This presentation focuses on the entangled history of affiliation of traditional âşık (folk minstrel) musicians with the Turkish left between 1960 and 1980. Following the Second World War, many âşık musicians migrated to major cities alongside their communities as a part of broader waves of migration. Therein, they found ample opportunities partly due to their affiliations with the left- wing movement to turn out to be a considerable part of national and less efficiently international music scenes. Through this affiliation, âşık/Alevi musicians secured a significant cultural role by (re)articulating the political ideologies of the left, actively participating in cultural debates, taking stages in the urban setting and engaging with the popular music genres and artists. As a result, they secured a public recognition as artists and earned a position of authority to establish the aesthetic standards of the folk music worlds in the urban sphere. The presentation finally argues that while the growing left- wing movement has seen the living example of tradition of dissent in the figures of âşıks in its attempt to establish a cultural hegemony, the âşıks translated the socialist lexicon into a more accessible language for the urban and rural poors and fused the socialis discourse with a utopian/millenarian heritage of the Alevi community.
Özgür Balkılıç is a fellow researcher at the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin with his project, funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, titled Âşık/Alevi Music Revival in Between Politics, Culture Industry and Urban Space in Turkey, 1960-1980. He has obtained his BSc and MA degrees from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey and Ph D degree from Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario Canada. His research interests and studies focus on the social and cultural history of the contemporary Turkey. He published two books, several book chapters and a number of articles in the national and international journals.
Ali Sipahi holds a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and currently works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. He co-edited The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century (I.B. Tauris, 2016) and published articles in academic journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, History and Anthropology, and Middle Eastern Studies. He is a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien working on a manuscript about anthropologist Lloyd A. Fallers’ research on Turkey in the 1960s.
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