The presentation seeks to analyze the images that accompany the hybrid musical genre of the 1960s and 1970s called Anatolian pop in Turkey. The unique characteristic of this musical style is twofold; firstly, it stems from the polycultural nature of the genre as it brings together European, Mediterranean, Arabic, Balkan and other post-Ottoman ‘musicscapes’ (drawing on Appadurai 1996), and secondly, it blends rural and urban elements up to a point that can be called ‘rurban’, a term adopted from urbanism. The latter also needs to be examined in the context of migration flows from rural Anatolia to larger cities mostly in the West of Turkey. Anatolian pop music developed in a globalizing-localizing context, a ‘liminal’ place and space of both domestic and international cross-cultural communication (Bhabha 1994; Lie 2003).
The rurban character of Anatolian pop is for one part present within the music, but also in its materiality, most prominently in the metamorphosis of the rural lute saz into an electrified urban rock instrument. Rurbanity is, however, equally inherent in the images produced alongside this music: for record covers, magazines and films that show musicians, fashion garments, accessories, and instruments. These images can be read as ‘documents’ of particular social, temporal and/or spatial relationships, and can thus be analyzed employing Bohnsack’s (2011) reconstructive documentary method. Based on a sample of 1970s Turkish weekly pop-culture magazine “Hey”, we will examine how the interplay of rurban fashion and music works, and how these discourses were framed in the photographic images. We will also investigate the visual and discursive links between the ‘costumé aventure’ films of the period and Anatolian pop music. Thus, the objective of this analysis is to uncover the incorporated habitus of the period, i.e. the often unconscious and unreflected patterns of behaviour and valuation in a society (Bourdieu 2014).
Register: http://www.popularmusikforschung.de/gfpm2021.html
Program: https://padlet.com/All_the_Things_You_Are/jsb1c2l7kio8i0nx
Review: https://www.hdm-stuttgart.de/science/view_beitrag?science_beitrag_ID=651
