A B S T R A C TIn 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 tradition’s 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]

There’s a story that we tell: God created the human body, and then hetold the soul to go and get in the body. The soul came back and said, ‘‘Itried, but I couldn’t do it.’’ The soul was too penetrable and the body tooimpenetrable. 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 significanceof music

In 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 symboli-

cally 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

REBECCA BRYANT

George Mason University

The soul danced into the body:

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 222 – 238, ISSN 0094-0496, electronicISSN 1548-1425. A 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content throughthe University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

eschew folk music as too ‘‘country,’’ it has grown in

popularity in all classes and political affiliations among

those looking for expressions of Turkishness amid rapid

globalization and Americanization (Figures 1 and 2).2

This article concerns the politics and practices of

learning to play an instrument that is hailed as a symbol

of national tradition. The discussion revolves around two

questions: First, what happens to traditions that become

self-consciously Traditional, that is, history, rather than

heritage?3 As Turkish folk music was converted from a

local tradition to a national Tradition, it acquired textual-

ity as well as a fixedness that, by most accounts, it did

not previously have. This self-consciousness of folk music

as Tradition, and the status that it has begun to acquire

qua Tradition, takes one to the heart of the question of

how ‘‘tradition’’ is constituted. For underlying many of

our assumptions about ‘‘tradition’’ is the conviction that

traditions should not be self-consciously ‘‘traditional’’

and that, as soon as a practice is labeled a ‘‘tradition,’’

it loses its capacity to be a real tradition, that is, the past

living in the present. Rather, it seems to become a dead

past, something to be dissected and stuffed, precisely

because it is pinned under the glare of scholarly analysis,

rather than simply existing in what Friedrich Nietzsche

(1980) described as some happy-go-lucky pasture of the

present. What I suggest here is that the emergence of a

self-conscious and reflexive Tradition alters but does not

invalidate claims to traditionality.

Second, how do traditions taken self-consciously as

Traditional, that is, as history, come to have the potential

to shape personhood?4 I began learning the saz at a time

when I was still thinking through the results of my work on

education and nationalism in Cyprus. Before I had been

playing very long, I discovered an interesting point

at which saz playing and Cypriot education intersect:

namely, the point at which something self-consciously

described as ‘‘tradition’’ comes self-consciously to shape

personhood. In Cyprus, I wondered how an education

that, throughout much of the 20th century, taught lan-

guages and histories remade in the crucible of nationalism

could have been as successful as it was in creating persons

who considered themselves, because of that education,

to be Greeks and Turks. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence

Ranger’s 1983 volume and work following from it have

demonstrated the possibility—indeed, maybe even the

necessity—for ‘‘invented traditions’’ to appear to their

bearers to extend into the misty vagueness of a primordial

past. The nation is notoriously homogenizing, turning

local shrines into national icons.

I attempt to answer these questions through a dis-

cussion of my own apprenticeship in learning the saz, an

apprenticeship that involved more than learning a skill but

was equally importantly an apprenticeship in a set of signs.

As I argue here, lessons were about much more than

learning to play the saz; they were about learning to

become the type of person who could play the saz. This

is a process that I call here ‘‘empersonment,’’ a process

that is realized through a discipline by which one con-

sciously and consistently imprints a practice on the body.

At the outset, however, I avoid calling that practice

‘‘embodied’’ to indicate the point at which this article

departs from literature, especially that following Pierre

Bourdieu (esp., 1977, 1980), that emphasizes the uncon-

scious nature of cultural practice, or practice as ‘‘learned

ignorance.’’ It is the unconscious nature of that practice

that I wish to call into question, joining other voices thatFigure 1. A turku (folk music) bar in Beyoglu.

Figure 2. Young men dance halay, a common folk dance, in a turku bar.

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul n American Ethnologist

223

have begun to delineate the theoretical limitations of

Bourdieu’s habitus (Mahmood 2001; Starrett 1995; see also

Bryant 2001). These studies have primarily been concerned

with the body as moral site defined by ‘‘different concep-

tions of the self under particular regimes of truth, power,

and authority’’ (Mahmood 2001:845). A body disciplined

within particular conventions becomes a means to realize

a particular kind of self.

Moreover, I concur with Charles Hirschkind that an-

thropology should ‘‘interrogate traditions in terms of con-

tinuities of disciplined sensibility and the practices by

which these are created and revised across changing

historical contexts’’ (2001:641). Whereas Hirschkind and

others have been concerned with a disciplining of the

senses within a religious tradition, I argue here that a

disciplined sensibility is not only about a disciplining of

the senses, as important as that might be. An apprentice-

ship in saz playing certainly requires, first and foremost,

that one be able to distinguish good saz playing from bad,

something that depends on training the ear. But an ap-

prenticeship, as such, is also a much wider process of self-

formation undertaken under the eyes of others.

That process, I argue here, is an ethical formation.

Indeed, an underlying assumption of this article is that

ethics constitutes the critical missing edge in theories of

practice. A further assumption, however, is that those who

have focused on religious practice have not given the

ethical wide enough scope. As Talal Asad (1993) notes,

relegating critique via the moral to what in Euro-American

terms is conceived of as the realm of the moral—that is, as

something derived from disciplines associated with the

ascetic traditions of Christianity—tends to essentialize

bodily practice as a separate realm of moral discipline.

Again, Hirschkind’s approach is closest to my own in

seeing a disciplining of sensibility as a necessary prereq-

uisite for understanding and reception of traditions. Here,

however, I wish to emphasize the effects of that disciplin-

ing on personhood, as it is realized through an appren-

ticeship under the guidance and through the judgment of

others. In Islamic traditions, for instance, the discipline of

adab, or moral virtue, conceptualizes the body as a site for

iconically representing learned virtues as those virtues are

representative of different types of persons (e.g., Asad

1993; Khalid 1998; Mauss 1979; Metcalf 1984; Shakry

1998). Someone possessed of adab, then, is not only

someone possessed of learning but also someone pos-

sessed of the capacity to display that learning in a ‘‘civi-

lized’’ form. Morals, then, are inseparable from manners.

I wish to bring morals and manners into closer con-

juncture here through a concept of apprenticeship that

links being ‘‘good’’ with being ‘‘good at.’’ Michael Herz-

feld, in his ethnography of Greek masculinity, uses such a

conception to examine the ways in which acts such as

sheep stealing are evaluated not simply on their success

but, more importantly, on their style. ‘‘Effective perfor-

mance 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 per-

formative 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 pri-

mordial but teleological—that 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 elabo-

rate 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 socializa-

tion. 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 ap-

prenticeship more squarely into anthropological discus-

sions of learning and tradition. To accomplish this,

however, I believe that one must define the task of ap-

prenticeship 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

American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

224

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 defini-

tion of apprenticeship may be used to complicate both

Mauss’s techniques du corps and Bourdieu’s habitus and

how it may be seen as adding an ethical and political

dimension to Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s (1991)

notion of ‘‘legitimate peripheral participation.’’

Second, I argue here that the bodily signs that repre-

sent one’s 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 instru-

ments that he considered feminine—light, 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 people’s backs in the streets, I found myself separat-

ing 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 them-

selves into persons capable of expressing particular tradi-

tions. 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 tradi-

tion 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.

