Ankara : The Department of Management İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, 2015.Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Bilkent University, 2015.Includes bibliographical references leaves 279-296.This dissertation explicates the emergence and evolution of a market for
Kurdish music in Turkey. Using ethnographic methods, I start by detailing the illegal
circulation of cassettes during the restrictive and strife-laden period of the 1970s,
80s, and 90s. Through the resistive practices of circulation - recording, hiding,
playing, and exchanging cassettes – cassettes became saturated with emotions,
established shared emotional repertoires, and habituated individuals and collectives
into common emotional dispositions. An emotional structure was generated, and
accompanied the emergence of a sense of “us,” the delineation of the “other,” and the
resistive relationship between the two. I thus demonstrate the entwinement of
materiality with emotions, and the structuring potentiality that this entwinement
generates. In the second part, I ethnographically explore the trajectory of the market
after legalization in 1991. Situated within a context characterized by the sociopolitical
dynamics of domination and stigmatization, I detail how market producers
collectively construct an oppositional “market culture” by framing their marketrelated
experiences, as well as by interacting with and borrowing ideological codes
from the neighboring Kurdish political movement. These frames become entrenched
as a political-normative logic, shaping artistic production and business decisions.
This emergent logic negotiates societal-level conflict and stigma, and also resolves
the market-level tension between artistic and commercial concerns. Finally, I explore
the segmentation of the market in conjunction with changes in the socio-political
atmosphere in the 2000s. I discuss how segmentation also corresponds to competing
social imaginaries of a Kurdish public.Kuruoğlu, Alev PınarPh.D