Tradition and innovation in diasporic Turkish Alevi identity

Since the 1980s, Alevi communities in Turkey and across the diaspora have been engaged in an intense project of identity revival and a transnational quest for recognition. A number of its features make it a particularly interesting case of the rise of the salience of identity in social, cultural and political life in the contemporary era. The revival has involved a reconstruction of collective identity which itself traversed the shift from ‘ideological’ to identity politics characteristic of the latter part of the 20^th century, its political context has been very influential, and it has faced challenges arising from its historical roots in an oral tradition largely practiced in secrecy .  These very characteristics have led a number of commentators to invoke the idea of the ‘invention of tradition’ to describe the processes involved. In this paper, I argue that overemphasis on this notion obscures important aspects of the revival, and suggest that the ‘multiple modernities’ approach associated with S N Eisenstadt and Johann Arnason offers a more comprehensive and insightful framework for its analysis. More generally, I argue that the paradigm of multiple modernities provides important insights about the relationship between tradition and modernity that are relevant to the analysis of collective identities more broadly.