YouTube and the social archiving of intangible heritage

YouTube as an archive

Research on YouTube as an archive is not new and has been addressed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: media studies (Burgess and Green, 2009), cinema studies (Lundemo, 2009), archive studies (Prelinger, 2009), media history (Kessler and Schäfer, 2009), cultural studies (Gehl, 2009), television history (Spigel, 2010) and library sciences (Gracy, 2007). This study adds critical heritage studies to the fields of inquiry from which YouTube as an archive has been approached. This emerging field unveils the power relations maintained to sustain a traditional understanding of heritage (Association of Critical Heritage Studies, 2011). Laurajane Smith (2006) claims that heritage has been grounded in an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) that underlies national and international Western concerns about the characteristics, values and meanings of heritage (Smith, 2008: 161). This discourse constructs heritage in ways that reinforce varied relations of power, including those rooted in nationalism and social exclusion based on gender. AHD often draws a connection between nationalism and masculinity in which patriarchal culture becomes the heritage for all members of society (Smith, 2008: 162). From both within and beyond the borders of Western countries, the social archiving of heritage on YouTube has the potential to problematize dominant narratives in which national heritage privileges male practitioners. YouTube as an archive of intangible heritage can circulate practices of the marginalized and challenge traditional performances of heritage, situating this research terrain within critical heritage studies.

YouTube’s potential as an archive can be outlined only after the key characteristics that define the traditional archive are put forward. Governed by provenance, custody and a central authority, a traditional archive can be generally regarded as a collection of records that has historical, cultural or evidentiary significance. The archival tenet of provenance, which deals with the origin of records, has distinct meanings. The most prevalent usage refers to the ‘office of origin’ of records or to the administrative entity – individual, family or institution – from which the records, personal papers or manuscripts derive (Bellardo and Bellardo, 1992). The principle of provenance determines the nature of the collection in the traditional archive. A collection in an archive is composed of a set of documents that derive from the same source and are obtained as a whole (Hur-Li, 2000: 1107). The documents in an archival collection are usually primary-source materials that are unpublished and unique. Provenance also denotes the gathering of information on the succession of transference of custody of a specific paper or manuscript and refers to the notion that the records within a specific archival collection must not be intermixed with those of other record creators (Bellardo and Bellardo, 1992; Daniels, 1984). Those who are responsible for directing, organizing and managing the archive have the authority to decide what is of value and hence worthy of being collected (Gracy, 2007: 189). The principle reason for the existence of archives is to preserve documents deemed to be valuable enough to warrant conservation.

YouTube can never be an archive if the traditional version is the model that this video-hosting service is to emulate. The archives of intangible heritage on YouTube, which are continuously being built by users, do not have a clear point of origin composed of a set of initial documents. The growing intangible heritage archives of moving images on YouTube are produced by the users themselves, who upload and download videos, tag uploaded videos with keywords and link them to relevant and affiliated clips, as well as add to the documentation of clips by posting comments and videos in response to featured videos. What is deemed valuable and worthy of safekeeping is to a certain degree determined by users rather than by a central authority. YouTube users do not have absolute control, as Google has retained the right to remove any video whose content it deems inappropriate. Nonetheless, a large portion of the content on YouTube is both created and uploaded by users. Numerous user-generated videos uploaded on YouTube could be regarded as primary sources, as they are first disseminated on this video-hosting service. Yet many YouTube videos are derived from mainstream traditional media and commercial advertisement (Burgess and Green, 2009: 43–44). Finally, YouTube does not guarantee that videos uploaded can be conserved or protected. Not only can videos be removed by Google, but creators and/or uploaders of videos can also delete their videos at any time.

YouTube may not take shape as a traditional archive, yet it has been very effective in disseminating popular culture. Numerous scholars have highlighted this video-hosting service as a space of popular culture, including Patricia Lange (2007), Jean Burgess and Joshua Green (2009), Nick Salvato (2009), Michael Strangelove (2010) and Sheenagh Pietrobruno (2012). In contrast, archives have often been a limited resource for storing popular culture, especially the creations of subcultures and countercultures. William Uricchio (1995: 256, 260) has elaborated upon the historical filtration process in film and television archives, which often preserve materials associated with dominant social formations while disregarding those of marginal groups. Archival policy may simply reflect the interest of the state, which officially stores documents that validate national interpretations (Uricchio, 1995: 259). The preoccupation with preserving ‘facts’ often masks the conflicting discourses that are enveloped within a reconstruction of a historical moment or phenomenon through archival documents (Uricchio, 1995: 260). With the integration of poststructural theory in archive studies, the neutrality of the traditional archive has been complicated by Michel Foucault (1970), Jacques Derrida (1996), Diane Taylor (2003) and Eric Ketelaar (2008).

