Keeping the Path amid Change: Ritual Transmission and Religious Transformation Among Tahtacı Alevis in Western Anatolia

1. Introduction

On 13 October 2024 in Yılmazköy (Aydın), a seventy-four-year-old mürebbi and a seventy-one-year-old anabacı (the mürebbi’s wife and ritual partner) tied a belt in three successive knots before two young married talips who had recently entered the Yol (the Path). Each knot was linked to an ethical obligation—controlling one’s hands, waist, and tongue—and the younger participants learned through speech, gesture, bodily posture, material symbolism, and deference to recognized ritual authority. The episode condensed the problem at the center of this article: a religious tradition may remain recognizable across generations while the settings, forms, emphases, and practical capacities through which it is transmitted are being reorganized.

This problem is central to contemporary research on Alevism. Migration, urbanization, formal education, occupational diversification, institutionalization, and technological change can alter where ritual occurs, who participates, how religious authority is encountered, and which forms of knowledge remain practically reproducible. Such processes do not produce a single trajectory of secularization, decline, or preservation; rather, they reconfigure the social conditions under which Alevi religious life is learned, authorized, enacted, and carried forward (Ersal 2024). Religious transformation therefore requires analysis at the level of transmission as well as at the level of institutions, public identity, or doctrine.

The Tahtacı Alevis of western and southern Anatolia provide a particularly revealing case because religious life is organized through dense relations among households, ritual kin, musicians, elders, and ocak-based authorities. In this article, Yol refers to the moral, religious, and communal “Path” through which belonging and proper conduct are understood; ocak refers to a hereditary sacred lineage and authority network; dede to a hereditary religious authority; talip to an affiliated follower within that network; mürebbi to a recognized ritual mentor or guide; musahiplik to ritual kinship; and güvender/zâkir to a ritual-musical specialist. These terms are used in their Tahtacı contexts and should not be treated as uniform across all Alevi communities.

Existing scholarship has documented Tahtacı origins, social organization, ritual, music, death practices, transition ceremonies, and processes of sedentarization and modernization (Akyürek 2020; Çandarlı 2026; Demir 2024; Esen 2021; Gacar 2022; Gök 2023; Gülten 2020; Yetişen 1986, 2008). Recent work on contemporary Alevism has also made intergenerational transmission a more explicit problem: Özalp and Şimşir (2026) examine how dedes negotiate the transmission of beliefs and values to young people under urban conditions, while Demir and Çevik (2026) analyze how collective memory and affect move across generations through family narratives, embodied practices, and cem ritual (the central communal worship gathering in Alevi religious life). These studies establish transmission as active religious work rather than passive inheritance.

The present study extends that discussion by shifting the unit of analysis from a single authority figure, one ritual, or one mode of memory to the comparative reproductive capacity of several ritual domains. Tahtacı religious life is particularly suitable for this comparison because moral teaching, ritual kinship, music, mourning, food sharing, marriage, household continuity, and relations with ocak authorities overlap without being equally dependent on the same transmitters or occasions. This makes it possible to ask why some practices remain resilient while others become symbolically recognizable but practically fragile.

The central research question is therefore: How do Tahtacı Alevis reproduce culturally indispensable religious meanings, relationships, and practices across generations under changing social conditions? Three subsidiary questions guide the comparison: through which relationships and settings is knowledge transmitted; how do recognition, participation, competence, and authority differ across ritual domains; and under what conditions does adaptation sustain or weaken the capacity to generate future practitioners?

The analysis draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2026 in thirteen Tahtacı settlements in İzmir, Aydın, Muğla, and Denizli. It compares five domains that make different transmission mechanisms visible: the ethical teaching embodied in the three-knotted belt; Hak Üleştirme; Yas Nefesi and funerary practice; Öznek; and Hearth Digging. The study distinguishes direct observation, reported contemporary practice, and remembered practice so that participants’ claims of continuity are not treated automatically as evidence of unchanged historical form.

The argument is that religious continuity among the Tahtacı is best understood as differential reproduction within a transmission ecology. “Keeping the Path” names an ethnographically grounded framework in which boundary work and communal recognition, relational authority, intergenerational participation, embodied and oral-musical learning, and selective adaptation interact to produce uneven forms of future capacity. The contribution is not a universal model of Alevism. It is a comparative explanation of how transformation redistributes the conditions under which religious knowledge can remain meaningful, become performable, and be entrusted to subsequent generations.

2. Tahtacı Alevis in Histories of Religious Transformation

2.1. Religious Organization, Internal Diversity, and the Yol

Scholarship on Tahtacı Alevis spans folklore, history, anthropology, sociology of religion, ethnomusicology, and Alevi studies. Early work established the historical and ethnographic foundations for understanding Tahtacı origins, settlement, belief, and communal organization (Kehl-Bodrogi 1988; Selçuk 2004, 2008; Yetişen 1986, 2008; Yılmaz 1946, 1948; Yörükan 2002). More recent research has emphasized regional differentiation and cautioned against treating Tahtacı communities as geographically or socially homogeneous (Çıblak Coşkun 2013; Gülten 2020). This internal diversity is methodologically important because shared religious vocabularies coexist with localized practices, authority relations, and histories.

Historical scholarship has debated the relationship between contemporary Tahtacı communities and earlier Ağaçeri or Türkmen formations. Although interpretations differ, the literature consistently situates Tahtacı communities within a long history of mobile and semi-mobile forestry-related livelihoods, regional settlement, and distinctive Alevi religious organization (Gülten 2020; Selçuk 2008; Yılmaz 1948; Yörükan 2002). The present study uses these histories for contextualization rather than as evidence that contemporary rituals have survived unchanged.

Religious and social organization is structured especially through the ocak system, dede–talip relations, kinship, and ritual kinship (Çıblak Coşkun 2019; Gacar 2022; Selçuk 2008; Yörükan 2002). In Western Anatolia, the communities examined here are associated primarily with the Yanyatır and Hacı Emirli ocaks. Musahiplik creates durable ritual-kin obligations extending beyond biological descent, while relations among dedes, mürebbis, talips, elders, households, and ritual specialists organize repeated contexts of instruction, correction, obligation, and recognition (Kehl-Bodrogi 1997; Çıblak Coşkun 2019).

These relations matter analytically not because they mechanically “preserve” culture, but because they distribute religious learning and legitimacy. Ocak affiliation, household ties, ritual kinship, and recognized specialist roles shape who encounters whom, whose interpretations carry authority, and where practical knowledge can be acquired. Continuity is therefore relational: knowledge remains transmissible to the extent that social relations continue to connect meanings, practices, authorities, and new participants.

2.2. Ritual, Music, Memory, and Specialist Knowledge

Ethnographic studies have documented transition rituals, cem practices, sacrifice, household traditions, marriage, death, and local belief systems (Çandarlı 2026; Çıblak 2005; Duman 2019; Duman and Taşçinten 2020; Gök 2023). Death and mourning are especially revealing. Research in the Aegean region shows that laments and yas nefesleri combine sacred narrative, musical practice, emotional expression, and communal participation (Akyürek 2020; Uluocak 2014). For readers outside Alevi Studies, nefes and deyiş refer here to religious-poetic song forms, while semah refers to ritual movement/dance associated with Alevi worship; the exact repertoires and uses vary by region. Studies of nefes, semah, and the sazandar tradition demonstrate that musical knowledge is embedded in ritual service and authority (Akyürek 2018; Gacar 2022; Tamay 2009). Recent work on Alevi deyiş transmission further shows that variation in performance can coexist with strong religious and cultural continuity (Oktay and Özdemir 2026).

