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  • Tales from the Expat Harem:Foreign Women in Modern Turkey
  • Ann Evans Larimore
Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gökmen, eds. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006. Pp. 293. ISBN 1580051553.

This expertly written and edited anthology is an enchanting read of women's fast-moving well-told tales of adventures with Turkish men. It can be dipped into at any point, but there is a rhythm and progression to the presentation of these episodes, so that reading them in sequence is not only aesthetically pleasing but instructive. This is not a book of feminist scholarship; rather, it is a supremely feminine book celebrating the late twentieth-century adventures of independent, "liberated," mostly American women in Turkey. Many of the stories in this book can be seen as unwitting expressions of American superpower exuberance in the tellers' expectations of success (which many of them find) and safety.

The editors sent out a call for stories "through networks of people and computers, we heard from a multitude of expatriates... all desiring to be counted and to recount their sagas... only a fraction survived the editing process" (xvi–xvii). They have succeeded amazingly well in realizing their conceptualization of this anthology. It is, however, a very particular frame addressing issues for expatriate women in Turkey and women in Turkish families from a personalized stance only. It is problematic that the editors do not specify how the privacy of the Turkish families and the individuals portrayed by the contributors has been protected. Have personal and place names been changed to preserve anonymity, or not? There is no reference to this concern.

The book as a whole portrays dynamic contacts between powerful cultures at the most crucial and, in some ways, vulnerable structural joint—that of love and marriage, family formation, and generational reproduction. [End Page 115] Contemporary Turkish culture in much of its class, ethnic, and regional variety is the host culture. Women from the United States as well as from Guatemala, Pakistan, the Netherlands, and Australia have their tales to tell. Written with a sharp eye for telling small details, these stories can provide many ethnographic insights. From another point of view, the anthology can serve as a guide to cross-cultural interpersonal interactions for the adventurous, amorous woman traveler to Turkey. The careful systematic reader can gain a wealth of information about the everyday practices, often crucial ones, of contemporary Turkish female and familial culture, household operation, and social expectations, including perceptive comments on "the evil eye." The legendary mother-in-law is well represented in several characters. Not a few of the accounts chronicle the process of learning Turkish and the problems encountered when one has only a limited vocabulary in one's host's language.

The stories come from urban settings, especially Istanbul, and from smaller cities and towns, mostly in western Turkey. Only in two tales do the protagonists venture into the southeast, and neither account encourages a single woman to travel there. A cordial recounting of preparations for a family's ceremonial feast to welcome a fiancé into the family, which is a communal effort of the family's women, takes place in Tirebolu on the Black Sea coast. A few episodes occurred twenty to forty years ago, but most are clustered in the recent present, from the 1990s until now. Two of the more distant in time involve villages and villagers; nevertheless, the emphasis is on the elite, upper- and middle-class, Westernized families whose members are likely to encounter expatriate women. Some accounts by expatriate businesswomen relate interactions with more conservative Turks. In one story, the younger women of a family from a Kurdish village are transplanted to western Turkey to work as field laborers. The reader gets only glimpses of the lives that most Turkish families lead, an artifact of the method of gathering stories for the book.

By contrast, many of the tellers of these tales write self-reflectively of changes in their self-perceptions, emotional struggles, and wild impulses and fears during cross-cultural encounters. Their honest testimony about their personal difficulties in their experiences being embedded in Turkish familial society is impressive. Self-revelation and psychological growth is a pervasive theme...

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