Books by Marlene Schäfers
The University of Chicago Press
A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contem... more A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey.
“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.
Articles by Marlene Schäfers
Anthropological Quarterly, 2023
Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs ... more Many followers of the socialist Kurdish liberation movement surround themselves with photographs of fallen militants who they respect and cel- ebrate as martyrs. These images hold considerable power: they are able to direct speech, shape bodily comportment, and command the everyday lives of their spectators. This paper asks where this potency stems from and what effects it has. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish communities in Turkey and Europe, it argues that displays of martyrs’ pho- tographs project a Kurdish body politic in the making, enrolling both those whom they depict and those who handle them into an alternative project of sovereignty that remains under acute assault. Key to this effect is how the photographs make the dead latent in the present. On the one hand, this makes the images immensely powerful media of political mobiliza- tion. Embodying the sacrifice of lifetime made by the fallen, the images become powerful vectors for feelings of indebtedness, commitment, and dedication that make distinct demands on the disposable time of those who contemplate them. On the other hand, photography’s capacity to make the absent present and thereby upset linear emplotments of time also makes it a potentially unsettling medium. As a result, photographs of martyrs become crucial sites where political belonging and commitment are fashioned, consolidated, and potentially rebelled against.
Mekânda Adalet ve Deprem, 2022
2016 yılında Social Anthropology 24(2) dergisinde “Ruined Futures: Managing Instability in Post-E... more 2016 yılında Social Anthropology 24(2) dergisinde “Ruined Futures: Managing Instability in Post-Earthquake Van (Turkey)" başlığı ile yayınlanmış makalenin Türkçeye çevirilmiş ve kısaltılmış versiyonu.
İngilizceden çeviren: Esril Bayrak ve Ceren Yartan
Kurdish Studies, 2022
In this interview, founder and long-time managing editor of Kurdish Studies, Dr Welat Zeydanlıoğl... more In this interview, founder and long-time managing editor of Kurdish Studies, Dr Welat Zeydanlıoğlu, tells the story of the journal's establishment and recalls its development to becoming the leading English-speaking journal in the field of Kurdish studies today. He explains the relations between the journal and the Kurdish Studies Network, reflects on the difficulties that the journal has faced over the years, and outlines its major contributions to the field. The interview sheds light not only on the history of a journal but on the development of an entire scholarly field, while sketching the challenges lying ahead.
Kurdish Studies, 2021
In this interview, Prof. Shahrzad Mojab reflects on her longstanding personal, political, and int... more In this interview, Prof. Shahrzad Mojab reflects on her longstanding personal, political, and intellectual engagement with Kurdish women. Twenty years after publishing the groundbreaking edited volume Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (Mazda Publishers, 2001), Mojab assesses the complex relation between Kurdish Studies and feminism and evaluates current discussions regarding gendered power relations in Kurdish scholarship. Gender relations in Kurdish society and in Kurdish Studies can only be understood, she insists, when taking into account how gender intersects with capitalism, class, colonialism, nationalism, and patriarchy. Through her personal trajectory, the interview offers insight into the historical developments that have facilitated Kurdish women to increasingly be included in Kurdish Studies as both researchers and research participants.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020
The Kurdish resistance movement, one often hears in Kurdistan, Turkey, and beyond, has brought mo... more The Kurdish resistance movement, one often hears in Kurdistan, Turkey, and beyond, has brought momentous change to a deeply patriarchal society and in this way paved the way for the empowerment of Kurdish women. Instead of discussing whether such empowerment has “actually” materialized, this article seeks to investigate what moral expectations, normative standards, and gendered subjectivities this narrative generates. The Kurdish case reveals how narratives of empowerment form a crucial part of the moral and gendered bargains that sustain and legitimate resistance movements. As they tie personal lives to political projects of resistance and liberation through notions like sacrifice, gift, and debt, such narratives shape political belonging and render critique a perilous undertaking. Tracing how Kurdish women seek to reconcile the dilemmas that arise as a result, the article reflects on the ways in which the political comes to be refracted in intimate realms of kinship and family. It contends that familial and personal relationships are crucial sites where expectations of political loyalty and allegiance take on shape and substance but are also negotiated and contested.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020