The literature also reveals an important distinction between widespread cultural principles and specialist knowledge. Some teachings circulate broadly through family and communal life, whereas musical repertoires, ritual sequences, or forms of sacred authority may depend on a smaller number of recognized transmitters. This difference is visible in studies of sazandarlık, yas nefesleri, and localized ritual practices. It suggests that “continuity” should not be treated as a single condition: different cultural domains may possess different transmission infrastructures and therefore different degrees of resilience.

2.3. From Social Change to the Transmission Problem

Research on sedentarization, migration, education, urbanization, and occupational change demonstrates substantial transformation in Tahtacı social life while also identifying persistent cultural values and ritual relationships (Ersal 2024; Esen 2021). Demir’s (2024) review of postgraduate research confirms both the breadth and the disciplinary dispersion of Tahtacı scholarship. At the same time, Salman Yıkmış’s (2026) Narlıdere ethnography shows that weakening dede–talip and ocak relations can accompany genuine losses in traditional religious knowledge. Taken together, these studies caution against both romantic continuity and linear modernization narratives.

Recent studies published within contemporary Alevi research sharpen the transmission problem from complementary angles. Özalp and Şimşir (2026) show how Alevi dedes negotiate the transmission of beliefs and values to young people under urban conditions, whereas Demir and Çevik (2026) demonstrate how collective memory and affect are reproduced across generations through family narratives, embodied practices, and cem ritual. The present study extends these arguments in three respects: it focuses specifically on Tahtacı Alevi communities, compares five ritual domains across thirteen settlements, and asks not only whether meanings remain recognizable but whether current arrangements generate practical competence, legitimate authority, and future transmitters.

What remains underdeveloped is an integrated account of how different transmission mechanisms interact and why they generate unequal outcomes within the same religious tradition. Existing studies provide rich evidence on origins, institutions, rituals, music, death, settlement, memory, and social change, but these strands are rarely compared as parts of a relational system. A transmission perspective makes it possible to connect authority, boundary work, participation, tacit learning, music, memory, and adaptation without reducing transformation to either loss or persistence.

Three gaps follow. First, continuity is frequently documented as an outcome but less often analyzed as the social production of future religious capacity. Second, single-site or single-domain studies make it difficult to compare how different practices depend on different combinations of family life, ritual authority, specialists, and recurring participation. Third, change and continuity are often treated as opposites, whereas the ethnographic problem is to determine which meanings and relationships remain culturally indispensable, which forms can be reorganized, and when adaptation narrows the opportunities through which competence can be reproduced.

3. Analytical Framework: Keeping the Path as a Transmission Ecology

3.1. Culturally Indispensable Elements and Differential Reproduction

The analytical framework treats ritual continuity as a socially organized process of reproduction rather than unchanged survival. Classical ritual theory established that rituals organize transitions, authority, collective belonging, and social order (Bell 1992, 1997; Turner 1967, 1969). Schechner’s (2003) concept of restored behavior is useful because repetition can create recognizability without exact duplication. Recent heritage theory similarly emphasizes reproduction through reinterpretation and renewal rather than static preservation (Zhu 2026). The relevant question is therefore not whether form remains identical, but which dimensions of religious life are reproduced and with what future capacity.

Rather than positing a fixed cultural core, this article refers to culturally indispensable elements as those meanings, obligations, relationships, and forms of belonging that participant repeatedly recognize as constitutive of the Yol. These may be normative, symbolic, relational, or communal, but their status is an ethnographic finding rather than an analytical assumption. The framework therefore leaves room for disagreement, generational reinterpretation, local variation, and historical change.

This formulation avoids treating Tahtacı culture as a timeless essence. What counts as indispensable is reconstructed from recurring participant recognition and from the ways particular meanings continue to organize action, authority, obligation, and belonging. The comparative task is then to ask whether these elements are reproduced at the level of recognition only, or whether they are also supported by participation, procedural knowledge, performative competence, authorization, and the ability to teach others. This is what the article calls differential reproduction.

3.2. Situated, Embodied, and Oral-Musical Transmission

Cultural transmission is likewise treated as active social work. Thurston (2026) argues that transmission requires presence, time, effort, learning, and participation. Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) show that cultural competence develops through situated participation rather than formal instruction alone. In Tahtacı contexts, transmission occurs through families, elders, dedes, mürebbis, ritual specialists, musicians, kinship, musahiplik, and repeated communal participation. This study therefore defines transmission as the socially organized reproduction of knowledge, practice, moral obligation, authority, and belonging across generations.

Transmission also has vertical, horizontal, and relational dimensions. Knowledge moves between generations, among peers, and through relations that do not fit a simple parent-child model. A younger participant may learn one aspect of the Yol from family, another from a dede or mürebbi, another through music, and another through participation in funerals or communal meals. The density of these overlapping channels is analytically important because redundancy can strengthen resilience: if one channel weakens, others may continue to sustain recognition and competence.

A substantial part of this knowledge is embodied and tacit. Bourdieu (1977) emphasizes dispositions produced through practice, while Connerton (1989) shows how social memory is carried through bodily and commemorative action. Miton and DeDeo (2022) further distinguish explicit knowledge from tacit competence. Knowing that a ritual exists is not the same as knowing how to participate, when to act, how to respond to authority, or how to perform culturally appropriate conduct. This distinction is central to evaluating continuity.

This embodied perspective also provides a way to distinguish different levels of continuity. Symbolic familiarity can remain strong even when practical competence declines. Conversely, a practice may continue procedurally while participants attach changing meanings to it. The framework therefore asks separately about recognition, interpretation, competence, participation, and reproduction. This distinction becomes especially useful in analyzing Hearth Digging and other practices whose symbolic significance may outlast regular performance.

Memory and music provide another transmission channel. Cultural memory is socially organized and mediated through ritual, narrative, performance, and material-symbolic forms (Assmann 2011). In Alevi contexts, poetic and musical traditions connect sacred history, affect, and group boundaries (Kara 2023). Oktay and Özdemir (2026) show that deyiş transmission is dynamic: variation in melody or performance does not necessarily constitute rupture. Oral-musical tradition can therefore sustain continuity without exact sameness.

3.3. Boundary Work, Relational Authority, and Selective Adaptation

Boundary work is treated here as an active process of communal recognition rather than as social closure. Boundaries may remain meaningful even when mobility, education, urbanization, and intermarriage increase. What matters is whether distinctions, obligations, and forms of authority associated with the Yol continue to organize interaction and evaluation. Historically endogamous networks are therefore one enabling condition among several, not a deterministic explanation of continuity.

Relational authority is equally important. Following Barth (1969) and Cohen (1985), the analysis shifts attention from static cultural content to the social production of belonging; studies of Tahtacı ritual organization likewise show how ocak affiliation, dede–talip relations, and musahiplik connect knowledge with legitimate authority (Çıblak Coşkun 2019; Gacar 2022). The framework brings these dimensions together as Keeping the Path: boundary work and communal recognition, relational authority, intergenerational participation, embodied and oral-musical transmission, and selective adaptation interact to shape whether culturally indispensable elements can be reproduced.

The process can be summarized as follows. Changing social conditions reorganize relations of authority, belonging, and opportunities for participation. Participation in turn creates—or fails to create—situations in which verbal, bodily, moral, musical, and affective learning can occur. Where several pathways overlap, a practice may remain resilient despite changes in form or setting. Where transmission depends disproportionately on one specialist, one generation, or rare occasions, recognition may persist while practical reproduction becomes fragile. Keeping the Path is thus a comparative heuristic for analyzing both continuity and transformation within the same ethnographic field.

