Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I examine the politics and practices
of apprenticeship in the traditions of Turkish
folk music through playing the baglama, or saz.
The saz has become iconically representative of a
folk music collected and preserved in the era of
nationalism, and I examine the meaning of such a
self-conscious and reflexive traditions claims to
traditionality. I outline the ways in which that
tradition is acquired as an aesthetics of self,
requiring one to consciously shape the self to
become the type of person who can play the saz
and, hence, improvise within the sensibility of a
tradition. [musical apprenticeship, personhood,
habitus, Turkey]
Theres a story that we tell: God created the human body, and then he
told the soul to go and get in the body. The soul came back and said, I
tried, but I couldnt do it. The soul was too penetrable and the body too
impenetrable. So God said to bring someone who could play the hosney,
which is the kind of ney that has two stems. So someone began playing it,
and the soul gradually danced into the body.
a 74-year-old ney player and teacher, on the fundamental significance
of music
n the Beyoglu area of Istanbul on any night of the week, dense
throngs crowd the main boulevard, as strollers gaze at shop windows
and stop to greet friends passing by. In the side streets, the air is
filled with the smoke of kebabs and grilled fish, and music pounds
from the bars and clubs. And on any of those winding side streets,
one finds saz bars, the venues in which people listen to traditional folk
music, drink, and dance. The baglama, usually simply called the saz, is a
long-stemmed, large-bowled stringed instrument that has come symbolically to represent a folk music that has grown in popularity in recent years.1
And as it has grown in consumption, the music has also grown in
production, spawning a new popularity of saz learning, reflected in the
growth of music schools and saz bars.
During the first years that I spent traveling back and forth to Istanbul, I
stayed with friends in the Beyoglu area and often saw students with
instrument cases slung across their backs. Having a longtime interest in
music, I decided sometime later to take up lessons, and I found a small
dershane, or shop and school, on a main road near the Bosphorus shore in
an area where I then lived. I began to take lessons and to spend quite a lot
of time hanging out in the shop and observing how folk music is played and
consumed in the heterogeneous urban space of Istanbul. Police, locally
considered reactionary if not fascist, and students who thought folk music
was cool were the two ends of the spectrum of avid apprentices who
converged on the saz shop. Although many in the educated middle class
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 222 238, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic
ISSN 1548-1425. A 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/
rights.htm.
American Ethnologist
Figure 2. Young men dance halay, a common folk dance, in a turku bar.
223
American Ethnologist
224
but, more importantly, on their style. Effective performance uses form to draw attention to a set of messages,
he remarks. When Glendiots reject a particular action as
without meaning, they generally imply that it lacks performative flair or distinctiveness. It is not enough just to be
a man; even the lowest ones of all were born male. One
must be good at being a man (Herzfeld 1985:47). But
although Herzfeld is concerned with the location of such
values at the disputed intersection between the local and
the national, my concern here is to understand how
traditions explicitly learned as national may nevertheless
shape personhood (see also Herzfeld 2003).
In this article I argue, first, that a student of the saz
learns to become the type of person who can play the saz,
an apprenticeship that also entails learning the signs of the
saz as emblem of national tradition. This further implies
that one learns to become a good Turk of a particular type.
Although my teacher never explicitly stated so to me, I
always had the sense that his willingness to tolerate my
own ignorance had, in large part, to do with my status as
gelin, or bride, that is, as someone who had married a
Turk.5 He could easily accept that I might want to learn
folk music as part of my Turkification, in the same way
that I should want to learn how to cook Turkish food or to
keep a proper Turkish house. The rationale was not primordial but teleologicalthat is, was not about being but
about becoming.
This process of self-conscious self-making also takes
one, I believe, to the heart of the imagined nature of the
nation. What I have argued elsewhere and wish to elaborate here is that certain aspects of imagining the nation are
best understood not as poetic but as aesthetic, not as
embodiment but as empersonment. The process at work
in this self-formation is neither the mind training of
education nor the unselfconscious learning of socialization. It is, rather, apprenticeship, a technique of learning
that entails a self-conscious molding of the self. The
aesthetics of self that I discuss elsewhere (Bryant 2001) is
accomplished through the techniques of apprenticeship,
leading to mastery.
Marcel Mauss suggested as much when, in his famous
essay on techniques du corps, he noted that a technique is
an action which is effective and traditional (1979:104).
