Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism.

If much liberal theory has concerned itself with prescriptive questions about whether and how socio-cultural plurality ought to be reflected in structures of governance (e.g., Rawls Reference Rawls1993; Taylor Reference Taylor1994; Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1995), critics of such approaches have instead insisted that in actual historical contexts structures of governance have long been invested in demarcating and policing communal boundaries (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996; Scott Reference Scott1999; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2004). While these latter investigations have often centered on colonial forms of governmentality, more recent inquiries interrogate what Povinelli (Reference Povinelli2002: 6) refers to as “multicultural domination”: the demand by states and majority populations that minorities—or indigenous communities in settler colonial states—perform and authenticate their difference within the moral and legal frameworks determined by those demanding agencies (see also Asad Reference Asad1993; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2004; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2005). Critical theory, in other words, has been less sanguine than its liberal counterparts, not only about the gap between political theory and institutional practice, but also about the very autonomy of socio-cultural differences from institutional sanction.

I seek to extend the analysis of the limits of multicultural difference, but in a context in which multiculturalism, or pluralism as I will refer to it, exists as merely one framing of politics among several.Footnote ¹ I focus my attention on Turkey, a nation-state in which demands for greater political recognition of cultural plurality continue to be issued by domestic actors from a variety of minority ethnic and religious groups, as well as by political commentators and representatives of institutional bodies in the European Union. Pluralism in Turkey exists less as an established mode of governance and legal adjudication than as one critical perspective on state practice. The Turkish case allows us to explore pluralism as an incipient rather than entrenched mode of politics. It invites reflection on the social practices necessary to successfully conjure a pluralist framing of politics, and on those that preclude its emergence.

This essay centers on public performances of rituals that distinguish Turkey's Alevi Muslim community from the Sunni majority. I offer an account of debates about the state's categorization of such practices, debates that frequently raise questions about whether Alevi rituals constitute a form of national folklore or of Islamic worship. I conjoin to this account of public argument an examination of the historical development of aesthetic forms that have mediated the community's public visibility in ways that have rendered the latter palatable and often pleasurable to a national audience.

Building upon analyses that draw attention to practices that constitute the contextual modes of public address (Warner Reference Warner2002; Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006; Wedeen Reference Wedeen2008), I detail the social, spatial, and material practices that mediate the public circulation of performances of Alevi ritual. Such mediations enable expressions of a pluralist challenge to the national state, even as they incorporate the minority into the rhythms and gestures of national spectacle. My aim is to interrogate the limits of pluralist politics not only as a function of national ideologies but also in terms of emergent forms of visibility and the sensibilities with which they articulate.

Scholars estimate that anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of the Turkish population is Alevi.Footnote ² Such numbers have not been corroborated by the state's statistical bureau, since differences between the Sunni majority and the Alevi minority are not measured by the national census—both groups are officially considered to be Muslim, a category of religious identification for which the state does not recognize sectarian distinctions.Footnote ³ Having long inhabited rural regions of southwestern, central, and eastern Anatolia, large numbers of Alevis began migrating to towns and cities, both domestically and internationally, as industrial laborers in the context of state-led urbanization and industrialization in the 1960s. Over the next several decades, Alevi populations began to organize communal activities in city centers, and by the late 1980s, Alevis in both Turkey and Europe were mobilizing a socio-political movement, organizing rituals in public squares, demanding recognition as a distinct community from the Turkish state, and calling for an end to de facto discrimination in sites of public employment and schooling. As a result, Alevi ritual and religion acquired a degree of visibility in the urban milieu as never before, leading a burgeoning chorus of commentators to depict contemporary Alevism as a “public religion” (e.g., Yavuz Reference Yavuz, Eickelman and Anderson2003; Ellington Reference Ellington and Shankland2004; Göner Reference Göner2005; Şahin Reference Şahin2005; Sökefeld Reference Sökefeld2008).

Inspired in part by Casanova's (1994) critical interrogation of the secularization thesis, recent discussions of public religion in Muslim societies have described instances in which the presence of religion in spaces of public interaction has facilitated participation in debates about the common good, often with the effect of countering repressive state regimes (Hefner Reference Hefner2001; Eickelman and Salvatore Reference Eickelman and Salvatore2002). These analyses, however, tend to neglect the spatial and material forms that mediate public presence and participation. In the situation examined here, the specific form of visibility that Alevi rituals have attained has led to a deferral of the political adjudication of communal differences. Far from simply making use of the public sphere for political agitation, many Alevi actors increasingly express unease about the social and political effects of the visibility they have acquired. Taking such expressions of anxiety as a starting point, this essay offers a historical and ethnographic account of Alevi visibility in an effort at conceptualizing the aesthetic mediations of pluralist politics.

INVOCATIONS OF PLURALISM

With the rise of identity politics in Turkey, as elsewhere, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and social movements have begun to query the possibilities of pluralism in relation to the limits of the cultural and political imaginaries of the nation. Contemporary Alevi mobilizations figure prominently in debates about Turkish pluralism. Some commentators have referred to an “Alevi awakening” in order to describe the construction of new Alevi organizations, the production of a new wave of publications, and the development of new claims made on the state on the basis of a communal identity (Çamuroğlu Reference Çamuroğlu2005; Ocak Reference Ocak1996). The Alevi awakening has come to be viewed as one piece of a broader political-economic liberalization that has posed a challenge to the hegemony of Turkish nationalism (Yavuz Reference Yavuz, Eickelman and Anderson2003).

At the heart of debates over the Alevi awakening sits the ayin-i cem, or cem for short, a central ritual practice within Turkey's Alevi community. It functions as a rite of initiation for adolescents, as a commemoration ritual for revered figures in early Islamic history, and as a site for the adjudication of social disputes among members of the community. For several centuries, the Alevi cem was performed in gatherings explicitly closed off to outsiders and foreigners. Long held as a private, communal affair, the cem has gained unprecedented public exposure in the past several decades.

