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The Alevis 

My longest field research has been amongst the Turkish Alevi community of Anatolia, where I first travelled for my doctoral researches, which began in 1986. This resulted in my doctoral dissertation, and also my subsequent monograph, which appeared in 2003. For this work, I stayed in one particular village, though I got to know the surrounding villages as well. The work there can be divided into a number of different areas of inquiry: I was interested in trying to understand the way of life, from the general point of view, of a community on the reverse slopes of the mountain range. This lead me to consider the household, kinship, patterns of agriculture and animal husbandry, and also their seasonal migration to the mountain pastures above the village.

 

In demographic terms, there were about a hundred households during my time in the village, though there had been more until recently. It was still usual that a man would plough his fields with oxen, but already almost every household had some kind of small income from remittances either from family members who had moved within Turkey, or from those who had moved abroad, particularly Germany and Austria. Nevertheless, the traditional peasant economy was still in operation whilst I was there during the late 1980s. The greatest difficulty that the villagers faced was that the fields were not high yielding, but full of stones and often uneven. This means that it was extremely difficult to obtain any kind of surplus from agriculture. Animal husbandry was potentially more likely to yield a profit, but this in turn needed a substantial investment of family labour that was, at that time, increasingly difficult to obtain as the younger generation began to move out, whether to work or to go to school. It might be said that I was present just at the end of a long series of attempts to employ traditional farming methods to create a viable community based on shared agricultural pursuits.

 

My second main area of interest was the social organisation of village life. I realised soon that the households were patrilocal and patrilineal, much as Stirling has described with regard to the village near Kayseri where he had worked some forty years before. However, in addition some patrilineages were regarded as being distinguished by virtue of their being descended from a person who had achieved a particularly sacred status. Such lineages were known as ocak. Every lineage in turn would be followers to an ocak lineage, or talip. These relations between sacred and follower lineage extended across to other local villages, meaning that a person would be linked both by kinship ties into a wider network, but also religious affiliations. The two concepts overlapped in village cosmology in as much as a man from a holy lineage who was active in leading in religious matters was called a dede, literally ‘grandfather’.

 

This led me to the third major area of interest, which was the ritual and religious life of the village. Though Muslim, the Alevis regarded themselves as possessing a distinctive interpretation of the Islamic faith, one that was markedly influenced by an esoteric interpretation of God. The village possessed a mosque, which was attending by some men on Fridays, and also on religious holidays, but they also held collective gatherings known as cem, which were held during the winter, and led by a man, or men, from a sacred lineage. These ceremonies could last for several hours, and celebrated in complex ways the Alevi understanding of faith in prayer, and ritual dance. Though the cem is the most important of the village rituals, there are many others, including marriages which at that time would last usually for three days. Music is essential to these, and may be provided by a minstrel, aşık, or in the case of the marriages additionally a pair playing the drum and pipe, which is known as mehter. In the years following this initial inquiry, I have been looking at social change, both in terms of the reformulation of ritual and religion, and the way that migration has transformed the village community.

 

References

Shankland, D. 2003 The Alevis in modern Turkey: the emergence of a secular Islamic tradition, London: RoutledgeCurzon.

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Shankland, D. 1998 'Anthropology and Ethnicity: the place of Ethnography in the new Alevi Movement', in Olsson, T. et al (eds), Alevi Identity, Istanbul; Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul: 15-23.

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Shankland, D. 1994 'Social Change and Culture: Responses to Modernisation in an Alevi Village in Anatolia' in Hann, C. ed. When History Accelerates, London: Athlone Press, 238-254.

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