BRISMES 1994 Annual Conference

The annual conference of the British Society for Middle EasternStudies (BRISMES) was hosted by the Department of Middle EasternStudies at the University of Manchester and concentrated on thetheme of "Culture: Unity and Diversity." About two hundred participantsdeliberated over approximately ninety papers of varying standards,in addition to the three plenary sessions. This was achieved bygrouping the speakers, many of whom were from overseas, intothirty-four panels covering such diverse themes as law, politics, language,literature, poetry, culture, identity, history, religion, architecture,mysticism, media, economics, and agriculture. A balance wasalso maintained between the historical and the contemporary in manyof these areas. Each session. featured up to five panels, each withbetween two and four speakers. These were held simultaneously inorder to give all of the participants in each session the opportunity tochoose the one panel that would be of most interest to them. Some ofthe panels were hosted by special interest groups: The Society forMoroccan Studies; The Association for Cypriot, Greek and TurkishAffairs; The Manchester University Research Group on Central Asiaand the Caucasus; and two panels in memory of Avriel Butovsky.The focus of the conference's attention was the plenary session oneach of the three days. A different guest speaker was present for eachsession. The most striking presentation was that of Seyyed HosseinNasr (George Washington University, USA). The opening plenaryaddress was by Bozkurt Guvem; (Ankara, Turkey), and the closingplenary session featured Tayeb Salih (London, UK).After the opening speeches, Bozkurt Guven????. currently advisor tothe President of Turkey and formerly an anthropologist and architect,was called upon to speak on the "Quest for National Identity inTurkey: Cultural Continuity of Historical Diversities." He began byfocusing on the dilemma that a quest for identity generates due to itsdeep-rootedness in the sociocultural and historical consciousness ofpeople at the individual, collective, local, national, static, and transitionallevels. In answer to the question "Who are you?," one's identityis as much dependent on the attitude of the perceiver as it is on theperception that the perceived has of himself or herself. It is therefore ...