City Origin Research Articles

Listening for Jazz in Post-Armistice Istanbul

On the evening of 14 July 2013, while living in Istanbul, I walked down Kumbaracı Yokuşu away from the sounds of protest to the city's contemporary art museum. As part of the Istanbul Jazz Festival lineup, the Istanbul Modern screened director Batu Akyol's documentary Türkiye'de Caz (Jazz in Turkey), which gathers interviews with Turkish jazz musicians intimate with the country's jazz scene from the 1940s onward. The emergence of a jazz ecology of musician-composers, entrepreneurs, jazz promoters, and collectors runs in tandem with the history of the Turkish Republic, beginning in the years leading up to and including World War I and gaining momentum in the 1930s and 1940s. The documentary does not present a hermetically sealed nationalist understanding of Turkish jazz, but rather affirms a vibrant celebration of the music. To date, Istanbul's arts organizations host international jazz summer festivals and yearlong jazz programs. There are jazz clubs, radio programs, and magazines that highlight international and local events. Turkish university music departments offer jazz studies and formal performance opportunities for musicians. But there are also informal venues, such as the streets, cafes, and bookstores. While out late in Istanbul when I lived there, I would frequently listen to a lone street musician stationed outside of Narmanlı Han playing “My Funny Valentine” on his trumpet. On more recent trips, I have come across a jazz band playing Dixieland tunes along İstiklal Avenue. This is all to say that Istanbul is a city where one can listen to jazz standards, Dixieland, bebop, cool, and fusion as well as take lindy hop dance lessons from a local group. Although Akyol's documentary uncovers a jazz soundtrack dating to the 1930s that is composed of personal stories of local musicians becoming jazzers, the post-Armistice period (1918–23) remains mute, mired in what I consider to be a standard version of the city's origin story of jazz. I want to consider the case of jazz in post-Armistice Istanbul to think about how master narratives erase some sounds and privilege others.

Can government be self-organized? A mathematical model of the collective social organization of ancient Teotihuacan, central Mexico.

Teotihuacan was the first urban civilization of Mesoamerica and one of the largest of the ancient world. Following a tradition in archaeology to equate social complexity with centralized hierarchy, it is widely believed that the city’s origin and growth was controlled by a lineage of powerful individuals. However, much data is indicative of a government of co-rulers, and artistic traditions expressed an egalitarian ideology. Yet this alternative keeps being marginalized because the problems of collective action make it difficult to conceive how such a coalition could have functioned in principle. We therefore devised a mathematical model of the city’s hypothetical network of representatives as a formal proof of concept that widespread cooperation was realizable in a fully distributed manner. In the model, decisions become self-organized into globally optimal configurations even though local representatives behave and modify their relations in a rational and selfish manner. This self-optimization crucially depends on occasional communal interruptions of normal activity, and it is impeded when sections of the network are too independent. We relate these insights to theories about community-wide rituals at Teotihuacan and the city’s eventual disintegration.

Archaic Greek foundation poetry: questions of genre and occasion

From the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE the Greeks settled an astounding number of new cities on foreign lands from the Black Sea to the coast of Spain, and these new civic foundations generated narratives designed to record and celebrate a city's origin. In general, the Greeks loved to speculate about beginnings; the births of heroes, the origins of cults, and the founding of cities all formed part of their aetiological repertoire. While tales of city foundations appear prominently in archaic literature, I will argue that foundation (or ktisis) poetry does not, as is commonly assumed, function as an autonomous literary genre in the archaic period. Genre is determined by type of occasion, not by content, at this time, and there is no evidence for any one specific occasion for which ktisis poetry was intentionally composed and performed. Instead, the foundation narrative always functions as part of a larger project; we find it embedded in many different poetic genres. For these reasons, the ktisis is better understood as a literary topos or theme which adds geographical detail and aetiological focus to a variety of poetic contexts and thus is performed on more than one occasion.