There and back: Circassians in Anatolia, by Jim Samson

[Circassian World Newsletter]

2017 Glasbene migracije: Stičisšče evropske glasbene raznolikosti . Weiss, J. (ed.). Ljubljana: Narodna in univerzitetna knijižnica [Musical Migrations: Crossroads of European Musical Diversity] p. 17-32.

 

Jim Samson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

 

Summary

 

Georgian scholars like to refer to their constituent musical traditions as ‘dialects’. But visits to the borderlands of the state (notably Svaneti and Tusheti) suggest that this may be the wrong metaphor, given the affinities of these traditions with North Caucasian practices (Kabardino-Balkaria and Chechnya / Dagestan respectively). If we visit yet another Georgian ‘borderland’, Abkhazia, the issue comes into yet sharper focus, since here musical affinities with North Caucasian (Circassian) traditions serve to underline the contested politics of the state.

 

An Abkhaz-Adygean (Circassian) culture survives today as much (or more) in Turkey as in its ancestral homelands, following the expulsion of populations in the 1860s. It has been cultivated above all in the Circassian Associations of cities such as Kayseri and Ankara, where music and dance (even more than language) have been important markers of cultural and political identity in a context of frequent minoritarian oppression. Since the 1990s, however, return to the Caucasus has become possible, whether as occasional visits, as a vie bifurquée, or as full settlement. There can also be movement in the other direction, and of course the Internet can now enable ‘virtual returns’. In this context, music and dance become the litmus tests of allegiance.

 

Biography

 

Jim Samson is Emeritus Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the music of Chopin and Liszt, on analytical and aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, and on the cultural histories of East Central and South Eastern Europe. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture, in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2016 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Ionian University. He is currently working on a book entitled Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People.

 

http://circassianworld.com/analysis/1711-there-and-back-circassians-in-anatolia-by-jim-samson