A FOUCAULDIAN CRITIQUE OF THE ALEVI MUSIC REVIVAL

In recent years, there has been a series of affirmative discourses on the revival of Alevi music in academic circles. As expounded, particularly in ethnomusicological works, revival refers to the discovery and renewal of a music tradition, in a way restoring its long-denied livelihoods and performative practices. However, despite all the positive meanings attributed to the narrative of the Alevi Music Revival, its theoretical baggage, primarily based on the common presupposition that Alevi music is an age-old cultural-religious genre, requires critical examination. Thus, paying attention to the longue durée of the politics of Alevism in Turkey, I aim to go herein beyond this narrative and write a brief history of how Alevi music was constructed. The data, analyzed through an ethnomusicological perspective and contextualized by the lens of Foucauldian historiography, were derived from the relevant literature and from my ethnographically informed PhD research in Turkey between 2017 and 2020. The results show that, contrary to this narrative, Alevi music is neither an age-old cultural-religious genre devised by the ancestors of today’s Alevis and handed down from centuries ago to the present, nor has it been pushed to the brink of extinction due to the domineering policies of the Turkish nation-state, nor has it been revived from its ashes led by a group of bağlama virtuosos since the 1990s. Instead, as a musical identity, it is the very product of a construction process that is both the manifestation and the antithesis of a historico-political problematization on the issue of how a national-secular music could be made. The study concludes that this construction process began to materialize through the axes of knowledge, power, and ethics in the early 1980s, that is, just before the rise of cultural Alevism discourses.