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

hagiographies 203 genuinely reflect the religious, political, and cultural stand of those
people who produced these legendary accounts and then transmitted them through
generations.
Modern anthropological studies showed that verbatim memorization, and thus
verbatim transmission of knowledge, is inapplicable in the oral tradition. Rather, in the
oral milieu, every utterance and performance is, to a certain extent, a re-creation of the
story. During the utterance, the singer or folk-teller is inevitably constrained by the
surrounding conditions; and as a natural result adds some new elements to the story
while omitting some others. In other words, every utterance injects some new elements
to the story from the preset social set up or ambiance. Fundamentally differing from the
nature of written documents, all chains of transmission in the oral milieu, hence, to a
certain extent, alters the previous version of the story. Once written down by a compiler,
however, this alteration process stops and the story freezes. 204 Likewise, when we look
203 It is intended here the so called Alevi-Bektashi velâyetnâmes. Other legendary accounts narrating
mystic leaders of sunni spiritual orders are out of the scope of this study.
204 Among a number of studies see especially Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory. History, Culture and Mind,
Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989; M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England
1066-1300, London, 1979; D. W. Cohen, “The Undefining of Oral Tradition”, Ethnohistory, vol. 36, no.
1, Ethnohistory and Africa, 1989, 9-18; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989; Susan A. Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective
Memory”, The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no.5, (Dec., 1997), 1372-1385; James Fentress and
Chris Wickham, Social Memory, Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992; R. Finnegan, Literacy and
Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication, Oxford, 1988; Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance
and Social Context, Cambridge, 1977; Amos Funkenstein, “Collective Memory and Historical
Consciousness”, History and Memory, 1, 1989, 5-26; Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, “Collective Memory-
What is it?”, History and Memory, 8, 1996, 30-50; Jack Goody, “Mémoire et apprentissage dans les
sociétés avec et sans écriture : La transmission du Bagré”, L’Homme, 17, 1977, 29-52: The Domestication
of the Savage Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 (first published 1977); The Power of
the Written Tradition, Washington, London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000; Jack Goody and I. P.
Watt, “The Consequence of Literacy”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5, 1963, 304-345; D.
H. Green, “Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies”, Speculum, vol.65, no.2,
1990, pp. 267-280; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited, translated and with an
Introduction by Lewis A. Coser, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. (Translated
from Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1952; and from La
topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: Etude de mémoire collective, Paris: Press
Universitaire de France, 1941.); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the Word,
Routledge: London, 1989.
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