Le Ray 441also increasingly become an occasion to organize and expose collective
memories of violence; not so much those of the last decades, but the mas-
sacres perpetrated in 1937–1938 by the Turkish army, which killed tens of
thousands of people in the region and forcibly displaced many others.^42
Efforts have increased to collect and diffuse the memories of this period.
Though it is still impossible to openly discuss these massacres in public
or debate them in a seminar, bus drivers, notably, found a way to directly
challenge official history. Transporting people from one district to another
during the festival, they took the opportunity to indicate sites where the
massacres took place: on the road, in the hills from which bodies were
thrown into the river, and on the banks where survivors were recovered.
y practicing and narrating spaces in “localized” terms, all these B
people thus challenge the sociospatial standardization process. How does
this production of challenging spatial meaning-making concretely pave
the way for the renegotiation of the rules of public life and for the emer-
gence of arenas of debate? Scaling down in the analysis, I will here more
specifically claim that this adversarial production and display of alterity
provides opportunities to effectively question and transform the existing
categories governing identification and interaction and, at the same time,
creates social experiences through which the formulation of a “public
issue” can be made meaningful.
Renegotiating categories
“Ordinary” public experiences
The display of Alevi identity plays an important role in reclaiming space
in Tunceli. Besides the resumption of pilgrimages towards previously for-
bidden sacred sites, several places of worship [cem evi] were built from
1999 on, generally located in meaningful sites for Alevi cosmology in
Tunceli, such as water sources or mountains embodying legends. Forms
of circulation, attitudes and practices around these new landmarks were
partly defined in contrast to the dominant norms of Sunni Islam and
associated rituals. In Tunceli, state agents have long tried to remind Alevis
of their “true” Muslim identity. More specifically, after the 1980 military