Pressure on/pressure off?

Recently, I was driving with a friend from Göreme to Ankara. It was one of those interminable journeys with nothing much to look at except the long road rolling out in front of us, so it seemed as good a time as any to ask a question that had been bothering me for weeks. “I keep seeing this expression in the newspapers, ‘neighborhood pressure.’ I know it’s a translation of something in Turkish, but I don’t know exactly what.” “Mahalle baskısı!” my friend responded, before launching into a tirade about the rising tide of pressure on people to conform to expected social norms. His chosen examples came from Ankara, but a report in the English newspaper The Guardian had claimed something similar for Kayseri. There, the journalist reported, workplace canteens had been closed over Ramadan to ensure that workers would abide by the... [read full story]