The Dengbeji tradition among Kurdish-Kurmanj communities: narrative and performance during late nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract

This thesis studies the dengbeji tradition and kilams, the musical storytelling of Kurdish-Kurmanjee minstrels, mainly in Eastern and Southeastern Turkey, and Western Armenia. In the thesis, dengbeji is classified as a “genre” that is different from other Kurdish musical-narrative genres such as stranbeji and çirokbeji. As a methodology, the thesis is based upon library research, private musical archives, and in-depth interviews. The existing literature on dengbeji usually consists of descriptive accounts of regional collections of kilams and strans, which, altogether, are part of the same repertoire. However kilams differ from stran and çîrok genres in their particularly historical focus. While çiroks are fictions with fantastic elements, and strans express emotions such as sorrow, happiness, or descriptions from daily life, kilams are surviving narratives of historical events that have been experienced. An important contribution of this thesis has been the content analysis of the repertoire of kilams. This thesis is argues that kilams have three important components which mark them. They all speak of a historical event, which can be a riot, a family/tribal conflict or a true love story. They are also an outcome of a purely oral tradition, functioning as an oral transmitter of the knowledge of the past, and kept in memory though performances, through which they are adapted and continuously reproduced. This thesis also argues that the dengbeji tradition is a performative form of transmitting of history through a local voice. This means, the thesis focuses on local history and local language ithe afore-mentioned Kurmanjee speaking communities.