My aim is to bring the self-conscious self-making of apprenticeship more squarely into anthropological discussions of learning and tradition. To accomplish this,
however, I believe that one must define the task of apprenticeship in a particular way. Apprenticeship, as I use
the term here, is that technique that teaches one how to
become the type of person who can do X. Someone who is
apprenticed as a carpenter does not simply learn the skills
of carpentry; he or she learns how to become a carpenter,
that is, how to become the type of person who is good at
carpentry. Or someone learning the piano does not simply
learn notes but learns how to train his or her fingers to play
those notes without conscious thought, that is, how to
become the type of person who can play the piano. I
discuss at the end of the article how this particular definition of apprenticeship may be used to complicate both
Mausss techniques du corps and Bourdieus habitus and
how it may be seen as adding an ethical and political
dimension to Jean Lave and Etienne Wengers (1991)
notion of legitimate peripheral participation.
Second, I argue here that the bodily signs that represent ones accomplishments are also gendered. During the
almost two years that I took lessons, I was given the
somewhat rough attentions of a teacher whom I call here
Necati, a young man who consistently behaved toward me
in an ambivalent way, clearly wanting to dismiss my
interest in music because I was a woman but unable to
do so because I was, by then, also teaching in a university.
I also learned quickly, and he enjoyed making me play for
people who came into the shop. But on two occasions
when I asked him to buy a saz for me, he chose instruments that he considered femininelight, with a smooth
tone, and decorated. In subtle ways, part of my learning
also involved internalizing an understanding of the type of
person who could play the saz, an understanding that was
also gendered. Before long, whenever I saw saz cases slung
over peoples backs in the streets, I found myself separating male from female. I also came to dismiss the girls as
mere students, as persons who could not be interested in
playing the music seriously and who certainly would not
become performers of the music.
What follows, then, is an analysis of the ways in which
devotees of Turkish folk music consciously shape themselves into persons capable of expressing particular traditions. Moreover, I argue that the expression of those
traditions is gendered and that its gendering is not simply
incidental but is essential both to its forcefulness as a sign
of Turkish culture and to the success with which a tradition consciously re-created in the age of nationalism is
handed down and acquired. Becoming good at the saz also
meant becoming a good Turk of a particular type, one
capable of displaying in behavior and comportment a
masculine Turkishness. Hence, through a description of
learning to become a saz player, one enters the realm in
which tradition meets Tradition, history meets heritage,
and techniques of the body also express habits of the heart.
American Ethnologist
225
American Ethnologist
226
American Ethnologist
227
American Ethnologist
:
Figure 3. Saz players as they wish to be seen: Left to right, Semsi Yastman, Ankaral Unal Turkben, and Ylmaz Ipek (courtesy of Sinan Yastman).
During the period when Stokes did his research, his informants appear to have been loath to discuss Turkish folk
music as part of the Eastern tradition, and he describes
several attempts to orchestrate folk music polyphonically.
By the time I began taking lessons in 2000, however,
recordings of the arabesk music that Stokess informants
so disliked were constantly played in the saz shop, and the
musicians who worked or gathered there tried to imitate
the saz players on the recordings. Moreover, the teachers in
the dershane where I took lessons unproblematically
employed the makam system that is an integral part of
Arabic and Turkish classical music. In discussions of different forms of Turkish music, all those with whom I spoke
in the shop seemed unproblematically to integrate the
various forms of Turkish music into a single Eastern
systemwitness their approving comments about the
ezzin when he chanted the call to
voice of the local mu
prayer and about his ability to do so in makam.11
Hence, playing the saz is improvisation, and each
player must find his or her own style, his or her own manner
of ornamentation. At the same time, saz players must be
able to hear folk music in a way that tells them what
sounds right. This is the meaning of a sign hung in the saz
shop: If you want to understand turku [folk songs], you
must listen to turku. Hence, the contradiction of trying to
teach baglama in lessons modeled after what is considered
to be modern, that is, Western music learning: Doing
so would be very much like teaching someone how to think
by offering him or her a set of instructions.
Here the distinction so often drawn between rote
memorization and learning to think in fact collapses
because, although an important part of learning the saz
involves memorization, that memorization is pointless
228
Figure 4. The community of learning: Ask Daimi and Semsi Yastman, 1956
(courtesy of Sinan Yastman).
American Ethnologist
229
American Ethnologist
230
American Ethnologist
231
American Ethnologist
232
Figure 6. The ask as voice of the people: Krklarelili Ask Ali Tamburac
(courtesy of Sinan Yastman).
Beyond habitus
In the introduction, I defined apprenticeship in a precise
way to mean learning to become the type of person who
can do X. This definition is very close to the formulation
offered by Lave and Wenger (1991; Wenger 1998), who
describe learning as a process of increasingly proficient
participation in communities of practice. They also begin
from a notion of apprenticeship that they believe is more
broadly applicable to all forms of learning, not just to the
learning of crafts and technical skills. One way to think of
American Ethnologist
233
American Ethnologist
234
Conclusion
I have argued here that the aesthetics of improvisation
may provide a model for thinking about the ontological
status of tradition, invented or otherwise. In the Turkish
folk music tradition, a discourse of correctness works in
tandem with improvisation determined by a particular
aesthetic. The tradition, then, is not about learning the
songs, but about learning the sensibility through which the
songs are produced. Learning that sensibility requires
learning and memorizing the songs, just as the development of malaka requires repetition. But only when one has
acquired the sensibility and disposition of Turkish folk
musiconly when one has empersoned itcan one become a good saz player, that is, good at playing the saz.