Introduction to CSSAAME special section on loyalty and critique in resistance movements, with con... more Introduction to CSSAAME special section on loyalty and critique in resistance movements, with contributions on Kashmir, Western Sahara and Kurdistan
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019
This article investigates how middle-aged to elderly Kurdish women in Turkey engage with large co... more This article investigates how middle-aged to elderly Kurdish women in Turkey engage with large collections of Kurdish music recordings in their possession. Framing them as archives, women mobilize these collections as central elements in a larger, ongoing Kurdish project of historical critique, which seeks to resist hegemonic state narratives that have long denied and marginalized Kurdish voices. While recognizing the critical intervention such archives make, the article contends that, to be heard as “history” with a legitimate claim to authority, subaltern voices often have to rely on the very hegemonic forms, genres, and discourses they set out to challenge. This means that subaltern projects of histor- ical critique walk a fine line between critique and complicity, an insight that nuances narratives that would approach subaltern voices predominantly from a perspective of resistance. At the same time, this article argues that a more complete picture of subaltern archives requires us to attend to the voices they contain not just as metaphors for resistance or political representation but also as acoustic objects that have social effects because of the way they sound. By outlining the affective qualities that voice recordings held for the Kurdish women who archived them, the article shows how their collections participated in carving out specific, gendered subject positions as well as forging a broader Kurdish sociality. Paying attention to history’s “acoustic register” (Hunt 2008), this suggests, promises to open up perspectives on subaltern historiography that go beyond binary frameworks of resistance and domination, critique and complicity.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2018
Women’s rights and human rights projects in Turkey and elsewhere routinely construe and celebrate... more Women’s rights and human rights projects in Turkey and elsewhere routinely construe and celebrate subaltern voice as an index of individual and collective empowerment. Through an ethnographic study of Kurdish women singers’ (dengbêjs) efforts to engage in their storytelling art in Turkey, this article questions the equation between “raising one’s voice” and having agency. It investigates two concrete instances in 2012, in Istanbul and Van, where Kurdish women publicly raised their voices. It shows that public audibility does not necessarily translate into agency, because these spaces, like most, discipline voices ideologically and sonically. Audibility is not a neutral achievement but an ideologically structured terrain that shapes voices and regulates whether and how they are heard and recognized. Voices routinely have ambiguous and even contradictory effects once they become audible in public. It is not simply a matter of “having voice” or “being silenced.”
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2017
Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalized groups 'lacking v... more Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalized groups 'lacking voice' and celebrate their efforts at 'raising their voices'; we are advised to listen to our 'inner voice' and be 'vocal' in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. Anthropologists have sought to denaturalize these associations, showing them to be the product of a particular ideology of voice that is neither universal nor inevitable. At the same time, they have also studied the effects that such associations have on imaginations of subjectivity as well as public and political life.
As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.
http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/voice
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017
This article focuses on the appeal that writing and authorship hold for Kurdish women singers in ... more This article focuses on the appeal that writing and authorship hold for Kurdish women singers in contemporary Turkey. It argues that authorship has come to the fore as an object of aspiration at a moment when a history of political silencing intersects with a more recent commodification of Kurdish culture. In this context, authorship constitutes an avenue for Kurdish women to insert themselves into struggles for political rights, discourses of history writing, and an emerging cultural market. Yet, as the analysis shows, becoming an author centrally relies on gaining access to means that allow materially inscribing voices and making them durable. Authorship therefore needs to be recognized as a fragile achievement, especially for subaltern authors, whose position is marked by restricted access to inscriptive means. Tracing Kurdish women's attempts at making their voices, quite literally, matter, the article contributes to our understanding of the politics of voice in the contemporary world.