4. Materials and Methods

4.1. Research Design and Field Sites

This study employed a qualitative, multi-sited ethnographic design to examine how religious knowledge is experienced, interpreted, practiced, and transmitted among Tahtacı Alevis in Western Anatolia (Geertz 1973; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). A multi-sited design was appropriate because the aim was not to treat one settlement as representative of Tahtacı life as a whole, but to compare how similar religious principles and practices were organized under different local conditions (Marcus 1995).

Fieldwork was conducted between 2021 and 2026 in thirteen settlements in İzmir, Aydın, Muğla, and Denizli, including communities associated primarily with the Yanyatır and Hacı Emirli ocaks. Sites were selected purposively to provide variation in ritual authority, participation, migration, urbanization, and intergenerational contact. The thirteen sites are not a statistical sample of all Tahtacı communities. They constitute an analytical comparison in which recurring patterns were traced across locations while local differences were retained rather than normalized.

4.2. Participants and Data Generation

Twenty-five participants were selected purposively as information-rich interlocutors (Patton 2015): thirteen men and twelve women aged twenty-one to eighty-five. Selection prioritized variation in generation, degree of participation, and position within religious and communal life. Participants included long-term community members, active ritual participants, elders, cultural transmitters, and individuals with experience as dedes, mürebbis, güvenders/zâkirs, musahips, or other knowledgeable community members. The sample was designed for ethnographic depth and comparison rather than statistical representation.

Data were generated through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, field notes, and audiovisual documentation. Observation focused on ritual sequence, participant roles, intergenerational interaction, bodily conduct, oral and musical transmission, food sharing, ritual authority, and explicit references to the Yol, continuity, and change. Interviews focused on how participants learned practices, from whom knowledge was acquired, which meanings and obligations they regarded as important, and how they understood generational differences.

A central methodological distinction was maintained among directly observed practices, reported contemporary practices, and remembered practices. Participants’ temporal comparisons—such as “formerly,” “today,” “our elders,” and “young people”—were treated both as claims about change and as culturally meaningful ways of evaluating the present. Because not every ritual occurred with equal frequency and not every practice was directly observed in every settlement, recollections that a practice had “always” existed were not treated as historical proof of unchanged form. This calibration of evidence is especially important to the article’s distinction between cultural recognition and practical reproduction.

Audiovisual materials were used as supplementary evidence for musical, bodily, and sequential dimensions that are difficult to capture fully in notes. They were interpreted together with interviews and observation rather than as self-explanatory records. The five ritual domains analyzed in the article were selected because the field material allowed meaningful comparison of different transmission arrangements; they are not presented as an exhaustive inventory of Tahtacı ritual life.

4.3. Data Analysis, Trustworthiness, and Ethics

Data were analyzed iteratively using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006). Initial coding remained close to the ethnographic material and included learning from elders, ritual participation, family transmission, ocak authority, moral teaching, music, obligation, changes in form, declining participation, and references to the Yol. Codes were then compared across participants, sites, generations, and ritual domains to identify differences in recognition, participation, competence, authority, and reproductive capacity. Negative and contrasting cases were retained so that vulnerability was analyzed rather than treated as an exception to continuity.

Trustworthiness was supported through methodological triangulation, multi-sited comparison, prolonged engagement, generational variation, reflexive field notes, and attention to negative cases (Creswell and Poth 2018; Lincoln and Guba 1985). Ethical practice emphasized informed participation, confidentiality, cultural sensitivity, and respect for restricted ritual knowledge. Where appropriate, personal information was anonymized, and audiovisual documentation was used only with permission. The corresponding formal ethics, consent, and data-availability declarations are provided in the back matter.

Analytically, the study moved from situated ethnographic evidence to participant interpretation, comparison across sites or participants, identification of continuity or variation, and then conceptual interpretation. This sequence was used to prevent the framework from substituting for primary evidence. Claims were therefore calibrated to the scale of the material: practices documented in one location are presented as local cases, while broader propositions are made only where recurring evidence across interviews, observations, or sites supports comparison.

5. Results: Uneven Pathways of Religious Transmission

Across the thirteen field sites, the ethnographic material revealed continuity in moral principles, social relationships, and culturally significant meanings, but not uniformity in ritual form, frequency, or practical competence. Some practices remained embedded in several overlapping contexts of participation, while others depended on fewer specialists or rarer occasions. The results therefore present continuity and transformation together. Each subsection begins with situated ethnographic evidence and then asks what that evidence reveals about the capacity to reproduce future practitioners, not merely about the present visibility of a practice.

5.1. Embodying the Yol: Moral Instruction through the Three-Knotted Belt

On 13 October 2024, in Yılmazköy (Aydın), a seventy-four-year-old male mürebbi and a seventy-one-year-old anabacı (the mürebbi’s wife and ritual partner) tied a belt in three successive knots in the presence of two young married talips, a twenty-four-year-old man and a twenty-one-year-old woman, who had recently entered the Yol. As the elder practitioners formed the knots, they associated them respectively with the obligation to control one’s hands, waist, and tongue. Their explanation connected bodily restraint with appropriate conduct: the hands referred to one’s actions toward others, the waist to sexual morality and self-discipline, and the tongue to responsible speech. Through the handling and tying of the belt, these ethical principles were given a visible and bodily form.

The sequence brought different generations and ritual positions into the same space of instruction. The mürebbi and anabacı did not present the three principles as abstract statements to be memorized. They demonstrated them through an object worn on the body and through an act performed under recognized ritual authority. The younger talips learned not only by listening but also by watching the elders’ movements, attending to the sequence of the knots, and adopting the bodily posture expected in the ritual setting. Moral knowledge was therefore communicated simultaneously through speech, gesture, material form, hierarchy, and participation.

The ritual felt profoundly mystical and sent shivers through me. At that moment, I felt genuinely bound to our inherited Yol and sensed the responsibility of transmitting it to future generations. I folded my hands in front of me, bowed slightly, and experienced, in the depths of my being, my respect for my guide, my elders, and the ritual.

This account reveals that the young participant did not experience the teaching simply as information about an inherited custom. Folding the hands, bowing, and feeling “bound” to the Yol connected moral instruction with bodily submission, respect for ritual authority, and an emerging sense of intergenerational responsibility. The participant’s reference to future transmission is particularly significant: entering the Yol was understood not only as receiving an inheritance but also as assuming an obligation to carry it forward.

The elder and younger participants nevertheless emphasized different dimensions of the same event. The elder practitioners presented the knots primarily as binding ethical commitments that should regulate conduct both within and beyond ritual contexts. The younger participant foregrounded reverence, emotional attachment, inherited identity, and responsibility toward future generations. This was therefore not a contrast between knowledge and ignorance or between continuity and disappearance. Rather, it showed how a recognizable moral principle could be interpreted through different generational registers. The normative language of the elders became, in the younger participant’s account, an affective experience of belonging and responsibility.

Accounts gathered in other interviews and informal conversations likewise indicated that controlling one’s hands, waist, and tongue was not understood as a principle confined to the occasion on which the belt was tied. Participants connected it with family instruction, the authority of elders, communal evaluations of conduct, and everyday expectations concerning speech, sexuality, self-restraint, and responsibility. A person’s relationship to the Yol was thus evaluated not only through attendance at ritual events but also through conduct made visible in ordinary social life.

The continuity of this moral teaching therefore depends on several overlapping channels. It is verbalized by elders, embodied through the three-knotted belt, enacted within an authorized relationship between mürebbi and talip, reinforced through family socialization, and recalled when community members evaluate appropriate behavior. Because it circulates through ritual, language, bodily practice, family instruction, and communal judgment, its transmission is not dependent on a single occasion or specialist performance.