The cataloguing of minority cultures has often occurred through popular forms of archiving, not via official documentation. For instance, in a study of working-class and immigrant audiences’ responses to Vitagraph’s employment of historical figures to garner cultural acceptability, Uricchio (1995: 261–262) reveals that their responses could be located in non-cinematic sources of popular imagery supported by an array of materials such as school textbooks, classroom chromolithographs and church sermons. Arjun Appadurai (2003: 17) elaborates upon the ways that the generation of documents and their combining to form archives are facets of everyday life that take place beyond the authority and influence of the state. Popular archives take shape through personal diaries, family photo albums, community museums, libraries of individuals and oral archives such as narratives and stories. According to Appadurai (2003: 18), the essential role of the archive as a popular form of collection is exemplified through the emergence of new kinds of electronic archiving that enable non-official actors to decide the manner in which documents are configured as archives at a range of levels beyond the authority of the state.

YouTube to a certain extent fits into theoretical assessments of analogue and digital forms of popular archiving by storing videos and hence cultural memories of practices that extend beyond those sanctioned by a central authority. Nonetheless, dominant cultural forms such as UNESCO’s representation of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony, which has been put forward by the Turkish nation-state through the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, also circulate on this video-hosting site. By enabling online videos of both dominant and marginal cultures produced by both state and non-state institutions as well as by individuals to coexist within the same space, YouTube combines the content of traditional and popular archives. As a digital medium, YouTube resembles the participatory and interactive archive, which allows users to add to core collections, enabling a popular voice to enter into centrally controlled collections. Isto Huvila’s model of the participatory archive provides an example of the way that archives incorporate their users through digital technology. Huvila (2008: 26) developed participatory archives by using MediaWiki software to transform the digital archives of two Finnish cultural heritage sites – the Saari Manor in Mietoinen and Kajaani Castle – into spaces in which users of the archive can participate. Participants are able to edit historical records through their input, which has generated more intricate descriptions of content and links between records and has facilitated the process of updating the archive. Furthermore, Eric Ketelaar (2008: 17) envisions the use of Web 2.0 by archives as transforming them into Archives 2.0, which enables people to upload their stories and documents to the archival institution’s server. This allows dialogues to be forged between private and public documents that can inaugurate a ‘community of records’, to borrow Jeannette Allis Bastian’s phrase (2003: 5). A community of records could be envisioned, according to Bastian (2003: 5), as the assemblage of records of all types produced by the manifold strata of user participation and by the interconnections between and among the people and institutions within a community.

Archives that employ Web 2.0 to integrate users in record building emulate to a certain extent the user-generated collections of intangible heritage on YouTube. Yet for their records these archives often continue to maintain a core and coherent structure upon which users build. For instance, individuals can reshape the material in Huvila’s participatory archive, but their user-generated content is not able to dismantle the basic coherent structure of the archive (2008: 25). This maintenance of the authority of both the ‘initial’ repository and the authorial voice of the archive does not exist when YouTube stores intangible heritage. YouTube’s archive under the search term ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’, for instance, is composed of a collection of videos uploaded by users – individuals and institutions – engaged in creating a body of records that constitute the archive. YouTube is being constantly built and reshaped by its users. Along with the title and description of each video, the tags listed in this collection play a role in determining whether a video is grouped under a particular classification via the search request and the order in which it appears. But this type of metadata does not ensure that the contents of this YouTube archive will remain stable.

The composition of this archive is constantly shifting. Every time users navigate the pathways that include videos from the ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ archive, the contents and order of its videos change in response to user participation. Users who are viewing, rating, commenting on or flagging videos also have an impact on the response of YouTube to a given search request. By simply viewing videos, users implicitly provide metadata. Thus even a user who merely browses and does not add content produces data (Flanagin et al., 2010: 186). The viewing rate becomes a factor in determining the order of videos that correspond to a keyword or various words (Kessler and Schäfer, 2009: 281). The building of archives on YouTube combines both algorithms and user-generated content and participation.

