Bir piyasanın siyasileşerek gelişmesi: Türkiye'de Kürtçe müzik üretimi ve dolaşımı

This dissertation explicates the emergence and evolution of a market for Kurdish music in Turkey. Using ethnographic methods, I start by detailing the illegal circulation of cassettes during the restrictive and strife-laden period of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Through the resistive practices of circulation - recording, hiding, playing, and exchanging cassettes – cassettes became saturated with emotions, established shared emotional repertoires, and habituated individuals and collectives into common emotional dispositions. An emotional structure was generated, and accompanied the emergence of a sense of "us," the delineation of the "other," and the resistive relationship between the two. I thus demonstrate the entwinement of materiality with emotions, and the structuring potentiality that this entwinement generates. In the second part, I ethnographically explore the trajectory of the market after legalization in 1991. Situated within a context characterized by the socio-political dynamics of domination and stigmatization, I detail how market producers collectively construct an oppositional "market culture" by framing their market-related experiences, as well as by interacting with and borrowing ideological codes from the neighboring Kurdish political movement. These frames become entrenched as a political-normative logic, shaping artistic production and business decisions. This emergent logic negotiates societal-level conflict and stigma, and also resolves the market-level tension between artistic and commercial concerns. Finally, I explore the segmentation of the market in conjunction with changes in the socio-political atmosphere in the 2000s. I discuss how segmentation also corresponds to competing social imaginaries of a Kurdish public. KEYWORDS: Materiality, Circulation, Emotional Structures, Resistance,Community Market Formation, Framing, Political Normativity, Institutionalization, Social Movements, Market Culture, Stigmatization, Domination, Segmentation.