Contribution short abstract:

I examine the 1975 and 1981 International Turkish Folklore Congresses as key events transnationalizing folklore studies in Turkey, where the National Folklore Institute, as the state’s central institution, took the lead in collecting, archiving and presenting folklore outside of universities.

Contribution long abstract:

The first and second International Folklore Congresses (1975 and 1981) were pivotal events that established a tradition of congresses and aligned Turkish and foreign folklorists in the following decades. Organized collaboratively by Turkish folklorists and the Turkish state, they served as critical forums to present a national canon of “significant” genres. They connected Turkish scholars with transnational networks and influenced the folklore studies' disciplinary agenda in the next decades. While the content was predominantly national, the conferences were deeply embedded in transnational networks, which expanded folklore research beyond Turkey. Congresses, alternating in different locales and frequencies as obligatory celebrations of a discipline’s raison d'être, structure trajectories of scholarly ideas, confirm certain forms of their governance and long-term impacts (Howard/Mawyer 2020), and transform disciplinary knowledge (Rogan 2015, 2012). Drawing on "epistemic cultures" (Knorr-Cetina, 1999), I analyze how these congresses shaped the production and circulation of folklore knowledge in Turkey. I consider the networks involved and analyze the organizational structures and the roles of diverse actors in shaping the field. My aim is to understand how these encounters helped forming a nationalist canon that prioritized certain folklore genres and how these knowledge practices influenced un-doing folklore in Turkey at large. With a special attention to folklore's engagement with broader society, my analysis contributes to un/re/writing the history of folklore studies in Turkey and to global folklore histories at large, linking greater political and disciplinary developments with insights into the interplay between academic discourse and broader cultural and political forces.