The Quiet Grammar of Domination: Symbolic Violence and the Gagauz Struggle for National Identity through a Bourdieusian Lens
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69760/aghel.026002017Keywords:
Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence, linguistic capital, habitus, Gagauz, national identity, linguistic insecurity, ethno-confessional identity, Gagauzia, MoldovaAbstract
This article develops a sociological reading of the Gagauz struggle for national identity through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, together with the cognate concepts of the linguistic market, linguistic capital and habitus. The Gagauz a Turkic-speaking, Orthodox Christian minority concentrated in southern Moldova occupy an instructive sociological position: they enjoy formal language rights and even territorial autonomy, yet their language continues to recede in favour of Russian. I argue that this paradox cannot be explained by overt coercion, which is largely absent, but only by the subtler mechanism Bourdieu calls symbolic violence: the process whereby a dominated group comes to perceive its own subordination as natural, reasonable and even freely chosen. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship in particular Dağdeviren-Kırmızı and İnan’s work on linguistic insecurity, Kapaló’s ethnography of Gagauz folk religion, and the extensive Polish-school literature on Gagauz statehood and autonomy by Kosienkowski and Hatłas the article shows how the low symbolic value of the Gagauz tongue has been historically produced and durably internalised. A central original contribution is a conceptual model (Figure 1) that maps Bourdieu’s abstract circuit of symbolic violence onto the empirical Gagauz case. The conclusion argues that the success of Gagauz identity politics depends less on further legal recognition than on a reconstruction of the symbolic value of linguistic capital itself.
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