YouTube’s archives of intangible heritage seem to be forging a new form of structure that absorbs both dominant and marginal perspectives and is produced by the efforts of the human and machine. This archive is constantly shifting. As Alexander Galloway proposes in a consideration of the relation between the archive and the network, ‘Networks are not simply textual entities, they are entities in a constant labour with themselves and with us’ (2010: 173). Each interaction with YouTube brings about a trace in the system, which turns into a record with statistical significance that is read externally as a marker of popularity. This user participation becomes integrated into the software design (Kessler and Schäfer, 2009: 285). The building of archives on YouTube, which is achieved through user participation and algorithms, intersects with an incipient area of inquiry in new media. The effect of the combined role of algorithms and user-generated content in a range of applications such as Wikipedia, Google AdSense and YouTube is an emerging concern (Beer, 2009: 994; Uricchio, 2011: 34).

According to John Hartley (2012: 166), the instability of YouTube is characteristic of a new form of internet-produced archival structure or ‘probability archive’. The massive scale of online information grants users the unprecedented possibility that they will find multiple uploaded versions of what they are looking for. This archive is about findability rather than preservation. Findability from the perspective of the YouTube archive means that the identity or meaning of a single video is not determined by an essential property of that video but takes shape through the semiotic consequence of display and narrative in relation to numerous uploaded videos on a similar subject (Hartley, 2012: 172).

YouTube also serves as a record of significant cultural and historical events, one of the key functions of the archive, through users’ creation and uploading of videos for experiential reasons. Videos disseminated on YouTube by tourists to show that they have witnessed the celebrated attraction of whirling dervishes in Turkey may serve as documents that record the rising presence of women in sema ceremonies in Istanbul. That digital video creation can provide a means to celebrate a present moment as well as to record a historically significant cultural moment counters a binary division that Patricia Lange (2011) claims has endured in academic approaches to the study of digital video creation. This duality draws a distinction between the employment of images for memory preservation and their use both in disseminating presentist experiences and in dealing with contemporary issues of identity. Lange (2011: 27) points out that the distinction between these two polarities can dissolve when images that were initially produced to convey the experience of being somewhere at a given time are archived online. An example includes the photographs of prisoner abuse from Abu Graib prison, which were initially taken by soldiers for experiential reasons but, when distributed, became a means to recollect a political event (Cobley and Haeffner, 2009; Van Dijck, 2008). While recognizing that some users may be consciously involved in creating and distributing videos for their historical importance, this research also reinforces the potential of YouTube to act as a means of conservation via its widespread use as a repository of experiential moments.

Gender, nationalism and the Mevlevi Sema ceremony

To elucidate the manner in which YouTube as an archive can challenge dominant heritage narratives put forward by nation-states, background information about the sema and its gendered and nationalistic dynamics first needs to be brought to the fore. The Mevlevi Sema ceremony – a mystical Islamic practice – includes the sema dance, or the ‘whirling dervish dance’, as it is known in Western nations. In this spiritual and meditative practice of the Mevlevi Sufi order, which is more a prayer than a dance, the dervish moves in an unbroken circle for a considerable period of time. The sema dance is one of the ‘labors’ – along with prayer, poetry, music and movement – that the Sufis of the Mevlevi order undertake in sema ceremonies in order to realize their spiritual quest for the inner path of Islam. A key aspiration of Sufism is to break through the opaqueness of the temporal realm and remove the veils of the perceptible world in order to ponder inner spiritual realities and regain the oneness with the divine that previously existed in the spiritual world (Geoffroy, 2010: 2, 12, 171). The practices of the Mevlevi order are founded upon the poetry and teachings of Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Following the death of Rumi in 1273 and the consequent establishment of the Mevlevi order by his supporters, including his son Sultan Veled, the sema dance, or whirling prayer, was traditionally performed only by men in the semahane, or area in which the sema ceremonies was publicly held in Mevlevi lodges. The semahane typically included an enclosed lattice-covered gallery from which women could watch the performance without being seen (Bakirci, 2010: 54). There is nonetheless a handful of documented cases of women who performed the sema in public and alongside men during Ottoman times (Baldick, 1989: 113; Helminski, 2003: 124). Despite these exceptions, the sema has been for centuries an ancient male performance in which women have been basically prohibited from taking part in its public embodiment.

