Sounding Roman: Representation and Performing Identity in Western Turkey by Sonia Tamar Seeman (review)

Sonia Tamar Seeman’s book, Sounding Roman: Representation and Performing Identity in Western Turkey, presents the long and divergent history of Romani musicians in Turkey, the history of the researcher’s witness to Romani musicians from representations in the written and visual sources from the past to their becoming mobile actors in trans-national World Music markets, and their transformation into cosmopolitans with a particular social formation. One impressive aspect of the book is the author’s awareness of this symbiotic relationship and two-dimensionality of history. Another impressive aspect about it is her masterful combination of written, visual, and audio sources with the ethnographic methods. Indeed, if we ask Sounding Roman the questions Carl Dahlhaus intended for Western classical music, ‘What is a fact of music history?’ (Foundations of Music History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 33) and ‘Does music history have a ‘subject’?’ (Foundations of Music History, 44), we would have been led to reveal the success of Seeman in writing this book with the multiplicity and diversity of our potential answers. Even considering only the sound recordings mentioned in the study, the oldest one of which dates back to 1904, we see the following: the creators of the Romani sound were not and are not alone, we cannot speak of Romani music, but Romani musics. Musical features and practices can transcend geographies with borders determined by exact and artificial lines, fields, genres and categories, music and musical practices can unite many other things within its zone of interaction, and consequentially, these can create a series of unique syncretism. Indeed, in her work, Seeman first occupies herself with highly fictionalised, exoticised, standardised. and, as a result, canonised narratives and representations on Romani people. She turns to historical sources and reveals how these narratives and representations came to be formed. The author begins considering this aspect of her subject by scrutinising the Eurocentric ‘Gypsy’ and Romani studies. This scrutinising inevitably necessitates a direct or indirect recontemplation of the origin theories and concepts such as Orval and Urheimat, basic assumptions, and the main texts upon which these assumptions are built, which these origin theories incorporate almost as historical a priori. Seeman begins her discussion of the subject by considering the early studies on the Sanskrit and Indo-Aryan languages by Hungarian, German, and British scientists in particular, and Ferdowsi’s Shah-Nameh, which plays a quite critical role in this line of scholarship. In contrast with this scholarship, however, Seeman considers these for narratives about the musicians. Besides, with the observations and data accumulated from her years-long field study, she breaks the monolithic judgements and assumptions in reference works on the Romani into pieces. Thus, she traces through the Romani the quest for origins in the formation of European identity, which lasted into the second half of the twentieth century. With this, her study also becomes a part of post-colonial readings.

The fact that Seeman takes into consideration documentation on proto-Romani groups in the Byzantine and Ottoman Anatolia is as important for incorporating such sources into research as for unearthing the historical aspect of the indecisive attitude towards these groups. As Seeman demonstrates, the official attitude, which remained constant under different state structures and names, has been coordinated assimilation and marginalisation of these groups. Seeman’s emphasis on this coordination forms a distillate and traceable basis that allows the reader to understand the Romani sound and its creators together with hegemonic relations, official and social alienation processes, the niches they create, and the emergence of neighbourhoods (mahalle) that reinforce their group identity and become the symbol of this identity.

One of the strongest points of the book is the balanced relationship Seeman establishes between disciplines such as history, sociology, and linguistics that have been influencing research on musical culture almost from its beginning and the concepts that have often been borrowed from these disciplines that lost their...