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A Spark of Curiosity: The Role of Social Identity and Narrative Genre in Musicking Turkish–Kurdish Reconciliation
Abstract
This paper examines the role of social identity, narrative, and music in Turkish–Kurdish reconciliation through a comparative study of the discographies of two bands, Kardeş Türküler (Turkish: “Ballads of Solidarity”) and Bajar (Kurdish: “City”). The last three decades of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict have oscillated between periods of state and non-state violence as well as periods of de-escalation, peacemaking, and openings for civil rights. Throughout these years, bands like Kardeş Türküler and Bajar have been musicking the stories of Turkey’s Kurdish communities, aided by the lifting of restrictions on non-Turkish language publication and art-making in the 1990s. In their efforts to spark curiosity and build understanding among Turkey’s many ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and faith communities, these two bands have often grappled with contested national, linguistic, ethnic, and religious identities in Turkey. The aims of both Kardeş Türküler and Bajar fit neatly into John Paul Lederach and Angela J. Lederach’s sonic metaphor for reconciliation, which allows for an understanding of reconciliation as resounding within small, local containers of activity and relationship (rather than only on an official stage). Yet, the growing literature on the role of musicking initiatives within reconciliation is overly focused on claiming the successes of music in conflict transformation, while remaining sparse on the particularities of how music interrelates with conflict dynamics. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on social identity theory and a new matrix around the function of narrative genre in conflict to elaborate how Kardeş Türküler and Bajar construct narratives of the Kurdish experience in Turkey. In my study of a 20-song sample from these two bands, I use Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina’s collective axiology of social identity and Solon Simmons’s narrative genre model to elaborate a more precise understanding of how intergroup relationships are constructed in the context of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict and draw out potential implications for Turkish–Kurdish reconciliation. The use of these frameworks allows me to examine both the social identity content and the narrative processes at work in the sample. The results of this analysis suggest that narratives of social identity and intergroup relationship in the Turkish–Kurdish conflict can play out in both conflict escalatory and conflict de-escalatory modes. However, even in conflict escalatory modes, these narratives can still avoid denigration of outgroups, providing a better understanding of exactly how music can play a constructive role in conflict transformation and reconciliation.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Anatolia
Kurdistan
Turkey
Sub Area
None