Search

Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay is a well-known folklorist in Turkey and abroad. While writing her doctoral thesis, she applied to Elazig tales the Propp method, which was developed by Russian scientist Vladimir Propp in his work "Morfogija Skazki", published in Leningrad in 1928, which marks the beginning of her scientific works. She is the first scientist to implement the Propp method, which is frequently used by folklorists today, in Türkiye. She started her career at Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Geogra- phy, and continued at Hacettepe University, thus creating the Hacettepe University school. She led the establishment of the chair of Turkish Folklore at the same university between 1985-1991. She received the title of "Associate Professor" with her research titled "Aşık Style Poetry Tradition and Dream Motif". She served as a member and consultant in commissions and committees related to culture, folklore and education activities of various institutions such as the Prime Ministry of the Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of National Education, UNESCO and the State Planning Organization. In addition to her 5 books, Prof. Dr. Türkeş Günay has hundreds of publications including articles, papers, introductions-critiques, essays and translations. Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay, who continues her duty as the Dean of the Faculty of Education at Girne American University, sheds light on young researchers with her scientific articles and speeches. Scientists are people who produce, research, question, present their knowledge to the world of science and train young scientists. Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay, a scientist who has devoted her life to Turkish cultural studies, is principled, open to different suggestions and extremely objective as an administrator. She is uncompromising in scientific and business disciplines. She never conducts her relations with the people she works with on the subordinate-superior plane. By displaying her respectful style towards identities and personalities to both academic staff and students, she approaches young academics and students both like a mother and a teacher. In this study, information about Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay's life, her academic and administrative duties, the theses she supervised, and the books, articles and papers she wrote is given. In the study, the following books of Prof. Dr. Türkeş Günay, each a value in itself, were examined in detail: "Elazig Tales and Propp Method", "Aşık Style Poetry Tradition and Dream Motif in Turkey", "Risâlet-i Nushiyye and Yunus Emre", "History of Turks", and "Criticism of Turkish Culture". Based on the works of Turkish culture researcher Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay, attention was drawn to the messages she conveyed to the Turkish society and the importance of her books was examined. In the study, the views of Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay about science and the situation of the Turkish world in the historical course were pointed out and her suggestions and solutions were discussed. In addition, the articles written by Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay on the importance of critical perspective as regards the development and growth of societies are also included within the scope of the study. In addition, the bibliography of Prof. Dr. Umay Türkeş Günay's works is provided. Thus, an attempt has been made to draw a scientific portrait of Prof. Dr. Türkeş Günay based on the works. In the 80th year of her birth, the life path of the professor of the professors, Umay Mother of the Turks, is examined and her contribution to Turkish science is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name of Korkut has long attracted the attention of the world scientific community. In the folklore of many Turkic peoples related to the ancient Oghuz tribes, there are legends and myths about Korkut, which describe the heroic deeds of the Oghuz heroes. The legacy of the legendary Korkut's music and epic has attracted the attention of researchers since the middle of the 19th century. Scholars from Russia, Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have written a wide number of research papers, which highlighted the problems associated with the main epic legacy of Oghuz antiquity -- "The Book of Dede Korkut" or "The Book of Korkut Ata". The literary artifacts associated with the name of the legendary Korkut have gained worldwide fame. Both versions of the Oghuz manuscript "Kitab-ı Dede Korkut Ala Lisan-ı Taife-i Oğuzan" (Dresden) and "Hikâyat-i Oğuznâme-i, Kazan Beğ ve Gayrı" (Vatican), which have come down to us, are now the focus of scientific consideration. The abundance of cognitive information and onomastic names in the epic increasingly attracts the attention of folklorists. It is no secret that in the Kazakh folklore of the early 20th century, the Soviet ideology imposed a ban on the development of the epic heritage of Korkut. Moreover, closer to the middle of the 20th century, the Oghuz heroic epic was evaluated as a creative product of the feudal era. For this reason, some peoples of Oghuz origin openly ignored the folk heritage. Korkut is a representative of the Oghuz tribe. In addition, his name has existed in Kazakh folklore for a very long time. Even before the 1917 Revolution, several legends about the Korkut tombstone were recorded by famous ethnographers. Kazakh scholars began to study folklore materials about Korkut at the turn of the 1970s. This topic was first voiced by Professor Auelbek Konratbayev, who published several articles, then translated V. V. Bartold's edition of "The Book of my grandfather Korkut" into Kazakh. In recent decades, especially after the gaining of independence, folklorists, musicologists, and performing musicians have begun to deal with this problem. It got to the point that some of them started talking about the newly found legacy of the legendary Korkut - musical compositions for the bowed instrument - kylkobyz. Without referring to reliable sources, without arguing the origin of the newly discovered musical compositions attributed to Korkut, individual authors began to publish their rather detailed research in the form of scientific articles and even books. Despite the existing criticism in international publications, the wave of pseudo-researchers is growing. The questions related to the