Folklore Knowledge and Knowledge Transfer: Folklore Milieus, Formats, and Venues in Turkey, (1950s - 1980s)

• Applicant: Professorin Hande A. Birkalan-Gedik, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550261321

Focusing on the 1950s-1980s, the proposed project examines folklore knowledge in Turkey, which emerged in different milieus, formats, and venues mostly outside academia, supported and created by the state. The project begins with changes that took place since 1948, when the Turkish Folk Literature and Folklore Department at Ankara University, the only one in Turkey at the time, was closed due to political allegations of communism against pioneering folklorists. These decades mark the first transformative era in Folklore Studies in Turkey, when folklore was taught as a topic in other disciplines, but did not constitute an independent subject. The period is also globally significant: while Folklore Studies in post-war Europe took on transnational orientations, in Turkey it kept a national focus. Despite or perhaps due to the demise of Folklore Studies as an academic discipline in this era, folklore knowledge emerged in other contexts: for instance, state-funded organizations collected and archived folklore materials; journals published new genres and challenged the canon; and national institutes organized (inter)national folklore congresses to reach a wider public - thus blurring the distinction between 'academic' and 'non-academic' fields, offering new styles of doing folklore, and complicating folklore terminologies. The project’s goal is to trace these dynamics in three exemplary case studies to show how complex forms of institutionalization linked literary academics, lay folklorists, bureaucrats, and state and civil actors, and how they redefined the meanings, styles, and functions of folklore knowledge. Rather than concentrating on a single scholar or canonical oeuvre, the project focuses on folklore activities within a generation and network of scholars under whom a new type of folklore knowledge flourished with state-support, and other civil actors who negotiated this folklore knowledge. Through examining historical documents with source analysis, critical discourse analysis, content analysis, and perspectives from Begriffsgeschichte, complemented by oral history interviews, the project unpacks how folklore knowledge was produced and transferred in Turkey between the 1950s-1980s; how the specific milieus, formats, and venues under scrutiny supported this type of knowledge, and how this folklore knowledge was historically and politically embedded. The project challenges narratives of European ethnology that placed Turkey at ist geographical and epistemological margins and offers unique insights to understand transformations of Turkish and transnational folklore histories.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants