Justice and merit in Turkish minstrel stories

This study, which deals with the reflections of the Turkish understanding of justice and merit in minstrel stories, consists of identifying and evaluating direct or indirect indicators related to justice and merit. In the study, a thematic analysis was made on minstrel stories. The texts were examined within the framework of the part-whole relationship, taking into account the idea that each unit should be meaningful and that they were designed in common memory by the society. With this examine, it is thought that the indicators related to justice and merit are not limited to texts, but they are related to the collective memory of the society in which the texts were created. Therefore, it has emerged that the concepts of justice and merit in minstrel stories should be evaluated with textural meaning and cultural context approaches. However, minstrel stories compiled from the oral tradition have been seen as appropriate texts for the examination of the concepts of justice and merit, as they reflect the norms of the society and emerge in a period of change in the lifestyle of the society. The texts to be used in the study were limited to one hundred stories belonging to the field of Turkey, as they show similar characteristics in terms of being based on collective knowledge. In the study, the printed texts compiled and written down were examined, but the study was not limited to the texts, the cultural context of the texts was also included in the analysis. At this point, how the concepts of justice and merit fictionalized in the stories has been evaluated, and the reasons behind the fictionalized behaviors have been classified by considering divine-social-institutional sources. In addition, the roles of these concepts in the provision of social order and the regular carry out of the social functioning were discussed through the functions they undertake in the text. Thus, with the emergence of the meanings of the concepts in the context, it has been possible to see the understanding of justice and merit in the traditional dimension. In this way, the examination of minstrel stories in terms of the concepts of justice and merit is important in terms of understanding the traditional world views of the Turkish, based on the codes behind the behavior patterns in the stories, and thus reaching a common mental structure.