Kürt Tarihi, Sep 2016
When I began doing research on women dengbêjs, I was repeatedly met with disbelief: But are there... more When I began doing research on women dengbêjs, I was repeatedly met with disbelief: But are there any female dengbêjs at all? Aren't dengbêjs always malewith the exception, perhaps, of famous Ayşe Şan and Meyrem Xan, both long dead? Women lament at funerals, yes, and they routinely sing lullabies, certainly, but female dengbêjs? Yet over the course of the following months I would discover that Kurdish women do indeed routinely raise their voices, not just at funerals or beside the cradle, but also to transmit personal and community history through the genre of the kilam. Mastery of the kilam is what I use as a working definition for what makes a dengbêj, a term that is otherwise difficult to circumscribe. Derived from the Arabic root k-l-m meaning to speak, talk, or express, the kilam is a genre closer to language than music. Ethnomusicologist Estelle Amy de la Bretèque describes it as a form of "melodized speech" which "resembles a chant" and which is "always associated with feelings of loss and self-sacrifice." 1
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, May 2016
This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by af... more This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by affecting people's abilities to engage with the future. Based on ethnographic material from the Kurdish-inhabited city of Van (Turkey), which was heavily damaged by two earthquakes in 2011, I analyse Turkish state authorities' mobilisation of expertise regarding Van's ruined built environment as a form of techno-political governance. Yet as ruins' material properties continuously exceeded attempts at governing them, they created a particular structure of risk, thereby contributing to the formation of political subjects feeling themselves to be at the constant peril of both natural and political disaster.
European Journal of Turkish Studies, 2015
Over the last decade the art of dengbêjî [Kurdish minstrelsy] has come to be understood as the pa... more Over the last decade the art of dengbêjî [Kurdish minstrelsy] has come to be understood as the paradigmatic form of Kurdish heritage and dengbêjs concomitantly as the authentic carriers of Kurdish “culture.” This article seeks to outline some of the complexities and paradoxes of this ongoing process of Kurdish heritage production as it occurs at the intersection of growing liberal multiculturalist and continuing repressive forms of governance in Turkish Kurdistan. I argue that the production of Kurdish cultural heritage as it unfolds on a highly politicized terrain relies on an understanding of heritage as a marker of collective primordial identity, which goes hand in hand with an idealization of culture as a sphere of prepolitical pristine authenticity. Moreover, this article also seeks to shed light on some of the specifically gendered dynamics involved in contemporary Kurdish heritage making by asking what promises the evocation of dengbêjî as explicitly distinct from politics may hold for a number of female dengbêjs.
Book Chapters by Marlene Schäfers
From Van to Yerevan: Dengbêj Gazin - Ashugh Leyli.
CD produced by Kalan Music (2017), in collabo... more From Van to Yerevan: Dengbêj Gazin - Ashugh Leyli.
CD produced by Kalan Music (2017), in collaboration with Anadolu Kültür.
Part of the "Women Ashughs and Dengbêjs Project" that took place in 2014-15 within the framework of the Support to the Armenia-Turkey Normalisation Programme, funded by the European Union.
Diversity and Contact among Singer-Poet Traditions in Eastern Anatolia, 2019
Published in: Özdemir, Ulaş, Wendelmoet Hamelink and Martin Greve (eds), 2019. Diversity and Cont... more Published in: Özdemir, Ulaş, Wendelmoet Hamelink and Martin Greve (eds), 2019. Diversity and Contact among Singer-Poet Traditions in Eastern Anatolia. Ergon: Baden-Baden.
Methodological Approaches in Kurdish Studies: Theoretical and Practical Insights from the Field, 2018
Northern Kurdistan constitutes a politically highly polarized place. Decades of armed conflict ac... more Northern Kurdistan constitutes a politically highly polarized place. Decades of armed conflict accompanied by assimilationist government and violent displacement have unsettled, transformed and deeply divided Kurdish society. On the troubled terrain of Kurdish politics, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and associated organisations have established a position of hegemony within a polarized world that pits the Turkish state against Kurdish resistance, ‘collaborating’ village guards against ‘honourable’ Kurdish patriots. As a result, questions of loyalty and allegiance occupy paramount significance in everyday interactions in today’s Northern Kurdistan.
