Rationalising pedagogy: what counts as skill across musical communities of practice in contemporary Istanbul

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the skilled practice of learning the ney (Sufi reed flute) has gone through a massive revival in Turkey, as part of a broader interest in the revitalised ‘Sufi music’ genre and in Islamic arts learning. One key step in this process has been the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s incorporation of ney teaching into mass public education through its council-run adult education programme (İSMEK). While this development has been pivotal in broadening access to skill attainment in the metropolitan area of Istanbul in significant ways, it has also led to a rationalisation of pedagogical practices, bringing with it transformed understandings of musical skill. To show what this process of rationalisation involves, this article examines skill training encouraged at government-sponsored lesson sites in tandem with a second mode of learning the ney grounded in apprenticeship pedagogy. The divergences emerging from this comparison reveal two very different paths to becoming an expert ney player, demonstrating, in turn, how pedagogical particularities foster different communities of practice.

Keywords:

• Ney
• skill training
• İSMEK
• adult education
• AKP government
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

We thank Trent Brown, Geert De Neve, Christopher Houston and the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This study was supported by the MacArthur Fellowship of the University of Melbourne.

Notes

1 For anthropological literature that credits the self-making potential of skilled learning practices, see Marchand (2008); Yen (2005); Makovicky (2020); Prentice (2012); Naji (2012).

2 One of the first crucial steps in the series of state-engineered projects to sponsor skill-based public education was the Kemalist movement’s founding of a nationwide network of People’s Houses in 1932. A large body of scholarship has pointed out the importance of these nationwide adult education centres, modelled on the Soviet Union’s Culture Houses, as key pedagogical facilitators of the Kemalist regime’s civilising project throughout the single-party period (Öztürkmen 1994; Houston 2012). By promoting western art forms, the People’s Houses both helped disseminate the political reforms of the ruling elites and sought to inculcate in citizens new skilled capacities, sensibilities and dispositions deemed compatible with their Turkifying mission.

3 The Mevlevi order was instituted following the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic-saint Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi (1207–1273). The dervishes of this order (more popularly referred to as ‘whirling dervishes’) gave prime importance to music and the sound of the ney in their main ritual activity known as mukabele.

4 In one revealing example, under the Mediterranean Sea, in Turkey’s first underwater sculpture museum opened in 2015, a parliament of whirling dervishes showcase their ‘mystic’ ritual for adventurist scuba divers. Alongside the soldiers who died in the ‘Turkish War of Independence’, dervishes blow into their neys, expressing ‘the richness of Anatolian civilization’, as one official describes it. Available at http://www.side-underwatermuseum.com/gallery.

5 When for the first time in 15 years, the AKP lost the Greater Istanbul Municipality in local elections in June 2019 to the main opposition party (People’s Republic Party, or CHP), the AKP pro-government media claimed that the new elected council government would close down İSMEK. The Islamist daily Yeni Şafak condemned CHP authorities for being responsible for making ‘our’ traditional handcrafts like hat (calligraphy), tezhip (the art of illumination) and ebru (water marbling) vulnerable to extinction, a reality that was now ‘inevitable’. The paper’s headlines also named what they claimed was the hidden agenda of Istanbul’s new authorities: ‘People’s Houses replace İSMEK!’ (‘İSMEK yerine Halkevleri!’). See ‘People’s Houses replace ISMEK’, Yeni Şafak, 7 September 2019, https://www.yenisafak.com/gundem/ismek-yerine-halkevleri-3505187. The CHP authorities have not closed İSMEK but have begun to re-form it in different ways.

6 On average, women constitute nearly 80% of the total number of participants during the period 2005–2019. In terms of their educational background, a large majority have completed either a high school (37%) or an undergraduate degree (19%). The three largest age groups are 20–30, 30–40 and 40–50. A large majority of learners attend lessons for non-economic purposes. According to İSMEK’s own surveys, the primary reasons for attendance in training activities were self-development and filling in spare time, followed by professional development in an existing job. These statistics come from the official data held by İSMEK for the teaching period from 2005 to 2019. This data was provided to the authors in 2021 by the current İSMEK coordinator.

7 Partly due to the European Union harmonisation process, over the last decade the AKP government has overseen an expansion in skill training programmes under ‘lifelong learning’. According to Turkish Statistical Institute data, in 2012 a total of 77,715 courses were organised by the key providers in this area, including the adult education centres under the authority of the Ministry of Education, municipalities, universities, unions and associational institutions. In 2017, a total of 89,062 courses were taken by more than five million learners.

8 On the intellectual origins of the term, see Yavuz (2016). Yavuz defines it as a political project geared towards the selective revival of the Ottoman past in a variety of public domains.

9 For a critique of the generic use of the concept of neoliberalism in education research, see Pykett (2010) and Rowlands and Rawolle (2013). See also Kipnis (2007) and Parnell and Robinson (2012) for critical reflections on the trope of neoliberalism in social science research.

10 This is a pseudonym.

11 Sohbet (suhba in Arabic) is an essentially Sufi discursive-pedagogical practice. The idioms ‘to do sohbet’ or ‘to convey sohbet’ are used to denote a spiritual conversation between a spiritual guide and disciples. The practice is accorded so much value in the pedagogical practices of some Sufi orders that, as one Sufi master describes it, ‘it is the greatest namaz [five daily prayers], which cannot be made up later’ (‘kazası olmayan en büyük namaz’) (Filiz 2009, 246).

12 Yet this approach to skilled becoming must also take into account the fact that modern selves are never made by singular causes. In the rapidly changing globalised and intensely politicised city of Istanbul, individual ney-learners’ intentions towards the world are conditioned by a range of forces – eg a nationalistic education system, neoliberalism, partisan mass media, militarised gender norms, religious commitments, and the ‘theatre’ of politicised and performative urban modernism. All these seek to deposit in residents particular affectual capacities and modes of perception. This same point applies to the reductive claims of the literature on neoliberalism, which seems to think that only neoliberal governance regulates and disciplines human subjects so that they come to understand their own personhood in line with neoliberal values (individual autonomy, entrepreneurship, self-responsibility etc.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Banu Şenay

Banu Şenay is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her current research on Islamic art pedagogies in Istanbul engages with debates in anthropology around skilled learning, ethics and Islamic cultural politics. She is the author of two monographs: Musical Ethics and Islam: The Art of Playing the Ney (University of Illinois Press, 2020); and Beyond Turkey’s Borders: Long-Distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora (I. B. Tauris, 2013).

Faik Gür

Faik Gür is Associate Professor of International Relations at Ozyegin University, Istanbul. His main areas of research are Turkish politics, urban sociology, and rural development with a special focus on agrarian transformation and agricultural policies in the Turkish context. He has published many papers in academic journals (eg Historical Research, Nations and Nationalism, Adult Education Quarterly) and edited volumes.