From smooth to striated space: Territorializing Hızır in Alevi Dersim

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

Abstract Dersim is the only region in Turkey with an Alevi majority. The major ritual practice in Dersim is the visitation of the numerous sacred natural sites, the jiare , which are indistinct occurrences in wilderness. The tendency in Dersim to transform the jiare into concrete buildings of worship is conceptualized in this study as a marker of economic and political integration of the pastoralist tribes into a centralized state and a capitalist market economy. The move away from the spatial flexibility of noncentralized pastoral systems to the market-oriented, state-regulated structures of industrial animal husbandry has profound effects in Dersim on the community’s ontological relationship with nature, as well as on the lived experience with the more-than-human. While pastoralist Alevi communities with common access to productive assets such as pastures have been forcefully integrated into the networks of extractive capitalism, sacred sites expanding on vaguely demarcated ground are transformed into static arrangements.