440 Resisting Publics
reproduction of the dominant grammar and memory. With the changing
political configuration, however, state agents can not silence the counter-
strategies or conflicting meaning-making operations the way they used to
at the height of the conflict.
Counter-meaning-making: Challenging the sociospatial order of
the nation-state
The inhabitants of Tunceli have gradually (re)gained the ability to attach
meanings to their surrounding environment and to challenge state-
sponsored meaning-making. To make sense of this dramatically trans-
formed environment, they notably engaged in the active production of a
local time and space.^39 The most spectacular staging of this “production
of locality” (Appadurai 1996) is probably the annual Munzur Cultural
Festival. Munzur is the name of a mountain chain in Tunceli, and also
designates the river that flows across the region. This festival, initiated in
2000 by the associations of migrants of Tunceli, has been co-opted, if not
hijacked, by the newly elected pro-Kurdish city council of the provincial
main city from 2004 on.^40 Among the tens of thousands of people attend-
ing the event, many are Tunceli émigrés, now living all over Turkey but
also the rest of the world (especially Europe). This festival time marks
a temporary withdrawal of the security forces and a certain weakening
of their hold over the definition of “proper” behaviors and discourses in
public. They are indeed overwhelmed by the alternative meaning-making
operations these visitors engage in or simply enable by their presence.
During the four days of this festival, colors, songs and readings consid-
ered “publicly illegitimate” or de facto stigmatizing the rest of the year
force their way into the streets, on the stands and musical stages of the
festival. Meanwhile, sensitive issues are discussed in seminars.^41 Young
revolutionary sympathizers, while attending crowded concerts of Turkish,
Kurdish or Alevi leftist artists, systematically display challenging, often
illegal, signs of allegiance (the V for victory, pictures of the founders of
armed revolutionary movements, slogans). Émigrés who have been able to
learn and improve their native tongue (Zaza or Kurmanc) in Europe now
converse in Zaza in the streets, try to remember old words with inhabit-
ants and use the former names of places. In recent years, the festival has