Rethiking zeybek culture in the context of political culture and folklore

Although the concept of political culture is a deep-rooted concept, it shows a variety of meaning and definition on the basis of the approaches that take it as a subject. The political culture approach, which basically refers to the field of social values and assumes that these values affect the political system, has increased its explanatory capacity as an anthropological concept in the historical development process. The discovery of the explanatory power of myths and symbols has distracted the concept of political culture from a restrictive and reductionist approach such as an "orientation to the political". In the study, the zeybek culture is handled with its story and symbolic narrative styles with the perspective of political culture focusing on symbolic meanings. It has been seen that the symbolic interaction of the society with the zeybeks is realized through the political imagination found in folkloric elements. While the society marks the structure produced by the Ottoman political culture as "unjust", it has turned to the zeybek institution, which can create an alternative to it and is decorated with images of domination familiar to its own consciousness. Zeybeks, who were considered as bandits to be destroyed in the Ottoman state discourse, were declared heroes with the republic. In the Republican era, the Zeybek resistance was manipulated by the dominant political culture by using the zeybek image, along with the meaning world of the power symbols it was loaded with. Zeybek myth or image has been redefined in the discourse of the state and the political elite by being removed from its story and turned into a commodity used in the political construction process. While this extinction process obscured the folk hero identity of the zeybeks through the use of the zeybek image by the state leader, it brought the national hero zeybek figure to the forefront and the rebellion culture in the zeybeks was eliminated with a kind of discursive integration.