Blessings (Prayers/good wishes) and curses (Maledictions/bad wishes) in Turkish culture: A textual and contextual study

Existence in the worldly, unworldly, individualistic, and societal senses as well as the protection of the values associated with it has been a part of the fabric of the instincts and necessities of man since the very beginning. Man's instincts, which both allow him to feel protected and safe, as well as which meets her/his psychological and physiological needs, has led man to thus make many a step or leap forward as well as to forge many a new path. In nearly every period within the history of both humanity and various human societies, there has equally always been a place for benedictions and maledictions-that is, words that express wishes, desires, praises, prayers, and worship-and that are used to fulfill the function of creating a sentimental sense of protection and security. Benedictions and maledictions-which are a fundamental manner of discourse within culture and faith, as well as which take refuge in their being supernatural-have been observed throughout history as being used to meet each and every of man's needs within a range of individualistic, societal, and cultural contexts. They at the same time, both through the magical potency and influence of idiom, and moreover through their being carried from the past into the present and their being peppered throughout daily life, beliefs, values, and general culture, have over time emerged into a literary form onto itself due to the extensiveness of their use. These types of idioms, which vary in name from culture to culture, are known within the context of Turkish culture as "alkışlar" and "kargışlar", or "blessings" and "curses". This dissertation focuses on the subject of blessings and curses-which has yet to be studied even at the undergraduate level within Turkish academia-within the framework of Anatolian history, including identifying their principal forms and the fundamental qualities of those forms. This study simultaneously has aimed to holistically examine blessings/benedictions and curses/maledictions with reference to their diachronic and synchronous forms as part of Turkish cultural history, daily life, rituals, literary genres, and other fields. This subject-which has been encountered as early as the dawn of mankind itself in the form of faith, thought, action, and discourse-also has, an intimate relationship with anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, mythology, belief, communication, linguistics, and literature as one inspects these fields more closely. From this angle, one can state that this research has benefited from the principal methods and theories of folklore and aforementioned disciplines with which folklore has an intimate relationship with, entailing an interdisciplinary junction point spanning the whole the humanities and social sciences. At the centre of this study is the theory "ethnography of speaking", which has been used to dissect each and every aspect of this subject in detail.