The saz as ‘‘tradition’’

In Dudaktan Kalbe (1959), a novel very popular in its own

time, one of the great fiction writers of the early Turkish

republic, Resat Nuri Guntekin, portrays a young, ambitious

violinist and composer who has been trained in Europe

and achieved fame there. This young man decides to

retreat one summer to his uncle’s island estate, where he

meets both the cynical princess whom he will ultimately

marry and the very young girl whom he seduces and

abandons and who eventually has her revenge when she

breaks his heart. Whereas the princess loves only the

young man’s European side, the seduction of the pure,

young girl—nicknamed Kınalı Yapıncak, or Hennaed

Grape, for the blush in her cheeks—takes place over a

series of weeks as the young violinist plays Turkish lulla-

bies late at night, standing in the window of his studio and

letting the music drift across the vineyards. Although

European music may be the language of civilization, it is

Turkish music that makes the soul dance.

The history of Turkish folk music in the 20th century is

entwined with the rather confused distinction between

culture and civilization that underpins official Turkish

nationalism. At the beginning of the 20th century, folk

music was something primarily played in the home or the

village, whereas what is usually called Turkish ‘‘art music’’

was the music of certain public and urban spaces. With the

Ataturk revolution and establishment of the republic, that

changed, and ‘‘sensual,’’ ‘‘Oriental’’ music was officially

rejected in favor of the ‘‘civilized’’ music of ‘‘the West.’’

What makes Turkish music ‘‘Oriental’’ is both its rhythms

and tones that cannot be found in European polyphonic

music. Rhythms contain sequences of beats and ways of

emphasizing beats not found in European music. More-

over, Turkish folk as well as classical music employs the

makam system used in music throughout the Middle East,

the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, and parts of

Central Asia. In Turkish music, up to 53 microtones make

up a Western octave, so that whereas European poly-

phonic music moves from E to E flat to D, Turkish music

inserts at least two tones between D and E. The makam

system, furthermore, is a different way of conceptualizing

musical organization based on compositional modes and

a knowledge of the tuning of instruments and of intervals.

I must note here that my use of Western for the

European polyphonic tradition refers to the division prev-

alent in Turkish discourse between West and East, Batı and

Dogu (or, sometimes, garp and sark, from Arabic). In

musical discourse, ‘‘the West’’ invariably refers to Europe,

that is, to European polyphonic music. The East–West

dichotomy as employed in Turkey results from a dualism

that is both political and ideological and that is unflag-

gingly salient in the semiotics of everyday life. It is political

in the sense that the Ottoman Empire long represented the

Other against which Europe most immediately defined

itself. And it is ideological in the sense that ‘‘the West’’ is

represented in Turkish discourse by certain sets of signs—

such as dress, behavior, and music—that became integral

to the project of ‘‘Westernizing’’ Turkey. But the reverse is

also true: In music courses and curricula anywhere in the

world, ‘‘Western music’’ is a concept, like ‘‘Western civi-

lization,’’ that serves as the unmarked category against

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul n American Ethnologist

225

which anything ethnomusicological is defined. For Turks

to talk of Western music, then, is already for them to locate

the position from which they are made Other.6

At the same time, the music of the Turkish folk, seen

by the sociologist Ziya Gokalp as one of the truest expres-

sions of a pure Turkish culture, became the object of

study and collection as part of the efforts to purify Turk-

ish culture of degenerate Islamic and Arab influences.

During the period in which Gokalp wrote at the begin-

ning of the 20th century, a clear status division existed

between elites associated with the state and the vast ma-

jority of villagers and peasants. So, although Gokalp

and other Turkish nationalists rejected the music of the

Ottoman courts—the music of Ottoman civilization—as

something degenerate and irrational, they accepted the

presumed rationalism of Western music, and they placed

great emphasis on Turkish folk music as a true expres-

sion of the Turkish soul (Gokalp 1923, 1973). Through a

synthesis of folk music and Western music, or through

using Western techniques to transcribe and record folk

music, nationalists hoped to foster not only a unity

across status difference but also a unity that would be

achieved along Western, ‘‘rational’’ lines.7

Of course, the actual consequences of the state’s im-

plementation of these policies was much more confused

than Gokalp’s neat cut-and-paste method would have sug-

gested. In an interview with two female teachers who were

educated in the first years of the republic, I had a glimpse of

the role of music in the cultural and educational projects of

those early years. Until the advent of radio, ‘‘Western

music’’ was taught in the schools and heard on gramo-

phones and in films. ‘‘Western music,’’ of course, meant

Western classical music, but it also meant the Western

music of a more popular sort, which was the type to which

young women learned to dance. Another teacher several

years younger than the first two had told me, for instance,

that he had been incredibly fond of jazz and had started a

blues band when he was young. And one of the two women

noted that ‘‘in our time, there were no radios and such

things. They were always playing Western music.’’

The radio, here, represents the period when music

began to serve the masses. Moreover, Western music was

associated with good, civilized manners:

Feride: The radio came in ‘36.

Hatice: Now my . . . the other day they were singing

a song: ‘‘Aman, aman, aman!’’ [parodying what has

come to be called ‘‘arabesk’’ music, the name being

shorthand for ‘‘orientalized’’ music]. These [referring

back to Western popular music] were the songs of our

time, my child. In our girlhood we grew up always

singing and dancing to those songs. They were always

our . . . because Western music was always our thing.

F: With Ataturk it was more Western music [meaning

pop music], but they also learned [Western] classical

music.

H: We were learning French. It worked on our insides

so much that I was going to school like this at Capa

[imitates the walk of a lady]. I set foot in school, and

I’m walking ahead and apologizing to myself. That

was how classicized we were [o kadar klasiklesmis

gibi] . . . We were so . . . it had become a habit with us.

F: Every teacher had to play a musical instrument.

H: Of course.

F: There was violin, and I’ll never forget we had this fat

piano teacher. But afterwards they started, more folk

songs started.

H: In Ataturk’s time, there was a violin in every house.

If you have talent, you would take violin lessons.

Rebecca Bryant: Now, I wonder about some of the

things you’ve said about music. You listened to West-

ern music, but in the house there was an ‘ud [a

stringed instrument used in Turkish classical music].

H: Why would there also be an ‘ud? Because our

fathers . . . There were these songs [she begins hum-

ming]. Our fathers’ war songs. But in school—

F: I started to learn folk songs after I became a teacher.

For the educated generation that experienced the early

years of the republic, folk music was a quaint part of living

history, an important part of Turkish ‘‘culture’’ but not

part of the ‘‘civilization’’ in which educated, nationalist

Turks of the period strove to participate.

At the same time, however, Turkish folk music came to

be an object of study, laying the groundwork for a trans-

formation of that music with the development of mass

media that would open it to a new reputability. This was

expressed to me by Hilmi Bey, the ney player and teacher

quoted in the opening epigraph, who spent much of his life

working as a pharmacist and playing the ney for his friends:

I wasn’t from a memur family, or a wealthy family, so Ihad to pick a career in which I could make money. Inthose days being a musician just wasn’t reputable. Wecalled them calgıcı. You couldn’t walk down the streetthe way you do with the saz on your back, or peoplewould look and make remarks. My father used to playthe ney, and when he went somewhere with it, he’dtuck it into his pants so that no one would see. My

American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

226

father said, ‘‘You want to be a musician?’’ [saidsarcastically]. I decided to pick a career, somethingwith regular money. It didn’t matter to me what it was:veterinarian, doctor, civil servant.

My father told me that someday it would berespectable to be a musician, but he said until then,I should do something else. And he was right. TheAtaturk period brought respect both for Westernmusic and for our music. It used to be that I wasone of maybe ten people in the country who reallyknew the ney. Now it’s probably 500, and I’m in thetop, maybe, 100.8

Only in the new environment of an economically open

Turkey, in which relations of class, status, power, and

money had begun to shift, could Hilmi Bey retire from

pharmaceutical work and begin to teach the ney.

