Kırsal Göçmenin Kimlik, Aidiyet ve Bağlılık Mücadelesi: Rizeli Göçmenler Üzerine Bir Çalışma

Abstract

This research concerns clarification, explanation and interpretation of a social fact known as rural migrant’s “longing for and loyalty to the homeland”, which remains in the background of the migration and urbanization literature. This social fact, discussed in the example of the migration of people of Rize to different places within and outside the country, constitutes a struggle for existence and belonging which appears through different strategies and applications exhibited by the migrants occasionally to return to their homeland but mostly to spend their lives in a collective settlement order and to transfer the feeling of loyalty to the homeland to the next generations. The basic subjects exclusively dealt with by this study for clarification and explanation of this struggle include the reasons the migrants had to migrate and how they perceived and interpreted these factors; thoughts, relationships and socialization patterns that made them preserve their connection with their homelands; and how their struggles were received and how much they were supported by their family environments and the new way of life they set up where they migrated. To clarify these subjects, 81 migrants were in-depth interviewed during the research process and these migrants were determined with the expediency method (purposive sampling) in consideration of their purposes or reasons for migration and the way of settlement they maintain. The migrants interviewed with regard to their reasons or purposes for migration comprise four subsets. These are (i) the ones who migrated for the purpose of receiving secondary or higher education, (ii) the ones who migrated for the purpose of becoming entrepreneurs or engaging in trade, (iii) the ones who migrated to search for employment opportunities in different places as unskilled workers, (iv) and the ones who migrated by marriage. The migrants in terms of the settlement order they still maintain comprise four main sets. These are (i) the ones who live where they migrated, not in Rize, and return to the rural area at specific times of the year for short or long term holidays or for harvest and own rural dwellings used for this purpose; (ii) the ones who return to their rural origins after migration; (iii) the ones who migrate from the rural area and then return to city or county center of Rize; (iv) and the ones who reside both in the rural area and the city, particularly in one of the city or county centers of Rize, following the migration process. The research data shows that the connection the migrants maintain with their own origins and the struggle they go through for this purpose do not simply indicate that they failed to build a new and meaningful existence for themselves where they migrated. On the contrary, migrants mostly do not consider that they migrated, but temporarily went to a foreign land (gurbete çıkmak) to return to home later. Furthermore, their struggle for belonging and loyalty to their homelands is qualified as a value-oriented rationalistic action they take to preserve “being displaced” for generations that represents a significant aspect of their social identities, in particular to ideas, thoughts and emotions generating from the effects of early socialization. The struggle of the migrants having this qualification appears to be the manifestation of meta-historical rationality, in Weber’s words, even when it is not suitable for substantive-formal rationality of modernity. However, this struggle and the concrete form it gained do not seem to end. On the contrary, the struggle put forward for identity, belonging, and affiliation and transfer and preservation thereof for generations appear to be a form of social existence, called liquid modernity by Bauman, which is seen specifically among migrants and reevaluated, interpreted and added new content and orientation with every new generation within the social conditions they are in.