A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of  the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity

Cengiz Nuran

doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

Research Article

DOI :10.26650/IAR2021-1602 IUP :10.26650/IAR2021-1602 Full Text (PDF)

A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity

The nomads (yörüks) of Anatolia were forced to sedentarisation both during the Ottoman and the Turkish Republican eras. In today’s Anatolia, only approximately one hundred families are left who maintain their nomadic way of life: the Sarıkeçili Yörüks whose inclusion in UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding is pending. In The Legend of the Thousand Bulls [Binboğalar Efsanesi] (1971), Yaşar Kemal tells, with genuine pathos, the story of the Karaçullu, a sixty-tent pastoralist clan living in the Middle Taurus area of Southern Anatolia. Kemal depicts the Karaçullu as one of the last surviving nomadic groups of the Turkish Republic in the early 1950s and follows their quest, from one spring to the next, to find a permanent pasture upon losing their hopes of the possibility of continuing a nomadic way of life. He demonstrates the correlation between sedentarisation and the tribe’s disintegration over two axes. The first is the process from one stage of capitalism to the other as regards the ending of the nomadic way of life. The second axis is cultural integrity. Yaşar Kemal constructs the story of the tribe over the very intertwinement of the fight for existence and the fight for cultural integrity laying emphasis on the inextricable link between them. Analysing Yaşar Kemal’s emphasis on this link through the representations of nomadism in his novel as well as the connections he makes with historical events that led to the disappearance of the nomadic culture in Anatolia, I hope to contribute to cultural studies related with anthropological research on nomadism and create awareness about the situation of the last nomads of Anatolia.

Keywords: Nomads, Sedentarisation, Anatolian rural culture, Yaşar Kemal, Indigenous people, Aboriginal people

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APA

Cengiz, N.B. (2021). A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity. Istanbul Anthropological Review, 0(1), 87-100. https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

AMA

Cengiz N B. A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity. Istanbul Anthropological Review. 2021;0(1):87-100. https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

ABNT

Cengiz, N.B. A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity. Istanbul Anthropological Review, [Publisher Location], v. 0, n. 1, p. 87-100, 2021.

Chicago: Author-Date Style

Cengiz, Nuran Buket,. 2021. “A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity.” Istanbul Anthropological Review 0, no. 1: 87-100. https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

Chicago: Humanities Style

Cengiz, Nuran Buket,. “A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity.” Istanbul Anthropological Review 0, no. 1 (Apr. 2024): 87-100. https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

Harvard: Australian Style

Cengiz, NB 2021, 'A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity', Istanbul Anthropological Review, vol. 0, no. 1, pp. 87-100, viewed 18 Apr. 2024, https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

Harvard: Author-Date Style

Cengiz, N.B. (2021) ‘A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity’, Istanbul Anthropological Review, 0(1), pp. 87-100. https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602 (18 Apr. 2024).

MLA

Cengiz, Nuran Buket,. “A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity.” Istanbul Anthropological Review, vol. 0, no. 1, 2021, pp. 87-100. [Database Container], https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

Vancouver

Cengiz NB. A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity. Istanbul Anthropological Review [Internet]. 18 Apr. 2024 [cited 18 Apr. 2024];0(1):87-100. Available from: https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602 doi: 10.26650/IAR2021-1602

ISNAD

Cengiz, NuranBuket. “A Tribe is Burnt to the Ground: Reading The Legend of the Thousand Bulls as an Advocacy of Cultural Integrity”. Istanbul Anthropological Review 0/1 (Apr. 2024): 87-100. https://doi.org/10.26650/IAR2021-1602

Issue 12021, P. 87-100

TIMELINE

Submitted	23.01.2022
Accepted	01.02.2022
Published Online	16.02.2022

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