Voices That Matter
Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12796758 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Flannery O''Connor (0000-0002-6891-770X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 433-435 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-30 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Middle East Women s Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1552-5864 • E-ISSN: 1558-9579 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/15525864-10815609 |
| OpenAlex | W4388021847 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Fortuitous oversights often lead to wonderful experiences. When in contact with the book review editor of JMEWS regarding an unrelated matter, I was asked to review this book. As I was familiar with some of Schäfers’s work, after a quick glance at the title I agreed. I had mistakenly presumed that this book referred to “political voice” more broadly conceived. To my surprise and delight, the book, rather than assessing Kurdish women’s political representation, took me on a sonorous odyssey deep into the culture and practice of female practitioners of the Dengbêj musical tradition in the Van region. The book is a rich, minutely detailed, and assiduously researched anthropological treatment of Dengbêj women singers and the musical technicalities of its form, but it is also much more than that. Dengbêj culture is the prism through which Schäfers lays out the internal tensions in Kurdish society as it undergoes a reckoning with its patriarchal structures, interrogates liberal conceptualizations of musical culture and its “ownership,” and highlights the flawed logic behind the trope of minority representation as an end in itself, when it is often forced to depoliticize to be acceptable to hegemonic political society.The book begins with an introduction that summarizes the repression of the Kurdish language and the language’s centrality to the Dengbêj tradition and that addresses the systematic marginalization of its female performers. Chapter 1 is somewhat technical and will be the most challenging for nonexpert readers. Here Schäfers outlines the practical components of the kilams (songs performed by Dengbêj singers) and how various genres and styles generate different affective results for their audiences. Chapter 2 includes a more empirical description, demonstrating the affective power and role that female Dengbêj singers have had in Kurdish society and the impact of the disembodied voice through radio and recorded songs, disconnecting voice from its corporeal bearers. Chapter 3 interrogates liberal understandings of voice “as the public expression of interior self” and assesses the ambiguous relationship between voice as an individual or a collective phenomenon. Schäfers empirically articulates this debate by juxtaposing Dengbêjs and commercial singers, the former demanding the channeling of both individualized female pain and the collective suffering of the Kurdish nation. It also addresses innovation in the genre, highlighting that Dengbêj is a lived tradition rather than simply a repackaged cultural relic. Chapter 4 was my personal favorite, describing how Dengbêj culture was treasured by early twentieth-century Kurdish nationalists but avowedly rejected as a vestige of feudalism by the generations of activists since the 1960s until it was reappropriated in the cultural awakening of the post-2000 period. The chapter addresses some of the unintended consequences of this modern revival, such as the individualization of its collective inheritance; the homogenization of a singular Kurdish Dengbêj culture, undermining its regional variations; and the increased dangers for women due to their becoming individualized purveyors of the craft rather than anonymous carriers of an ageless and collective culture. The final chapter takes up the question “What happens when the focus of attention shifts from the voice as an efficacious force in its own right to the voice as a symbolic token standing for agency and empowerment” (141)? It is thus of salience for the international discussion about representation as an end in itself rather than a means to a more substantive end. Schäfers uses two cases of Dengbêj performances at a university in Istanbul and a Kurdish movement concert for International Women’s Day in Van to illustrate that the interactions between the performers and audience and the meanings generated therein depend greatly on context. In her own words, she argues that “rather than accepting at face value narratives that celebrate the coming to voice of subaltern subjects, I have sought to bring into view how acquiring public voice is not simply a neutral, technical procedure of amplification, but an ideological process that frames, conditions, and where necessary disciplines voices” (161).The book has many strengths. For a book that is quite dense in musicological minutiae, it is very pleasant to read. Schäfers expertly guides the reader (even musically uninformed ones like the author of this review) through complex discussions regarding the composition of kilams and explains why these specific details are of broader social relevance. Her interweaving of empirical vignettes—such as that of a young girl named Fadime who is married off to a man as old as her father (67–73) and the translation of her bitter kilam, intended as a reproach to her family—evocatively demonstrates the almost tangible societal power of Dengbêj compositions. Schäfers’s use of a first-person narrative grants the book an immediacy often lacking in academic works. She writes with great fondness and empathy for the people she worked with and about whom she conducted her research. This lends terrible poignancy to the revelation that the book’s great protagonist, Gazîn, had unexpectedly died before its publication. It remains a scholarly book but a politically engaged one, a book that speaks unambiguously about the current state of authoritarianism stalking Kurdistan and how it concretely affects Kurdish women and their cultural initiatives.Beyond the empirical richness and the adroit way that Schäfers explores Kurdish women’s role in perpetuating Dengbêj culture in inauspicious circumstances, I found one recurring theme that is of much broader social scientific relevance. She critiques the individualist ontology of scientific categorization prevalent in what she calls the framework of liberal pluralism. Although the singers she analyzes and the songs they sing seem to have become increasingly individualized in recent decades (e.g., kilams may feature individual names and first-person perspectives), they are also the continuing expressions of collective identities and inherited traditions. Schäfers’s research takes Kurdish society not as a mass accumulation of individual identities but as a relational, collective identity, a dynamic one in the process of change and continuity between a mutually constitutive collective (as Kurds, as Yezidis in Armenia, as Kurdish women) and individual identities (as singular women, as mothers or daughters and, importantly, as musicians). Accordingly, the societal constitution of the self and how that finds expression in Dengbêj voices is not simply an ethnomusicological finding but one that puts into question the individualized ontological foundations of how academe, or more precisely Western academe, analyzes non-Western societies. In summary, this excellent book tells the story of an important Kurdish cultural phenomenon, but Schäfers takes it even farther, using it as a platform to address our conceptualizations of individuality and the self and to critique dominant understandings of representation and voice, which makes it a book of much broader importance to the social sciences
Art history · Citation · Icon · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Gender Politics and Representation · History · Law · Turkey's Politics and Society
| Citations per year | 1.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |