442 Resisting Publics
coup, the governor of the province fostered the building of mosques, one
in nearly every village, and imams were appointed. Nowadays, within the
cities, the cem evi generally operate as cultural centers, providing music
and semah [an Alevi ritual dance] courses as well as a site for worship-
ping.^43 Further, the celebration of Alevi holidays and commemoration
of the violence perpetuated against the Alevi community began to ani-
mate streets and recovered sacred sites of Tunceli again. This renewal of
a heterodox religious space, with (nearly exclusively) Sunni state agents
looking on, did not come about without tensions. A young girl, going to
the cem evi of the main city of Tunceli with her mother, remembers one
of the policemen at the checkpoint sneering: “Dirty Christians, go and
light some candles for us too!”^44 The young girl, shocked, stared at the
policeman, while her mother chose to ignore him.^45 Here, the policeman’s
disparagement gave visibility to conflicting normative systems and adver-
sarial moral principles. There was no stabilized system of mutual expec-
tations as such: the policeman did not show the “civil inattention” that
might have been expected; but neither did he prevent them from going
to the cem evi, by using violence or further harassment for example. As
for the mother and daughter, they tried to appear unaffected, ignore this
verbal aggression and go on their way as proudly as they could. That the
policeman asked for moral accountability, using references and terms that
are part of a broader debate on orthodoxy (however stereotyped); and
that this affected both the protagonists and onlookers in their attitudes, as
well as in their later conversations, makes it a public experience.
s experience then became available to feed the definition of Thi
a public issue or a broader debate. The young girl in this story was, for
example, recounting this event during a discussion with friends and for-
eigners to support her argument over the identity of the people of Tunceli
and their uniqueness. This is also the same type of “ordinary” experience
that participants in the seminar on “Alevism: An Identity under Pressure”
during the Munzur Festival mobilize to illustrate their point and to make
sense of the more “general” arguments of the speakers. To find resonance,
these debates need to be grounded in lived experience and practical
knowledge. The rise in generality calls for a simultaneous confrontation
with particularity.^46 Conversely, the rise in generality within debate can
more immediately follow from this confrontation over devices and rules