During the course of my fieldwork in Turkey, I was invited to attend a number of cem ceremonies, the fact of which was itself indicative of the new publicity of Alevi practices.Footnote ⁴ While in attendance, I was often able to correlate the unfolding series of ritual events with the practices that I had read about in ethnographic accounts of the community: the chanting of hymns about revered figures, a cantillation that recounts the ascension of the Prophet to heaven, the performance of religious dances, the recitation of the singularity of God (tevhid), and sacrificial offerings to God.

At one such cem ceremony, I witnessed a moment that interrupted the formulaic steps of the ritual's typical progression. The event took place in a relatively nondescript, three-story building, itself located within a predominantly Alevi neighborhood of a central Anatolian town. The room in which the ritual was conducted was spacious, capable of holding several hundred participants. At this particular event, women and men sat on separate sides of the room, leaving a narrow gap between them, which constituted the ritually demarcated center, or meydan. Toward the conclusion of the cem, a group of ten adolescents entered the meydan. They arrived in order to participate in the ceremony, specifically for the sake of performing the semah, a practice constituted by a series of prescribed rhythmical movements, usually set to the recitation of a devotional hymn, and which constitutes a part of the cem. The youth group's desire to perform a semah in this ritual context was not out of place, and indeed a version of the practice had been enacted earlier in that very cem. However, the religious leader conducting the ritual, known as a dede, was troubled by the presence of this group of youngsters and began to reprimand them. “The cem is a form of worship (ibadet),” the dede declared. “This is not a stage for the performance of folklore (folklor).” The dede ultimately relented and allowed the group to perform the semah, but only after repeating that the performance was not a part of the act of worship for which they had congregated.

The claim that the cem is a form of worship has become a rallying cry for Alevi social movements. Were the state to authorize Alevi ritual as worship, Alevi organizations that establish sites of ritual practice would be eligible for tax exemptions and possibly for state funds.Footnote ⁵ Concerns for recognition, in other words, have been linked to demands for a more equitable distribution of resources. The Turkish state, however, has consistently maintained that the only site of worship for Muslims is the mosque, an assertion that many Alevis consider as evidence of discrimination against their community.

In this struggle, Alevi groups have found supporters both within Turkey and abroad. The European Commission's annual report on Turkey's EU accession status regularly includes a discussion of the Turkish state's ongoing failure to adequately recognize Alevi ritual. In its discussion of undue constraints placed on the freedom of religion, the most recent report mentions that cemevis—sites for the performance of the cem—are “not recognized as places of worship and, as a result, receive no funding from authorities” (European Commission 2008: 19). In a similar vein, a popular Turkish musician, Zülfü Livaneli, published a critical commentary in a national daily about the state's unwillingness to view the cem as a form of worship. “Our Alevi citizens can open a cemevi as a ‘social and cultural association’ but not as a ‘place of worship’ (ibadet yeri). As this situation is contrary to human rights and to democracy, it is probably not necessary to state that it is also contrary to the principle of secularism” (Livaneli Reference Livaneli2005: 6).Footnote ⁶ The concern for Livaneli, as for the European Commission, is that the Turkish state systematically misrecognizes Alevi ritual, and consequently places material constraints on its expression.

Returning to the ritual scene depicted above, the dede's reprimand of the youth group gave voice to a debate taking place among Alevis, their supporters, and the state, but in the context of the ritual practice itself, his critique was directed at adolescents within the community. No one in attendance claimed that the cem is a piece of folklore rather than of worship, but the possibility of this interpretation haunted the scene nonetheless. In the context of ritual performance, the distinction of folklore and worship is rarely a matter of explicit linguistic designation, subjected to political dispute; the moral force of this distinction, I suggest, resides in the aesthetics of the performance itself.Footnote ⁷

The dede's critique addressed what he perceived to be the social form that the youth group typified. This particular ensemble of adolescents bore the marks of many other such groups in Turkey. They constituted what has come to be called a semah group (semah ekibi). Such groups are recognizable by certain characteristic traits: they are constituted by adolescents, wear distinctive costumes, rehearse their musical and dance routines in after-school programs, and only perform certain dances such as the semah, rather than the entirety of the ritual progression that constitutes a cem. Semah groups perform at a diverse array of venues, which include not only cem ceremonies such as the one I attended, but summer festivals, celebrations for the opening of new businesses, and gatherings for political parties. By virtue of this wide circulation, semah groups constitute one of the primary mechanisms by which Alevi rituals have generated a public audience. They are a central element of what some analysts refer to as the process by which Alevism has transformed from a secretive, esoteric cult into a “public religion.” Yet it is this very circulation that created tensions for the dede described above. As we will see below, the circulation of semah groups into settings like festivals and political gatherings is authorized by ascriptions of the rubric of national folklore to the dance. Removed from the context of communal ritual, the semah performed by such youth groups is sanctioned by bureaucrats, industrial businessmen, and party officials as an element of the national heritage.

Many Alevis maintain an ambivalent attitude toward the youth groups and their semah. On the one hand, these sorts of groups provide a site in which Alevi youth learn the traditions of their community in an urban environment far removed from their families' villages of origin. Perhaps more importantly, the performances of such groups have enabled Alevis to represent their community in public domains, sparking debates over the recognition of communal differences that have been taken up by domestic celebrities and international agencies. On the other hand, the publicity of the semah, as performed by these youth groups, is contingent on being recognizable as a type of national folklore rather than as a form of communal worship. The forms of public visibility attained by Alevi organizations are hinged, paradoxically, to the category of folklore that Alevi movements are seeking to challenge. If the emergence of Alevi religious practice into public view poses a pluralist challenge to the Turkish state's efforts at defining and controlling the religious expressions of its citizenry in singular terms, this very visibility has been justified, legitimated, and sanctioned by discourses that re-inscribe a unitary vision of the nation.