The Yılmazköy episode consequently illustrates a comparatively resilient form of continuity. The precise circumstances in which younger participants encounter the teaching may differ from those experienced by older generations, and its emotional or identity-related meanings may become more pronounced. Yet the principle remains recognizable because it continues to connect bodily discipline, moral responsibility, ritual authority, and belonging to the Yol. In this case, continuity does not consist in the mechanical repetition of a ritual form. It is produced when a moral teaching is repeatedly translated into words, gestures, relationships, and obligations through which new participants can experience it and eventually become responsible for its transmission.

5.2. Making Hak Circulate: Food, Reciprocity, and Communal Obligation

On the evening of Thursday, 25 April 2024, a household in Yeniköy (Aydın) prepared börek with seasonal herbs over a wood fire, together with round pieces of dough referred to as lokma. Before the food remained within the household, portions were set aside for distribution. These portions were shared with neighbors and other residents throughout the village. Plates were also reserved for people who were not at home and were delivered to them later.

The sequence of preparation and distribution was significant. Food was not offered only to those who happened to be present, nor was sharing treated as an optional act performed after the household’s own needs had been met. Portions were separated in advance, and the absence of particular recipients did not remove them from the network of obligation. By ensuring that food reached those who were temporarily outside the immediate setting, participants extended the act of sharing beyond face-to-face exchange. The practice materially enacted the principle that what is recognized as hak—a share carrying moral and religious obligation—should circulate rather than remain confined to a single household. An eighty-two-year-old female talip, reflecting on these changes, recalled:

In the past, toward evening, we would bring the earliest fruits of the season out onto our street and distribute hak, offering them to everyone who passed, adults and children alike. This also served as a charitable offering for the souls of our deceased relatives. At times, our distribution of hak consisted of börek made with seasonal herbs and drinks such as tea or ayran. Those who had something shared what they had with those who did not, ensuring that everyone could obtain fruit and vegetables. It was, in a sense, a balance between rich and poor. When we distributed hak, we felt spiritually fulfilled; those who ate the fruit prayed for our deceased and felt gratitude. It represented our unity as a community, equitable sharing, and the removal of distinctions between rich and poor. I especially want the younger generation to continue this ritual, tradition, and custom.

Her account presents Hak Üleştirme as more than the transfer of food between households. The earliest seasonal fruits, herb-filled börek, tea, and ayran became media through which several relationships were simultaneously renewed. The living shared with one another, those with greater access to food were expected to include those with less, and recipients offered prayers for deceased relatives. Sharing thus linked material provision, remembrance of the dead, spiritual fulfillment, and communal recognition within the same practice.

The participant’s description of the practice as a “balance between rich and poor” is particularly important. This statement does not imply that economic differences within the community disappeared. Rather, it shows that Hak Üleştirme was understood as a moral response to such differences. Food was temporarily removed from exclusive household ownership and placed within a wider circulation of entitlement and responsibility. The practice did not depend on determining whether recipients had formally requested assistance. Adults, children, passers-by, neighbors, and people who were absent from their homes could all be included within the act of distribution.

The older participant’s recollection also introduces a temporal contrast. Her repeated references to “the past” and her wish that younger generations continue the practice indicate that she perceived a reduction in its regularity or visibility. Accounts collected during the fieldwork similarly associated changes in the organization of communal sharing with altered household structures, work routines, migration, and contemporary patterns of everyday life. Such recollections should not be treated as proof that Hak Üleştirme was practiced identically or with equal frequency in every settlement in an earlier period. They instead reveal how participants evaluate the present through memories of a more intensive communal life and which dimensions of the practice they consider worthy of transmission.

The Yeniköy observation complicates a simple narrative of disappearance. Although older participants expressed concern about declining frequency, food was still being prepared, deliberately set aside, carried beyond the household, and delivered to those who were absent. The form and regularity of the practice may therefore be changing without its moral logic becoming unintelligible. Participants continued to recognize that possessing food generated an obligation extending beyond the individual household and that the fulfillment of this obligation produced both social and spiritual value.

The episode also demonstrates that the transmission of Hak Üleştirme occurs through participation in a sequence of ordinary tasks. Knowledge of the practice is encountered through preparing food, separating portions, identifying recipients, carrying plates, receiving what has been distributed, and acknowledging the intention associated with the offering. These actions create different positions from which community members can learn what counts as hak and what obligations accompany it. The principle is therefore transmitted not only through explicit explanations by elders but also through repeated participation in the social organization of sharing.

Hak Üleştirme represents a form of adaptive continuity. What persists is not necessarily an unchanged schedule, an identical range of foods, or a uniform mode of distribution across all settlements. Its more resilient element is the expectation that something recognized as hak must move outward: from the household to the neighborhood, from those who have to those who may have less, from the living toward the memory of the deceased, and from older practitioners toward younger generations. The continuity of the practice is consequently relational and moral as well as procedural. It is reproduced whenever food is transformed from private provision into a medium of communal responsibility.

5.3. Mourning through Sound: Yas Nefesi and Sacred Memory

On 27 November 2024, during a funeral in Çine (Aydın), relatives knelt around the shrouded body of the deceased in the mourning area. A güvender/zâkir, accompanied by other talips, performed Yas Nefesi with a divan sazı. The performance included nefes attributed to Kul Himmet, whose verses addressed death, separation, and departure, as well as improvised laments expressing loss, longing, and separation. Those gathered listened in silence and tears, while the singing was occasionally interrupted or accompanied by sobbing.

The performance developed through the participation of successive male and female singers. Rather than each performer establishing a separate musical setting, the divan sazı maintained a consistent modal and tonal framework to which the singers adapted as they continued the nefes. The instrument therefore did more than accompany individual voices. It held together a performance in which different participants entered, sang, withdrew, and allowed another voice to continue the mourning. The musical continuity created by the divan sazı made it possible for grief to be voiced collectively without becoming musically fragmented.

The relationship between singing and listening was equally important. Some participants actively performed, while others remained gathered around the deceased, listening, crying, and responding through silence or sobbing. These were not passive positions. The listeners’ bodily and emotional responses formed part of the event and influenced its communal atmosphere. The performance did not function as background music accompanying a funeral procedure. It organized how grief could be expressed, heard, and shared in the presence of the deceased. The güvender/zâkir who led the musical framework, a seventy-six-year-old ritual musician, explained:

Accompanying a Yas Nefesi on the divan sazı is not easy, because the place of mourning is sorrowful, tearful, and spiritually heavy. Yas nefesleri consist only of quatrains attributed to Kul Himmet whose themes are death, separation, sorrow, and longing. A melodic theme is played on the bağlama and is followed by a quatrain. When a talip passes to Hakk in the evening, it is customary to mourn the deceased with Yas Nefesi and laments until morning.

His account presents musical competence as inseparable from an understanding of ritual context. Accompanying a Yas Nefesi requires more than the technical ability to play a melodic pattern. The performer must recognize the emotional weight of the mourning place, know which poetic material is considered appropriate, sustain a musical framework for successive singers, and respond to the changing movement between singing, silence, and lamentation. Musical knowledge is therefore also ritual knowledge: knowing how to play includes knowing what may be performed, when it should be performed, and how the performance should relate to the bereaved community.

The attribution of the quatrains to Kul Himmet further situates the immediate death within a transmitted poetic and sacred tradition. The words concerning death, separation, sorrow, and longing were not composed solely to describe the person whose body lay before the mourners. They brought inherited poetic language into the present moment of loss. Through this conjunction, personal grief became connected to a repertoire already recognized by the community as appropriate to death and mourning. The deceased was mourned within a language whose authority preceded the particular funeral but acquired renewed emotional force through its performance there.