Indeed, the new popularization of Turkish folk music,

and its acceptance as a symbol of the Turkish folk, tells

much about the ways in which nationalist projects may

evolve, developing a life and ‘‘traditions’’ independently of

elite-derived discourses.9 Hilmi Bey’s story, however, also

indicates something else: the relationship between dis-

course and status. Martin Stokes notes, for instance, that

male musicians are with great frequency portrayed . . .as men without social power, passive homosexualsand transsexuals, or at the very least, inappropriatechoices for a husband. Conversely they are held topossess an extra-social, diabolic power (as in Mann’sDr. Faustus, and myths in European folklore of thedevil’s violin), or a kind of inspired madness. [1994:23]

As Hilmi Bey indicates, however, the incorporation of

tradition into the nation-state elevates the status of folk

musicians from despised calgıcı to persons possessed of

signs and skills that represent the nation. In other words,

folk music became a practice to which one might aspire

precisely because it became a national symbol.

Playing and personhood

From the first time I sat in the saz shop and miniature

school where I took lessons, it was clear to me that the

place was both a dusty, disorganized repository for tradi-

tion, a meeting place for musicians who would come to

pay their respects and almost always end up in a jam

session, and an object of ambivalent curiosity for passers-

by, who would stop to look at the jumble of traditional

instruments that cluttered the window and often poke a

head in the door to ask a price. The shop bears the name of

Semsi Yastıman, its now-deceased founder and a saz

player known as much for his methodical collection of

folk songs as for the memory of his playing. He, in fact,

played an important part in the conversion of Turkish folk

music, in general, and saz playing, in particular, from

practices that fathers passed on to their sons into some-

thing now taught in classes that sometimes begin in

elementary school and that culminate in courses of study

in fine arts academies and conservatories. He helped to

convert it, in other words, from a customary practice with

diverse local traditions into a catalogued form of tradi-

tional knowledge that now, as a whole, represents the mu-

sic of the Turkish folk. Songs that were once part of social

memory are now transcribed and printed in books used

by students, and my teacher would often evaluate the

transcriptions as ‘‘correct’’ or ‘‘incorrect’’ (Figures 3 and 4).

My teacher’s comments echoed others made to me

about the ‘‘incorrectness’’ of previous modes of learning.

One young doctor commented to me that he thought it

wonderful that I was taking lessons on the saz, because he

had learned it from his father and, therefore, had ‘‘learned

a lot of wrong things.’’ ‘‘Now, they teach it in the schools,’’

he said, ‘‘and they have a method.’’ When I asked him

what he thought he might have learned incorrectly, he

could not specify, and, when pressed, he began to rethink

what he had said and wondered to himself what a correct

way of playing might be. Stokes (1992) has noted the

emphasis on the clean, or ‘‘logical’’ method of playing in

dershane such as the one where I studied and the frequent

lack of congruence between such a method and a more

‘‘rural’’ style. Stokes gives an example that I repeated in my

own learning: He describes how, in the dershane, one

learns to use all the sets of strings through a logical process

that allows one to break down the music rationally. This is

seen as a more ‘‘modern,’’ hence, ‘‘Western’’ method in

contrast to a ‘‘rural’’ style that emphasizes playing the

melody on the bottom set of strings, using the top strings

as a drone and the middle strings for strumming (Stokes

1992:70–76).10 Hence, the ‘‘correct’’ method emphasizes

logic (mantık) as opposed to what is seen as a more

haphazard style, the type passed from father to son or

picked up by fooling around on the instrument.

This discourse of correctness clearly values one style of

playing over another. In contradistinction to its suggestion

of a rigid adherence to method and traditionality, however,

the primary mark of even an intermediate-level saz player

is the ability to improvise around a tune, to embellish it.

The straight playing of a melody is considered ‘‘dry’’ (kuru)

and signals relative lack of familiarity with the instrument.

Indeed, saz playing is an improvisational aesthetic.

It is the integral nature of improvisation that, in fact,

constitutes the most important aesthetic difference be-

tween Western polyphonic and Eastern monophonic

music. Whereas Western music emphasizes harmony,

monophonic music emphasizes embellishment, so that

members of an orchestra play not in harmony but in

constant improvisational elaboration with each other.

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul n American Ethnologist

227

During the period when Stokes did his research, his inform-

ants 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 Stokes’s 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 dif-

ferent 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’’

system—witness their approving comments about the

voice of the local muezzin when he chanted the call to

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

without an aesthetic within which the songs memorized

can be decoded. But that aesthetic is learned precisely

through the memorization of songs. My teacher claimed

to know ‘‘thousands’’ of songs and often spoke of writing

his own compilation of folk music to replace the flimsy—

and, in his opinion, fault-ridden—volumes for sale in

Istanbul shops. But knowing those thousands of songs

would have provided little cachet if he had played them

simply as they are, in a dry style, without the appropriate

embellishment. The songs become embodied and capable

of recall without conscious thought, but for them to be

admired, they must be empersoned and embellished well

within a particular aesthetic.

Figure 3. Saz players as they wish to be seen: Left to right, Semsi Yastıman, Ankaralı Unal Turkben, and Yılmaz I:pek (courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).

Figure 4. The community of learning: Asık Daimi and Semsi Yastıman, 1956(courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).

American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

228

In Turkish the process by which this competence is

achieved is called mesk, a word derived from the exercises

given to students of calligraphy. The task of those students

was to achieve the exact replication of their exercises, and

they repeated the text again and again until their masters

were satisfied. In music, however, mesk came to refer to a

whole set of practices surrounding the achievement of

competence in the music. According to Cem Behar, an

economist who has also written a history of Turkish

musical practices, ‘‘Teaching a work meant to take it from

its passive state on the dusty shelf of a real or imaginary

library and to make it part of the mental map, the identity,

and the personality of the student’’ (1998:30). In this

practice, he continues, ‘‘what was being taught was not

reason but tradition’’ (Behar 1998:30).12

Through simple repetition one memorizes while at the

same time embodying. And here one finds another contra-

diction in the textualization of folk music: certainly for me

and, apparently, for all the musicians around me, really

learning a song—that is, making the song itself and the

playing of it part of unconscious recall—is much easier

when that song is learned without a text. Indeed, for most

musicians the text becomes an archive, possibly a source

for consultation, but not the primary means of learning. The

primary means of learning is listening to tapes and playing

pieces over and over in imitation of famous saz players. The

aim, through whatever form of memorization, is to make

the song such a natural part of one’s bodily movements that

thinking about it becomes like thinking about one’s heart-

beat: It can actually cause failure of the process. I have

memorized many piano sonatas, often lengthy ones, and

am quite aware of the necessity of not consciously attempt-

ing recollection, which causes one to stumble.

Embodiment, however, does not necessarily mean

mastery. My embodiment of those sonatas does not mean

that I have mastered them; otherwise, I would be a concert

pianist rather than an anthropologist. In a similar way, in

Qur’anic schools students interminably repeat the lessons

until the reading of the Qur’an becomes a humming in the

body. But it is those who can properly ‘‘sing’’ the Qur’an

who acquire cachet for their memorization of it. In other

words, although embodiment is an important part of the

process, it is also a relatively unremarkable one. Or, as Tim

Ingold notes, ‘‘The continuity of tradition in skilled prac-

tice is a function not of the transmission of rules and

representations but of the coordination of perception and

action’’ (2000:351). Becoming a good pianist means be-

coming good at playing the piano, something to be judged

only within an aesthetic tradition of which the inheritance

of music is a part.