The debate over the ritual status of the Alevi cem represents a primary site in which the politics of pluralism has been asserted within Turkey. These invocations of pluralism stretch across the conventional separation of public argument and private religious performance, incorporating explicit deliberative reason and aesthetic anxieties alike. In the remainder of this essay, I explore the contingent conjunctures that have obtained between public deliberation and ritual aesthetics. I proceed by first sketching the historical development of discourses of identity recognition in Turkey, before turning to a discussion of the emergence of an aesthetics of ritual visibility. Efforts to politicize communal differences under the sign of pluralism contend as much with the historical forces constitutive of the latter as with the terms of discourse precipitated out of the former.

TAMING DIFFERENCES

José Casanova (Reference Casanova1994: 58) argues that one of the reasons that a religion enters the public sphere is to “protect the traditional life-world from administrative or judicial state penetration, and in the process [to open] up issues of norm and will formation to the public and collective self-reflection of modern discursive ethics.” In this account, the entry of a religion into public visibility potentially widens the scope of public deliberation and expands the sites of political disputation about the common good. Hefner similarly describes certain forms of public religion in the contemporary Muslim world, which have repudiated both the establishment of an Islamic state and the relegation of religion to the private domain. These modes of rendering religion public, Hefner argues, have worked “with, rather than against, the pluralizing realities of our age” (Reference Hefner2000: 220).

The rise of a public Alevi religion in Turkey in the past several decades has been interpreted in an analogous fashion. Ellington, for example, explains that “the process of urbanization and modernization in Turkey, far from weakening the public expression of religion, has invited an ever more vigorous demand for the recognition of religious rights from Turkey's diverse populations” (2004: 399). Yavuz adds that public expressions of Alevi religion have drawn upon “new communication networks,” resulting in increasing Alevi participation in public debate and in a concomitant pluralization of political discourse (2003).

These analyses present an important critique of older theories of modernization that presumed the incompatibility of public expressions of religion with democratic politics. The “de-privatization” of a religion, in these assessments, fosters pluralist political possibilities. However, such efforts to rethink public religion often overlook the specific mediations that license displays of public visibility.Footnote ⁸ Not all signs, practices, or speech acts claiming to represent communal plurality necessarily challenge the presumed homogeneity of the national body. Indeed, as indicated above, public representations of Alevism have often been represented under the sign of the nation itself.

The political philosopher Chantal Mouffe appears to place her understanding of pluralism upon different conceptual ground. Foregrounding the hegemonic dimensions of discursive practice, Mouffe argues that pluralist politics is constrained rather than promoted by procedures that encourage the reconciliation of differences through the achievement of reasoned consensus.Footnote ⁹ According to Mouffe, pluralism cannot overcome conflict, but it can refashion it by transforming violent antagonisms between social constituencies into agonistic disputes, waged in political arenas. Pluralist politics “helps us to envisage how the dimension of antagonism can be ‘tamed’” (2005: 20). When antagonism is tamed, “agonistic legitimate political channels for dissenting voices exist” (ibid.: 21). The taming of differences in a pluralist regime is what allows for political rather than violent expressions of conflict.

Yet for Mouffe, as for scholars of public religion more enthusiastic about consensual deliberative politics, what remains unexamined is the determination of the channels capable of funneling disputes in a legitimate fashion—a determination, I would insist, that is not simply a problem for political theory to resolve but one that demands a historical analysis. The processes and practices that tame conflict can also function to de-politicize disputes.Footnote ¹⁰ If transforming violent conflict into political dispute is a central task of pluralism, the quelling of antagonisms can also have a converse effect, namely, removing conflict from sites of political adjudication. Pluralism hinges on the multiple consequences of any project of taming conflict.

The ambiguities of pluralism are particularly evident in Turkey, in which the national identity is, as Neyzi argues, “Janus-faced”: it is “defined in terms of a commitment to secular modernist values on the part of the citizens of Turkey,” on the one hand, and yet it is understood to be organized in terms of “a single language and a single imagined ethnicity associated with a particular religious heritage,” on the other (Reference Neyzi2002: 140). Similarly Bozarslan (Reference Bozarslan, Diekhoff and Kastoryano2002) maintains that at its inception, the secular Turkish nation-state established Sunni Islam—the religious identification of the majority of the population—as the de facto religion of the nation.Footnote ¹¹ While the Janus-faced character of Turkish nationalism has spawned socio-political fractures since the birth of the republic in 1923, the political tensions of cultural plurality intensified in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the large-scale migration of predominantly rural Alevi populations into urban settings. As urbanizing Alevis began to share in material resources with the Sunni majority—resources from which they had been previously excluded—issues related to political and economic distribution across sects emerged as a problem of governance. Bozarslan suggests that in the second half of the twentieth century the increasing presence of Alevis in the urban milieu raised challenges to the institutionalized confluence that had long obtained between Sunni Islam and imaginaries of the Turkish nation.

The state began to face significant challenges in relation to communal plurality with the eruption of sectarian discord in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, Turkey witnessed an escalation in civil violence—between leftist and right-wing groups and across sectarian and ethnic divisions. By the end of the decade, in cities across central and eastern Anatolia such as Maraş, Malatya, Sivas, and Çorum, Alevi communities fell victim to practices of systemic discrimination, harassment, and ultimately violence. Overt sectarian conflict was brought to an end only by the military coup in 1980 and the period of martial law that it initiated.

Following the coup, issues of sectarian division cooled considerably. Indeed, urban Alevi intellectuals in the post-coup era began to write openly about their religious identity, and through the 1990s Alevi organizations rapidly emerged and expanded, providing sites of communal ritual expression in cities across Anatolia. Moreover, such organizations began to exploit new communicative media, such as private radio, television channels, and the internet, in order to give public voice to Alevi communal concerns (Vorhoff Reference Vorhoff1998; Şahin Reference Şahin2005).

