Discovering the Folk and their Music

Folk music in Turkey is considered by its proponents and practitioners to play a specific role in creating a culturally unified and cohesive nation-state. Its practice and performance transforms the individual, transmitting the ideology with which the music is bound up, instilling values of sociality, team-work, competition, and self presentation. It also provides a model of logical, systematic, and rational thinking, a notion which lies at the centre of the Atatiirkian philosophy of the secular regeneration of Turkey. It is a music which is both performed and performative, acting upon the individual and social body. In this it is diametrically opposed to arabesk, which is considered by its detractors to be incapable of doing anything.

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