{"id":485,"date":"2017-10-09T11:35:29","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T15:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/?p=485"},"modified":"2017-10-09T11:35:29","modified_gmt":"2017-10-09T15:35:29","slug":"the-grocer-and-the-chief-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/uncategorized\/the-grocer-and-the-chief-6\/","title":{"rendered":"The Grocer and the Chief"},"content":{"rendered":"

When reading this article, I often found myself thinking especially about Plato’s The Republic\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Monica Ringer’s\u00a0essay on modernity. The Republic<\/em>\u00a0came to mind particularly when, after being asked what he would do as president of Turkey, the Grocer answers that he would build roads so that the villagers would not “stay in their holes all their lives” (Lerner 24); for me, this comment evokes the image that Plato constructs of men in an underground cave, who know only shadows on the wall, being pulled above ground and\u00a0 into the light, seeing the real world. This kind of process of enlightenment that Plato describes was somewhat underlined by the fact that the Balgati people originally marked the Grocer as an infidel and later, after being modernized, after being pulled up out of their holes, they refer to him as a prophet.<\/p>\n

When reading about the modernizing process that Balgat experiences, I couldn’t help but thinking that the changes to the Balgati society followed stereotypical–possibly Western–definitions of modernity. This led me to think of Ringer’s idea of “translating foreign institutions” (Ringer 5) into the contexts of other places, an idea which is exemplified in Balgat by the introduction of basic “necessities” of modernization: roads, buses, water, and electricity (Lerner 33), but more so by the creation of a school and a police station (Lerner 30). In addition, the Grocer’s comment that, if given the chance to live anywhere else, he would move to America also made me think of Ringer’s comment on “the use of ‘the West’ as a yardstick” (Ringer 4) because the Grocer seems to see America, particularly the opportunity it affords, as an example of what he would want in Balgat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When reading this article, I often found myself thinking especially about Plato’s The Republic\u00a0and\u00a0Monica Ringer’s\u00a0essay on modernity. The Republic\u00a0came to mind particularly when, after being asked what he would do as president of Turkey, the Grocer answers that he would … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1723,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fourth-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1723"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":487,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions\/487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}