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, what we see in Turkey is the transformation of antagonistic violence between sects into legitimized expressions of public religion.Footnote ¹² It is important, however, to interrogate more closely the extent to which this process has facilitated a political contest about communal differences. Unlike ethno-national Kurdish movements in Turkey, which have produced calls for a separate sovereign state, and unlike Islamist movements, which have motivated the establishment of distinct Turkish political parties, Alevi movements have, with few exceptions, rarely taken overt political form. More often than not, Alevi organizations have explicitly distanced themselves from movements that seek to challenge the sovereignty of the state or the foundational principles of the secular Republic.

The Alevi community does not owe its contemporary public visibility to the successful transformation of violent antagonism into political agonism. To the contrary, the entry of Alevis into public spaces of deliberation in the 1980s was mediated by a newly inclusive rhetoric of right-wing political groups, such as the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP). Such groups began to court the Alevi community—a position that was an about-face from the prior decade, when they were involved in mobilizing violence against Alevis. Bora and Can (Reference Bora and Can2004: 486) suggest that the efforts of these parties were aimed at “integrating Alevism into their ideologies and politics.” Members of the MHP and intellectuals associated with it began to assert the Turkic character of Alevi religious belief, valorizing Alevism for its purported racial and cultural ties to the Turkish nation. In the present day, representatives of political parties across the ideological spectrum appear at Alevi festivals, and often sponsor public performances of Alevi rituals. This staging of national inclusion has provided a modality of legitimacy for many Alevi organizations. As Massicard (Reference Massicard and Keiser2006) reveals, the single most prominent concept deployed by Alevi groups since the late 1980s was that of “the Unity of the Nation.”Footnote ¹³

The incorporation of Alevism into the historiography of the Turkish nation itself has a history, starting with assertions by nationalist ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s. Recuperated in the late twentieth century by Alevi and non-Alevi intellectuals alike, this thesis was rapidly incorporated in official policy, as officials from the state's Directorate of Religious Affairs began, in the 1990s, to proclaim that Alevism has contributed to the richness of Turkey's cultural history. In a revealing interview, conducted in a journal predominantly concerned with Alevi issues, the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, Ali Bardakoğlu, was asked about the religious status of the cemevi, urban centers where Alevis have begun sponsoring and performing the cem ritual. Bardakoğlu responded, “According to Islam, according to true knowledge of Islam, the cemevi is not a place of worship (ibadet yeri) and the supplications and the cem ritual that are performed in the cemevi are not a kind of worship (ibadet) that resembles daily worship (namaz) or fasting. But it is a good form of behavior (davranış), it is an activity that must be kept alive” (Gültekin and Işık Reference Gültekin and Işık2005: 10). Characteristically, he expresses his approval of the cem only on the condition that it not be considered worship. The term used by Bardakoğlu to characterize the cem, behavior (davranış), leaves ambiguous the ritual status of the practice. The interviewers continue to push Bardakoğlu on this matter, forcing him to specify further what the cem amounts to. He responds: “Never in our history has the cemevi been an alternative to a mosque or vice versa. They existed together, but the mosque existed as a place of worship, while cemevis were places of culture (kültür evleri) in which the traditions of a group within Islam flourished” (ibid.: 11). Asserting that Alevi sites of ritual are cultural or folkloric is one manner in which state officials have come to incorporate, or tame, communal differences within a singular conception of the nation. At the moment when Alevis were emerging into public visibility, potentially challenging the de facto institutional understanding of Turkish nationalism, Alevism itself was coming to be defined by political parties and by the state as an element of the nation's culture and history.

A useful point of comparison can be found in Étienne Balibar's recent discussion of multiculturalism in Europe. Balibar argues that the multicultural problem “stems from the fact that a given linguistic, religious, geographical, or historical identity is not officially considered to be one of the ‘legitimate mediations’ of … national identity” (Reference Balibar and Swenson2004: 29). From this perspective, the emergence of communal differences into public spaces does not, in and of itself, threaten the unitary vision of belonging enforced by the nation-state. Rather, the issue of pluralism emerges in relation to how such differences are brought into public view. The taming of communal differences within an ideological imaginary of the nation can be one manner of preventing, rather than consolidating, the emergence of a pluralist politics.

Since the late 1980s, debates about sectarian differences have focused on precisely the question of whether and in what manner Alevism functions as a “legitimate mediation” of Turkish national identity. Efforts by Alevis to create a space of communal identification that does not, ultimately, cohere with historical and religious imaginaries of the nation have continuously confronted accusations of divisiveness. By insisting that Alevism mediates national identity as a form of culture or folklore, state officials and certain political parties have de-politicized communal differences. They have deferred the problem of a pluralist politics just at the moment when Alevi groups have sought to bring communal differences into sites of public and political deliberation. What we are witnessing is not merely a political struggle between Alevis and the state, but a struggle over whether such communal differences ought to be made subject to political deliberation at all.

AESTHETIC HISTORIES

The extensive public debates currently underway in Turkey about the administrative classification of Alevi ritual might tempt us to locate the vibrancy of politics primarily in realms of deliberative argument. Thus conceived, social and political actors conceptualize and dispute the categorization of the ritual independent of any materialization of the practice itself—a materialization that therefore remains only arbitrarily bound to the classificatory schemas under critical scrutiny. However, I would caution against an understanding of the politics of dispute that ignores the specific economies of sound and gesture that give material form to the practices being debated. The discursive intelligibility of the ritual—that is, the classification of the practice through categories that allow commentators to explain or debate its meaning and function—is crucially contingent upon the genres of music and dance that make it “publicly accessible” and perceptible to social actors (Urban Reference Urban1996). The aesthetics of the ritual's public form is not, in other words, epiphenomenal to its signifying potential.

In order to deepen our understanding of the tensions that obtain between pluralism and the public mediation of sectarian differences, it is important to explore how efforts to motivate a pluralist politics, that is, a political adjudication of communal differences, have been stalled rather than motivated by the ritual's public accessibility. The unease expressed by the dede described above regarding the form of ritual practice that has achieved public visibility is not adequately explained by recourse to a history of state ideologies and the late ascendancy of movements to counteract them. As I have emphasized, the dede's criticism was directed not at the restrictions on communal expression levied by the state but at the spatial and material forms of expression that have achieved public visibility. The tensions that I am attempting to explore result from a history of aesthetics that is only partly coincident with the discursive-ideological history often recounted in discussions of social movements that contest administrative and legal policy.

