Life-cycle rituals such as weddings and funerals vigorously stimulate transnational engagements among immigrant communities. On the basis of a two-year multi-sited ethnographic research project among Alevi immigrant communities in Europe, this article approaches the process of 'revival', by which Alevism has evolved from a locally invisible to a transnationally visible belief community, through the lens of mortuary practices. The 'mortuary focus' draws attention to the significance of funeral rituals to the study of transnational engagements of contemporary immigrant communities beyond methodological nationalism. This analysis thus considers the act of transporting deceased community members back to their home-village as a ritualized and spatial practice of (transnational) community-making beyond national categories and cartographies.
After a long period of silence and invisibility, Alevis of Turkey have dramatically become one of the controversial issues of Turkish politics in the last two decades. This is the phenomenon known as Alevilik Uyanz:jl (the Alevi Revival) (<;:amuroglu 1998) and popularly named as Alevilik Patlamasz (the Explosion of Alevism) (Vorhoff 2003: 91). These gripping concepts refer to a dramatic and almost unexpected increase in the socio-political visibility of Alevism. Hundreds of books published, dozens of Alevi associations and new radio stations established appeared as the indicator of this phenomenon. Although some researchers had forecasted the nearly inevitable disappearance of this particular culture in the beginning of the 1980s (Vorhoff 1998: 31), the silence was broken when an open letter, the Alevi Declaration, signed by numerous intellectuals was published in 1990. With this 'coming out', constitutional recognition of Alevis, as a particular but integral component of the nation, was explicitly demanded for the first time in Turkish history. Nearly 15 years after the Alevi Declaration, another phase in this revival was reached when a second declaration was jointly issued by Avrupa Alevi Birlikleri Konfederasyonu (the Confederation of European Alevi Unions-the CEAU) 1 and Alevi Bekta:ji Federasyonu (the Federation of Alevi Bektashi-the FAB) 2 on 7th of October 2004. This declaration was actually a response to the EU Regular Re-The CEAU has been established in 2000 as an umbrella organisation so as to represent Alevi associations on European scale. Presently, hundreds of Alevi associations from 10 European countries such as France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway are represented under this organisation.
Dersim refers to a large cultural geography in the Eastern part of Anatolia, where Zazaki-speaking Alevis live. In the wake of a harsh and inequitable military campaign conducted during the years 1937–1938 to assimilate Zazaki Alevis into a newly emerging republican national body, the name became a metaphor for distress and concealment. The Turkish state never took its oppressive hands off Dersim, and instead renamed and rescaled this region as a tiny province, Tunceli. The name of Dersim became one of the most controversial issues during the opening process initiated by AKP in the second half of the 2000s when AKP tended to instrumentalize most of the republican taboos to attract popular support from liberal sectors of the society. This chapter explores this process through which Dersim re-emerged from the shadows of the Republic. It focuses on a media incident, which revolves around Hüseyin Aygün, the then Tunceli MP from CHP, at the end of 2011. Based on this case analysis, the chapter provides a comparison of this process with the “Alevi revival” that happened at the beginning of the 1990s.
Bu çalışma etnografi yöntemine dair bir tartışmaya, çok-alanlı bir etnografi saha araştırmasından doğru katkı sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. 1980'lerle birlikte araştırmacının üyesi olduğu toplulukla çalıştığı saha deneyimlerini betimlemek üzere önerilen "evde antropoloji" yaklaşımı, antropolojide bilgi üretme sürecini de zorunlu olarak yeniden düşünmemizi gerektiren bir tartışma gündemi olmuştur. Bu tartışmaya yaklaşmazdan evvel Malinowski'den doğru geleneksel etnografi yöntemini betimleyerek sonraki kuşaklara miras kalan iki soruya odaklanacağım. Etnografi yöntemine özgünlüğünü veren "ötekilik sarsıntısı" deneyiminin doğal sahnesi olarak düşünülen "sahanın" gerçekte inşa edilen bir mekân olması düşüncesini ziyaretle "evde antropoloji" yaklaşımına dair bir tartışma yürütmeyi amaçlıyorum. Son kısımda ise Alevi-olmayan bir antropolog olarak gurbet-mekânda ama evde Alevilik konusunda gerçekleştirdiğim çok-alanlı saha çalışmasından öz-düşünümsel bazı notlar aktararak Türkiye düzleminde konunun önemini tartışmaya açmaya çalışacağım.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.