Migration

The transformation of Turkey into a modern nation is inextricably intertwined with migration, both internal and external. The extent of this became evident to me right at the outset of my researches in the 1980s, when daily lorries would leave the village piled high with the belongings of families who had decided to try their best to find a living in Istanbul. This was often very difficult and uncertain, as they went to an outlying district with little infrastructure, and often without an assured source of income on arrival. I shall always remember the distress of those who were leaving, anxious as to their future, and equally that of their neighbours as they said their farewells to friends and relatives departing.

 

Yet, labour migration from the village had begun already much earlier, when men departed to earn some money in agricultural work on the Black Sea coast in the summer. Later, beginning in the 1950s, they departed to Istanbul or other large towns in order to seek a job. Then, they would go alone, often staying in rough accommodation. Some would bring their families if they succeeded in becoming established, but often they would leave their families in the village and return to see them when they could. This pattern changed again after migration to Germany, and other European countries, became a possibility, one that the villagers embraced with alacrity.

 

Initially, it would be usual for a single man, or occasionally a woman, to go to Germany to work. Having been granted a visa, their first employment would be arranged before arrival. Over the next decades the number of villagers working abroad grew, so that almost every household had some kind of remittance, and equally almost every household a relative abroad who could arrange a visa by marriage after the initial free movement of workers became no longer possible.

 

With the support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the AHRC, and the Humboldt Foundation, over the last twenty years I have been conducting a longitudinal study of the villagers who have migrated to Germany and to Austria. My aim has been to trace the way that they have established themselves in Europe, and then to examine the emergence of new ritual and religious traditions as they have done so. More recently, in 2023-4, as Stadt Wien Research Fellow at the IFK in Vienna, I have been researching the different forms official recognition that the Alevi community more broadly has been seeking.

 

References

Forthcoming. [2025] (With Atila Çetin) ‘The Alevis’, in Minorities in the Islamic World, edited by Erica Hunter, London: Tauris. (10,000 words).

 

Shankland, D. (with Atila Çetin) 2015 ‘Aleviten in Deutschland’ in Aleviten in Deutschland

Identitätsprozesse einer Religionsgemeinschaft in der Diaspora ed. Martin Sökefeld, Bielefed; Transcript, 219-244.

 

Shankland, D. 2005 ‘Culturalism and Social Mobility: an Alevi village in Germany’, in Alevis and Alevism: Transformed Identities, edited H. Markussen, Istanbul: Isis Press, pages 11-30.