Indeed, what came across most clearly in conversa-

tions that explicitly discussed the aesthetic of Turkish folk

music was the idea that folk music was part of a long and

noble tradition comparable to, and in many ways better

than, the traditions of European music. In that sense,

Turkish folk music was part of a civilization, complete in

itself, that one could learn in the same way that one had

learned to play Western music. At the same time, despite

knowing something of what Western music was about,

musicians I knew exhibited a general lack of curiosity

about it, and I never heard European polyphonic music

played in the shop. Indeed, in everything that was said to

me about the differences between Western and Turkish

musics, people clearly conveyed a sense of the radical

nature of the difference and of the differences in the types

of persons who chose to play each type.

Learning to play the saz did not involve learning to

play notes on an instrument; it involved learning to be-

come the type of person who could play the saz. For all of

the students that I met during my two years of study,

learning to play was a vocation that required immersion in

the music and a remaking of self. One way in which this

was brought home to me was through the unsystematic

and communal nature of lessons. My teacher was from the

eastern Black Sea region, near the Georgian border. He

came to Istanbul to enter the conservatory, but he kept

getting kicked out of school for not attending his classes.

He is a talented musician who refuses, when he can afford

to do so, to play in the saz bars, because he finds them

demeaning. He considers his music an art and himself

something of a local genius, and he takes obvious pride in

the way that the university students who come to take his

classes call him hocam, or ‘‘my teacher.’’ He constantly

‘‘studies’’ music by listening to and playing it. Indeed, my

‘‘lessons’’ often consisted simply in listening to Necati and

friends jamming in the shop. As they played, Necati would

tell me to pay attention if my gaze seemed to wander.

My experience seemed to mirror other apprenticeship

practices in Turkey, in which children are apprenticed to

carpenters or hairdressers or other craftspeople. The chil-

dren’s task, for years on end, is to hand the master

a hammer or scissors, to sweep up the mess, and to be

attentive. Such an apprenticeship may continue from the

time the child is ten or 12 years old until he or she is

almost grown, and those years may pass without the

apprentice ever being allowed to touch a hammer or take

up scissors him or herself. ‘‘We learn by watching’’ (Baka

baka ogreniyoruz), they inevitably say when asked.13 As

Behar (1998:14) notes, however, the difference between

musical apprenticeship and other forms is that one learns

not only the theory and the techniques but also the reper-

toire itself, which should be handed down intact.

Although in certain ways the teaching of saz has been

made to resemble the teaching of a subject in school, once

one is past the initial stages, this resemblance becomes

merely superficial. At an early stage, one’s status as ap-

prentice is made clear. One can be brushed off with

impunity or sent to fetch the teacher tea or cigarettes

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul n American Ethnologist

229

(something from which I acquired immunity as a teacher

myself). But even more importantly, as one enters the

status of pupil or apprentice, any master may order one

to play and correct one. Anyone who enters the room can

order a performance and make comments on a student’s

playing and progress.

One day I went to the shop for a lesson, only to find

the shop crowded with men I had not seen before. They

had arrived from Ankara in anticipation of a concert that

night in honor of Semsi Yastıman; because his son still

owned the shop, they naturally gathered there. A rotund

man with a bellowing voice, who seemed to be the center

of attention, was awaiting the arrival of Semsi Yastıman’s

divan saz, which he was to play that evening.14 I was

invited to sit, and the rotund man, Hasan Bey, growled

at me that I should take my saz from its case and play

something. At the time, I had been playing only a couple of

months and so could play only the simplest of tunes, with

little embellishment. But clearly I could not demur, and so

I extracted my saz from its case and played the last piece

that I had learned. Hasan Bey commented on it and gave

me some encouragement. In such an interaction, the roles

are clearly those of the master who can command a

performance and the apprentice who must comply.

Moreover, any lessons must be snatched from the at-

mosphere, and learning becomes the responsibility of the

apprentice, rather than of the master. This is best demon-

strated by an almost random selection from my notes:

I go for my lesson, and we sit in the shop. The dentist(Kemal) comes in, taking his lunch break. I play mypiece for them [the one that I had learned for thatday]. Necati says that it’s good, but I rush the finalnote, and Kemal comments that 9/8 time must notbe easy for foreigners. While N. talks on the phone, Iplay it again while Kemal keeps time, then Kemaltakes my saz saying he hopes he won’t get it out oftune, and he starts playing something. Still talkingon the phone, N. starts correcting him. When he closesthe phone, N. starts showing Kemal how it should beplayed, though N. doesn’t know all of the piece. Theythen start trying to work on the piece, while I’mlistening. N. gets a call on his cell phone, and Kemaljokingly tells him, ‘‘Hang up the phone! We’ve justgotten into it!’’ They finish the piece, then N. gives mesomething else to play. While he’s looking for thepiece and gets another phone call, I play some of myother pieces, and without seeming to listen, hecorrects me. [February 13, 2001]

The attentive discipline of teacher and pupil focused on a

particular subject is not the type of pedagogy at work here

because the aim is not simply to learn a tune. The aim is to

learn to become a master, an ustat. And that cannot be

accomplished through lessons but must be learned in

context and in practice.15 Behar describes the 19th-century

apprenticeship in Turkish classical music as a face-to-face

enterprise: ‘‘The student must sit in front of the teacher

and must learn well, assimilate, interpret and finally repeat

to the teacher all of his [the teacher’s] actions, words, and

gestures’’ (1998:51–52). Hence, the exact memorization of

thousands of songs is not simply about developing one’s

repertoire but about developing oneself as the type of

person who is capable of calling on that tradition.16

This is, in fact, not so very different from what was

happening in the schools in Cyprus earlier in the century,

when religious identities were being converted through

education into national ones. I have argued elsewhere that

education in Cyprus was necessary for nationalism be-

cause education already embodied community traditions

and represented communal continuity (Bryant 2001). Both

the Greek Orthodox and Muslim communities of Cyprus

were literate in the sense that they considered the best,

most representative, and, indeed, most virtuous aspects

of the communities to be embodied in the texts and tra-

ditions learned through formal schooling. Indeed, educa-

tion was something that was supposed to create better

persons, persons who embodied communal understand-

ings of virtue or worth. In Cyprus, in both the Greek and

Turkish communities, people commonly said that one

went to school to ‘‘become a person’’ (Turkish, insan

olmak; Greek, na ghınei anthropos). Certainly, students

became—in a very fundamental sense—different persons

through education.

As I noted earlier, this practice is encapsulated in the

Turkish musical tradition under the term mesk. One indi-

cation of this is one’s ability to pronounce, like my teacher,

on the correctness of music and method. When my teacher

repeatedly told me that he knew thousands of songs by

heart, and when he repeatedly pronounced on the correct-

ness of written versions of songs, he was also pronouncing

on his own accomplishments, his own trustworthiness as a

teacher. Behar, in discussing Turkish classical music, notes

that the perception of authority and mastery were inter-

twined such that a certain ustat, or master, might be

perceived as more ‘‘trustworthy’’ or fastidious in his own

mental recording of the music than others. ‘‘The interest-

ing thing,’’ Behar remarks, ‘‘is that the different written

versions of works that were committed to paper only

hundreds of years after the death of their composer are

even today seen with the same eyes’’ (1998:80). My own

teacher, then, in asserting his own better knowledge,

employed not only a discourse of correctness but also

one of authority.

