MANAGING (IN)VISIBILITY BY A DOUBLE MINORITY: DISSIMULATION AND IDENTITY MAINTENANCE AMONG ALEVI BULGARIAN TURKS

This dissertation focusses on invisibilities of ethno-religious minorities which face cycles of persecutions and severe discrimination in their larger societies. The literature portrays marginalized groups’ visibility either as a requirement for their empowerment or a source of their surveillance. However, I argue that for such groups what matters is not their visibility or invisibility per se but rather their control over it, i.e. to what extent the community members are able to reveal or conceal information about themselves. For them, invisibility may be a tactical tool as well as a structural burden. My dissertation examines complicated (in)visibilities of a double minority, Alevi Bulgarian Turks in Bulgaria and Turkey.\ud \ud Specifically, I focus on a paradoxical configuration of Alevis’ invisibilities: while the minority is marginalized and rendered invisible due to historical and structural conditions, they have not strived for increased visibility, but rather tried to decrease it. This configuration of self-imposed invisibility is captured by the term takiye (protective dissimulation), a Turkish variant of the Arabic taqiyya. In Islamic theology, the term refers to hiding one’s religious identity or its components. My analysis of takiye enables me to develop the English concept of dissimulation to indicate the possibility for collective agency for marginalized minorities even when their marginalizations persist, as I show by examining Alevi Bulgarian Turks’ historical and present day dissimulations. \ud \ud The major theoretical contribution of the dissertation is development of this concept of dissimulation.\ud \ud For a dissimulating minority, the group’s identity remains robust even when its members publically claim membership in other groups, and group boundaries remain salient even when the members of the minority pretend to cross them. Therefore, dissimulation actually reinforces the distinction between the minority and other groups in the eyes of the minority’s own members. I discuss cases in which Alevi Bulgarian Turks utilized dissimulation by means of simulating the varying, historically changing majorities in post-Ottoman Bulgaria, while still following Alevi ways in the privacy of their own group members. The data for my thesis was gathered during nine months of ethnographic fieldwork Bulgaria and nine months of fieldwork in Turkey.\u