Türk Kültürü ve Hacı Bektaş Velî Araştırma Dergisi (Sep 2019)
SIRAÇ SOSYOPOLİTİK HAREKETİ VE ANŞA BACILI OCAĞI
Abstract
Sıraç, known as an Aşiret, is a Kızılbaş/Alevi community of Beydili Turkoman living in villages of Tokat, Yozgat, Sivas and Amasya in central Anatolia. Most of the Siraçi villages in Tokat-Zile and Yozgat-Çekerek belong to the ocak of Anşa bacı that began to institutionalize a hundred and fifty years ago. Sıraç Turkmens set up a new ocak during the leadership of Anşa bacı at the end of the nineteenth century. The 19th century, when the ocak was founded, coincided with a transition period in which the Ottoman Empire implemented Westernization projects, underwent a process of rapid, radical and intertwined structural and cultural change and faced with crises related to it. This study aims to explore socio-political movements initiated by Sıraçis at the beginning of the nineteenth century against both Kızılbaş ocaks and central authority and resulting in schism and establishment of a new ocak as a process according to V. Turner’s approach of social drama. How the movement initiated by Sıraçis was structured as a separate and new ocak is tried to be pointed out. The institutionalization of the ocak of Anşa Bacılı was analysed according to the data obtained from the Ottoman archival documents and the ethnographic fieldwork carried out in villages in the Zile/Tokat and Çekerek/ Yozgat between 2010 and 2012. As a result, it was concluded that Sıraç sociopolitical movement was institutionalized as a new and separate ocak through the stage of breach, crisis and redress.
