Urban Ethnography and the Ethnographic Object
How were changes in middle-class formation during the liberalization episode affected by globalizing processes, and how were these refracted in the changing cityscape of Istanbul? This question has embedded in it another prior question about how the middle class is constituted as an object of study. Before we had determined the exact subject, namely, education practices of families and households that are central to the question of how a middle class is reproduced and transformed, we had intuitions and made self-evident observations about what constituted a middle class. These were based on our knowledge from several sources, including the literature on social class and our many conversations with people in Istanbul about the salience of our concept of class for exploring the relationship between education and social hierarchies. To these sources were added intuitions and experience from living in the city as well as more formal and recorded observations and interviews.
In one sense, fieldwork in Istanbul began for one of us in childhood. Balkan, who was born and grew up in a middle-class household in Bakirköy, now the largest and most populous district of Istanbul, went to Kadiköy Maarif Koleji, renamed Kadiköy Anadolu Lisesi when the state created the first five Anadolu middle schools in the 1950s in an attempt to meet middle-class families demand for quality education.
During the academic year of 1991–92, Rutz taught at Bo
Methodology
Decisions about this book's problematic, methodology, and scope frame decisions such as what methods to deploy for gathering the necessary kinds of information from which to make interpretations and upon which to base conclusions. On the most general level, the book is about the multiple agencies of the neoliberal state, market, and family in making new middle classes in this era of globalization.
Ethnography is understood to include interpretations and conclusions based on extended periods of observation and interview. Ethnographers embrace both objectivities and subjectivities as information to be interpreted through their own methodology that nevertheless is recorded and transformed by our interpretation of their interpretations of themselves. Social and cultural knowledge remain incomplete, at times ambiguous, and open to scrutiny.
An apposite metaphor for our approach to methods is illustrated by Pablo Picasso's painting entitled The Studio (1927–28).4 To the viewer, the painting exists through the image of multiple planes on a two-dimensional canvas, each with different colors, hues, and textures, which together create meaning for the artist. His subject is the object of his gaze, but the observer also interprets what is painted on the canvas. In The Studio, the painter has placed himself in the painting, discernible as an outline of his figure, looking at his subject, who also is figured in outline in another plane on the canvas. The observer sees different planes signified by different colors in the space between the artist and his subject. The viewer discerns table-like, vase-like, framed picture-like planes that together suggest the context given in the title of the painting. The painting is a finished object of a project in the making in the artist's studio, without assuming that the viewers agree on the meaning.
Loic Wacquant captures an important social reality of middle-class formation when he states: “The middle class is necessarily an ill-defined entity. This does not reflect a lack of theoretical penetration but rather the character of reality. Theories of the middle class should constantly strive to capture this essential ambiguity of their object rather than to dispose of it” (1991: 57). This injunction needs to be kept in mind in any attempt to establish the reality of an Istanbul new middle class.
One way to conceptualize class ambiguity is to refer to a core middle-class fragment as less ambiguously constituted than either upper middle-class or lower middle-class fragments, which necessarily share more with capital and labor, respectively. The next chapter delves more deeply into the conceptualization of the Istanbul middle class. Here the concern is to give some empirical support to the realization of an Istanbul middle class by locating it in the cityscape.
One instrument we used to locate class in social space and to refine the social construction of class by district was a socioeconomic survey undertaken in the summer of 1993. The survey was named Global Integration of Turkey's Economy and Changing Household Consumption Trends. Throughout the book, it is referred to as the 1993 Survey (see Appendix A). The survey, conducted by eight university students, was administered to 550 households scattered across 104 districts of Istanbul. One of the aims of the 1993 Survey was to discover whether our presuppositions, based in part on university students' classroom perceptions, were supported by answers to standardized survey questions. The 1993 Survey was our main instrument for ferreting out patterned relationships among occupations, attained levels of education, and consumer lifestyles.
Interviews
In 1994 we narrowed our primary focus to the significance of the annual national Selective Middle Schools Examinations (SMSEs) as a window on the rise in importance of an Istanbul new middle class and its reproduction. Balkan's lifelong associations with friends and classmates, together with his wife's extended family (büyük aile) provided access to persons when we conducted twenty-six taped interviews with parents, teachers, school administrators, school entrepreneurs, and tutors during the spring of 1996 (see Appendix B).
Of thirty-six adults who agreed to be taped, twenty-six were parents, four were private school owners or administrators, three were private tutors, one was a high school teacher, one a journalist who wrote an education column in a major Istanbul newspaper, and one who was a partner and administrator of a private lesson school. Nine of the parent interviews were conducted with both spouses present. In addition to taped interviews, we had innumerable informal conversations about all aspects of education with many people, educators as well as educated, over a period that spanned seven years of periodic living in Istanbul. Many of the comments and observations made during conversations found their way into a daily journal, and helped us to frame relevant topics and issues that eventually became part of the design of our interviews as well as having an influence on many other aspects of our project.
Our main interest in doing taped interviews was to accumulate a record of how families planned for the education of their children. Education plans are no casual matter. Parents begin with a plan at the birth of a child and involve a wide range of family members. We wanted their experience of their world in their words. As it turned out, this was not difficult to achieve. Working through family, friends, relatives, former students, and classmates, we were able to gain introductions to a rather wide range of new middle-class families who lived in widely separated districts of Istanbul. These introductions were invaluable, indeed necessary, to the success of our project. Had we merely selected people according to some objective criteria, the interviews would have been formal and brief. As it turned out, the interviews were lively and interactive. People had much to say about “Turkey's education system today.” They discussed and debated their differences on topics such as the immorality of the state, their own ambivalent feelings of resistance and resignation toward the national middle schools examinations, the failure of public education, the sacrifices of the family, and many other topics related to success and failure, tests and education, class and privilege. They often struggled to find language that would articulate their feelings about the lost childhood of their children and to contrast it with the memory of their own experience.
Parents had much to say about schools, education, and tests. They also placed their personal experience in the larger