In 1925 all Sufi lodges, meeting places and monasteries were officially closed and confiscated, resulting in the banning of the sema of the Mevlevi order. This prohibition, which is still part of the current Turkish constitution, was an outcome of the secularization policies established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk when Turkey became a republic and an officially secular state in 1923. Despite this prohibition, the Mevlevi Sema ceremony has endured in Turkey’s cultural panorama. Rather than jettisoning Mevlevism completely, the Kemalist government decided to foreground its non-religious elements, which conformed to the secular ideology of the Republic. Public performances of the sema were permitted to a limited extent in the 1950s if they highlighted the practice not as a religious activity linked to the Mevlevi order but as a cultural event that celebrated Rumi as an outstanding Turkish poet (Aykan, 2012: 49). The sema performances that have taken place since the 1950s have garnered global audiences and worldwide attention (Aykan, 2012: 50). To realize the potential of the sema to promote Turkey in the international arena, the Turkish government under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has organized sema performances and set up Mevlevi Sema groups (Aykan, 2012: 51). For instance, in Konya the Turkish Mystic Group performs with the financial support of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism (TMCT) (Bakirci, 2010: 28).

The heritagization of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony within UNESCO through the TMCT has reinterpreted the previous national significance of this performance as an expression of the secular Republic. This renewed official representation of the Mevlevi Sema conforms to the nationalist aims of the party that has governed Turkey since 2002 – the AKP (Justice and Development Party). The AKP has Islamic roots. Although it is difficult to substantiate claims that the AKP has a covert program to transform Turkey into an Islamic state grounded in sharia, or Islamic law, the AKP does use (Sunni) Islam, rather than secularism, as an emblem of Turkish identity (Aykan, 2012: 57). Bahar Aykan (2012: 61) reveals how the candidature file of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony submitted to UNESCO’s Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (Proclamation of Masterpieces) pinpoints Turkey’s secularization policies as a means to deprive the ceremony of its essential religious significance, and she emphasizes the manner in which these policies jeopardize the sustainability of this heritage by threatening its traditional makeup. This ceremony was sanctioned as heritage in 2005 through the Proclamation of Masterpieces and integrated as an element on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Representative List) in 2008 under the Convention.

Gendered traditions that date back to 13th-century religious practices endure in contemporary performances of the sema. In Konya, the birthplace of the Mevlevi order, for instance, women are not allowed to perform this ritual in public and alongside men. The belief that women are not a part of the public expressions of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony in contemporary Turkey is a stance put forward by official authorities. For instance, Öcal Oğuz (2011), the director of the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO: Intangible Cultural Heritage Commission, has publicly announced that women do not take part in the sema in contemporary Turkey. This assertion was put forward in July 2011 at a conference discussion in Istanbul after Oğuz’s keynote address on Turkish intangible heritage, in which he responded to concerns from the audience about the absence of women’s participation in the immaterial heritage safeguarded by Turkey through UNESCO. Therefore, one of the ways that the Mevlevi Sema ceremony officially represents national identity is through the exclusion of women.

The privileging of male practitioners is nonetheless not unique to Turkish intangible heritage protected through UNESCO. In their work on intangible heritage and gender, Valentine Moghadam and Manilee Bagheritari (2007: 10) argue that UNESCO does not significantly address the hierarchical gendered divisions that underlie the safeguarding of many forms of intangible heritage. A survey of the YouTube videos of all the safeguarded elements on the Representative List reveals that the majority of practices privilege men through the exclusion of women practitioners or a male–female participation dynamic that involves greater or more essential involvement by men, including as key practitioners and transmitters of the traditions (UNESCO, 2012). This underrepresentation of female practitioners in official global intangible heritage could be linked to the gap that exists between the aim of the Convention and its actual implementation. The Convention defines intangible cultural heritage as a living practice that is constantly being renewed by communities and groups in response to their environment (UNESCO, 2003). This definition allows for the involvement of women and other minorities within the recreation of heritage. Nonetheless, the legal structure of the Convention grants state parties sovereign authority to interpret and represent the intangible heritage in their territories (Lixinski, 2011: 94–96). Although state parties are supposed to consult communities and groups to determine the intangible heritage within their territories, the sovereignty granted to nations may lead to the exclusion of community expressions that do not conform to the political aims of national governments. This sovereignty of state parties could induce the privileging of male practitioners within the domain of officially recognized intangible heritage.

