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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how women shaped folklore knowledge in Turkey, from female storytellers to early folklorists, and how their labour became less visible with the institutionalisation of the discipline.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the historical transformation of women’s roles in the production and circulation of folklore knowledge in Turkey. It proposes a threefold epistemic trajectory, moving from female oral narrators (“storytelling women”) who functioned as constitutive subjects of narration, to women collectors involved in folklore documentation during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, and finally to early female folklorists participating in the institutionalisation of folklore as an academic discipline. The central argument of the paper is that folklore knowledge was largely produced through women’s labour of narration, transmission, and mediation, yet this labour became increasingly marginalised as the discipline gained institutional and academic authority.

The paper is structured around three epistemic figures: (1) female storytellers who actively shaped and transformed narratives according to context, (2) women collectors who transferred oral knowledge into written and archival forms, and (3) early female folklorists who contributed to the academic redefinition of folklore knowledge. Drawing on feminist histories of anthropology and folklore, the paper does not romanticise continuity between these figures, but instead analyses how women’s epistemic positions were redefined and rendered invisible through gendered hierarchies at different stages of knowledge production.

By situating Turkey as a semi-peripheral and transnational case, the paper challenges male-centred and Western-dominated histories of ethnography and folklore. It aims to foreground women’s foundational yet often overlooked roles in the making of folklore knowledge and to contribute to more relational and entangled histories of anthropology.