TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

is obvious that the expansion of the Ottoman high culture was a demanding one on the
Turkoman way of life, not only forcing some structural changes but also threatening the
very existence of it.
A careful reader would immediately realize that the present thesis has primarily
focused on the ‘surface current’ that refers to the political and ideological aspects of the
historical process that produced the Qizilbash Identity. Although making occasional
references to the cultural and religious background, the ‘deep current’ is of secondary
rank of interest. Consequently, the religious aspects of ‘the making of the Qizilbash
Identity’, which are without doubt as important as at least its political aspects, by and
large remained untouched. This is, however, not the intention of the present author but a
constraint posed by the present literature on the issue and the available sources. In order
to discuss the religious, anthropological, and cultural aspects of the Qizilbash Identity,
which might be labeled as the ‘invisible dimensions’ of history, or in Lévi-Strauss’s
term “unconscious structure” 2040 of societies governing the development of events, one
should first establish the ‘visible dimensions’; that is, the historical data on the events.
This thesis has already demonstrated that in the available literature, most of the
historical data regarding the advent of events had been waiting to be explored. It is
because of this fact that, the present study, although opening the discussion with
providing an intense theoretical framework, inevitably gained a narrative character in the
following chapters. Nevertheless, a careful reader would not miss that the narrative text
is structured according to the theoretical framework presented at the first chapter.
Accordingly, the theoretical approach, which is indeed derived from the analyses
2040 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, 1963, p. 21.
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