Intangible heritage that is not state-sanctioned might enable more equality between men and women. In Turkey there exists only one Mevlevi organization that allows women to perform the sema alongside men in public ceremonies. This Istanbul-based community is the Foundation of Universal Lovers of Mevlana, or EMAV (from 1982 to 1998 called the Preservers of the Galata Mevlevi Temple Association). In 1993 the spiritual leader of this community, Hasan Dede, permitted women to take part in public performances of the sema alongside men. EMAV introduced women in public sema performances who whirl in colored or white robes (or tennure), adding a new dimension to an age-old traditional ceremony performed only by men. The precepts of this Mevlevi community outlined by Hasan Dede differ from those currently sanctioned by the government, as they do not regard secularism as incompatible with Mevlevi Sufism (Özalp, 2000: 105). Hasan Dede is regarded as a ‘Kemalist Mevlevi’, signifying his link to the secular politics of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Ayman, 2004: 48). This combining of Sufism with secularism enables EMAV under the spiritual guidance of Hasan Dede to have a more open approach to the role of women in sema performances. According to Suha Taji-Farouki (2007: 226), the adoption of Sufism by secular individuals has become widespread since 2002 in various cities, such as Istanbul and Casablanca. Combined with secularism, Sufism enables a connection to Islam that diminishes the constraints of rigid gender segregation and patriarchal norms. The integration of women in EMAV’s public performances of the sema is nonetheless controversial. Popular documentation reveals, for instance, that the spiritual leader of the Galata Mevlevi Music and Sema Ensemble, Dede Nail Kesova, was against the EMAV’s practice of combining men and women in ceremonies (Görgün and Denker, 2000). Both EMAV and the Galata Mevlevi Music Ensemble performed at the Galata Mevlevi Lodge in Istanbul from the late 1990s until the end of 2007, when the building closed for renovations.

The empirical stages

This consideration of YouTube as an archive of intangible heritage that can challenge the exclusion of women from heritage and, in this particular context, as an archive of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony, is based upon the fact that the knowledge that female dervishes actually exist in Istanbul was first ascertained through engagement with this video-hosting service. From September 2010 to January 2011, short online interviews with five Turkish academics, 60 former students and five residents of Istanbul were conducted to ascertain information about the presence of the female whirling dervish, or semazen, in Turkey. These online interviews, sent through email, consisted of three qualitative semi-structured questions about the Mevlevi Sema ceremony’s inclusion of women in Turkey. These respondents either provided no information about Turkish female dervishes or regarded Emine Mira Hunter’s solo performance in 2004 at a Mercan Dede concert in Istanbul as the first and, in some cases, only public female whirling dervish performance in the city and hence in Turkey. Mira Hunter is a Canadian whirling dervish from Vancouver who has performed throughout the world in the concerts of Mercan Dede – a Turkish-born and Canadian artist (Hunter, 2008).

From September 2010 to September 2011 an analysis of the sema on YouTube was conducted. This investigation included analyzing the content, the metadata, including descriptions and tagging, and the posted texts of approximately 1000 videos, ascertained through a range of search headings. This analysis provided a broad spectrum of sema representations on YouTube, which range from popular music performances and tourist cultural shows to religious ceremonies. At the start of this investigation, videos were viewed and analyzed that featured performances dating back to 2005 of women participating in public sema ceremonies alongside men. An example is the video ‘Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul’, which features a mixed performance in Istanbul in 2005 (Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul, 2006). Contacting the channels of these videos resulted in the discovery that the sema performances that combine male and female practitioners are part of the spiritual practices of EMAV.

In September 2011 a focused analysis was conducted of a specific ‘archive’ under the search request ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ to reiterate the title of UNESCO’s official video of this practice. This YouTube archive of the ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ combines state- and non-state-sanctioned videos of heritage, enabling a potential contestation of the gendered narrative that underlies UNESCO’s representation of the sema. This virtual ethnography takes into account the multiple ways that YouTube conveys information: through the visual content, metadata, video responses and posted texts of an individual video as well as its relation to the shifting order of videos, including the up-next videos and list of suggestions. This method involves interpreting the visual content of heritage narratives of individual videos through an analysis of their cinematic codes, such as close-ups, musical score and editing. The narratives produced by voiceovers as well as by posted texts are interpreted through textual analysis. The order of videos is also analyzed by investigating the visual and textual relation between individual videos and the up-next videos and list of suggestions. This methodology has the potential to capture YouTube as an archive that produces heritage narratives not only from isolated videos and posted texts but also through the context in which images and texts are displayed, which is being constantly reshaped through the interplay of user-generated content and algorithms.

