Shifts in the Stature of Professional Music-Making in Kurdistan (or how Kurds from around Mardin Became Professional Musicians)

Today, self-identifying Kurds regard music-making-a vibrant, expanding domain of activity encompassing a wide array of genres and forms-as a prestigious vocation vital to their culture. Print, broadcast, and digital media embrace historical accounts of Kurdish music in which older generations of musical performers are invoked with an unambiguously laudatory tone that celebrates their national roles as agents in Kurdish culture. What is absent from such accounts as well as from the broader academic literature on Kurdish music, however, is an acknowledgment that until the midtwentieth century, performing music generally carried a stigma which branded these practices as shameful and/or sinful. In fact, the main body of professional musicians hailed from local peripatetic lineages and were locally ascribed labels comparable to the pejorative and racialized term "gypsy." The entrance of the dominant selfidentifying Kurdish population into professional music-making is part of a gradual historical process, one where music, musicians, and music-making were incorporated into a new system of meanings and values, resulting in Kurds' increased participation and the vibrant and diverse music scenes which exist today in Kurdistan and in the diaspora. By examining this process in the cultural area around Mardin, southeastern Turkey (Northern Kurdistan), this article aims to reveal how Kurdish professional musicians have navigated the stigma placed upon musical performance.