This implies acquisition of an aesthetic, embodiment of a
practice, and expression of ones mastery of that knowledge in ones behavior, usually through a displayed masculinity, gravity, and heaviness.
Hence, even when converted into a homogenized
and self-consciously traditional or historical version of
themselves, traditional knowledges do not simply become
static, even when replication begins to take precedence
over invention. Rather, they become part of that complex
of ideas the learning of which allows one to become a
person. Of course, this is part of the historical process
of creating citizens out of subjects, a nation of the people
rather than an empire of the aristocracy. As tradition is converted into Tradition, learning to play the saz no longer
means becoming a calgc with a ney stuck down his pants,
but it means becoming a person capable of calling forth a
particularly Turkish music and thereby of occupying a
social category as bearer of a now important tradition of
the nation. The self-consciousness of this molding in this
particular aesthetics of self does not compromise but is,
in fact, a necessary and intrinsic part of that aesthetic. And,
so, although heritage may be converted into history, inventedness does not necessarily trump experience.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article greatly benefited in its early
stages from the comments of Dominic Boyer, John Coma lalp, Hiro Miyazaki, and four anonymous
roff, Haldun Gu
reviewers. The research discussed here was one outgrowth of
a project on learning practices in Greece and Turkey supported
American Ethnologist
country in the contest, neighbors and allies are known to vote for
each other. These days in western Europe the contest is considered by many to be the height of camp, but for peripheral
countries such as Turkey it remains important as some peculiar
proof of Europeanness. For almost 30 years, top Turkish performers had competed in the contest in hopes of having Turkish
music accepted in Europe. Turkey finally won the contest in 2003
with the countrys first English-language entry, Sertab Ereners
Every Way That I Can. And in 2004 it hosted the contest,
spending millions of dollars on what it considered a prime opportunity to advertise Turkeys suitability for EU entry.
7. According to Gokalp,
In order to create our national music, it is necessary on
the one hand to learn science and technique from
Europe, and on the other hand to collect the voices of
the folk songs that are sweetly sung in the mountains
and villages [daglarda ve koylerde terennum edilen
rkulerinin seslerini toplamak lazmdr]. So by followtu
ing these methods, we can weld European civilization to
our national culture. [1973:306]
8. A memur is a civil servant of any rank, but I do not translate
the term here because of the connotations implied in Hilmi Beys
remark, which deserve explanation. Although a memur is basically
a bureaucrat, it is also a term used to mean civil servant,
implying a career path that depends on some education and that
guarantees income for life and a decent retirement. In the early
years of the Turkish republic, as in the Ottoman Empire, being a
memur had the additional connotation of being part of a very
small educated class attached to the state (on the Ottoman
Empire, see Findley 1980 and Fleischer 1986; on the early years
of the republic, see Keyder 1987). In interviews that I conducted,
teachers from the early republican decades had the clear impression that there were only two classes in Turkey: the memur class
and the peasants. This impression had two further connotations:
The first was a distinction between educated, Westernized elites
and ignorant, backward peasants, a theme often explored in
literature (see Karaosmanoglu 1968 and Rathbun 1972); the second was the marginalization from historical consciousness of nonMuslims engaged in trade.
In Hilmi Beys comments, the derogatory connotation of calgc,
which literally means musician, derives from its assumed jux zisyen, a word that, like enstru
man, comes from
taposition with mu
French and implies music as art and status. C
algc has some of
the connotations of fiddler in English.
ztu
rkmen shows how the evolution of folk dance in
9. Arzu O
Turkey was national by its nature, arising out of dynamics
created by the consolidation of the Turkish nation-state
(2002:142), rather than in the direction that nationalist thinkers
of the early republican period would have wanted or expected (see
ztu
rkmen 1998).
also O
10. The quotidian salience of such distinctions is apparent, for
instance, in the album liner notes that explain the leftist folk
lfu Livanelis tuning revolution in the 1970s. At the time
musician Zu
the common method of playing the saz on the radio was
by tuning it G-D-A and playing the melody on the lower
string, while the upper strings gave an unchanging
sound. But in the method that had been used for
hundreds of years in Anatolia, the baglama is tuned ED-A, and the melody was realized on all three strings.
