The dengbêjî tradition among Kurdish - Kurmanj communities: Narrative and performance during late nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The aim of this thesis is to study the the kilams and the dengbêjî tradition, the musical storytelling of Kurdish-Kurmanjee minstrels, mainly in the Eastern and Southeastern Turkey, and Western Armenia. In the thesis, the dengbêjî is classified as a ?genre? which is different from other Kurdish musical-narrative genres such as stranbêjî and çîrokbêjî. The thesis uses library research, private musical archives, and in-depth interviews as its main sources. The existing literature on dengbêjî usually consists of descriptive accounts of regional collections of kilams and strans, taking these to be part of the same repertoire. However the kilams differ from stran and çîrok genres in their particularly historical focus. While çîroks are fictions with fantastic elements, and strans express emotions like sorrow, happiness, or descriptions from daily life, kilams are surviving narratives of experienced historical events. An important contribution of this thesis has been the content analysis of the kilams? repertoire. This thesis is argues that the kilams have three important components which mark them. They all tell a historical event, which can be a riot, a family/tribal conflict or a true love story. They are also an outcome of a purely oral tradition, functioning as an oral transmitter of the knowledge of the past, and kept in memory though performances, where they are adapted and continuously reproduced. This thesis also argues that the dengbêjî tradition is a performative form of transmitting of history through a local voice. This means, the thesis focuses on local history and local language in the mentioned Kurmanjee speaking regions.