Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon biographical, bibliographical, and archival sources, this paper discusses the collaborations between Hayrünnisa Boratav and her husband Pertev Naili Boratav, the doyen of Turkish folklore in the documentation and study of folklore in Turkey.

Paper long abstract:

In 1948, three professors at Ankara University were accused of propagating communism in their classes, among whom stood Pertev Naili Boratav, the founder and doyen of folklore in Turkey. After a long trial, Boratav was acquitted, but the funding of his department was cut off. He left Turkey in 1952 and continued his scholarship in France. During when Boratav could not come to Turkey for seven years, his wife Hayrünnisa collected folklore materials in Anatolia and sent them to Boratav in Paris (Birkalan 2001). This type of folklore fieldwork, husband-wife collaboration, which can be seen as ‘innovative’ today, derived from the uncertainties the family faced at the time. Hayrünnisa Boratav had accompanied Boratav in the field on many occasions and she was by no means a hidden scholar behind her husband’s research and writing. She had undertaken fieldwork, classified materials, gave contexts and pertinent information about dates and events—even prepared documents for the Boratav Archive in Istanbul and Nanterre. Being more than merely the wife of a folklorist accompanying her husband to the field, Hayrünnisa Boratav was the vital force for Boratav’s pathbreaking folklore research from a distance. Interestingly, however, her contributions were overlooked in the literature dealing with Boratav’s scholarship. While themes such as husband-wife fieldwork and writing (Mead 1986; Callan/Ardener 1984), ‘academic intimacy’ (Gottlieb 1995), and ‘two-person, one career’ (Bauer 1998; Papanek 1973) have been well-discussed in anthropology, our case helps us to reevaluate wife-husband collaborations, which can take previous assumptions in folklore-fieldwork into new planes.