Book Reviews Eberhard Werner, Rivers and Mountains, a Historical

Iran and the Caucasus 23 (2019) 433-436

Book Reviews

Eberhard Werner, Rivers and Mountains, A Historical, Applied Anthropo- logical and Linguistical Study of the Zaza People of Turkey including an In- troduction to Applied Cultural Anthropology, Nürnberg: “VTR Publishing”, 2017.—549 pp.

The title of the book Rivers and Mountains refers to the culturally richly connoted landscape of a Turkish province called Tunceli, which is the homeland of the Zaza people. Historically also known as Dersim, this re- mote region is literally hidden “inside four mountains” topped with snow even in summer, and traversed by deep, torrential rivers. Along with the sun, moon and the stars, almost every peak, spring and river has its religious importance in the oral tradition of the local population (pp. 239, 261). In the Rivers and Mountains, Eberhard Werner, an athropologist af- filiated with the SIL,1 examines the struggle for the vitality of the language and culture of the Zazas, an Iranian-speaking ethnic group of around two- three million in modern Turkey. The book is a careful study of the assim- ilatory politics implemented by the Turkish state and the pro-Kurdish movement with regard to the Zazaki language and Zaza culture, which broadens our understanding of the state vs. minority relations while high- lighting political challenges that endure into the present. For this research, Eberhard Werner spent a long time with the com- munities of the “Zaza people”, or the “River people” (pp. 63, 71), both in their homeland in Turkey and in the European diaspora, mainly in Ger- many (p. 37). The present book is his empirical research in the frame of which he realised all in all four field trips, and held interviews with 15 Za- zas in 2005/6 on their world view (p. 19). His detailed insights into differ- ent aspects of the language, history, culture, and religions of the Zazas are the fruit of an extensive research over a period of fifteen years.

1 SIL International is a Christian non-profit organisation, researching, documenting and promoting small languages.

At the centre of Werner’s narrative stands the Zaza population in Tur- key with its self-perceptions, contested histories and group identities, navigating the area of tention between Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms. Throughout the book, the author distinguishes between several Zaza groups based on linguistic and religious differences. According to his definition, the Nothern group inhabits the mountain area called Tunceli/Dersim and folllows Alevism (pp. 116-117), whereas the Southern group, living in Diyarbakır province and its adjacent northern parts, and the Eastern group, occupying the region of Palu, Bingöl, Lice, Dicle, Genç, Muş and Kulp (pp. 67, 117-118), follow the Sunni Hanafi and Shafi͑ʿi schools. Werner’s research explicitly focuses on these three main groups of the Za- zas and the two major religious affiliations of the Zaza population to ana- lyse its diverse social forms (p. 14). Since years, international scholarship on the Zazas in Turkey and in Europe is steadily growing and extending our understanding of the main characteritics of this people and its political stakes in the modern Turkey. However, research has been dominated and shaped by a focus on Turkish- speaking Alevis, Zazaki-speaking Sunnis, identified as Kurds, as well as on a pro-Kurdish depiction of the Zazaki-speakers, levelling out historical and religious differences. Therefore, the author’s choice to adopt a broader perspective and to include also Tunceli/Dersim, as the only Turkish province with an Alevi Zazaki-speaking majority, represents a consequent option. By not labelling the entirety of Zazaki-speakers either as Turkish or Kurdish, the comparative approach adopted by Werner sig- nificantly broadens our knowledge about diversity of the Zazas in Turkey and in the diaspora. The book is divided into five parts. Following a short introductory note, Chapter 1 provides an extensive introduction to Anthropology and Ethnography (pp. 25-57), discussing conceptual and methodological challenges and describing the area of reserach (pp. 56-57); it presents an over- view of the history of research on the language of the Zazas and its dia- lects (pp. 58-59); following L. Paul (in Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Tur- key, 1989: 190-198), the author underlines the close interrelation between the language and religion. Chapter 2 is devoted to the description of the Zaza society and the Zazaki language. This part offers an interesting dis- cussion of the term “man”, merdım (pp. 341-348) and the perception of the