REBECCA BRYANT

George Mason University

The soul danced into the body:

Nation and improvisation in Istanbul

There’s a story that we tell: God created the human body, and then he
A B S T R A C T
told the soul to go and get in the body. The soul came back and said, ‘‘I
In this article, I examine the politics and practices tried, but I couldn’t do it.’’ The soul was too penetrable and the body too
of apprenticeship in the ‘‘traditions’’ of Turkish impenetrable. So God said to bring someone who could play the hoşney,
folk music through playing the bağlama, or saz. which is the kind of ney that has two stems. So someone began playing it,
The saz has become iconically representative of a and the soul gradually danced into the body.
folk music collected and preserved in the era of
—a 74-year-old ney player and teacher, on the fundamental significance
nationalism, and I examine the meaning of such a
of music
self-conscious and reflexive tradition’s claims to
traditionality. I outline the ways in which that n the Beyoğlu area of Istanbul on any night of the week, dense
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]
I 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 bağlama, 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 Beyoğlu 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

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 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
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
Figure 1. A türkü (folk music) bar in Beyoğlu.
n American Ethnologist
Figure 2. Young men dance halay, a common folk dance, in a türkü bar.
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 that
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American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005
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
224
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
 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
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, Reşat Nuri Güntekin, 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
n American Ethnologist
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
Atatürk 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
Doğu (or, sometimes, garp and şark, 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
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American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

which anything ethnomusicological is defined. For Turks F: With Atatürk it was more Western music [meaning
to talk of Western music, then, is already for them to locate pop music], but they also learned [Western] classical
the position from which they are made Other.6 music.
At the same time, the music of the Turkish folk, seen
by the sociologist Ziya Gökalp as one of the truest expres- H: We were learning French. It worked on our insides
sions of a pure Turkish culture, became the object of so much that I was going to school like this at Çapa
study and collection as part of the efforts to purify Turk- [imitates the walk of a lady]. I set foot in school, and
ish culture of degenerate Islamic and Arab influences. I’m walking ahead and apologizing to myself. That
During the period in which Gökalp wrote at the begin- was how classicized we were [o kadar klasikleşmiş
ning of the 20th century, a clear status division existed gibi] . . . We were so . . . it had become a habit with us.
between elites associated with the state and the vast ma-
jority of villagers and peasants. So, although Gökalp F: Every teacher had to play a musical instrument.
and other Turkish nationalists rejected the music of the
Ottoman courts—the music of Ottoman civilization—as H: Of course.
something degenerate and irrational, they accepted the
presumed rationalism of Western music, and they placed F: There was violin, and I’ll never forget we had this fat
great emphasis on Turkish folk music as a true expres- piano teacher. But afterwards they started, more folk
sion of the Turkish soul (Gökalp 1923, 1973). Through a songs started.
synthesis of folk music and Western music, or through
using Western techniques to transcribe and record folk H: In Atatürk’s time, there was a violin in every house.
music, nationalists hoped to foster not only a unity If you have talent, you would take violin lessons.
across status difference but also a unity that would be
achieved along Western, ‘‘rational’’ lines.7
Rebecca Bryant: Now, I wonder about some of the
Of course, the actual consequences of the state’s im-
things you’ve said about music. You listened to West-
plementation of these policies was much more confused
ern music, but in the house there was an ‘ud [a
than Gökalp’s neat cut-and-paste method would have sug-
stringed instrument used in Turkish classical music].
gested. In an interview with two female teachers who were
educated in the first years of the republic, I had a glimpse of
H: Why would there also be an ‘ud? Because our
the role of music in the cultural and educational projects of
fathers . . . There were these songs [she begins hum-
those early years. Until the advent of radio, ‘‘Western
ming]. Our fathers’ war songs. But in school—
music’’ was taught in the schools and heard on gramo-
phones and in films. ‘‘Western music,’’ of course, meant
F: I started to learn folk songs after I became a teacher.
Western classical music, but it also meant the Western
music of a more popular sort, which was the type to which
For the educated generation that experienced the early
young women learned to dance. Another teacher several
years of the republic, folk music was a quaint part of living
years younger than the first two had told me, for instance,
history, an important part of Turkish ‘‘culture’’ but not
that he had been incredibly fond of jazz and had started a
part of the ‘‘civilization’’ in which educated, nationalist
blues band when he was young. And one of the two women
Turks of the period strove to participate.
noted that ‘‘in our time, there were no radios and such
At the same time, however, Turkish folk music came to
things. They were always playing Western music.’’
be an object of study, laying the groundwork for a trans-
The radio, here, represents the period when music
formation of that music with the development of mass
began to serve the masses. Moreover, Western music was
media that would open it to a new reputability. This was
associated with good, civilized manners:
expressed to me by Hilmi Bey, the ney player and teacher
quoted in the opening epigraph, who spent much of his life
Feride: The radio came in ‘36.
working as a pharmacist and playing the ney for his friends:
Hatice: Now my . . . the other day they were singing
I wasn’t from a memur family, or a wealthy family, so I
a song: ‘‘Aman, aman, aman!’’ [parodying what has
had to pick a career in which I could make money. In
come to be called ‘‘arabesk’’ music, the name being
those days being a musician just wasn’t reputable. We
shorthand for ‘‘orientalized’’ music]. These [referring called them çalgıcı. You couldn’t walk down the street
back to Western popular music] were the songs of our the way you do with the saz on your back, or people
time, my child. In our girlhood we grew up always would look and make remarks. My father used to play
singing and dancing to those songs. They were always the ney, and when he went somewhere with it, he’d
our . . . because Western music was always our thing. tuck it into his pants so that no one would see. My