Transmission occurred at different levels within the same event. The knowledgeable güvender/zâkir sustained the instrumental and ritual framework. Other male and female participants entered the performance by adapting their singing to that framework. Those who did not perform encountered the repertoire through listening and observed how the instrument, poetic quatrains, improvised laments, silence, tears, and bodily proximity to the deceased were brought together. Participation therefore ranged from specialist performance to responsive listening, and each position offered a different form of access to the practice.

Listening, however, should not be equated with acquiring the competence required to lead or accompany a Yas Nefesi. Repeated exposure may produce familiarity with its themes, emotional register, and appropriate ritual context, but the ability to maintain the musical structure and guide other performers depends on more specialized knowledge. The Çine performance thus reveals both the strength and the vulnerability of this transmission system. A single knowledgeable musician could support several singers and create a setting in which a wider group participated in collective remembrance. At the same time, the performance depended substantially on the competence of that musician and on the presence of participants who knew how to continue the nefes.

This dependence distinguishes Yas Nefesi from moral principles that circulate through family instruction, everyday speech, communal judgment, and several recurring ritual contexts. The symbolic meaning of Yas Nefesi may remain widely recognizable even when the number of competent performers decreases. Community members may continue to associate it with death, sorrow, Kul Himmet, and the appropriate expression of mourning while fewer individuals possess the repertoire or instrumental ability necessary to reproduce it in practice. Symbolic continuity and practical competence may therefore follow different trajectories.

The Çine episode demonstrates that the continuity of Yas Nefesi cannot be measured solely by the survival of particular texts or melodies. It lies in the continuing relationship among poetic authority, musical competence, the presence of the deceased, the participation of mourners, and the transformation of individual loss into a shared emotional experience. Sound made mourning public and relational: one voice was joined by another, the divan sazı sustained their connection, and those gathered responded through listening, tears, and lamentation. Yet because this relationship depends on a comparatively limited body of specialist knowledge, Yas Nefesi represents a form of continuity that remains symbolically powerful while being practically vulnerable.

5.4. Recognizing Marriage within the Yol: Öznek and Layered Legitimacy

In Öznek, the newly married couple declares before all the talips that they will act responsibly toward one another, become a unified whole, sustain family life in the best possible way, value one another, maintain their household in fidelity, refrain from adultery, and keep their hearth burning. Our Öznek ritual is never an alternative to civil marriage. On the contrary, it is a ritual practice through which they reaffirm, before all the talips, a marriage that has already been registered by the state and renew their commitment to one another.

The participant’s repeated insistence that Öznek is not an alternative to civil marriage is analytically significant. In this account, the two forms of recognition do not compete for the same authority. Civil marriage establishes the legal status of the union before the state, whereas Öznek situates that legally recognized union within the moral and relational order of the Yol. The ritual does not deny the legitimacy of civil marriage or seek to replace it. It addresses a different question: how a newly established household becomes publicly recognized as bearing responsibilities toward spouses, families, the community, and the Yol.

The presence of the talips is central to this distinction. The couple’s commitments are not represented as private intentions expressed only to one another. They are declared before a community capable of hearing, remembering, and evaluating them. Fidelity, mutual respect, responsibility, and the continuation of the household thereby become publicly acknowledged obligations. The gathering of the talips transforms marriage from a relationship between two legally recognized individuals into a union situated within a wider field of communal recognition.

The participant’s reference to “keeping the hearth burning” further expands the meaning of marital continuity. The hearth signifies more than the physical maintenance of a household. Within this account, it connects the couple’s conduct to the continuity of family life, reciprocal care, moral reputation, and the reproduction of a socially recognized domestic unit. The endurance of the marriage is therefore understood not only through its legal validity but also through the couple’s capacity to sustain a household in accordance with the ethical expectations attributed to the Yol.

Öznek also creates obligations extending beyond the couple. By witnessing the commitments, families and other community members acquire an ongoing relationship to the marriage. They are expected to recognize the union, support its continuity, offer guidance when necessary, and treat difficulties affecting the household as matters with a communal as well as a private dimension. Recognition therefore operates in two directions: the community acknowledges the couple as a married household within the Yol, while the couple acknowledges that their conduct remains answerable to relationships extending beyond themselves.

The ritual consequently establishes a layered field of responsibility. At one level, each spouse becomes responsible for acting with fidelity, respect, restraint, and care toward the other. At another level, the couple becomes jointly responsible for sustaining the household as a moral and relational whole. At a wider level, families and talips assume responsibility for recognizing and supporting the union. Öznek thus connects conjugal commitment, household continuity, family involvement, and communal accountability within a single framework.

Field records indicate that older and younger participants generally recognized this framework, although they emphasized different aspects of it. Older talips more directly associated Öznek with moral accountability, social cohesion, and the obligation to conduct one’s life in a spiritually responsible manner. Their accounts foregrounded the binding nature of the commitments and the community’s authority to recognize appropriate marital conduct.

Younger participants also evaluated the practice positively, but they more often emphasized its capacity to reinforce awareness of the Yol, keep the meanings of family and home culturally alive, and cultivate trust and fidelity between spouses. Their accounts did not necessarily reject the normative understanding expressed by older participants. Rather, they translated its significance into a language of relational trust, cultural belonging, and the preservation of family consciousness.

This generational difference is therefore better understood as a variation in emphasis than as evidence of a straightforward rupture. Older participants tended to describe Öznek through the language of binding obligation and moral accountability, while younger participants foregrounded identity, trust, fidelity, and the symbolic importance of maintaining the household. Both interpretations nevertheless located marriage within a field of responsibility extending beyond legal registration.

The coexistence of civil marriage and Öznek complicates a replacement model in which modern institutions necessarily eliminate inherited ritual forms. The authority of the state and the authority attributed to the Yol operate at different but intersecting levels. Legal registration makes the marriage valid within the civic order; ritual recognition makes it culturally and morally intelligible within the community. The continuation of Öznek does not therefore require institutional isolation from the state. Its contemporary relevance rests precisely on its capacity to incorporate a legally established marriage into an inherited system of obligations and relationships.

This does not mean that every procedure associated with Öznek has remained unchanged or that the practice is performed with equal frequency and form across all settlements. The available accounts instead show continuity in the functions participants continue to attribute to it: public commitment, moral accountability, communal recognition, family responsibility, fidelity, and the maintenance of the household. Where these functions remain meaningful, procedural alteration does not necessarily amount to cultural disappearance.

Öznek therefore illustrates continuity through functional differentiation. Its resilience lies not in reproducing the legal work already performed by civil marriage, but in performing cultural and relational work that civil registration does not undertake. By making commitments publicly audible before the talips, the ritual places marriage within the moral memory of the community and turns the establishment of a household into a matter of shared recognition. In this case, keeping the Yol means preserving the capacity to distinguish legal legitimacy from ritual-communal legitimacy while allowing the two to coexist.

5.5. Remembering without Reproducing: The Vulnerability of Hearth Digging

A comparison between an older and a younger participant, recorded in Alamut village (Aydın) on 17 June 2026, revealed a marked difference between recognizing Hearth Digging and possessing the practical competence required to perform it. Both participants knew of the practice and associated it with household continuity, family stability, and communal responsibility. Their shared recognition indicated that Hearth Digging had not disappeared from cultural memory. Yet the similarity between their accounts ended when they were asked to move from meaning to procedure.

The older participant was able to explain how Hearth Digging should be carried out and to reproduce its sequence. The younger participant, by contrast, possessed general knowledge of the practice and understood the meanings attributed to it but could not perform it independently. The contrast was therefore not between one participant who valued the practice and another who rejected it. Both treated it as a meaningful component of Tahtacı cultural life. What differed was the depth and form of their knowledge.