The knowledge of the ‘‘correct’’ version of a song does

not, however, commit one to playing it exactly according

to that version—far from it. Becoming the type of person

who can play the saz is not undermined by, but is actually

dependent on, improvisation. This is a point eloquently

American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

230

made by Paul Berliner (1994) in his extensive study of jazz

improvisation, in which he demonstrates the importance

of memorization for acquiring the aesthetic within which

improvisation will take place. The strength of a tradition,

in this sense, is not defined by its static nature, its capacity

exactly to reproduce itself, but by the precise opposite: by

the capacity to innovate within the tradition. Tradition,

then, can be understood as a sensibility acquired through

repetition, as one shapes oneself to become the type of

person capable not only of further repetition but also,

more importantly, of innovation.

Music and masculinity

In the anecdotes that everyone tells, playing the saz was

until recently something passed on from father to son, and

the saz is usually considered to be a masculine instrument

(see also Stokes 1992:46). It is often associated with smoky

bars, the drinking of much rakı, and a perception of

physical prowess that actually has some foundation in

the strength of hand required to put sufficient pressure

on the strings to produce the typical saz sound (Figure 5).17

For instance, I have never seen a woman play the enor-

mous divan saz. In the past few years, though, many more

women have begun to play the saz, and the first lesson that

I took was attended by two other women pupils who

worked not far from the shop. When I asked my teacher

about the novel popularity of saz playing among women,

he shrugged and said, ‘‘Oh, well, they saw women playing

on television and decided they could do it, too.’’

My teacher’s dismissive remark also points to gender

as the crucial juncture at which personhood and politics

meet in saz playing. The women who perform on televi-

sion play in a considerably different atmosphere from that

of male performance. Folk music performances on private

television, at least, are usually brightly lit and involve many

men sitting stiffly with their instruments on uncomfortable

chairs, and their audiences are usually made up of many

men with mustaches and women with head scarves, cor-

poreal signs that, when combined with other such signs,

are usually associated with a rural traditionality. Audience

interaction and dial-in questions are often key features of

such shows, as are cameras that pan the audience to take

in families clapping and dancing. In contrast, the one folk

music show that I have seen whose host is female has a

calm, soothing atmosphere, and the stage is lit by rows of

candles so that it is impossible to see anything beyond the

circle in which the performers sit. Almost all of the guests

are women, most of whom sing but some of whom also

play instruments. They chat about careers and music, but

the stage set, the type of music played, and the low tones

in which the women speak all give the show an atmo-

sphere of spiritual journey. The show, then, creates a very

soothing, ‘‘feminine’’ atmosphere, in contrast to the heavy

masculinity of other shows on which folk music is played.

This difference suggests that even a woman who shows

seriousness of purpose in learning the saz has to overcome

the hurdle of not being taken seriously. A young woman

who works in the saz shop and whom I here call Fatma

shows considerable talent on the saz and practices con-

stantly. Because her fingers are somewhat stubby, she

wraps them in rubber bands like braces while playing to

create a resistance that will strengthen them and make

them more pliable. Fatma lives with her mother, who works

delivering tea in an office building in a central area of the

city, and she herself works in the saz shop to have free

lessons and the opportunity to play when she is not selling

strings or picks to schoolchildren. She has dreams of

attending a conservatory but knows that they are unrealis-

tic, and she told me once that she had not been all that good

on the saz until my teacher arrived in the school. Despite

her talents on the instrument and her earnest efforts,

however, I saw her constantly pushed aside and ignored

by the men who came to the shop to play. Her tasks recently

have begun to include cooking for everyone in the shop in a

makeshift kitchen installed outside the classroom.

I was one of those who could be taken seriously,

although in an ambivalent way. My status was different

from Fatma’s, as a grown, married woman who was at the

time teaching at the most prestigious university in Turkey

and who could demonstrate prior training in music. I

developed with my teacher a type of joking relationship

in which we negotiated the problems of age and hierarchy.

I never called him hocam or abi, the honorific and kinship

terms usually used by others with Necati.18 In turn, he

often brought observers to our lessons and had me play

for them, enjoying the moment when he could tell them

that I was a foreigner. In fact, my status as a woman and

a foreigner mitigated my status as a university teacher

Figure 5. Saz greats in a meyhane (bar/restaurant): Left to right, Semsi

Yastıman, Kastamonulu Yorgansız Hakkı Baba, and Ahmet Tekeli inKastamonu, 1967 (courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul n American Ethnologist

231

two years older than Necati. Hence, he sometimes joked

around about my being a foreigner learning the saz.

This was not intended to imply that I was incapable of

learning—even though at other times he offered ‘‘racial’’

explanations for differences in certain types of music.19

What he meant was simply that I was at a disadvantage

in not having been immersed from an early age in the

Turkish folk music aesthetic. This also meant that I had

to avoid at all costs being perceived as hafif, or light, in

my behavior and dedication to the music.

Along with masculinity, folk music, especially music

played on the saz, generally connotes seriousness. Again,

an interesting physical analogue of this symbolic structure

is that the saz cannot be properly played by someone who

is not relaxed, ‘‘cool,’’ and the epitome of self-control. The

reason for this is that, although the saz requires consider-

able precision, the tendency of many beginning players to

stiffen the hand holding the pick leads to a tinny, flat

sound. One must, then, press with some strength with the

left hand while keeping the right hand completely relaxed

to produce the desired tonal resonance.

Much of the comportment of a saz player, then, is

aimed at displaying a type of self-control that is perceived

as particularly male. This perception of self-control as a

male quality has clear parallels with the dancing of the

zeibekiko in Greece, which is something that many Greeks

believe that only men can do. Key to both proscriptions on

the participation of women is a certain type of emotion-

ality that many in Greek and Turkish society perceive as

something that only men can experience.20 In Greece,

zeibekiko is danced by men because only men have the

depth of emotion and experience that would allow them to

dance it well (see, esp., Cowan 1990).21 Saz playing is

regarded similarly. One of the archetypes for Turkish folk

musicians is the asık, the wandering minstrel who is also

the ‘‘voice of the people.’’ The title of asık or ozan (bard) is

given to composers (for instance, Asık Mahzuni Serif and

Asık Veysel), thereby incorporating new folk music into the

realm of tradition.22 Although the asık is primarily a folk

poet, as one researcher commented, ‘‘When asıklar are

mentioned, the first matter that comes to mind is the saz.

In other words, the saz possesses a characteristic that is

determinative of the identity of the asık’’ (Kaya 2004). This

is an archetype closed to women (Figure 6).

In general, saz players’ self-presentation is agır, a

word that literally means ‘‘heavy’’ but that is used to

describe the self-control and seriousness of purpose that

is displayed in comportment. A man’s walk might be said

to be agır, as he walks not only with deliberation but also

with a visible gravity, rolling from heel to toe. To be hafif,

or light, in one’s comportment is to suggest a lack of

seriousness usually associated with women and, when

applied to women, this description also suggests promis-

cuity. Although a woman playing folk music could not

easily adopt a masculine heaviness without censure, she

could adopt a feminine seriousness, as seen in the sooth-

ing television show cast in candlelight. In contrast to the

flashiness, crassness, and skin-baring of pop stars, women

who play and sing folk music present themselves, in both

dress and behavior, with modesty.

The association of saz playing with masculinity, then,

is not a simple exclusion of women. Rather, it is an entire

domain of learning marked in the body through gendered

signs. Those gendered signs, moreover, are explicitly asso-

ciated with the nation. Scholars have often remarked that

Turkish nationalism is thoroughly masculine and milita-

ristic, especially concerned with the blood sacrifice of

young men (Bryant 2002; Kaplan 1996; Sirman 1990). In

a symbolic conjuncture, the saz as representative of the

heart of Turkish tradition converges with a masculine

comportment representative of the honor of the nation.