This was a style much closer to playing chords and to
polyphonic music. In other words, it was both the most
ancient and the most modern way of playing [Yani hem
en eskiydi, hem de en modern]. [Livaneli 2001]
235
American Ethnologist
236
References cited
Asad, Talal
1993 Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of
Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Atalay, Besim
1991[1924] Bektasilik ve Edebiyat. Istanbul: Ant Yaynlar.
Behar, Cem
rk
2003 Ask Olmaynca Mesk: Olmaz: Geleneksel Osmanl/Tu
gretim ve Intikal. 2nd edition. Istanbul: Yap
Muziginde O
:
Kredi Yaynlar I .
Bell, Catherine
1992 Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Berliner, Paul
1994 Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
American Ethnologist
Bloch, Maurice
1974 Symbols, Song, Dance, and Features of Articulation or Is
Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority? Archives
Europeennes de Sociologie 15(1):55 81.
Bohlman, Philip V.
1988 The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
1980 The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Bryant, Rebecca
2001 An Aesthetics of Self: Moral Remaking and Cypriot Education. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(3):
583 614.
2002 The Purity of Spirit and the Power of Blood: A Comparative Perspective on Nation, Gender, and Kinship in Cyprus.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(3):509 530.
Coplan, David B.
1991 Ethnomusicology and the Meaning of Tradition. In
Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History. Stephen Blum,
Philip V. Bohlman, and Daniel. M. Neuman, eds. Pp. 35 48.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cowan, Jane
1990 Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Daniel, E. Valentine
1996 Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of
Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Findley, Carter Vaughn
1980 Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789 1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fleischer, Cornell Hugh
1986 Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The
li (1541 1600). Princeton: Princeton
Historian Mustafa A
University Press.
Foucault, Michel
1990 The Care of the Self, vol. 3: The History of Sexuality.
Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Penguin Books.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg
1975 Truth and Method. New York: Seabury Press.
Gokalp, Ziya
:
rkculu
gun Esaslar. Ankara: Milli Ictimiyat Kitaphanesi.
1923 Tu
rel Temelleri, I. Istanbul: Milli
1973 Terbiyenin Sosyal ve Kultu
Egitim Basmevi.
ntekin, Resat Nuri
Gu
:
1959 Dudaktan Kalbe. Istanbul: Inkilap Kitabevi.
Handler, Richard, and Jocelyn Linnekin
1984 Tradition: Genuine or Spurious? Journal of American
Folklore 97(385):273 290.
Herzfeld, Michael
1985 The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan
Mountain Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2003 The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global
Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hirschkind, Charles
2001 The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in
Contemporary Egypt. American Ethnologist 28(3):623 649.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds.
1983 The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ingold, Tim
2000 The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
237
American Ethnologist
Kaplan, Samuel
1996 Education and the Politics of Culture in a Turkish
Community, circa 1990. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of
Anthropology, University of Chicago.
Karaosmanoglu, Yakup Kadri
1968 Yaban. Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi.
Kaya, Dogan
sklk geleneginin gelecegiyle ilgili dusunceler ve yapl2004 A
mas gerekenler. Electronic document, http://www.turkuler.
com/yazi/asiklik.asp, accessed January 6, 2005.
Keyder, C
aglar
1987 State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development. London: Verso.
Khalid, Adeeb
1998 The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Koselleck, Reinhart
1985 Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
Lapidus, Ira
1984 Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim
Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in
Islam. In Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in
South Asian Islam. Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed. Pp. 38 61.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
La Rue, Helene
1994 Music, Literature and Etiquette: Musical Instruments and
Social Identity from Castiglione to Austin. In Ethnicity,
Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place.
Martin Stokes, ed. Pp. 189 205. London: Berg.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger
1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
lfu :
Livaneli, Zu
rkuler. Istanbul: Ada Muzik.
2001 Livaneli: I lk Tu
MacIntyre, Alasdair
1984 After Virtue. 2nd edition. South Bend, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Mahmood, Saba
2001 Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual:
Disciplines of Salat. American Ethnologist 28(4):827 853.
Mauss, Marcel
1979 Body Techniques. In Sociology and Psychology. Marcel
Mauss. Pp. 95 123. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Metcalf, Barbara Daly, ed.
1984 Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South
Asian Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich
1980[1874] On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for
Life. Indianapolis: Hackett.
ztu
rkmen, Arzu
O
:
rkiyede Folklor ve Milliyetcilik. Istanbul: I letisim
1998 Tu
Yaynlar.
2002 I Dance Folklore. In Fragments of Culture: The Everyday
of Modern Turkey. Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, eds.
Pp. 128 146. London: I. B. Tauris.
Racy, Ali Jihad
1998 Improvisation, Ecstasy, and Performance Dynamics in
Arabic Music. In In the Course of Performance: Studies in the
238