The Dengbêj’s Two Bodies: Effigies of Sound and the Mediation of Tradition in Occupied Kurdistan
The dengbêj tradition looms large in academic as well as popular accounts of Kurdish culture and music. Literally translated as “voice-teller,” the dengbêj is a poet-singer whose repertoires of myth and folklore, according to many Kurdish writers and musicians, span the globe and extend as far back as ancient Sumer. In the context of Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, where Kurdish cultural practices have been under active erasure for a century, the dengbêj has been primordialized as the originary wellspring of Kurdish heritage and prefigured as the guardian and guarantor of Kurdish futurity.
In this talk, Glastonbury parses such valorizations of dengbêjî by attending to the mass mediation and embodied practice of dengbêj performance. He argues not merely that the dengbêj tradition owes its popularity to the circulation of mass media, but also that mass media (particularly cassettes) materialize an implicit logic at the heart of dengbêjî as a social fact: that is, the dialogic relation between the performing body of the individual dengbêj and the social body constituted by the cultural repository of dengbêj poetics. Cassettes, he shows, become effigies in the traffic between the dengbêj’s two bodies, animating the tension between colonial rupture and cultural continuity in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan.
Nicholas Glastonbury is a cultural anthropologist of sound, media, empire, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. At present he is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He is also a translator of Kurdish and Turkish literature, and a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya.
