ABSTRACT

Sterphone’s article engages with the relevance and consequentiality of ‘Muslim’ as a social category for everyday Germans during the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, it examines commonsense knowledge about the characteristics and actions bound to the category ‘Muslim’ and (re)produced in newspapers and speeches. It demonstrates that the German essentialization of ‘Turks’ following the end of the guest worker programme in 1973 deployed and (re)produced their simultaneous categorizability as ‘Muslims’. Thus Germans employed ‘Muslim’ as a resource for (re)producing category-tied knowledge about irreconcilable civilizational difference. Sterphone’s analysis combines discourse analysis with an ethnomethodological approach to studying categories and categorization practices. Since categories are ‘inference rich’ and act as storehouses for commonsense knowledge about the social world, they constitute resources for a variety of social actions. This paper demonstrates that not only did politicians and news journalists demonstrably orient themselves to the relevance of ‘Muslim’ as a means for (re)constructing and emphasizing incommensurable social difference, they also called on readers to participate in seeing these traits and behaviours as the kind of thing done or embodied by Muslims. Such practices produced the category ‘Muslim’ as mutually exclusive with ‘German’ long before the influx of refugees in the 1990s or the post-9/11 securitization. Thus Sterphone’s paper contributes to studies of German nationhood and its intersections with race, ethnicity and religion. Specifically, it highlights Germany’s post-war movement towards alignment with ‘the West’ and, consequently, the Muslim Turk’s position as a salient Other in Germany’s westernizing project. It therefore contributes to both theoretical and empirical discussions of anti-Muslim racism that demonstrate how Germans employ and (re)produce ‘Germanness’ (Deutsch-Sein) and ‘Muslimness’ (Muslimisch-Sein) so that they preclude one another.

摘要

Sterphone的文章涉及“穆斯林”作为1970年代和1980年代日常德国人的社会类别的相关性和重要性。具体来说，它研究了与“穆斯林”类别相关的特征和行为的常识知识，并在报纸和演讲中被（重新）制作。它表明，1973年宾客工人计划结束后，德国人对“土耳其人”的本质化部署并（重新）将其同时分类为“穆斯林”。因此，德国人将“穆斯林”作为一种资源，用于（重新）产生关于不可调和的文明差异的分类知识。Sterphone的分析将话语分析与一种民族方法论相结合，以研究类别和分类实践。由于类别是“推理丰富”的，并且充当有关社会世界的常识知识的仓库，因此它们构成了各种社会行为的资源。本文表明，政治家和新闻记者不仅证明自己将“穆斯林”作为（重构）并强调无与伦比的社会差异的手段，而且还呼吁读者参与，将这些特征和行为视为穆斯林所做或体现的一种事情。在1990年代难民大量涌入或9/11后证券化之前，这种作法产生的“穆斯林”类别与“德国”类别互斥。因此，Sterphone的论文有助于研究德国的民族及其与种族，种族和宗教的交汇。特别，它强调了战后德国与“西方”结盟的运动，并因此强调了穆斯林土耳其人在德国西化计划中作为突出的他者的地位。因此，它为反穆斯林种族主义的理论和经验讨论做出了贡献，这些论证表明了德国人如何使用和（再）产生“德语”（Deutsch-Sein和“ Muslimness”（Muslimschch -Sein），以便彼此排斥。