Stokes has remarked that the argument that ‘‘all rural folk

music is ultimately reducible to that which can be played

on the baglama’’ is an ideological assertion derived from

Figure 6. The asık as voice of the people: Kırklareli’li Asık Ali Tamburacı

(courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).

American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

232

its presumed ‘‘ ‘ethnic’ association with the Turks of Asia

as well as Asia Minor’’ (1994:107). In other words, Stokes

asserts that the saz is privileged as the representative

instrument of Turkish folk music because of its presumed

ethnic roots in the traditions of Central Asia.

I would propose, however, that the symbolic signifi-

cance of the saz is located not only in the instrument itself

but also in the capacity of players of the instrument to

represent the signs of the nation through their masculine

bearing. Moreover, this rule is in many ways proven by its

exceptions: The reappropriation of folk music by the Left

beginning in the 1970s, for instance, allows for an alterna-

tive masculinity associated with global revolution at the

same time that the Left has adopted alternative folk

musics—especially Alevi, but also Armenian, Kurdish,

and Greek—as a challenge to a homogenizing Turkish na-

tionalism.23 Or, more recently, many younger saz players

have begun to adopt some of the masculine posturing and

musical styling of heavy metal guitarists—again, a musical

genre with global appeal dominated by young males.

These appropriations of folk music present both alterna-

tive nationalisms (leftist, multicultural, or globalized) and

alternative expressions of masculinity. But public perfor-

mance continues to exclude women and is dominated by

the sort of masculine bearing described above.

Hence, in saz performance that mark or corporeal trait

seen in one’s disposition and sensibility is the sign of the

skill. But certain corporeal traits have as their starting

points assumptions about the nature of the bodies onto

which they are being traced. In this case, male bodies are

capable of being marked with the traits that are the sign of

the saz. The notion that men and women are suited for

different sorts of instruments is neither culturally nor

historically limited (see, e.g., La Rue 1994; Stokes 1994).

In the Turkish case, however, gender itself is important in

marking the saz player as representative of Turkish tradi-

tion. Indeed, an implicit syllogism is created: Saz music is

the ‘‘soul of the nation’’ and saz musicians the ‘‘voice of

the people.’’ The nation is masculine, and those who

represent it must also be. Therefore, saz players, as the

‘‘voice of the people,’’ also present themselves as mascu-

line representatives of the nation.

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

learning,’’ they note, ‘‘is as the historical production,

transformation, and change of persons’’ (Lave and Wenger

1991:51). Moreover, they outline a theory of learning that is

socially embedded:

As an aspect of social practice, learning involves thewhole person; it implies not only a relation to specificactivities, but a relation to social communities—itimplies becoming a full participant, a member, a kindof person. . . . Activities, tasks, functions, and under-standings do not exist in isolation; they are part ofbroader systems of relations in which they havemeaning. These systems of relations arise out of andare reproduced and developed within social commu-nities, which are in part systems of relations amongpersons. The person is defined by as well as definesthese relations. Learning thus implies becoming adifferent person with respect to the possibilitiesenabled by these systems of relations. [Lave andWenger 1991:53]

Their formulation also has direct parallels with Alasdair

MacIntyre’s definition of virtue in his important After

Virtue: ‘‘A virtue is an acquired human quality the posses-

sion and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve

those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of

which effectively prevents us from achieving such goods’’

(1984:194).

Whereas MacIntyre is concerned with the implications

of his analysis for ethics and whereas Lave and Wenger are

concerned with the implications of their analysis for an-

thropology, the two can easily be brought into fruitful

conversation. This can be done, I believe, through the

notion of apprenticeship as ‘‘learning to become the type

of person who can do X.’’ This implies that (1) practice and

personhood are inextricable; (2) practice requires becom-

ing a person embedded in a hierarchy of values and

capable of judgments; and (3) acquiring that hierarchy of

values means becoming capable of making judgments that

link being good with being good at. So, learning to become

the type of person who can play the saz means learning the

sensibility and disposition of a musician capable of mak-

ing judgments about what is good Turkish folk music.24

The aspect of self-making implied here is what I have

called elsewhere an ‘‘aesthetics of self,’’ which I distin-

guish from Michel Foucault’s (1990) ‘‘care of the self’’ in

that it links virtue (being good) to practice (being good at).

In other words, one does not blindly adhere to tradition

but, rather, acquires traditional practices as part of being

educated into one’s role in one’s community. This is

clearly a type of technique du corps, in Mauss’s words,

but it is quite different from Bourdieu’s appropriation of

Mauss’s notion into ‘‘habitus.’’ It is different because,

although such an apprenticeship requires an education

of the body into apparently unconscious practices, those

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul n American Ethnologist

233

practices are consciously acquired, can be given adequate

secondary explanations (‘‘I do it this way because of that’’),

and are techniques that are structured, layered, and sep-

arable. Moreover, those practices entail practices of the

body (such as a pianist cutting his or her fingernails short)

and forms of comportment that are, I claim, signs for

values that are clearly recognized.25

One aspect of an aesthetics of self closely resembles

the malaka of Islamic theology, the culmination of which

is the acquisition and expression of adab, or the correct

knowledge and behavior of a good, educated Muslim.

Adab, according to Ibn Khaldun, is one expression of the

more general phenomenon of malaka, which, according to

Ira Lapidus, ‘‘bears the meaning of the Latin, habitus—an

acquired faculty, rooted in the soul’’ (1984:53). Unlike

Bourdieu’s appropriation of the word, however, Lapidus

notes, quoting Ibn Khaldun, that ‘‘each activity ‘gives the

soul a special coloring that forms it.’ This mark, imagined

as a corporeal trait, is made deeper and more permanent

as a result of constant practice and repetition’’ (1984:55).

Malaka, then, Lapidus calls a ‘‘rooted disposition,’’ some-

thing necessary for those who practice crafts as well as for

submission to God. The knowledge of malaka, Lapidus

further notes, ‘‘is not merely knowledge known, but knowl-

edge which has become a built-in attribute (sifa) modify-

ing the very nature of a man’s being’’ (1984:55). This sense

of a conscious disciplining that shapes disposition and

sensibility I choose to call here ‘‘empersonment,’’ also to

emphasize the recursive nature of such identity formation,

as persons are shaped in an environment in which masters

of a body of knowledge undertake the criticism and shap-

ing of apprentices.

The type of apprenticeship that I have described here

entails a deliberate shaping of the self in the mold of

traditional knowledge. As I noted earlier, this by necessity

implies a shaping of the body (Mauss’s technique du

corps), but it is of the body as a social being and therefore

as something that should not be separated from mind, as

one is so tempted to do.26 Rather, one empersons a body of

knowledge that also contains a set of values, both ethical

and aesthetic. As a person shaped by that body of knowl-

edge, one works, lives, and innovates. And it is one’s being

as a person who has mastered that knowledge that one

displays in one’s comportment, gestures, and speech.

Hence, an aesthetics of self, as the self-conscious

process by which one undertakes self-making, depends

on empersonment, or the recursive techniques of appren-

ticeship through which one habituates oneself in a tradi-

tion. The hierarchy of values within which that self-making

takes place is also, in the case of the saz, gendered. But as I

showed in the case of the saz, the syllogism that links being

good at the saz with the signs of a good Turk of a particular

kind may remain even as the signs themselves may

change. The signs of a good Turk, under other political

and social conditions, may no longer be masculine ones;

there are many indications that the new political opening

that Turkey has recently begun is shifting those signs. As

long as the syllogism that links being good at the saz with

being a good Turk remains, someone educating him- or

herself into a national Tradition still perceives that tradi-

tion as living and real. In such a way does the soul dance

into the body, always to a traditional tune.