heritage of Korkut are overgrown with all sorts of tall tales of indefinite origin. This article attempts to conduct a scientific analysis of numerous studies published in the recent years on the pages of both foreign and local press. The works of individual novice authors who are engaged in inflating the number of legends associated with the name of Korkut are subjected to special consideration. In this regard, the article emphasizes that the classic version of the Kazakh legend of Korkut was published by V. Velyaminov- Zernov in the second half of the 19th century. Despite the presence of a published text, this legend has been freely interpreted by individual authors. Another legend, once published by A. Zhubanov without reference to the original source, also requires close study. This article is based on scientific problems related to the music and epic heritage of Korkut. It highlights the stages of mastering the musical heritage of Korkut and the legends associated with them. Much attention is paid to detailed, comparative analysis and the study of primary sources. In the process of developing the theme, all the changes that have occurred since the beginning of the development of the musical heritage of Korkut are identified. The legends that allegedly arose in connection with his music are also subjected to scientific analysis. Through the prism of hermeneutical analysis, the musical melodies attributed to Korkut are also studied. A special attention is drawn to the reliability of previ ously unknown primary sources that have begun to enter scientific realm. At the same time, the artistic features and scientific significance of these musical tunes are analyzed. Only in recent years, several articles about Korkut's musical heritage have been published on the pages of foreign scientific publications. They have become the focus of this article. In the recent years previously unknown legends, which have been claimed to be preserved in Kazakh folklore, have appeared in the literature. The admirers of Korkut's name are trying hard to connect these immature plots with the name of the legendary Korkut. Moreover, some researchers started talking about the musical heritage of Korkut, which is not known not only to the Turkic world, but also to the scientific world. As the primary source, they began to refer to the religious and mystical tunes of Nishan Shamenuly, who lived in the second half of the 20th century, from whom the musical tunes "saryn" and "sarnau" were recorded. This article attempts to determine the origin of the music and religious tunes of Nishan, because the aforementioned sweeping statements are circulated without taking into account the centuries-old performing tradition of the kobyz, some of which has not even reached our times. Without much detailed research so-called previously unknown musical heritage of medieval Korkut have been introduced to the whole world. Moreover, these same tunes, which have nothing to do with the legendary Korkut, were included in the UNESCO list as an example of the intangible culture of medieval antiquity. All these questions formed the main problem of the given article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering its domain and range, folklore is a discipline suitable for interdisciplinary studies by contributing to many scientific disciplines, especially social sciences and arts, or benefiting from them. In this context, we notice that folklorists benefit from the scientific disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, music, history, sociology and psychology at both theoretical and practical levels, and occasionally contribute to these disciplines. It is an unquestionable fact that among mentioned disciplines music, in particular, has a very wide and important place in folklore studies. Music has always appeared with its determinative and distinctive functions both in the process that covers the creation, transfer and sustainability of folklore outputs, and in the processes of defining, collecting, classifying, researching and analyzing them. In this context, even though the importance and function of music in folklore studies have been mentioned in many academic publications, musical features have been included in a specific and limited scope in a significant majority of these publications. Contrary to this situation, detailed musical analyses within the context of folklore have appeared in some studies; however, the number of these studies is limited. Considering current situation, this paper, written in the scope of Turkish folklore, has been prepared based on the view and thesis that it is important and necessary for researcher to incline to an interdisciplinary study, in its researches on musical folklore outputs, by obtaining musical knowledge or benefiting from it. In this context, the paper starts from the importance of music in the solution of the genre, form and maqam in the ashik poetry tradition. Then, it tries to explain with examples the determinative and distinctive features of music in the process of creation and transfer within the master-apprentice learning pattern in the context of ashik and Turkish epic narrative traditions; in the development and performance of religious or non-religious rituals and ritual-centred folklore outputs; the performance of folk dances; the process of creation and transfer of verse genres and forms of anonymous folk literature. The paper evaluates in which functions can be used musical items, such as rhythm (method), tune pattern (maqam/style), tempo, passages, strong pitch, increasing melodic interval size etc., within the processes of defining, collecting, researching, classification and analyzing folklore outputs that have musical features. After these evaluations, the paper discusses the necessity and importance of including musical features in studies in the period from finding and collecting to the analyzing folklore outputs within the scope of the text-centred and context-centred folklore theories. In this context, the paper puts forward the contributions which will occur as a result of the functional use of music in folklore studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this research to determine the basic dynamics of folklore research and examine general characteristics of discipline with comparing the topics that studied in Turkey and international literature. In this context, growths of scientific knowledge and existing indexing system have been examined by Scientometric point of