Itineraries of Enlightenment: Whirling Dervish Shows, Ethnographic Reflexivity, and Tourism in Egypt and Turkey

Year 2019, , 37 - 57, 30.06.2019

Victor Vıcente

https://doi.org/10.33906/musicologist.557795

Cited By: 2

Abstract

By the year 2010, both Turkey and Egypt had achieved
tremendous success in growing their tourism markets, in part by turning to Sufi
spiritual and musical practices, which had by then been internally
rehabilitated after being historically met with suspicion or outright
suppression even as they gained a global following in the New Spiritualties and
World Music arenas. Taking the case of the so-called ‘whirling dervish show,’
this article traces how its characteristic ‘dance’ was strategically used to
promote tourism and how rituals featuring it were adapted for presentation to
ever-bigger audiences coming from abroad. Based on ethnographic research
conducted in Cairo and throughout Turkey, the article demonstrates how binary
distinctions between tourist and pilgrim, sacred and profane, and local and
foreign, become quickly blurred or contested
at these shows and in other sacred settings involving travel. Further embedding
the musical ethnographer within these vagaries, the article seeks two main
ends: to call for an ethnomusicological method that better accounts for
tourists and their subjective experiences and, thereby, to also encourage more
open reflexive framework in which the fieldworker working in tourist and
tourist-like settings can better take stock of their own positionality while in
situ and when engaging in the writing of ethnography.

Keywords

Ethnography, Reflexivity, Sufi music, Tourism, Turkey, Egypt

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