In the 1970s, a full decade before Alevi religious practices became part of overt public debate, selected aspects of the cem had already found a public audience. Specifically, the semah was established and performed as a genre of folk dance, autonomous from its embedding in the act of worship. By the late 1980s, when communal identities came to the political fore, the ritual forms capable of representing Alevi identity had been in public circulation for a decade. The semah, if not the cem, was already publicly recognizable in a specific set of contexts and through a particular manner of performance. The extraction of the semah from the ritual context of the cem points to what I am calling an aesthetic history, in which the communal practice that eventually would be taken up in the project of becoming a public religion was initially established as a recognizable social form and authorized for performance in specific styles and sites. The question raised by an interrogation of aesthetics is how the semah came to be construable through a genre of performance independent of the ritual that had long provided it with function and meaning.

It should be clear that I conceive of aesthetics as a category with historical, rather than strictly literary-artistic, purchase.Footnote ¹⁴ The history I have in mind does not refer to the origins of ritual forms such as the cem or the semah, which extend back several centuries. Institutions and performance contexts that emerge only in the modern era sustain the contemporary practice of such rituals. Yet the aesthetic history of the semah must also not be defined in terms of a “symbolic politics,” in which claims to tradition are formulated for the tactical achievement of present-day political aims (Eickelman and Piscatori Reference Eickelman and Piscatori1996). Viewing semah performances as tactical usefully highlights the institutional resources and forms of recognition that assertions of communal identity potentially mobilize, but this analytical frame obscures the fact that the semah had already attained many of its characteristic modalities of public visibility in the decade that preceded the widespread rise of identity politics in Turkey. The form of the ritual's visibility is inherited rather than invented by contemporary Alevi actors.

A “social aesthetics,” as Seremetakis (Reference Seremetakis and Seremetakis1994) terms it, concerns the historically evolving repertoire of social, spatial, and material forms that constrain and constitute the signification of the practice they mediate.Footnote ¹⁵ In this regard, the intelligibility of a practice is neither fixed in advance of its enactment nor simply open to tactical manipulation—either such formulation relies on an impoverished conception of aesthetic mediation, reducing its referential scope to the arbitrary external garb through which a meaning is conveyed.Footnote ¹⁶ Later in this essay I will demonstrate that the aesthetic mediations of contemporary semah performances are not empirically isolable from the signifying effects achieved by the practice: such mediations animate styles of participation, sociability, and spectatorship. Gaonkar and Povinelli similarly argue that, when conceptualized in terms of their spatial forms and material textures, cultural practices can be seen to “entail, demand, seduce, intoxicate, and materialize rather than simply mean” (Reference Gaonkar and Povinelli2003: 395). In speaking of the aesthetics of Alevi visibility, I mean to highlight the shifting spatio-material parameters of public performance that enable participants and audiences to experience the community's practices as pleasurable, tolerable, or distasteful.

An aesthetic history, as I seek to understand it, is shaped by what Keane (Reference Keane1997) describes as the vicissitudes of a ritual's representational media. The transformations, stabilizations, and disruptions to which such mediatory forms are prone provoke moral and political anxieties irreducible to the meanings the ritual is said to symbolize (see also Tambar Reference Tambar2009). The unease aroused by the visibility of the practice, I submit, cannot always be redressed through criticism of the ritual's reflexive classification alone. Such anxieties concern the sensibilities and social expectations that have come to shape the performance and consumption of the practice.

Further below I will elaborate on how an account of the aesthetics of visibility alters an understanding of pluralist politics, but here I seek to excavate the aesthetic history constitutive of contemporary semah performances. According to Öztürkmen (Reference Öztürkmen2005), the semah began to be treated as a practice unto itself, circulating autonomously of the cem ritual, in the 1970s. At that time, it was taught at Boğaziçi University as one of the dances in the repertoire of the university's nationally renowned folklore club. The semah became a dance that could be performed by Alevis and non-Alevis alike, staged not as a mode of communally specific worship but as a form of national folklore. The semah had come to be viewed as part of an expanding number of dances included in domestic and international folklore competitions. The value and function of the dance were no longer dependent on the context of the cem.

While the state has promoted folk dancing for much of Republican history, folklore clubs were granted a new legitimacy in the 1970s. Reacting against the rising numbers of overtly political youth organizations in that decade, the state authorized folklore clubs as one of the few sites of legitimate youth sociability. Whereas the state frequently banned politicized youth groups, it continued to sponsor folklore clubs and competitions (Öztürkmen Reference Öztürkmen, Kandiyoti and Saktanber2002). The state's efforts to create a form of sociability apart from political and militant activity were not entirely successful: many folklore clubs continued to maintain associations with political organizations.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet one result of the state's legitimation tactics was that the performance of the semah as a genre of folk dance not only removed it from any necessary connection with the cem, but also operated through the institutional sponsorship and sanction of the state.

Equally significant to the entry of Alevism into Turkish public life has been the role of state-run media in promoting traditional Alevi hymns as folk music. The state's Turkish Radio and Television, in the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged Alevis to render elements of their spiritual repertory in a form congruent with the state's image of a national listening audience.Footnote ¹⁸ As Markoff notes, ritual genres like the düvaz and the mersiye, which contain explicit references to the religious orientation that distinguishes Alevis from Sunnis, remained “forbidden outside the bounds of ritual” (Reference Markoff1986: 50).Footnote ¹⁹ Hymns that were broadcast by state radio, by contrast, were cast as folklore, removed from the ritual context of the cem, and set into new contexts of national circulation. Supported by the state and sold in the private music market, Alevi hymns acquired public presence independently of the ritual act in which they were once inextricably embedded.

