Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

Fortuitous oversights often lead to wonderful experiences. When in contact with the book review editor of JMEWS regarding an unrelated matter, I was asked to review this book. As I was familiar with some of Schäfers’s work, after a quick glance at the title I agreed. I had mistakenly presumed that this book referred to “political voice” more broadly conceived. To my surprise and delight, the book, rather than assessing Kurdish women’s political representation, took me on a sonorous odyssey deep into the culture and practice of female practitioners of the Dengbêj musical tradition in the Van region. The book is a rich, minutely detailed, and assiduously researched anthropological treatment of Dengbêj women singers and the musical technicalities of its form, but it is also much more than that. Dengbêj culture is the prism through which Schäfers lays out the internal tensions in Kurdish society as it undergoes a reckoning...