This paper investigates some of the consequences, difficulties and dilemmas that such polarization entails for ethnographic fieldwork. Based on 17 months of fieldwork experience in the region of Van (2011/12), I argue that the polarized political context puts high pressure on individuals to position themselves in relation to dominant political players. Researchers are not exempt from such pressures, and inevitably find themselves drawn into existing webs of allegiance. Arguing that there is no neutral position from which to carry out research, the paper advocates tracing the boundaries that demarcate spaces of loyalty as a methodology for reckoning with the politicization of everyday life. It outlines how political identities are formed and authority is constituted through the performative enactment, maintenance and negotiation of such boundaries.
Online by Marlene Schäfers
Allegra Lab, 2020
Introduction to Allegra Lab thematic thread on #Afterlives with upcoming contributions by Kinda C... more Introduction to Allegra Lab thematic thread on #Afterlives with upcoming contributions by Kinda Chaib, Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins, Nancy Rose Hunt, Çiçek İlengiz, Rachel Lehr, Ruth Mandel, Adeline Masquelier, Chris Moffat, Tanja Petrović, Erol Sağlam, Marlene Schäfers, and Aslı Zengin.
https://allegralaboratory.net/category/thematic-threads/afterlives/
ROAR Magazine, 2017
Interview with Necîbe Qeredaxî
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Books by Marlene Schäfers
“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.
Articles by Marlene Schäfers
İngilizceden çeviren: Esril Bayrak ve Ceren Yartan
As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.
http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/voice
Book Chapters by Marlene Schäfers
CD produced by Kalan Music (2017), in collaboration with Anadolu Kültür.
Part of the "Women Ashughs and Dengbêjs Project" that took place in 2014-15 within the framework of the Support to the Armenia-Turkey Normalisation Programme, funded by the European Union.
This paper investigates some of the consequences, difficulties and dilemmas that such polarization entails for ethnographic fieldwork. Based on 17 months of fieldwork experience in the region of Van (2011/12), I argue that the polarized political context puts high pressure on individuals to position themselves in relation to dominant political players. Researchers are not exempt from such pressures, and inevitably find themselves drawn into existing webs of allegiance. Arguing that there is no neutral position from which to carry out research, the paper advocates tracing the boundaries that demarcate spaces of loyalty as a methodology for reckoning with the politicization of everyday life. It outlines how political identities are formed and authority is constituted through the performative enactment, maintenance and negotiation of such boundaries.
Online by Marlene Schäfers
https://allegralaboratory.net/category/thematic-threads/afterlives/
“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.
İngilizceden çeviren: Esril Bayrak ve Ceren Yartan
As an explicit category of conceptual and ethnographic focus, voice has entered the anthropological literature relatively recently. This entry charts out some of the principal ways in which anthropologists have approached voice, and the kind of literatures they have drawn upon to do so. It identifies the move to study sonic voices in tandem with metaphorical figures of voice as central to anthropological investigations of voice. It considers how doing so allows investigating the role of voice in the making of subjects, publics, and ideologies, as well as the impacts that sound technologies have on these processes. This entry suggests that voice is central to many key concepts in anthropology and social theory and that an explicit focus on voice is therefore of broader relevance for the discipline and beyond.
http://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/voice
CD produced by Kalan Music (2017), in collaboration with Anadolu Kültür.
Part of the "Women Ashughs and Dengbêjs Project" that took place in 2014-15 within the framework of the Support to the Armenia-Turkey Normalisation Programme, funded by the European Union.
This paper investigates some of the consequences, difficulties and dilemmas that such polarization entails for ethnographic fieldwork. Based on 17 months of fieldwork experience in the region of Van (2011/12), I argue that the polarized political context puts high pressure on individuals to position themselves in relation to dominant political players. Researchers are not exempt from such pressures, and inevitably find themselves drawn into existing webs of allegiance. Arguing that there is no neutral position from which to carry out research, the paper advocates tracing the boundaries that demarcate spaces of loyalty as a methodology for reckoning with the politicization of everyday life. It outlines how political identities are formed and authority is constituted through the performative enactment, maintenance and negotiation of such boundaries.
https://allegralaboratory.net/category/thematic-threads/afterlives/