From June to September 2011 and from December 2011 to February 2012, ethnographic research on EMAV in Istanbul was undertaken, which entailed attending 12 sema ceremonies, short conversations with community members, including dervishes, in-depth discussions that involved follow-up email questions with a female dervish, and a formal interview with the community’s spiritual leader, Hasan Dede. The format of the discussions and conversations was open-ended dialogue; the interview was comprised of semi-structured questions. The information that was obtained provided knowledge of the activities of the organization and the perspectives of its members, furnishing a more comprehensive vantage point from which to analyze YouTube representations of EMAV. This ethnographic method, which produces a dialogue between offline and online terrains, is inspired by the work of Robert V. Kozinets (2009), Daniel Miller and Don Slater (2001) and Christine Hine (2000).

The Mevlevi Sema ceremony archive

The videos under the search term ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ were analyzed to see whether social archiving reinforces or counters the dominant cultural heritage perspective proposed by UNESCO’s online video. The following empirical findings and analysis from this virtual ethnography illustrate the way that YouTube takes issue with traditional heritage that privileges exclusively male practices as emblematic of national identity. YouTube circulates alternative representations of heritage that challenge power relations underlying traditional heritage practices and values and in this regard realizes a key aim of critical heritage studies. When the search term ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ was entered in September 2011, 264 videos were featured: 109 videos depicted performances of this practice executed only by men, and 19 videos depicted women and men performing the sema together. Of the videos included in this category, 130 were irrelevant because they did not visually feature the Mevlevi Sema ceremony. Instead, most of these unrelated videos had been uploaded by IstanbulGeek since July 2011 and were tourist videos to promote the city.

The small number of videos of female dervishes performing the sema alongside men has the potential to counter the official gendered narrative that renders women absent from Mevlevi Sema ceremonies. Two videos that feature exclusively male performers, the official video uploaded by UNESCO TV and one posted on a Turkish tourist blog site, are contrasted with two videos that feature female and male dervishes, the video uploaded by EMAV and a vernacular user-generated video of an EMAV performance. Although the UNESCO TV, EMAV and Turkish tourist blog videos could be considered professional since they have been produced and uploaded by organizations, the professional versus amateur divide is collapsed in this study. In the case of the ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ archive, both vernacular and professional videos, which may also share similar aesthetic and technological quality, are productive in documenting the female presence in contemporary dervish performances in Istanbul. Moreover, Patricia Lange (2011: 26) points out that academic approaches to the study of digital video creation continue to maintain the divide between videos produced by professionals as opposed to amateurs, commonly referred to as user-created content or ‘vernacular video’, despite the waning significance of this division.

When the search term ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ is entered, the first video that appears is UNESCO’s video ‘The Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’, uploaded by UNESCO TV in 2009. It is a version of the 10-minute video that was included in the candidature for the Masterpiece Program (Galata Mevlevi Ensemble – ‘The Sacred Encounter’: UNESCO Proclamation Masterpieces 2005, 2009). This UNESCO TV video provides an exclusively male rendition of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony in the Galata Mevlevi Lodge in Istanbul performed by the Galata Mevlevi Music and Sema Ensemble. Even though this group put on ceremonies for tourists in the Galata Mevlevi Lodge from the 1990s to the end of 2007, the presentation of heritage in this video primarily looks toward the past before the founding of the secular Republic (1923) and the prohibition of Mevlevi Sufi practices (1925). The video highlights the historical practices of the Mevlevi order by providing a staged reenactment of the path of the dervish, who would spend 1001 days away from his family in training at the dervish lodge, or mevlevihane. The voiceover reiterates claims made in the candidature file that the effect of secularization has deprived this heritage of its religious and traditional significance. The narrator of the Mevlevi Sema story does not disclose that this heritage traditionally excludes women from public performances. This practice emerges as exclusively male through the absence of women from the video. Participation in public sema performances as either a spectator or practitioner as well as past membership in this order is visually conveyed to be male. Cinematic effects such as high-angle shots and slow motion are used to capture the spirituality of the whirling motion of the male dancers dressed in white flowing robes. The authority of a nationally sanctioned Mevlevi Sema ceremony supported by UNESCO in which women have no place is reinforced through the disabling of the function of adding comments. Users are consequently not granted the opportunity to directly challenge or support this rendition of the Mevlevi Sema promoted by UNESCO through the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