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 develop-

ment of malaka requires repetition. But only when one has

acquired the sensibility and disposition of Turkish folk

music—only when one has empersoned it—can one be-

come a good saz player, that is, good at playing the saz.

This implies acquisition of an aesthetic, embodiment of a

practice, and expression of one’s mastery of that knowl-

edge in one’s behavior, usually through a displayed mas-

culinity, 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 con-

verted into Tradition, learning to play the saz no longer

means becoming a calgıcı 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, inven-

tedness does not necessarily trump experience.

Notes

Acknowledgments. This article greatly benefited in its early

stages from the comments of Dominic Boyer, John Coma-roff, Haldun Gulalp, Hiro Miyazaki, and four anonymous

reviewers. The research discussed here was one outgrowth of

a project on learning practices in Greece and Turkey supported

American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

234

by a National Academy of Education – Spencer Foundation Post-

doctoral Fellowship.1. The word saz literally means any musical instrument but,

more narrowly, a stringed instrument. Usually, the word is used to

refer to the baglama. This linguistic overlap is a source of confusion

for Turks as well as for a foreigner like me. The first few lessons thatI took were with two other students, both of whom were confused

about the difference between saz and baglama and about what

exactly they should call the instrument that they were playing.Much of the confusion stems from the occurrence in Turkish of

two other words for musical instrument, calgı and enstruman. The

former refers to anything that might be played to make music

(from the verb calmak, to play), whereas the latter is simply thephonetic rendition of the French instrument. The latter is a word

that some purists would like to see removed from use, to be

replaced by saz, rather than calgı, interestingly enough.2. Different forms of the music have been associated with

different political affiliations, however. Alevi music became espe-

cially popular as music of the resistance starting in the 1970s, and

many leftists (solcu) still consider that particular brand of folk

music the most acceptable (see N. 22, on Alevism).3. I draw the distinction here between history and heritage in a

way that resembles the distinction drawn by E. Valentine Daniel in

Charred Lullabies (1996), although the distinction also relies on a

large literature on the self-reflexiveness of historical consciousnessin modernity (see, esp., Gadamer 1975; Koselleck 1985). The

distinction here concerns not the ontological status of tradition

but, rather, the way in which tradition is perceived, or what Danielcalls a ‘‘disposition toward the past’’ (1996:14). Whereas, in

Daniel’s formulation, ‘‘heritage’’ is a consciousness of the past

in the present, ‘‘history’’ is a consciousness of the past as past,

something that may be uncovered and is therefore future orientedinsofar as it seeks ‘‘truth.’’ My own distinction relies, as well, on

critiques of modernity that cite history as a self-conscious enter-

prise also capable of turning heritage into Heritage, tradition into

Tradition. This is not to assert that traditions that are heritage areutilized and performed unselfconsciously but, rather, to assert that

history turns heritage into an enterprise concerned with docu-

mentation and preservation qua heritage. This by necessity alsoalters the ontological status of tradition (see, e.g., Gadamer 1975;

Handler and Linnekin 1984; Ricoeur 1988).4. Most debates on this question have focused primarily on

ritual practice and on the role of emotion and agency in thatpractice (e.g., Bell 1992; Bloch 1974; Tambiah 1985; Turner 1969).

5. As I explain later, honorifics—usually through fictive kinship—

are an integral part of Turkish speech patterns. In Turkey, people

invariably refer to me as gelin (bride) or yenge (sister-in-law, alsouncle’s wife). A family member would use gelin or damat (groom) to

refer to persons who have married into the family, even when a

relationship was a distant one to the speaker. That distance can be

indefinitely extended, in my case to the nation. I become, in effect, a‘‘national’’ gelin, a concept that has at times been explicitly stated,

as in a case of a 13-year-old English girl who made headlines when

she married a Turk, moved to Turkey, and converted to Islam. Innewspapers, she was called the ‘‘milli gelin,’’ or ‘‘national bride.’’

This concept is easily applicable to women, although not to men.

Just as in Islam non-Muslim women may marry Muslim men but

not the other way around, in Turkey foreign women who marryTurkish men gain immediate citizenship, whereas foreign men

marrying Turkish women do not.6. An excellent example of the significance for Turks of this

musical Othering is a national obsession with the Eurovision songcontest. The contest features a single group or performer selected

by each European country, and it involves dial-in (and always

highly politicized) voting. Although one cannot vote for one’s own

country in the contest, neighbors and allies are known to vote for

each other. These days in western Europe the contest is consid-ered 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 per-

formers had competed in the contest in hopes of having Turkishmusic accepted in Europe. Turkey finally won the contest in 2003

with the country’s first English-language entry, Sertab Erener’s

‘‘Every Way That I Can.’’ And in 2004 it hosted the contest,spending millions of dollars on what it considered a prime op-

portunity to advertise Turkey’s 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 ofthe folk songs that are sweetly sung in the mountains

and villages [daglarda ve koylerde terennum edilen

turkulerinin seslerini toplamak lazımdır]. So by follow-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 Bey’s

remark, which deserve explanation. Although a memur is basicallya 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 amemur 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 impres-

sion 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 sec-

ond was the marginalization from historical consciousness of non-Muslims engaged in trade.

In Hilmi Bey’s comments, the derogatory connotation of calgıcı,

which literally means ‘‘musician,’’ derives from its assumed jux-

taposition with muzisyen, a word that, like enstruman, comes fromFrench and implies music as art and status. Calgıcı has some of

the connotations of fiddler in English.

9. Arzu Ozturkmen shows how the evolution of folk dance in

Turkey was ‘‘ ‘national’ by its nature,’’ arising out of ‘‘dynamicscreated 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

also Ozturkmen 1998).

10. The quotidian salience of such distinctions is apparent, for

instance, in the album liner notes that explain the leftist folk

musician Zulfu Livaneli’s tuning revolution in the 1970s. At the time

the common method of playing the saz on the radio was

by tuning it G-D-A and playing the melody on the lowerstring, 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 E-

D-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]

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul n American Ethnologist

235

11. In Turkish a single verb, okumak, may be used to denote

reading, chanting, and singing. Although there are other ways to

express ‘‘to sing’’ (esp. sarkı soylemek, lit., to say a song), okumak

is the only verb for ‘‘to read.’’ Okumak, however, is also in manyways the most familiar way to express ‘‘to sing.’’ A performer

might ask his audience, ‘‘Ne okuyayım?’’ ‘‘What shall I sing?’’ or

someone having heard a performance might remark that thesinger ‘‘read/sang’’ a particular song.

12. The original has an interesting wordplay: ‘‘Buralarda da

oncelikle aklı degil naklı ilimler ogretiliyordu.’’ The word akıl,coming from Arabic, has a number of meanings involving reason,

comprehension, wisdom, and sense. The word nakil refers to

transport or transfer and, as an adjective (as it appears here), also

refers to things traditional, things handed down.

13. The examples of carpenter (marangoz) and hairdresser or

barber (kuafor or berber) for males and other forms of beauty care

(manicurist or facialist) for women are some of the most common.Only a few years ago, students were required to complete only the

fifth form in school, and so at the age of about twelve, many would

leave to become apprentices. From my own numerous conversa-tions with apprentices and masters, I ascertained that most

apprentices spend five to six years doing only menial work before

finally being allowed officially to learn the trade. An apprentice to

a kuafor, for example, might spend six years sweeping the floorand handing the kuafor his scissors, eventually graduating to

washing hair. Only after the five or six years had passed would

he begin blowdrying hair, and eventually coloring and cutting it.