226
 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
father said, ‘‘You want to be a musician?’’ [said
sarcastically]. I decided to pick a career, something
with regular money. It didn’t matter to me what it was:
veterinarian, doctor, civil servant.
My father told me that someday it would be
respectable to be a musician, but he said until then,
I should do something else. And he was right. The
Atatürk period brought respect both for Western
music and for our music. It used to be that I was
one of maybe ten people in the country who really
knew the ney. Now it’s probably 500, and I’m in the
top, 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 homosexuals
and transsexuals, or at the very least, inappropriate
choices for a husband. Conversely they are held to
possess an extra-social, diabolic power (as in Mann’s
Dr. Faustus, and myths in European folklore of the
devil’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 çalgıcı 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
Şemsi 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,
n American Ethnologist
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.
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American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

:
Figure 3. Saz players as they wish to be seen: Left to right, Şemsi Yastıman, Ankaralı Ünal Türkben, and Yılmaz Ipek (courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).

During the period when Stokes did his research, his inform- without an aesthetic within which the songs memorized
ants appear to have been loath to discuss Turkish folk can be decoded. But that aesthetic is learned precisely
music as part of the ‘‘Eastern’’ tradition, and he describes through the memorization of songs. My teacher claimed
several attempts to orchestrate folk music polyphonically. to know ‘‘thousands’’ of songs and often spoke of writing
By the time I began taking lessons in 2000, however, his own compilation of folk music to replace the flimsy—
recordings of the arabesk music that Stokes’s informants and, in his opinion, fault-ridden—volumes for sale in
so disliked were constantly played in the saz shop, and the Istanbul shops. But knowing those thousands of songs
musicians who worked or gathered there tried to imitate would have provided little cachet if he had played them
the saz players on the recordings. Moreover, the teachers in simply as they are, in a dry style, without the appropriate
the dershane where I took lessons unproblematically embellishment. The songs become embodied and capable
employed the makam system that is an integral part of of recall without conscious thought, but for them to be
Arabic and Turkish classical music. In discussions of dif- admired, they must be empersoned and embellished well
ferent forms of Turkish music, all those with whom I spoke within a particular aesthetic.
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 müezzin 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 türkü [folk songs], you
must listen to türkü.’’ Hence, the contradiction of trying to
teach bağlama 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 Figure 4. The community of learning: Âşık Daimi and Şemsi Yastıman, 1956
involves memorization, that memorization is pointless (courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).