In addition to UNESCO’s depiction of the sema, most of the videos featured under the search heading ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ that are relevant to this category depict this ritual primarily as a male ceremony. An example is a video entitled ‘Turkey-Galata Mevlevihanesi’, uploaded by tinasor on 15 November 2006 (Turkey-Galata Mevlevihanesi, 2006). This video has been selected from among the 109 possible ones because the context in which it is embedded is exemplary in providing a means to challenge the privileging of male practitioners, demonstrating how, in addition to individual videos, the system of YouTube archives and safeguards developments in contemporary expressions of intangible heritage. ‘Turkey-Galata Mevlevihanesi’ is catalogued under ‘Travel and Events’ and has been uploaded by the English-language tourist blog ‘I Was in Turkey’ (www.iwasinturkey.com). This professionally produced and stylized video of whirling dervishes in the Galata Mevlevi Lodge employs a range of cinematic shots for varying effects. For instance, it contrasts close-ups of the turning foot patterns of the dervishes with high-angle shots of the dervishes whirling, which in turn highlight the circular movement of performers in relation to the circular-shaped ceremony floor of the building. It resembles UNESCO’s video by visually emphasizing the artistry and spirituality of male dervishes at the Galata Mevlevi Lodge.

‘Turkey-Galata Mevlevihanesi’ has received responses in regard to its exclusion of women. One year ago, user bosphorate, for instance, provided in a posted text comment a link to a video uploaded on YouTube that includes visual information detailing the presence of women dervishes in the sema performances of EMAV. Bosphorate writes,

The above link leads to a video entitled ‘Female Whirling Dervishes – Turkey’, produced and uploaded by Journeyman Pictures, which is an independent London-based distributor of recent and relevant news features and documentaries (Female Whirling Dervishes – Turkey, 2008). Despite the reference to female dervishes in the title, this video does not explicitly deal with the phenomenon of women who participate in public sema ceremonies. Yet it does provide footage of an EMAV performance in which involvement by women as dervishes, musicians and members of the audience is displayed. This video does not appear under the search heading ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ but is brought into the archive through user-generated content.

The comments posted by bosphorate one year ago respond to posted texts added by users three years ago, in which the presence of female dervish performances in Turkey was queried or remarked upon. For instance, the user mc4661 (Israel) writes, ‘When I visited this monastery there were women in coloured robes spinning together with the men, but I don’t know how often this happens’ (Turkey-Galata Mevlevihanesi, 2006). Although the comment by mc4661 is addressed by the video link listed by bosporate, it is also visually dealt with in the wider context in which the video ‘Turkey-Galata Mevlevihanesi’ is embedded. For instance, as the first and second videos on the list of suggestions and up-next videos are performances by EMAV that depict women dancing, they visually reproduce the comment made by user mc4661 that women perform the sema in colored robes. These videos are respectively ‘The Sufi Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul’, uploaded by 4transform (United States) in August 2007, and the previously cited ‘Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul’, uploaded by AprilRoberts (unknown national origin). These two videos appeared as up-next videos from September to November 2011 in accordance with the interaction between algorithms and user participation with ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ videos. As user-generated content shifts, these up-next videos may also be replaced by other videos that could reflect future developments of the lived context of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony in contemporary Istanbul.