view. The literature of folklore studies has been evaluated with a hybrid approach that combined, social network analysis and text mining applications, bibliometric data and Scientometric laws which are both similar approach relationship and dynamics of field. Current trends of folklore publications and cultural heritage material classification seen that general framework of publication are closely related to folklore core publication journals. Our findings confirm that scientific cooperation between researchers' that are regularly published in folklore related journals and diversity of sources that are used in folklore. Considering this literature and its applications it seems that the interconnections in folklore between collaboration and multi-authored papers may be more complex than the others. Most of the authors works alone (%93), in other words according to the results of the study, in folklore researches single-authored papers predominate. A number of publications have reflected on the new collaborative possibilities that after the year 2010. However, looking to studies of collaborative publication patterns in folklore studies, it is clear that relatively little has been done on this from a quantitative perspective. The visualization of the network has shown that folklore publication dynamics are based on single authored papers. It can be defined the folklore discipline is closed research area, based on reference sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional folk dances- important elements in oral culture- play important role in transmitting cultural values between generations. The dance called “canimen” performed by the Alawi Turkmens in Central Anatolia is also one of the elements of traditional oral culture and has been carried to the present day as a cultural heritage whose source is the community and whose creator is not known. The tradition of using the performing arts dating from the era before Turks’ embracing of Islam as their religion has been preserved in Alawi practices which are based on different belief forms of Turkish culture within the belief system of Alawis. This study reveals the traces of “canimen” from the past. The functions dances fulfil in the transmission of cultural codes from generation to generation are examined within the scope of the study. The field study of the dance “canimen”- which is integrated into the value system of Alawism, which reflects the social structure of the local people, which transmits the cultural features to the present and which is performed for fun- was limited to Elmapınar village of Kalecik district of Ankara. Folk dances assemble people and they prevent them from being individuals and thus play role in turning them into collective elements. The functions of the folk dance have been evaluated not only as the explicit function that is performed in the visible state but also with implicit latent functions including rituals and ceremony elements. The research data were collected through semi-structured interviews. In the study, the play-dance relationship has been emphasized and canimen is considered as a didactic element. It is found in this study that the dance has functions that strengthen the sense of unity and togetherness as an important cultural element of the community, which enable the transmission of cultural codes between generations and which also act as an instrument of socialization. On the other hand, the way folk dances are performed and the functions they fulfil also change in parallel to socio-economic and socio-cultural developments such as globalization, urbanization, and migration. While maintaining its existence in the culture-belief system in the region; it has been observed that the concepts of verbal memory of the folk dance were gradually forgotten, visual memory was beginning to disappear and the didactic function of the dance coming from the past to the present time cannot be fulfilled sufficiently today. Because rituals have significant functions in arranging, maintaining, and establishing social order; they are also open to changes in accordance with social structure. Canimen- which faces the danger of being forgotten today- is an important product of a social culture with its cultural codes and functional properties. It is of vital importance that its current structure should be recorded and transformed into a written source in keeping the cultural values alive so that the folk dance can be transmitted down to next generations by re-synthesizing it in the system of values which develop with changing life conditions. This paper considers the folk dance, canimen, from the sociological perspective. Such an element of oral culture-which is in danger of beginning forgotten- will be preserved through studies to be performed in the future with larger samples in disciplines such as literature, folklore, and performing arts. Besides, it is also thought that studies which describe the historical, cultural, and geographical details of the dance will contribute to the areas of culture and science significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, 'sense of sight' has much shorter and impressive transfer ability compared to 'reading' and 'writing'. This effectiveness stems from the fact that it offers a lot of data rapidly and also at the same time."The person observing" is provided with considerable amount of information regarding the life styles and experiences by "the object observed", which is quite important. Therefore, the existence of visual texts in cultural studies are as important as that of the written and oral texts. In this paper the traditional architecture is studied as visual text. Due to their visible properties and the fact that they are organized according to their social structure context, the traditional buildings have become the common interest of both architecture and folklore disciplines. Considering this common ground, in this paper, the examples of traditional architecture are examined as visual text through visual folklore. The examples were taken from the work titled Living Traditional Architecture at the Turkey in 2003 edited by M. Öcal Oğuz, Ezgi Metin and Fatih Mormenekşe due to the fact that architectural examples examined in the text were the structures recently compiled and that it examined architectural examples from almost all the regions of Turkey. The traditional buildings, without the need for written or spoken texts like in other visual texts, transfer plenty of information about