Performances of the semah in the 1970s preceded the era that most social scientists recognize as the period of pluralism and identity politics. These early efforts at staging the semah are, in a sense, discursively pre-historical—they established a social form that would serve the needs of a pluralist politics emergent only in a subsequent era. Yet, delimited as a species of folk dancing and inserted into an available and sanctioned form of social interaction, the social form that was thus consolidated carried the marks of the nation-state's authority, which would persist into the later period, initiating the paradoxes that inhere in contemporary Alevi pluralist projects. Attempts to invoke a pluralist politics confront their limits not only in the obstinacy of state officials and the inadequacy of their designations but also in the aesthetics of visibility that has provided a public footing for Alevi ritual.

FORMS OF CIRCULATION

The encounter that I described between the dede and the youth group he reprimanded took place in 2006. By that point, performances of the semah in folk dance competitions and festivals had been in public circulation for nearly three decades. The semah-as-folk-dance represented by the youth group was easily and immediately discernible to the dede, as well as to most of the other participants in the cem.

What was recognizable to onlookers was the social form, or genre, typified by the youth group. Recent anthropological work inspired by the writings of Bakhtin has theorized the concept of genre less as a device for classifying texts and practices, and more as a property of social action itself (e.g., Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and McGee1986; Hanks Reference Hanks1987; Crapanzano Reference Crapanzano, Silverstein and Urban1996; Bauman Reference Bauman1999). Genres are invoked to achieve social ends.

As Briggs and Bauman argue, one of the consequences of invoking a genre is the establishment of “indexical connections that extend far beyond the present setting of production or reception, thereby linking a particular act to other times, places, and persons” (Reference Briggs and Bauman1992: 147–48). The youth group's semah conjured, for performers as for observers, other contexts in which the dance has been enacted. An entire chain of iteration—of contexts, actors, and codings—came into view in the performance. Conceived in terms of its generic features, the semah is not only a form in circulation (the dance itself). It has required a distinctive form of circulation, which has shaped the channels of transmission, the various contexts of performance, and the sensibilities and expectations that attend to such contexts.Footnote ²⁰

As argued above, the aesthetic history of the semah has yielded a formation of Alevi ritual concordant with a national audience. Alevi efforts to raise a pluralist challenge to nationalist ideologies must contend not only with state designations of Alevi ritual but also with the sites, actors, and audiences precipitated out of the semah's aesthetic history. The social form of the youth group's presentation—the genre they exemplified—elicited, for the dede, urban sites and performances associated with folklore. In order to provide a sense of the socio-political anxieties that attend to the aesthetics of the semah's performance, I turn now to an ethnographic elucidation of the forms of circulation and the social expectations with which the practice has come to articulate.

In contrast to the dede's critical dismissal of the semah group, Alevi intellectuals and organizations in the early 1990s did not immediately repudiate the coding of communal ritual as folklore. Having only just begun to assert their cultural identity in public, the category of folklore provided a legitimate avenue of public recognition. The semah, we should recall, was already at that point an established social-folkloric form, made available through mass media and state sponsorship. Alevi organizations that were newly emerging as part of the “Alevi awakening” taught the semah to adolescents as a way of introducing urban youth to the community's traditions. The youth groups were recruited to perform the practice, not simply for the sake of participating in folklore competitions as in the 1970s, but as an explicit demonstration of communal identity in public spaces. Alevi organizations made use of the publicly available and sanctioned social genre, but as a manner of expressing communal distinction. Consolidated as an autonomous social form in the 1970s, the newly authorized semah underwent a transformation in the 1990s, being conceived as a public sign of both national folklore and Alevi community.Footnote ²¹

The youth group I observed in 2006 imagined itself very much in terms of a broader communal struggle for public recognition. Several adolescents of the semah group explained to me that their performances are an important aspect of the “Alevi awakening.” One member said that the performance of the semah in public arenas would not have been acceptable in the past, when Alevis were more overtly persecuted, but that in the present it is a vehicle through which Alevis can learn about and express their identity: “The semah allows us to announce, ‘We are here!’ (biz buradayız).”

This particular semah group was organized by a local neighborhood association in the central Anatolian town where I was conducting fieldwork. The association offers music lessons in the saz and bağlama, drawing courses, and drama lessons, in addition to teaching the semah.Footnote ²² Students in such courses are all between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. The association, in a sense, functions as an after-school program, in which adolescents participate in supervised activities with other kids their age and learn about Alevi traditions at the same time. Adolescents participating in the semah group meet weekly for rehearsals, learning the steps and movements of a number of different semah styles. While participants are aware that the different styles are drawn from a number of regionally distinctive traditions, taken from across central and eastern Anatolia, few are able to specify the particular origin of each style.

The semah group performs not only in cem rituals but also at a number of different locations. I observed one performance outside of a grocery store that had recently opened. The owner of the market informed me that he wanted to generate publicity for the store. He saw the semah group as providing a kind of entertainment to attract customers. The semah was employed to summon a public audience of consumers, unmarked for sectarian affiliation.

The most common site in which the youth group participates is the summer village festival. Alevis who migrated to the town from nearby villages often sponsor festivals in the summer, primarily as a means of drawing family and friends back for a reunion in the natal environment. Importantly, larger variants of these festivals are often advertised in town through posters on storefronts, and frequently generate an audience that includes not only Alevis but Sunnis as well, an occasional politician in search of local support, and local journalists seeking to capture a photograph and to compose a brief caption. Such festivals are usually one-day affairs, involving barbecues and picnics. Often a musician will be hired to provide entertainment. Semah groups are also recruited for this task.

