Posted by alp on March 3, 2007, 1:29 am, in reply to "Re: south azerbaijan recognized by UNPO" The first issue or question is: where is exactly Iranian Azerbaijan? In one sense this is rather an obvious issue, with various provincial divisions going back to the time of Reza Shah. However, the closer you examine the topic, the more complicated it gets, and as the recent unrest clearly demonstrated the cultural make up of Azerbaijan is another thing. There were demonstrations in Tabriz, Urmieh, Ardabil, Zanjan, and in numerous other smaller cities in all the four provinces. Many people in all of these provinces found the Iran newspaper cartoon offensive and reacted to it. As far as many local people are concerned, it is not absolutely clear whether the reason d’etre for provincial divisions into East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, Ardabil and Zanjan were simply because of administrative needs or logistics. So, where is the larger cultural Iranian Azerbaijan? The northern and the western boundary of this area are clear, the international borders with the Republic of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey. The southern boundary is somewhat diffused with Kurdish, Turkmen and Persian speaking people, and a significant number of Turkish-speakers in and around the city of Hamadan. The eastern and southeastern borders of this cultural area has in recent years been pushed into Karaj and even into Tehran, where a low of 25% and a high of 40% are Turk, Azeri or Azerbaijani, take which ever term you would like. The second issue has to do with the politics and poetics of the above terms. The twenty million or so native Turkish-speakers refer to themselves as Turks. They do not see why others insist on referring to them as something other. Anthropology tells us that generally we should stick to the emic categories, that is, native categories of thinking and understanding of a particular local group that are meaningful to them. Interestingly, in one of the post May 2006 unrest discussion sessions held in Tehran by journalists of Iran and Sharg newspapers, specifically inviting Turkish-speaking colleagues to access the impact of the Mana Neyistani sousk cartoon, and their own ethnic, cultural and linguistic sensitivities and sensibilities in writing about minority populations, it was suggested by a Turkish-speaking colleague, that a first step is, to call Turkish-speakers Turks, as they themselves do, and not keep referring to them as Azeri or Azeri-speakers, which has become the nomenclature of the print world in Iran particularly since the Islamic revolution. The term Azeri has found a fashionable currency for distinguishing Iranian Azerbaijanis or Turkish-speakers from those in Turkey and the Republic of Azerbaijan and other groups in Iran. The test of the native usage is, when two Iranian Azerbaijanis not knowing a third, will ask each other whether that third person is a “Turk or a Fars”, or of another ethnic group, such as Armenian, Assyrian or a Kurd, but not “Azeri or Fars”. ... Link: http://www.iranian.com/Safizadeh/2007/February/Azerbaijan110/index.html
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Where is Azerbaijan?
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