the way of life of the period they existed. This information also provides different perspectives to researchers so that the cultural heritage can be safeguarded and redesigned in agreement with the modern times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper evaluating the relation between memory and tradition on folklore museums axis, primarily the boundaries of memory and tradition have been determined and their mutual relation has been reviewed. Due to the fact that memory and tradition are misused as substitutes for each other and as this causes incomprehensibility, it has become necessary to determine the boundaries of these two concepts. In addition to this, the relation of cultural memory and tradition with the museum has rendered an in-depth understanding of these two concepts necessary. The fact that "tradition", which enabled the birth of museums as the most important sustainability institutions of modern and postmodern societies and also the birth of folklore museums, in the context of this study, is not present in the exhibitions and collections of these museums constitutes the focus point of this article. No matter how natural it is for folklore products to constitute the collections of folklore museums, these museums are unable to exhibit all products of folklore. In this paper products of folklore are classified as "living", "inter-timed" and "fixed". While "Living" products of folklore are synonymous with tradition, inter-timed folklore products are considered as the dream of the past in the present. In addition to these, fixed folklore products are considered to be matured or dead. When the said products of folklore are considered to be artifacts and/or collections of museums, it has been observed that products of living "folklore" are not a part of museum collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Riddles are one of the most common and rich genres of folklore in both Turkish and world cultures. They explain and give us the clues of the thinking paths of the societies of oral culture. Besides riddles taught the refined ways of asking and answering the questions. Riddles have important functions in constructing and conducting the future and in the building process of the cultural memory. From this point of view riddles seems really important in educational, cultural and humorous fields. In this paper, animal riddles that are the bearer of the cultural codes from the Turkic World are analyzed with comparative method. In this study we tried to classify the complied animal riddles of Turkic World by thematic approach in means of answering, structural and thought similarities. Determining the functions of riddles with these methods will help the improvement of the riddle studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural life in the Islamic societies has developed under the Islamic culture environment. The Ottoman(the classical period) has taken the associations from the Islamic and Turkish states and developed through the conditions of the era. The Ottoman Palace, which is represented with the power relations horizontally rather than vertical with the spatial dissociation, defined both the characteristics of the Emperor residence as an identification of central politics, and the difficulty of attainability to the emperor in the area. The outer area that represents the public sphere and the inner part-harem-that represents the privacy are the indicators of a systematic that is organized related to the privacy nearby the social status as an extension of Islamic culture. In this study; the reflection of privacy of Ottoman culture to the Topkapi Palace Harem is investigated. The aim of this paper is to aid the folklore by introducing some parts of the cultural values that are lived in that structure [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Playing an instrument (saz) is vitally important in the tradition of minstrelsy. Besides 'playing a saz' as an individual tradition, the functions of the saz are highly significant at some practices, such as saying extempore/exchanging remarks (=atışma), drinking wine / the motif of dream, relationship between master and apprentice, minstrel-type folk story-telling, riddle and get somebody or something talk, all of which form the traditions of minstrelsy, and in each of these traditions the saz carries out similar and different functions. In the minstrel-type poetry, the connection and harmony between melody and lyrics are quite noteworthy. Those researchers such as Hikmet Dizdaroglu, Ahmet Talat Onay, M.Öcal Oguz have stressed the importance of melodies called 'sos styles' and 'melodies of the minstrels' in determining the types and forms of the poetry. The functions and place of saz in minstrelsy traditions require newer and further researches. The saz has been determined to have some functions, such as treating / keeping the bad souls away, communicating with sacred people, strengthening the inspiration, making the words more efficient, allowing the minstrels think while saying extempore, preparing the listeners, deciding the meter and type of the poetry, waking the minstrel candidate from dreaming who had drank wine and enable him to recite poetry. Besides all, the saz has been regarded as a 'symbol' of minstrelsy, sainthood and sacredness; therefore it is considered to be "blessed" and "companion" of the minstrel. This paper aims to reveal the function and place of the saz in the traditions of minstrelsy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, it is aimed to get clues about the concept world and idea construction of Turks through the explanation of metaphors in the proverbs of Dîvânu Lugâti't-Turk (DLT) that is the oldest dictionary of Turkish language. Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase that ordinarily means one thing is applied to another thing in order to suggest a likeness between the two, implying the comparison between the two different things. Metaphors are elements that get vigor and deed to expression and display variety to another culture from a culture. They appear through our physical, social and cultural experience. A lot of metaphors in DLT are ontological. These metaphors are loaded with lots of message. In these messages, usually, an order or an advice modality is not located in imperative sentences but is located in declarative sentences. This situation is be able to seen as an effective precaution toward refuse order or advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]