Transmission Processes of Religious Knowledge and Ritual Practice in Alevism between Innovation and Reconstruction

As his principal sources, he makes wide use of buyruk texts that he understands, however, not simply as historical sources for the development of the cem ritual and its socio-religious context, but to which he attributes a status and evolution of their own. This status, the author argues, materialised simultaneously with the evolution of the cem. By scrutinising these processes, Yıldırım characterises this evolution as a mutual interaction between text and ritual. Moreover, he critically assesses the available sources and offers a general discussion of buyruk manuscripts from the early 17th to 19th centuries.

While Yıldırım focusses mainly on Alevi scriptural traditions, Béatrice Hendrich in her contribution applies a broader concept of cultural storage devices for ritual knowledge and practice. She delivers an important insight into the process of the materialisation of Alevi culture by identifying location(s) of collective memory and commemoration in Alevi culture. Her main emphasis rests on the paradigmatic change concerning the storage devices for religious knowledge in recent Alevi culture. This shift is not restricted to a move from orality towards literacy but also includes the relegation of the traditional technique of embodying cultural memory in the chain of pirs and dedes. These are increasingly replaced by physical, mostly architectural archives such as commemorational statues and ‘cultural centres’, cem evis, museums or other modern spatial structures. The use of literacy and the construction of an explicitly Alevi (‘sacred’) architecture are not entirely new to Alevi culture, but draw on the Bektaşi tradition of tekkes, which form the historical basis for contemporary Alevi communities. Still, Hendrich argues, the main impetus for this paradigmatic change lies in the modifications of the present socio-cultural context.

Robert Langer’s and Hasan Gazi Öğütcü’s contribution—centered around methodological questions and giving a comprehensive overview of the project’s approaches and research architecture—focusses on the ruptures and continuities in the village’s ritual tradition, making use of data collected in the course of interviews with the village population. Langer and Öğütcü point out that to assume that such individual and collective accounts of the villagers contain accurate descriptions of former ritual practice is misleading. Of course, such data can be used to identify key historical dates or to outline general historical developments; for example the abandoning of the talip görme (nowadays often referrred to as görgü), which was performed in the village in question for the last time, according to the informants, in the late 1960s. In fact, these data can also be used to identify recent modes of reception of mediatised forms of Alevi ritual—i.e. filmed performances edited to be broadcasted or stored in online Social Media—and their repercussions on recent village practice, which has none the less continued to a certain degree from the 1960s until today, as well as its revitalisation on individual, communal and collective levels.

Janina Karolewski, making use of the above mentioned oral history data and methods in order to contextualise her material, presents a hitherto neglected, even almost unknown type of written source concerning Alevi ritual: handwritten notebooks, her examples dating from the late 1920s and 50s. These notebooks, preserved in Alevi families, contain not only hymns and prayers, but also prescriptions for ritual practice. The composition of such notebooks is interpreted by the author as an attempt of both dedes and talips to preserve their ritual knowledge—up until that time predominantly transmitted by oral and mimetic means—when faced with the disruption of the Alevi tradition. Furthermore, she examines in how far personal notebooks and guidebooks differ from buyruk manuscripts and texts on rituals contained in buyruks.

Hande Birkalan-Gedik, in her article, turns to a very special group of transmitters of religious and ritual knowledge in Alevism: female aşıks. By considering the relationship between (literary) genre, gender and nationalism, she establishes an analytical framework that helps us to understand the emergence and continuity of the female aşıks. She also considers the political contexts of their poetry with particular emphasis on concepts such as Alevism (Alevilik) and nationalism. Touching upon the impact of nationalism on folklore, Birkalan-Gedik analyses the ways in which Alevi women have been conceptualised and represented in the gendered discourses of their community. She familiarises the reader with the biography and work of two female aşıks from the Bektaşi-Alevi village of Kısas (Urfa): Hürü Aşan and Emine Uğur, both of whom define themselves as performers of aşık literature. By considering the effects of the concept of Alevilik not only within a cultural, but also within a religious context, she points out continuities and contingencies in the process of the transmission of religious and especially ritual tradition and knowledge.

Erdoğan Gedik’s German language case study on the Alevi community of Varto draws on the vast body of material collected during his fieldwork in Varto and its surroundings. The author explores the question of how ethno-linguistic, religious and national identities change in heterogeneous settings such as Varto. There, according to the author, this setting is created by the cohabitation of Turkish, Kurdish and Zaza groups and their respective languages and idioms that undergo constant processes of exchange. In the course of his argument, Gedik puts special emphasis on religious practice. He shows how different ritual traditions, in combination with linguistic and cultural contact settings lead to the emergence of new hybrid forms of religious practices. These are illustrated not only by the case of congregational rituals, but also by analysing modifications in the way the tombs of local saints are visited and venerated; a practice the author considers a constitutive element of local Alevi identity and practice. Additionally, Gedik points to the fact that the increasing activity of Turkish and European scholars and researchers within such communities also has an impact on their development and the change of their ritual practices.

This volume is characterized by a great variety of methodological perspectives on a wide range of transmission and reception processes in Alevism and beyond. It covers an equally wide spectrum of specific aspects and features of historic and contemporary Alevi ritual practice. In doing so, and by showing how these processes have triggered and influenced changes in the structure and self-understanding of the group nowadays termed as ‘Alevi’, the contributions of this volume shed light on the processes that have led to the emergence of modern ‘Alevism’ and have formed its fundamental cultural resources. Of course, this volume cannot offer a comprehensive or conclusive treatment of these complex and multi-layered problems. It is, in the best sense, to be understood as a preliminary synopsis of promising approaches to an aspect of Alevi research that is both essential and yet to be fully developed.

Special thanks must be attributed to Dr Frank Neubert, who on behalf of the Collaborative Research Center 619 “Ritual Dynamics” introduced the participants to specific methodological approaches developed in Heidelberg by presenting examples from his own research on the “International Society for Krishna Consciousness”.

Due to the imponderabilities academic life these days gives rise to, the final editing and publication of this volume was delayed several times. We thank all contributors for their patience and faith in our project.