Watch

Being a child of the internet, I feel confident in saying that I have spent the last few years honing my navigation skills on the vast ocean that is YouTube. Trusting in my self-endorsed capability, I have decided that every Monday I will try and post a video that I have come across which I feel is interesting, informative, or entertaining.

This week, I present the inaugural episode of the Crash Course: US History series presented by John Green, the author of the popular novel The Fault in Our Stars. Green, working with the Thought Cafe animation studio, does a wonderful job of explicating the nuances and complexities of American History in weekly segments that usually run shorter than fifteen minutes. If you are interested in US History, but find traditional ways of learning about it a bit daunting, or if you are just bored, I highly recommend the series.

Osmanlı: The Original Pluralists

Seeing as my legs are beginning to buckle under the weight of impending midterms, I figured I would keep this week's post rather short and post something more substantial over the course of the coming week.

We Americans have a tendency to pride ourselves on a shared sense of plurality. This exists in various dimensions in the the United States, be it our cornucopia of dinner options or beer brands or television shows about "Real Housewives", but I like to think, among all else, we have the most self regard for the diversity of cultural identities that exists among the American people. Let me be clear, I do not ascribe to the belief that the United States is a veritable patchwork of peoples who live side by side in some off kilter utopia. American history is primarily the tale of our collective struggle to extend our shared concept of freedom to every person who calls our country home, and we still have tremendous difficulty in doing so, despite our many advances.

Being American encompasses different things to different people, but the fact that we all adopt that common title is what melds us together as a national unit. Immigration is such an integral part of our history that many people can rightfully claim their American identity regardless of where they or their parent emigrated from. The common thread, however, is the recognition, not of an American sense of Nativism, but of the reality that we are a demographic mess composed of the children of every opportunist, reject, inventor, refugee, wealth seeker, slave, and autodidact who settled on our land for one reason or another.

In my infinite ignorance, I assumed that this sense of plurality was something that was unique to the United States. I found, however, that to many Turks, the essence of Turkishness can be derived from a similar mode of thinking. The Ottoman empire (to which the Republic of Turkey is seen as a successor to) was so vast and incorporated so many different populations that it is virtually impossible to truly identify which Turks originally came from what ethnic  lineage. Turkic, Balkan, Greek, Armenian, Arab, Jewish, and a plethora of other peoples intermingled in relative peace throughout a state that stretched from Budapest to Yemen.

Historically speaking, an Ottoman was someone who followed Osman, the 14th century founder of the Ottoman Empire. Prior affiliation, be it ethnic or religious, was irrelevant, as long as your Ottoman identity came first. The Turkish people have adapted this ideology to their modern state: If you identify as a Turk, you are pretty much a Turk. There may be a slight degree of fine print to peruse in regards to this statement, but, for the most part, you can count yourself Turkish. The vast majority of Turks I know see this claim to the right of Turkishness as the main source of authority when it comes to their own national identity, regardless of where their ancestors originated from.

Similar circumstances tend to breed similar ideas, and it is both humbling and fascinating to see a such an important piece of my own national identity shared in a nation so far from my own.

Anyways, back to studying...