228
 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
In Turkish the process by which this competence is
achieved is called meşk, 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, meşk 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
n American Ethnologist
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 öğreniyoruz), 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
229
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005
(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 Şemsi 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 Şemsi 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 my
piece for them [the one that I had learned for that
day]. Necati says that it’s good, but I rush the final
note, and Kemal comments that 9/8 time must not
be easy for foreigners. While N. talks on the phone, I
play it again while Kemal keeps time, then Kemal
takes my saz saying he hopes he won’t get it out of
tune, and he starts playing something. Still talking
on the phone, N. starts correcting him. When he closes
the phone, N. starts showing Kemal how it should be
played, though N. doesn’t know all of the piece. They
then start trying to work on the piece, while I’m
listening. N. gets a call on his cell phone, and Kemal
jokingly tells him, ‘‘Hang up the phone! We’ve just
gotten into it!’’ They finish the piece, then N. gives me
something else to play. While he’s looking for the
piece and gets another phone call, I play some of my
other pieces, and without seeming to listen, he
corrects 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 üstat. And that cannot be
accomplished through lessons but must be learned in
230
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 ghı́nei ánthropos). 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 meşk. 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 üstat, 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
 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
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
Figure 5. Saz greats in a meyhane (bar/restaurant): Left to right, Şemsi
Yastıman, Kastamonulu Yorgansız Hakkı Baba, and Ahmet Tekeli in
Kastamonu, 1967 (courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).
n American Ethnologist
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
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American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005

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 Figure 6. The âşık as voice of the people: Kırklareli’li Âşık Ali Tamburacı
depth of emotion and experience that would allow them to (courtesy of Sinan Yastıman).
dance it well (see, esp., Cowan 1990).21 Saz playing is
regarded similarly. One of the archetypes for Turkish folk
musicians is the âşık, the wandering minstrel who is also easily adopt a masculine heaviness without censure, she
the ‘‘voice of the people.’’ The title of âşık or ozan (bard) is could adopt a feminine seriousness, as seen in the sooth-
given to composers (for instance, Âşık Mahzuni Şerif and ing television show cast in candlelight. In contrast to the
Âşık Veysel), thereby incorporating new folk music into the flashiness, crassness, and skin-baring of pop stars, women
realm of tradition.22 Although the âşık is primarily a folk who play and sing folk music present themselves, in both
poet, as one researcher commented, ‘‘When âşıklar are dress and behavior, with modesty.
mentioned, the first matter that comes to mind is the saz. The association of saz playing with masculinity, then,
In other words, the saz possesses a characteristic that is is not a simple exclusion of women. Rather, it is an entire
determinative of the identity of the âşık’’ (Kaya 2004). This domain of learning marked in the body through gendered
is an archetype closed to women (Figure 6). signs. Those gendered signs, moreover, are explicitly asso-
In general, saz players’ self-presentation is ağır, a ciated with the nation. Scholars have often remarked that
word that literally means ‘‘heavy’’ but that is used to Turkish nationalism is thoroughly masculine and milita-
describe the self-control and seriousness of purpose that ristic, especially concerned with the blood sacrifice of
is displayed in comportment. A man’s walk might be said young men (Bryant 2002; Kaplan 1996; Sirman 1990). In
to be ağır, as he walks not only with deliberation but also a symbolic conjuncture, the saz as representative of the
with a visible gravity, rolling from heel to toe. To be hafif, heart of Turkish tradition converges with a masculine
or light, in one’s comportment is to suggest a lack of comportment representative of the honor of the nation.
seriousness usually associated with women and, when Stokes has remarked that the argument that ‘‘all rural folk
applied to women, this description also suggests promis- music is ultimately reducible to that which can be played
cuity. Although a woman playing folk music could not on the bağlama’’ is an ideological assertion derived from