This distinction is central to understanding the vulnerability of Hearth Digging. The younger participant’s familiarity demonstrates the successful transmission of the practice at the level of recognition. Its name, general purpose, and association with the continuity of the household remained intelligible. Such knowledge allows a person to identify the practice as belonging to the Yol and to explain why it has been valued. It does not, however, provide the embodied and procedural competence required to reproduce the ritual without assistance.

The older participant’s knowledge was of a different order. Explaining and reproducing the sequence required recalling not only what the practice meant but also how its constituent actions should be organized. This procedural knowledge could not be reduced to a general verbal definition. It depended on familiarity with the order of performance, the relationship among its successive actions, and the culturally appropriate manner in which they should be enacted. The ability to perform the sequence therefore represented accumulated practical knowledge rather than symbolic recognition alone.

The Alamut comparison makes visible several layers of ritual transmission that may otherwise be collapsed into the general statement that a tradition is “still known.” A person may know that a practice exists without understanding its significance. Another may understand its cultural meaning without knowing how it is performed. A further level involves the ability to describe its procedures, while practical competence requires being able to organize and enact those procedures. The most demanding level is the repeated reproduction of the practice within communal life in a manner that also enables others to learn it.

These layers are connected, but they are not interchangeable. Cultural meaning may remain recognizable after opportunities for observation and participation have diminished. Narratives transmitted by elders can preserve the name and significance of a ritual even when younger community members have rarely witnessed its performance. Symbolic knowledge may consequently travel farther and survive longer than the tacit knowledge contained in bodily action, sequence, timing, and participation.

The younger participant’s inability to perform Hearth Digging independently should therefore not be interpreted as cultural indifference. The field comparison provides no basis for such a conclusion. Instead, it points to a weakened connection between cultural recognition and practical apprenticeship. The participant had received enough knowledge to understand that the ritual mattered, but not enough repeated experience to become one of its independent practitioners.

This finding also directs attention away from the individual participant and toward the social conditions of transmission. Practical competence develops through opportunities to observe, assist, repeat, receive correction, and gradually assume responsibility. When performances become infrequent, younger participants encounter fewer occasions through which such competence can be acquired. The vulnerability of Hearth Digging consequently lies not simply in changing personal preferences but in the narrowing of the relational and participatory settings through which its procedures can be learned.

The concentration of practical knowledge in the older generation intensifies this vulnerability. As long as knowledgeable elders remain present, they may explain the ritual, recall its procedures, and guide others through its performance. However, if younger participants remain primarily at the level of recognition, the loss of an older practitioner may also mean the loss of part of the ritual sequence. Oral recollection can preserve an account of what Hearth Digging signifies, but it cannot automatically reproduce the embodied competence through which the practice becomes performable.

Hearth Digging therefore differs from practices reinforced through several overlapping contexts. The moral principle of controlling one’s hands, waist, and tongue circulates through ritual instruction, family life, everyday conduct, and communal judgment. Hak Üleştirme can be encountered through food preparation, neighborhood distribution, reciprocal exchange, and remembrance of the deceased. Hearth Digging, according to the intergenerational comparison, appears to depend on narrower occasions of direct instruction and performance. Its transmission is correspondingly more exposed when those occasions decline.

The Alamut case prevents the broader account of Tahtacı continuity from becoming idealized. Reduced frequency does not necessarily demonstrate that a practice has disappeared, because its name and cultural meanings may continue to circulate. At the same time, continued recognition is not sufficient evidence of secure transmission. A ritual cannot be considered performatively resilient merely because community members know that it once existed or can explain what it represents.

Hearth Digging thus occupies a position of symbolic continuity with weakened practical reproduction. Its associations with household continuity, family stability, and communal responsibility remain recognizable across generations, but the competence required to enact those associations has become more unevenly distributed. What is being transmitted successfully is the understanding that the ritual belongs to the cultural world of the Yol; what is less securely transmitted is the capacity to perform it.

The distinction between remembering and reproducing is therefore decisive. Remembering protects the practice from complete erasure, but reproduction requires a continuing chain of knowledgeable practitioners, participatory occasions, and intergenerational guidance. In the Alamut comparison, this chain remained present through the older participant but had not yet produced independent competence in the younger participant. Hearth Digging consequently represents the clearest vulnerable case in the study: culturally meaningful and still recognizable, yet uncertain in its capacity to generate the practitioners needed for its future performance.

5.6. Comparative Synthesis: Transmission Density, Bottlenecks, and Future Capacity

The five cases do not divide neatly into traditions that “survive” and traditions that “disappear.” They differ along several dimensions: breadth of transmission, frequency of participation, dependence on specialist knowledge, relation to recognized authority, and the degree to which younger participants move from familiarity toward competence. Table 1 summarizes these differences and makes visible the central comparative finding: symbolic continuity and future reproductive capacity are related but not equivalent.

The three-knotted belt and the moral teaching concerning hands, waist, and tongue possess the broadest transmission base because ritual instruction is reinforced through bodily symbolism, family socialization, elder authority, and everyday moral evaluation. Hak Üleştirme and Öznek show adaptive continuity: their scale, setting, or generational language may change while obligations of sharing, fidelity, household responsibility, and communal recognition remain intelligible and actionable.

Yas Nefesi and Hearth Digging expose different bottlenecks. Yas Nefesi remains emotionally and symbolically powerful to a relatively broad circle of mourners, yet competent musical leadership is more narrowly distributed. Hearth Digging displays an even sharper separation between recognition and procedure: cultural meaning crosses generations more securely than the embodied competence required for independent performance.

Three comparative mechanisms account for these differences. First, transmission density increases when the same religious principle can be encountered in several recurring settings and relationships. Second, specialist dependence creates bottlenecks when competence is concentrated among few practitioners. Third, participatory frequency matters because procedural and embodied knowledge requires repeated opportunities to observe, assist, receive correction, and assume responsibility.

These patterns are neither fixed classifications nor claims that every settlement displays the same configuration. New practitioners, renewed ritual occasions, or stronger relations with recognized authorities may increase a practice’s reproductive capacity; migration, reduced intergenerational contact, loss of knowledgeable elders, or declining performance opportunities may narrow it. The categories therefore describe field-observed configurations rather than permanent properties of Tahtacı ritual domains.

The comparative result is consequential for how religious transformation is interpreted. A practice may remain named, valued, and emotionally recognizable while its performative base narrows; conversely, a less frequent practice may remain capable of reactivation if knowledgeable transmitters, legitimate authority, and participatory relationships are still available. The question is therefore not only what remains, but whether present arrangements are producing the people, relations, and competencies through which the Yol can be carried forward.

6. Discussion: Religious Transformation as Reorganization of Transmission

The findings suggest that religious transformation among Tahtacı Alevis is not adequately captured by a choice between “survival” and “decline.” Across the five domains, transformation appears as a reorganization of the relationships, occasions, authorities, and competencies through which the Yol is reproduced. Some practices remain resilient because several transmission pathways reinforce one another; others remain symbolically strong while practical reproduction narrows. The analytical problem is therefore differential reproduction: which dimensions of a practice remain recognizable, who can enact them, and whether current participation produces future transmitters.

Keeping the Path is best understood as a transmission-ecology framework rather than a preservation model. Its unit of analysis is the relationship among practice, participant, transmitter, authority, community, and subsequent generation. Five mechanisms recur across the material—boundary work and communal recognition, relational authority, intergenerational participation, embodied and oral-musical learning, and selective adaptation—but their relative importance differs by ritual domain.