Generally, youth groups perform twice at a festival. The two performances differ in their content: one is referred to as a halk oyunu (literally, folk dance) and the other as the semah. The two are distinguishable by different forms of music, instrumentation, and costumes. The instruments in the halk oyunu include the davul and zurna (a percussive and wind instrument, respectively), as opposed to the saz (a lute) that is used in the semah. The halk oyunu is light-hearted. Dancers play out a narrative scenario in which several boys seek the affections of a girl. Dancing is accompanied by playful shouting, and participants frequently laugh with one another amidst the performance. The semah, by contrast, presents no such narrative. The demeanor of participants is more serious. As one performer mentioned to me, “We don't talk to each other when dancing the semah—we don't even smile.”

For most members of the youth group, several of whose performances I attended, the distinction between the two dances was crucial. I was often told that the differences in instrumentation, clothing, and disposition point to distinctions between folk dancing and worship (ibadet) that concern the contextual sensibilities appropriate to each. The davul and zurna used in the halk oyunu are commonly employed in celebrations such as weddings. Their distinctive sounds carry connotations of levity.Footnote ²³ The semah, by contrast, is accompanied by religious hymns (nefes and deyiş). When I asked several of the performers about the difference between the two dances, they each insisted that the semah is a form of worship, which needs to be performed with a gravity that is absent in the halk oyunu.

However important this distinction between the two dances, a number of performers also insisted that such festivals are for entertainment (eğlence), and are therefore not conducive of acts of worship. One of the participants warned me against misconstruing the semah, which he insisted was in fact part of an act of worship, in terms of the ethos established by the contextual milieu of the festival. Participants, in this sense, sought to distinguish the essence of the ritual from the contexts in which they have come to perform it.

Such festivals hold out both a promise and a danger. They offer a site for the reproduction of Alevi traditions and enable the public display of communal rituals. As Soileau (Reference Soileau and Irene Markussen2005) argues, festivals are among the most vibrant and widespread of sites where narratives of Alevi communal history are being consolidated and transmitted to younger generations. However, they also embed the community's ritual traditions within an aesthetics of visibility that most observers and participants find difficult to reconcile with the postures and dispositions of worship. The categories of folklore and worship are not simply competing discursive descriptions of Alevi ritual practices; they articulate with new institutional and social contexts, and the forms of sociability and engagement those contexts enable. The claim that the semah and the cem are practices of worship rather than forms of folklore or recreation increasingly contradicts the aesthetic conditions of legibility of their contexts of performance.

THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY

A number of recent accounts of Islamic movements have emphasized the political consequences of religious movements acquiring public visibility. Göle, for instance, argues, “Islamic public visibility presents a critique of a secular version of the public sphere” (Reference Göle2002: 188). Çınar similarly assesses the politics of donning the headscarf in Turkish public spaces: “The headscarf has given an undeniable visibility and presence to Islam in the secular public sphere. It was the wearing of the headscarf in a particular manner that came to be recognized as the mark of an Islamist ideology, and its appearance not just anyplace, but on the university campus—a monumental space of modernity and secularism—made it an issue of public controversy” (2005: 84).

Veiling has gained “public visibility in ways that escape and undermine existing categories,” thereby “subverting the authority and control of the secular public gaze” (Çınar Reference Çınar2005: 47). Wearing a headscarf is not only a sign of a gendered Muslim piety; the style (“wearing a headscarf in a particular manner”) and site (“the university campus”) of the performance are relatively stable indexes of a transgression of secularist norms. By attaining public visibility, veiling has acquired a political signification.

In contrast to the example of the veil, I have suggested that the aesthetics of the Alevi semah's visibility has not overtly instigated a political challenge to the regnant categories of the nation enforced by the modernist state. The domestication of Alevi ritual's public visibility presents a situation that allows us to pose questions that analyses of explicitly politicized practices, such as those concerned with veiling, have tended to foreclose: What are the conditions under which certain social practices systematically fail to effect political signification? How do the material and spatial contingencies of public performance enable or hinder political engagement? What are the aesthetic limits of political intelligibility?

Such issues are analytically pressing for an understanding of pluralism in contemporary Turkey, where many Alevis are beginning to question whether the public circulation of their rituals facilitates or disables a political challenge to nationalist designations of worship and folklore. A number of Alevis who I came to know in the course of my fieldwork were not persuaded by the youth group's efforts to tease out a distinction between the semah, as a practice of worship, and the festival in which it is performed, as a context of recreation. One Alevi friend, an elementary school teacher, expressed a criticism of these youth groups, arguing that the semah should not be performed outside of the cem. Offering me an example, he described being in a bar in a small town on the Aegean coast, when a popularized rendition of an Alevi hymn was played. A group of individuals spontaneously began to dance the semah. My friend is by no means religiously devout, but he was nonetheless taken aback by the spectacle. He concluded with some indignation, “The semah is a part of worship (ibadet'in bir parçası), and not a form of entertainment.” While the semah he witnessed was not performed by a youth group, he saw in its enactment a similar dilemma: the semah, conceived as a genre unto itself, has attained a circulation through contexts of leisure and entertainment, which would not otherwise sustain a practice of worship. Indeed, the semah is visible in sites such as bars where performances of the cem would be incongruous and inappropriate.

Yet as I have been suggesting throughout this essay, this newfound visibility is not without its ambiguities. The teacher concluded his comments on an ambivalent note. He qualified his criticism, claiming that semah performances fulfill an important role in introducing Alevi rituals to a public audience that would otherwise have no exposure to the communal form. The semah enables a form of public recognition.

Such ambiguities become most apparent in the ordering and organization of cem ceremonies in urban settings. A crucial piece of the “Alevi awakening” has been the development of Alevi organizations in major metropolitan centers and in the provinces of central and eastern Anatolia. These organizations have provided local Alevi communities with spaces for communal ritual expression, which had previously only been available in rural settings. Most importantly, they have created urban spaces for Alevis to participate in cem rituals. In many such contexts, the semah figures prominently, featuring not merely as one element in the ritual's progression but also often as a public form inserted into an intimate communal event. Indeed, the semah is frequently the portion of the ritual photographed by journalists and mentioned in news reports. Re-embedded within the cem, from which it had been extracted, the new genre of the semah has affected the legibility of Alevi religion in public discourse and the visibility of Alevi ritual in urban space.