232
 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
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
n American Ethnologist
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 the
whole person; it implies not only a relation to specific
activities, but a relation to social communities—it
implies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind
of person. . . . Activities, tasks, functions, and under-
standings do not exist in isolation; they are part of
broader systems of relations in which they have
meaning. These systems of relations arise out of and
are reproduced and developed within social commu-
nities, which are in part systems of relations among
persons. The person is defined by as well as defines
these relations. Learning thus implies becoming a
different person with respect to the possibilities
enabled by these systems of relations. [Lave and
Wenger 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
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American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005
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
234
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 çalgıcı 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 Gülalp, Hiro Miyazaki, and four anonymous
reviewers. The research discussed here was one outgrowth of
a project on learning practices in Greece and Turkey supported
 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
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 bağlama. This linguistic overlap is a source of confusion
for Turks as well as for a foreigner like me. The first few lessons that
I took were with two other students, both of whom were confused
about the difference between saz and bağlama 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, çalgı and enstrüman. The
former refers to anything that might be played to make music
(from the verb çalmak, to play), whereas the latter is simply the
phonetic 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 çalgı, 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 consciousness
in 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 Daniel
calls 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 oriented
insofar 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 are
utilized 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 also
alters 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 that
practice (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, also
uncle’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. In
newspapers, 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 marry
Turkish 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 song
contest. 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
n American Ethnologist
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 Turkish
music 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 Gökalp,
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 of
the folk songs that are sweetly sung in the mountains
and villages [dağlarda ve köylerde terennüm edilen
türkülerinin seslerini toplamak lâzımdır]. 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 basically
a 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 a
memur 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 Karaosmanoğlu 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 çalgıcı,
which literally means ‘‘musician,’’ derives from its assumed jux-
taposition with müzisyen, a word that, like enstrüman, comes from
French and implies music as art and status. Çalgıcı has some of
the connotations of fiddler in English.
9. Arzu Öztürkmen shows how the evolution of folk dance in
Turkey was ‘‘ ‘national’ by its nature,’’ arising out of ‘‘dynamics
created 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 Öztürkmen 1998).
10. The quotidian salience of such distinctions is apparent, for
instance, in the album liner notes that explain the leftist folk
musician Zülfü 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 lower
string, while the upper strings gave an unchanging
sound. But in the method that had been used for
hundreds of years in Anatolia, the bağlama 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]
235
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 2 May 2005
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. şarkı söylemek, lit., to say a song), okumak
is the only verb for ‘‘to read.’’ Okumak, however, is also in many
ways 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 the
singer ‘‘read/sang’’ a particular song.
12. The original has an interesting wordplay: ‘‘Buralarda da
öncelikle aklı̂ değil naklı̂ ilimler öğretiliyordu.’’ 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 (kuaför 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 kuaför, for example, might spend six years sweeping the floor
and handing the kuaför 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 education
was 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 education
but 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 gendering
is that being a kuaför, 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 never
seen 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 kuaför
appears 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 bağlama,
the others usually referred to as kısa sap, or ‘‘short stem,’’ and
uzun 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 itself
was 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 and
composer, making saz players like virtuoso Neşet Ertaş into stars,
so that young players such as my teacher aspired to a similar
236
career. Stokes (1992:56) notes that, at the time of his research,
Ertaş 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 the
burgeoning 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 tendency
for 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 the
most common terms of address are ağabey (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; and
amca 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 physical
type. 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 teacher
himself, 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 accorded
both 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 perceived
as 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 in
Sight’’ (‘‘Yolun Sonu Görünüyor’’). 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. One
was entitled ‘‘I’m in Depression’’ (‘‘Depresyondayım’’) and the
other had a chorus with the refrain, ‘‘Ah, this life is unbearable’’
(Ah, bu hayat çekilmez).
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 and
leaning 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. Âşık 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 the
legitimate caliph after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
 Nation and improvisation in Istanbul
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 that
Alevism 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 âşık,
discussed above. The emotional state induced in both audience
and 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 or
control 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 or
blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking—and
engage the most fundamental principles of construction
and evaluation of the social world, those which most
directly 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 more
features 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 as
cooking (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 University
Robinson Hall
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
rbryant@superonline.com