Performing Resistance: Horon Dance and Chanted Poetry in Turkey’s Transregional Environmental Activism

published first as (erstmalig folgendermaßen erschienen): Sevi Bayraktar: “Performing Resistance: Horon Dance and Chanted Poetry in Turkey’s Transregional Environmental Activism”. In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie / Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 145.2 (2020), Special Issue “Rethinking the Mediterranean”, pages 295–316. Die Zweitveröffentlichung dieses Artikels unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) erfolgte mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Reimer Verlags.This article examines how folk dance is deployed as an innovative tool of urban and rural contemporary protests in Turkey. It specifically focuses on horon, a popular folk dance genre across the country and a cultural heritage of minority communities in the eastern Black Sea region. I investigate how environmental activists transregionally circulate this dance during their coordinated protests in the city of Istanbul and the Rize province in the Black Sea region against a massive infrastructural project called the Green Road in the summer of 2015. The project has become a symbol of the state’s forced developmentalism, violent histories of ethnic and religious minorities and capitalist dispossession, against which multiple iterations of horon seek to create solidarity, social mobilization and political participation. Ethnographic and choreographic methods guide this study to explore the dance as a complex space of physical and social interactions. Its varying aesthetics, contested meanings, and forms of reproduction and circulation provide a lens through which to discuss how protesters negotiate their identities both in horon circles and protests. The improvisational quality of horon helps merge dance, music and chanted poetry together into political action and enables urban and rural protesters to find flexible ways of resistance across the Black Sea