One of these current up-next videos, ‘The Sufi Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul’, is part of the ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ archive. Ethnographic research reveals that EMAV is not financially supported by the government and thus obtains a portion of its funds through opening up its ceremonies to tourist audiences. Consequently, most of the EMAV videos on YouTube, of which this one is an example, have been created and uploaded by non-residents of Turkey. This EMAV performance outside the Galata Mevlevi Lodge counters the absence of women in sema performances. It uses cinematic effects, including a musical score and varied camera angles, to celebrate the beauty of the whirling dervish, some of which emphasize that both men and women can participate equally in this ceremony. For instance, in the second half of the video, when the music changes to a New Age, contemplative and highly melodic track, the camera zooms in to a close-up on the face of a female dancer in a red robe who seems taken over by spiritual peace. The camera then moves to a male dancer in a white robe and then to another female dancer, dressed in a lilac robe. In sharp contrast to UNESCO’s online representation, this user-generated video foregrounds the Mevlevi Sema ceremony as a performance that enables both men and women to experience spirituality through this whirling prayer. In the posted texts accompanying this video, 4transform highlights the presence of the female whirlers by commenting in April 2010, ‘If you look closely at the video, you’ll see half of them are women’ (The Sufi Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul, 2007). Through its elaborate use of cinematic effects, this vernacular video shares the professional quality of the previous two videos produced by institutions. Moreover, ‘The Sufi Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul’ is one of the most viewed videos in the ‘Mevlevi Sema Ceremony’ archive, with 428,008 views (17 July 2012), demonstrating the way that a user-generated video can have equal or perhaps more impact than a video created by professional videographers. A discussion with a female dervish from EMAV revealed that since the renovations of the Galata Mevlevi Lodge were completed in September 2011, women have not performed the sema in this building or on its grounds. Whether this absence is a result of an actual restriction against women dervishes could not be confirmed through ethnographic findings. But if women continue to be excluded from expressions of the sema in the Galata Mevlevi Lodge, this YouTube video will become a historical document, chronicling a time when they performed alongside men in this building. YouTube cannot guarantee that this video will remain on its site. Instead of preservation, YouTube offers the possibility – in light of John Hartley’s (2012) probability archive – that a video recording of women dervishes at this Mevlevi lodge will be found and viewed by thousands of users.

Finally, the video entitled ‘The Foundation of the Universal Lovers of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (EMAV)’, uploaded by this community under the user name serefayer on 13 April 2010, challenges the UNESCO version of this heritage: it combines Mevlevism and secularism and includes women practitioners in sema performances. The video’s voiceover makes reference to Rumi, whose writings and poetry advocate tolerance and equality among people, as well as to the secular principles of Kemal Mustafa Atatürk. The video renders explicit that the exclusion of women should not be part of the sema. At one point in the video, a shot of a female whirling dervish in a red robe is cross-cut into that of a male whirling dervish in a white robe to illustrate that both men and women can take part in the Mevlevi Sema ceremony. During this visual shift from a male to a female dervish, the narrator recounts, ‘Just as in the eye of God there is no discrimination between man and woman, it is the same in the sema’ (The Foundation of the Universal Lovers of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (EMAV), 2010). This video promotes complete equality between men and women. Ethnographic findings also reveal that women can be active participants as dervishes, composers, orchestra and choir leaders, musicians, singers and members of the community but that they have not yet attained equality in all activities. Women have not yet been granted the right to become spiritual leaders of the community although the possibility of this becoming reality in the future is not ruled out (Hasan Dede, 2011, personal interview). Despite this current restriction, EMAV has nonetheless provided women far more agency within a tradition that for centuries has privileged male participation and leadership.

Conclusion

As the case of EMAV’s female dervishes illustrates, YouTube can safeguard expressions by communities that are not officially recognized. In countering heritage representations put forward by nation-states through UNESCO, YouTube paradoxically furthers the goal of the Convention by continuously storing forms of intangible heritage that are being constantly recreated. This video-hosting service has the potential to safeguard multiple versions of heritage, including those that challenge power relations maintained through heritage policies that privilege representations of patriarchal practices as expressions of national identity. YouTube’s archiving of intangible heritage is situated within critical heritage studies, which seeks to unearth the frameworks of power forging traditional heritage narratives such as those that exclude women practitioners from national heritage. YouTube counteracts official heritage through videos, metadata and posted texts as well as the order of videos produced by the integrated work of algorithms and user-generated input. This interweaving of algorithmic technology and cultural content forges an archive of intangible heritage that challenges official heritage through the combined labor of the machine and human participation. Nonetheless, YouTube’s potential as an archive that takes issue with state-sanctioned heritage has limitations. As YouTube can circulate only uploaded content, this video-hosting service as an archive of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony is not complete. Distinguished by an abundance of videos, YouTube is also marked by absences. YouTube videos of EMAV performances at the Galata Mevlevi Lodge, for instance, date back no further than 2005 even though this community was established in 1982. A single video of a performance of EMAV from the early 1990s circulates instead on Daily Motion (See the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey, 2011). This research could be enriched by incorporating the contents of other video-hosting services to identify the gaps in YouTube’s archiving of the female Mevlevi dervish in Istanbul. Unraveling the politics behind the social archiving of the female whirling dervish opens up the terrain for future research on this video-hosting service and its relation to other forms of intangible heritage. This research should foster further empirical work that examines how social media can safeguard intangible heritage recreated by communities and groups and that exposes the power dynamics often embedded in national representations and practices.