Martin Soekefeld, Struggling for Recognition: The Alevi Movement in Germany and in Transnational Space

Abstract

Although rendered as natural, identities do not form a natural order. They are defined and delineated by continuous social interventions. Like identities, groups too are socially constructed. Group formation and enrolment are ongoing processes involving ties that are uncertain, fragile, shifting, and controversial. Groups are defined, boundaries marked, patrolled and rendered fixed and durable (Latour 2005). Struggling for Recognition discusses the construction of Alevi identity and group formation among and by Alevis in Germany. The author, Martin Sokefeld, was trained as a social anthropologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, worked as an assistant professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Hamburg, and is now employed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Social Anthropology of the University of Bern, Switzerland. Struggling for Recognition is not his first publication on Alevis—in fact he elaborates on his earlier work on the construction of Alevi identity and the struggle for definition and recognition of Alevi identity in Germany. Struggling for Recognition deals with two interlinked concerns. One is the question of how Alevi identity is constructed and maintained. Second, recognizing that if there is something essential to identities it is their innate instability. The author discusses the way in which Alevi identity is being fashioned through acts of commemoration (the ‘politics of memory’), taking up a position of opposition to the Turkish state and Sunni-Islam, and identification with modernity and Germany. The second concern is the making of Alevi civil society organizations in Germany. While debating Alevi identity and group formation among and by Alevis residing in Germany. The author also recognizes that identity construction and group formation are enacted in a transnational space among others by discussing how events in Sivas in 1993 and Istanbul in 1995 contributed to the making of Alevi identity and group formation in Germany. Most of the fieldwork for this study has been done in Int. Migration & Integration (2010) 11:239–241 DOI 10.1007/s12134-010-0129-5