Similarly, a carpenter with whom I have had numerous conversa-tions confirmed that his apprentices (including his son) spent the

first years of their apprenticeship carrying wood and tools, sweep-

ing up, and delivering goods. In 1997, when compulsory educationwas increased to eight years, the government also attempted to

bring some control to apprenticeship more widely. The same law

instituted a system that allows apprentices and ‘‘candidate

apprentices’’ (those who have finished compulsory educationbut are under 14 years of age) to attend courses and acquire

credit for their work.

I might also note that these practices are, as one might expect,

gendered. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of their genderingis that being a kuafor, that is, a hairdresser for women, has, over

the past few decades, become a male job. Although I heard rumors

that there are a few women practicing the profession, I have neverseen one, and no one has given me a concrete example. This was

bemoaned by one woman I interviewed who had trained as a

hairdresser in the 1960s, only to be pushed out of the trade as it

became increasingly dominated by men. Becoming a kuaforappears to be on a par with becoming a chef. In the latter case,

women’s cooking is relegated to the home, whereas the art of

cooking is something achieved by men. In the former case,

although women’s intimate grooming (manicures, waxing, etc.)is left to women, their style is decided by men.

14. The divan sazı is the largest of three main types of baglama,

the others usually referred to as kısa sap, or ‘‘short stem,’’ anduzun sap, or ‘‘long stem.’’ Nine others, not so frequently in use,

range in size from the meydan sazı to the tiny cura. Each has its

own tunings, repertoire, and techniques.

15. Behar (1998:49 – 50) describes how, in the 19th century,

apprentices in Turkish classical music often met with their teach-

ers in the corners of coffee shops, indicating that the setting itselfwas unimportant to the teaching.

16. I should also remark here that the reception of folk music

in recent years has tended to emphasize the performer andcomposer, making saz players like virtuoso Neset Ertas into stars,

so that young players such as my teacher aspired to a similar

career. Stokes (1992:56) notes that, at the time of his research,

Ertas was excluded from the canon of the national Turkish Radio

and Television (TRT). At the time of my own research, the

various TRT stations had lost so much of their audience to theburgeoning private channels that TRT’s influence on music

production seemed minimal. This also meant a shift away from

the ideological demand that folk music’s sources be anonymous(see Bohlman 1988).

17. Rakı, an anise-flavored drink usually diluted with ice and

water, is considered the ‘‘national’’ drink of Turkey. In recent years,

some newspaper columnists have jokingly discussed the tendencyfor men to drink rakı and women to drink wine when dining.

18. The use of kinship terms in direct address, even for persons

that one does not know, is considered respectful. Some of themost common terms of address are agabey (normally pronounced

and written as abi) and abla, or ‘‘older brother’’ and ‘‘older sister,’’

used to address persons who are relatively close to one in age; andamca and teyze, or ‘‘paternal uncle’’ and ‘‘maternal aunt,’’ used to

address persons who are considerably older than oneself. Such

terms can also be extended in absentia. For instance, a friend’s or

acquaintance’s wife may be referred to as yenge, or ‘‘sister-in-law,’’ by one speaking to the husband. Some people prefer to use

more formal terms of address, such as beyefendi (sir) or hanıme-

fendi (madam), but those terms imply more distance and often

may be employed in confrontation.

19. He told me at one point, for example, that the music of the

Black Sea is lighter and more joyous than that of other parts of

Turkey because the air is clearer there, creating a distinct physicaltype. Such racialization of musical difference evidences a very

interesting suppression of ethnolinguistic difference (Laz in the

eastern Black Sea region and Kurdish in the southeast, e.g.) that

conforms to the denial of ethnic minorities by the state. My teacherhimself, who grew up along the Georgian border, said that his

family spoke both Laz and Russian as well as Turkish at home.

20. One instance of the central social importance accordedboth music and emotionality is illustrated by an incident that

occurred shortly after the beginning of Turkey’s worst economic

crisis of the 20th century. Newspapers had a field day with a piece

of news that seemed to encapsulate what many people perceivedas the absurdities of their tenuous situation: It seems that one

evening the governor of Karaman Province in central Anatolia

declared a public ban on the folk song ‘‘The End of the Road is inSight’’ (‘‘Yolun Sonu Gorunuyor’’). In justifying his action, the

governor explained that ‘‘in the midst of the crisis that’s being

experienced, this folksong has a negative effect on people’s

psychological well-being.’’ ‘‘For citizens who are already suffer-ing anxiety,’’ he continued, ‘‘this kind of song or folk song could

drag them into further depression’’ (Radikal 2001: 1). At the same

moment, two pop songs that hit the top of the charts and were

played constantly in Istanbul’s streets had similar themes. Onewas entitled ‘‘I’m in Depression’’ (‘‘Depresyondayım’’) and the

other had a chorus with the refrain, ‘‘Ah, this life is unbearable’’

(Ah, bu hayat cekilmez).

21. This was brought home to me in southern Cyprus, when I

went at one point to a concert in a small bar. Near me were two

women, who began to dance the zeibekiko as their boyfriends

talked. But when one of the women went too far—kneeling andleaning back so that her head touched the floor—her boyfriend

yanked her from the ground and pulled her outside, beginning a

fight that had to be stopped with police intervention.

22. Asık literally means ‘‘lover’’ and comes from the Sufi tradi-

tion of ecstatic worship of the One. Alevis are a religious group

often confused with Shi’ites because of their belief that Ali was thelegitimate caliph after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

236

Alevism, however, also syncretically incorporates elements of

local, pre-Islamic practices. More recently, with the reforms that

have accompanied Turkey’s bid for EU entry, debate has begun

about the claims of some Alevis that they are not Muslim and thatAlevism should be accepted as a separate religion. In any case, the

Alevi poetic tradition has been seen as the indigenous literature of

Anatolia (Atalay 1991) and, hence, by some as its true voice.23. One of the pioneers of the folk music of the Left was

Livaneli, who, as noted, pioneered a new style of playing and

the use of a new tuning in the 1970s. The tuning is one that he had

apparently learned from his Alevi grandfather.24. I should note that the capacity to make such judgments is

often, in musical cases, related to the capacity to induce emotions

in an audience. This is certainly true of the case of the asık,

discussed above. The emotional state induced in both audienceand performers is given more explicit form in Arabic music, in

which it is captured under the term tarab, which may generally

be translated as a state of aesthetic ecstasy (Racy 1998; Shannon

2003). David Coplan notes that music ‘‘is crucial to the reappli-cation of memory and the creation and re-creation of the emo-

tional qualities of experience in the maintenance of a living

tradition’’ (1991:45).25. Bourdieu’s take on this problem is rather the opposite:

The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of

classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that

they function below the level of consciousness and

language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny orcontrol by the will. Orienting practices practically, they

embed what some would mistakenly call values in the

most automatic gestures of the apparently most insig-

nificant techniques of the body—ways of walking orblowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking—and

engage the most fundamental principles of construction

and evaluation of the social world, those which mostdirectly express the division of labour (between the

class, the age groups and the sexes) or the division of the

work of domination, in divisions between bodies and

between relations to the body which borrow morefeatures than one, as if to give them the appearances of

naturalness, from the sexual division of labour and the

division of sexual labour. [1984:466]

26. The recursive nature of the uses of the body for social

practices is a theme recently explored for topics as distinct ascooking (Sutton 2001) and hierarchy (Toren 1990).

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accepted September 16, 2004

final version submitted October 15, 2004

Rebecca Bryant

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

George Mason UniversityRobinson Hall

Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

rbryant@superonline.com

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