While the sites created for the performance of the cem were designed in relation to ideas of its historical practice, several novel features imposed by the urban space have impacted the development of the ritual. First, the cem was often conducted in rural settings not only as a form of worship between the individual and God but also as a place of social adjudication, in which disputes between members of a village could be reconciled. The urban cem, by contrast, is open not only to those belonging to a single face-to-face interactive community, but also to Alevis of wide-ranging origin—from different villages, towns, and provinces. The new cem is ordered in relation to a distinctly urban stranger sociability.Footnote ²⁴

Second, the site of the cem, or the cemevi, is no longer simply any large, open space, as it was in rural areas. Rather, it is created in relationship to a specific institutional status. The emergence of Alevism as a “public religion” has taken place within the institutional context of Turkey's post-1980 political economy. Alevis were not the only community to seek public recognition in this period; so, too, did a large number of groups—women's groups, business groups, environmentalists, groups that represent migrants, Islamic organizations, and so forth. Such groups have organized under the rubric of civil society, which has involved taking on a particular status and conforming to its regulations.Footnote ²⁵ Classed as foundations, Alevi institutions and the cemevis they support are not, for instance, eligible for tax exemptions, as are mosques, which are governed by a distinct ministry of state. This particular material concern is, however, but one materialization of a broader issue: contemporary cemevis are not simply new spaces for hosting essentially the same ritual; rather, the ritual itself is being constituted through new modes of engagement.

Third, whereas access to rural cems was often restricted to members of the proximate village community, the urban cem sustains a public presence. Foreign researchers, curious Sunnis, and occasional journalists are common, and are by now expected spectators at such events. The urban cem operates not only according to the ritual functions sought out by local Alevis but also for the sake of representing Alevism on a public stage and dispelling disparaging myths about the community.Footnote ²⁶

Arranging the cem within the conditions of stranger sociability, modern institutionality, and urban publicity, Alevi organizations in the early 1990s drew upon the form of the semah that had been rendered recognizable since the 1970s. Conducting ethnographic research in 1994 among the Alevis of Hatay, Martin Stokes describes the scene of an urban cem that he attended:

The semah plays a crucial role in this cem. The movements of the dance, the age restrictions on participants, and the rehearsed quality of the performance serve as aesthetic cues of the semah's social genre, carrying the traces of its circulation. They trigger a set of associations and contexts that shape the ethos of the cem as a whole. If the invoked semah grants a degree of legitimacy to the cem's public presentation, it is due largely to the social form that the dede recognizes as bearing the marks of folklore. The aesthetic cues of the performance recall what was by then a twenty-year-old genre of folk dancing.

In the cem that I observed in 2006, the dede posed the problem of folklore in an assertive, critical tone rather than as a question. His reprimand was sharp. In the days following that cem, I visited with a number of elderly individuals who had attended the ritual, asking them what they thought of the dede's criticism of the semah group. With little hesitation, several unequivocally agreed with the dede. One woman offered the following explanation: “The youth group arrived late. So they didn't participate in the whole cem. They only came to the cem in order to perform a folklore dance.” Another man concurred that the adolescents did not sit in the cem, and as a result did not have the proper concentration that would have come from participating in the entire length of the ritual. He concluded that the group did not perform the semah as a form of worship.

Some of these criticisms point to correctable contingencies in the youth group's behavior, such as the late arrival and the failure to participate in other segments of the ritual. Yet the ascription of folklore to the group's performance also suggests recognition of a more systemic problem with the form of their dance. The men and women attending the cem discerned in the youth group's performance the modes of public visibility that have authorized a rendition of Alevi ritual as a form of folk dancing.

Several characteristics of the youth group marked it as a token of this genre, features which were most apparent when contrasted to a version of the semah that had been performed earlier that night. The earlier semah was performed by several elderly men and women, each wearing their quotidian clothing rather than costumes. Their semah took place within the unfolding progression of the cem. By contrast, the youth group did not include anyone above the age of twenty-one, they wore specially designed outfits that distinguished them from the rest of the individuals in attendance, and their performance occurred at the conclusion of the ritual rather than within it. Each of these elements served to create a staging effect that distinguished performer from onlooker in terms of participant and spectator. For the duration of the youth group's performance, attendees in the cem found themselves viewing a show as members of an audience—the same performance, in fact, that they might view in a summer festival or at a publicity event for a grocery store—rather than participating in a communal act of worship.

The sense that one is viewing a show and being entertained recalls the other contexts of the youth group's circulation. The distinctiveness of the youth group's performance genre was discernible in the disjuncture between the ethos of recreation conjured by those contexts and the solemnity of worship that participants in the cem sought to establish. This mode of performing the semah is not easy to construe in abstraction from the festivals in which it is most often enacted. Entering the context of the cem, the youth group was criticized by many attendees for bringing the sensibilities of the festival into an arena of worship. In effect, their performance carried the risk of re-contextualizing the practice of the cem itself through the aesthetics of the semah's public visibility.

The urban cem reveals the difficulties faced by contemporary Alevi communities in seeking to invoke a politics of pluralism. Efforts to organize the ritual in urban spaces are often motivated by a concern to offer communal representation in a milieu that has been historically hostile to its ritual forms. Performances of urban cems are, in this sense, assertions of communal distinction in contrast to the unmarked yet institutionally supported modes of majoritarian religious worship. The element of the cem that has most successfully traversed public space in Turkey is the semah. Yet its success in achieving public recognition is inextricably tied to an aesthetic history in which it came to be delimited as a piece of folk dancing and later embedded in various contexts of recreation and leisure. Alevi movements struggling to create spaces of communal worship not only discover opportunities but also encounter their limits in those practices that have achieved public visibility. The social form that has most prominently facilitated the development of Alevism into a public religion simultaneously invokes an aesthetics of visibility that Alevi movements, in the name of pluralism, seek to contest.