This formulation also changes how continuity is assessed. Present visibility is not enough: a practice can be remembered and valued while its reproductive capacity weakens. Conversely, changed form does not necessarily indicate rupture if culturally significant obligations, relationships, and opportunities for competent participation remain active. The discussion therefore treats transformation as a redistribution of transmission capacity rather than as a simple departure from an original form.

6.1. Beyond Preservation and Decline: Differential Reproduction

Classical ritual theory shows that ritual produces authority, dispositions, distinctions, and collective belonging rather than merely reflecting an existing social order (Bell 1992, 1997; Turner 1967, 1969). The Tahtacı material adds an explicitly intergenerational question: does a practice that is meaningful in the present also reproduce the capacities required for a future performance? A ritual may organize relations successfully in one event while remaining vulnerable if no new participants acquire the competence or authority needed to enact it again.

Schechner’s (2003) notion of restored behavior helps explain why recognizability does not require exact duplication. Hak Üleştirme can change in scale or frequency while continuing to transform household resources into communal obligation; Öznek can coexist with civil marriage because the two forms of recognition perform different social work. At the same time, Hearth Digging shows why cultural meaning cannot substitute for procedural competence. Formal change is therefore neither automatically continuity nor automatically rupture.

The more useful distinction is between participant-recognized cultural significance and the practical capacity to reproduce it. This distinction must remain ethnographically grounded: researchers cannot decide independently that an altered form preserves an “essential” meaning. Such a claim requires evidence that participants continue to recognize the practice as belonging to the Yol, that its obligations and relations still organize action, and that legitimate contexts for participation remain available.

Differential reproduction also avoids homogenizing Tahtacı Alevis. Different components of the same practice may follow different trajectories, and the same domain may be more resilient in one settlement than another. A name may remain after a procedure becomes uncertain; an emotional repertoire may remain widely intelligible while specialists decline; a ritual function may persist within a new institutional setting. The unit of comparison is therefore the configuration of transmission, not a claim that “Tahtacı tradition” as a whole is either intact or disappearing.

This approach makes social transformation analytically specific. Migration, education, urbanization, occupational change, and legal incorporation matter because they alter opportunities for contact, participation, and authority, but they do not exert identical effects on every practice. Their consequences depend on the local transmission ecology through which a practice is learned and authorized.

The empirical value of this perspective is that it makes continuity falsifiable rather than celebratory. A practice cannot be treated as secure simply because participants value it or remember it. The stronger test is whether observers become participants, participants acquire competence, and competent practitioners can assume responsibility for future transmission.

6.2. Relational Authority and Distributed Religious Learning

The comparison shows that religious learning is distributed across relationships rather than concentrated in formal instruction. The teaching of hands, waist, and tongue moves through the mürebbi–talip relationship, bodily symbolism, family instruction, and everyday moral judgment; Hak Üleştirme is learned through preparing, separating, carrying, receiving, and explaining food. These practices demonstrate that the Yol is reproduced through ordinary social participation as well as through explicitly ceremonial moments.

This distribution can be described as transmission density: the number, diversity, and recurrence of relationships and situations through which a person encounters, interprets, and practices religious knowledge. High density does not mean that many people can merely describe a practice. It means that meanings and actions are encountered repeatedly across family life, ritual participation, communal obligation, material practice, and relations with knowledgeable authorities.

Redundancy within this ecology can increase resilience. If one channel weakens, another may preserve familiarity or create a new route into participation. A younger person may encounter an ethical principle through a parent, a mürebbi, a communal gathering, a funeral, a musical performance, or a food-sharing practice. Transmission is therefore vertical, horizontal, and relational; it cannot be reduced to a parent–child model or to the work of dedes alone.

At the same time, access does not establish legitimacy. The three-knotted belt is authoritative because the instruction is enacted within recognized ritual relations; the güvender/zâkir’s role in Yas Nefesi combines musical skill with judgments about poetic appropriateness, timing, emotional register, and ritual context; in Öznek, the presence of talips transforms private commitments into communally recognized obligations. Religious transmission therefore joins learning to authorization.

The ocak system and its associated relations are best understood here as a relational infrastructure rather than simply an institutional hierarchy. Relations among dedes, mürebbis, talips, musahips, ritual specialists, elders, families, and households organize who may guide, correct, interpret, and recognize practice (Çıblak Coşkun 2019; Gacar 2022; Kehl-Bodrogi 1997). When these relations remain active, participants can move from familiarity toward legitimate competence; when they become intermittent, knowledge may persist mainly as narrative or memory.

This helps specify the role of communal boundaries without equating them with isolation. Boundary work occurs through moral evaluation, ritual legitimacy, kin and ritual-kin obligations, and shared understandings of appropriate conduct. Tahtacı participants may be fully embedded in wider educational, legal, occupational, and technological systems while continuing to recognize distinctive obligations associated with the Yol.

The finding has a broader implication for Alevi transformation: the redistribution of religious authority need not be understood only through formal institutions or public organizations. It can also occur in the micro-relations through which people decide whose guidance is legitimate, where knowledge is encountered, and whether younger participants are given opportunities to assume responsibility.

Relational authority is therefore not an obstacle to change but one of the conditions through which change becomes religiously intelligible. Adaptation remains recognizable as part of the Yol when it is mediated through relationships that participants regard as legitimate; the weakening of those relations can make even strongly remembered practices difficult to reproduce.

6.3. Embodiment, Music, and Specialist Bottlenecks

A central empirical contribution of the study is the distinction among recognition, interpretation, participation, procedural knowledge, performative competence, authorization, and reproduction. These are not interchangeable indicators of continuity. A participant may know that a ritual exists without knowing its sequence, understand its meaning without being able to perform it, or participate competently without articulating a formal doctrine.

The distinction is consistent with theories of embodied practice and social memory. Bourdieu (1977) emphasizes dispositions acquired through practice, Connerton (1989) shows how social memory is carried through bodily and commemorative action, and Miton and DeDeo (2022) distinguish explicit knowledge from tacit competence. The Tahtacı cases specify how these forms of knowledge become unevenly distributed under changing conditions.

The three-knotted belt demonstrates how speech, material form, bodily posture, and recognized authority reinforce one another. The ethical principle is memorable because it is not only explained; it is tied, watched, embodied, and received within a relationship that gives the act religious legitimacy. Hak Üleştirme similarly teaches obligation through organized action rather than through doctrine alone.

Yas Nefesi makes the relationship among embodiment, affect, sacred memory, and specialist knowledge especially visible. In the Çine funeral, inherited poetic language, melody, silence, tears, successive voices, and the bodily presence of mourners connected an immediate death to a recognized religious repertoire. Listening is therefore genuine participation: it teaches what sounds, texts, emotions, and responses belong to the mourning context (Assmann 2011; Kara 2023; Oktay and Özdemir 2026).

Yet listening does not automatically create a future güvender/zâkir. The ability to sustain the modal framework, select appropriate material, respond to singers, and carry the ritual-emotional weight of the occasion depends on repeated apprenticeship and specialized competence. This is the clearest example of a specialist bottleneck: broad symbolic recognition coexists with a narrower performative base.

Hearth Digging presents a related but more advanced separation. The younger participant in Alamut recognized the practice and its association with household continuity but could not reproduce the sequence independently. The issue is not indifference; it is a weakened chain between cultural familiarity and practical apprenticeship.

These cases show why religious transformation must be studied through the distribution of competence as well as through belief or identity. A tradition can remain emotionally powerful and publicly meaningful while the number of people able to enact it declines. Conversely, competence can be regenerated when recurring occasions, knowledgeable transmitters, and legitimate opportunities for guided participation remain available.

