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Turkish May Day in London
by Besim Can ZIRH
(01.05.2011 - London)

The majority of Turkish and Kurdish communities to London largely came in a short period between 1989 and 1995 as political refugees. As a result, leftist and Kurdish political organizations and symbolism originated from Turkey are highly visible in Turkish and Kurdish speaking migrant neighborhoods of London, and moreover, this visibility also dominates May Day demonstrations organized in London since the early 1990s when the demonstrations in Turkey were brutally suppressed by the state. In the last five years, demonstration in Turkey became popular and peaceful again. Demonstrations in London are almost like a miniature of those organized in Turkey but it is still not possible to display many of political symbols, which are employed in London, in Turkey. For a person coming from Turkey, it would be puzzling to see and hear that May Day demonstrations shouting in Turkish and Kurdish in London. In this image, you see Trafalgar Square, the end point of May Day marches, and youngsters from various political organizations (Kurdistan’s Worker Party and Turkish Communist Party / Marxist-Leninist) waving their flags, and the choir of Worker Women from Turkey singing “May Day March” in Turkish.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac90A8Jchak&feature=related

The life cycle rituals such as weddings and funerals vigorously stimulate transnational engagements among immigrant communities. On the basis of two-year multi-sited ethnographic research project among Alevi migrant communities in Europe, this article approaches the process of ‘revival’, by which Alevism has evolved from a locally invisible belief community to a transnationally visible social movement, through the lens of the mortuary practices. The ‘mortuary optic’ draws attention to the significance of funeral rituals to the study of the transnational engagements of the contemporary migrant communities and also indicates the difficulties in imagining the notion of field beyond methodological nationalism. This analysis thus considers the act of transporting deceased community members back to the natal village as a ritualized and spatial practice of (transnational) community making beyond national cartographies.

Key Words: Transnationalism, Alevis, methodological nationalism, multi-sited ethnography, mortuary optic, funeral, migration.

At the end of a long period of migration, Alishar established a household which consists of four homes in different locales in Turkey and Norway. This (transnational) household is a kind of family album portraying his ‘multi-sited biography’ because Alishar did not leave one locale here for another there but developed a simultaneous engagement with all at once (t)here. His personal migratory biography does actually epitomize his village community at large. In the course of migration from Turkey to Germany and Norway, this tiny village community, the Juniper-stone, has become dispersed among various domestic and international locales and also been articulated with a lager socio-political process, the Alevi Revival. My multi-sited research attempts to focus on this process beyond categorical and political borders inevitably involve the question of methodological nationalism. In this article, I will attempt to map the Juniper-stone village community at large to discuss my research strategy to overcome this methodological challenge.