Future capacity therefore depends on movement across positions: from hearing and watching to assisting, from assisting to performing, and from performing to guiding others. Where that movement stalls, symbolic continuity may conceal a narrowing transmission chain.

6.4. Selective Adaptation and Layered Legitimacy

Adaptation is often invoked to explain the persistence of religion under changing social conditions, but not every alteration sustains continuity. Selective adaptation is useful only if it identifies how participants evaluate what may change and what must remain recognizable. The key questions are whether the practice is still recognized as belonging to the Yol, whether its obligations and relations still organize action, and whether the altered form preserves opportunities for meaningful participation.

Öznek offers the clearest example. Participants do not position the ritual against civil marriage. Legal registration establishes civic status, while Öznek places the legally married household within a field of public moral commitment, fidelity, communal recognition, and responsibility before the talips. The two forms of legitimacy therefore intersect without doing identical social work.

This layered legitimacy demonstrates that inherited ritual need not remain meaningful by excluding modern institutions. The state and the Yol can authorize different dimensions of the same marriage. What matters for continuity is not institutional isolation but whether the ritual still performs culturally intelligible relational work that participants regard as necessary.

Generational differences in the interpretation of Öznek further show that adaptation can occur within language and emphasis. Older participants stress binding obligation and moral accountability, while younger participants more often foreground trust, fidelity, belonging, and family consciousness. These emphases do not necessarily constitute rupture; they may represent a translation of inherited obligations into contemporary relational idioms.

Hak Üleştirme shows adaptation through scale and organization. Older recollections point to more frequent or publicly visible neighborhood distribution, yet the observed Yeniköy practice still moved food beyond the household and included absent recipients. The form and frequency changed while the moral movement of hak—from possession toward communal responsibility—remained active.

These cases also identify the limits of adaptation. A changed form may preserve symbolic recognition while reducing the occasions through which practical knowledge is learned. Selective adaptation therefore has to be evaluated together with transmission density and specialist dependence rather than celebrated as evidence that all change is harmless.

Ersal’s (2024) account of changing Alevi ritual contexts similarly indicates that migration and urbanization reorganize practice without producing one uniform outcome. The present comparison specifies why outcomes differ: the same social pressure interacts differently with practices supported by dense, ordinary participation and with practices dependent on rare occasions or specialist competence.

Religious transformation, in this sense, is a process of selective reorganization. It sustains continuity when altered settings preserve legitimate relationships and routes into participation; it becomes erosive when procedural simplification, reduced frequency, or institutional relocation disconnects participants from the people and occasions through which competence and authority are acquired.

6.5. Keeping the Path and Its Contribution to Contemporary Alevi Studies

Keeping the Path contributes to contemporary Alevi Studies by treating transmission as a distributed and comparative problem. Özalp and Şimşir (2026) demonstrate how dedes respond to the difficulty of transmitting Alevi beliefs and values to young people in urban settings. The Tahtacı material complements that account by showing that transmission also occurs through families, ritual kin, food sharing, mourning, musical specialists, and everyday moral evaluation. Religious continuity may therefore remain resilient even when direct instruction by a single authority figure is not the only or primary channel.

Demir and Çevik (2026) show how Alevi collective memory and affect are transmitted through family narratives, embodied practices, and cem ritual. The present study extends that insight by separating symbolic and affective recognition from practical competence and authorization. Remembering, feeling, and recognizing a tradition are important forms of continuity, but they do not by themselves ensure that a future participant can perform, interpret, authorize, or teach it.

The framework therefore shifts the analytical unit from “whether a tradition survives” to the configuration of transmission surrounding each domain. Boundary work and communal recognition identify meaningful belonging; relational authority links knowledge to legitimacy; intergenerational participation creates opportunities for learning; embodied and oral-musical practice converts exposure into competence; and selective adaptation reorganizes forms and contexts. The interaction among these mechanisms produces different degrees of future capacity.

Two mechanisms are especially useful for comparison. Redundancy exists when several relationships and settings reproduce the same cultural principle; bottlenecks arise when critical knowledge depends disproportionately on one specialist, one generation, one rare occasion, or one form of authority. The three-knotted belt and Hak Üleştirme display relatively dense pathways; Yas Nefesi and Hearth Digging make specialist and procedural bottlenecks visible.

This formulation also clarifies cross-site variation. Communities exposed to similar pressures of migration, urbanization, education, occupational diversification, and technological change may display different outcomes because the availability of authorities, frequency of participation, and distribution of competence differ locally. Transformation is therefore mediated by transmission ecologies rather than operating as a uniform external force.

Keeping the Path is not proposed as a universal theory of Alevism or as a claim that Tahtacı communities share one invariant essence. It is an ethnographically grounded comparative heuristic developed from Western Anatolian sites. Its broader value lies in making visible a distinction that is easy to miss in studies of religious change: present cultural recognition and future reproductive capacity are not the same achievement.

The broader proposition is that religious continuity is strongest when a community can repeatedly convert memory into participation, participation into competence, competence into legitimate responsibility, and responsibility into opportunities for others to learn. Transformation becomes analytically visible when one or more links in that chain are reorganized, multiplied, or narrowed.

6.6. Scope, Limitations, and Analytical Reach

The study has three main limitations. First, the field sites are concentrated in Western Anatolia and are associated primarily with the Yanyatır and Hacı Emirli ocaks; the findings should not be generalized to all Tahtacı or all Alevi communities. The comparative categories describe patterns observed across the thirteen sites, while local variation remains analytically significant.

Second, the twenty-five participants were purposively selected for ethnographic depth rather than population representation, and not every ritual was directly observed in every settlement. The analysis therefore distinguishes observation from reported contemporary practice and memory; retrospective accounts are evidence of participants’ understandings of continuity and change, not independent proof of historical invariance.

Third, Keeping the Path is intended as a mid-range comparative framework rather than a complete account of Alevi transformation. Future research could test the relationship among transmission density, specialist bottlenecks, relational authority, and reproductive capacity in other Alevi regions, diaspora settings, or ritual domains and could examine how digital mediation and new institutional forms alter routes into participation.

7. Conclusions

This study shows that religious continuity among Tahtacı Alevis in Western Anatolia is unevenly reproduced rather than uniformly preserved or lost. Across five ritual domains, the strongest continuity occurred where religious meanings and obligations circulated through several overlapping contexts of family life, communal participation, ritual authority, bodily practice, and everyday moral evaluation. Vulnerability increased where performance depended on infrequent occasions or narrowly distributed musical and procedural competence.

The central analytical contribution is to conceptualize this pattern as a transmission ecology. Keeping the Path identifies five interacting mechanisms—boundary work and communal recognition, relational authority, intergenerational participation, embodied and oral-musical learning, and selective adaptation—and asks whether they generate future practitioners as well as present recognition. The distinction between symbolic familiarity and performative competence is decisive: a practice can remain culturally meaningful while its capacity for future enactment becomes fragile.

For the study of contemporary Alevism, this means that religious transformation should be examined not only through migration, institutions, public identity, or doctrinal change but also through the micro-processes by which authority, participation, competence, memory, and responsibility are redistributed. Tahtacı cases show that adaptation can sustain religious continuity when it preserves legitimate relations and participatory routes, while the loss of those routes can weaken reproduction even where attachment remains strong.

Methodologically, the article argues for distinguishing observed practice, reported contemporary practice, remembered practice, recognition, procedural knowledge, performative competence, and reproductive capacity. These distinctions make it possible to analyze continuity without romanticizing inherited culture and to analyze transformation without assuming inevitable decline.

Keeping the Path therefore names an ongoing social achievement: the capacity to turn memory into participation, participation into competence, and competence into responsibility for those who will carry the Yol forward.