Nikolai Marr (1865–1934), best known today as the eccentric linguist whose ideas dominated early Soviet academic life, gained much of his early fame through archaeological excavations of the medieval city of Ani, beginning in 1892. Situated on territory annexed by Russia from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, the ruins of Ani were an object of Armenian national pride, conjuring, for Marr, the image of a harmonious crossroads between the great cultures of Greece and Persia (McReynolds 2016). In Marr’s own telling (2022 [1924]), the archaeological site itself prompted a major turning point in his career, as he shifted away from philology and the classical languages of Georgian and Armenian, to focus instead on dialects and “living unwritten languages.” In this paper, I consider Marr’s rejection of Indo-European linguistics, with its genealogical and racialized paradigm of language “families,” as a turn to a more complex archaeology of sound, in which languages and songs retain deposits and vestiges of many stages of development at once. In the process, I highlight Marr’s little-known investment in the vocal music of his home region of Georgia, which his students would later investigate through the phonograph. Drawing out questions of sound and material inscription—from cuneiform tablets to chant manuscripts, to policies of alphabetic reform and new technologies of sound recording—I show how Marr’s investment in a multiethnic, anti-nationalist future for the Caucasus and Eastern Mediterranean informed the way he listened to its past.

For centuries, musical practice across the Middle East and Central Asia has relied on various configurations of the cluster of modal traditions widely known as maqām. This “musical family” of traditions is wide ranging in terms of geography, history, and performance practice, and it includes repertories such as the Arab maqāmāt, the Turkish makamler, the Iraqi maqām, the Azeri mugham, the Tajik-Uzbek shashmaqom, and the Iranian dastgāh/radif. Especially since the rapid spread of nationalist movements beginning in the late nineteenth century, local populations have increasingly regarded these musical traditions as central components of their various ethnic, national, or spiritual identities, and there is indeed an argument to be made that local manifestations of maqām have developed along unique trajectories deserving of scholarly attention (Blum 2015, Lucas 2019). In this presentation, I examine the ways contemporary Iraqi Kurdish musicians and scholars utilize the concept of meqamî Kurdî to situate Kurdish musical practice in local, regional, and global contexts. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, examinations of music treatises published in Sorani Kurdish, and online discourse, I highlight the diversity of approaches and repertoires subsumed under the label “Kurdish meqam,” while interrogating the ways these practices and discourses have the potential to reshape the way scholars think about Kurdish musical practice vis-à-vis the flourishing of Kurdish meqam’s most closely related living tradition, the Iraqi maqām, as well as the historical development of the “Great Tradition” of maqām.

Code-switching emerged in the 1950s as a term for framing a socially nurtured fluidity in operating between multiple languages, particularly as a means of navigating structures marked along lines of social class and belonging. In this paper, I explore notions of code-switching and code-melding across seams of linguistic contact and entanglement that are woven through an intricately delineated Kurdish geography. When an abrupt transition is made from one language or musical inflection to another, they are cognitively entwined, the intangible residue of the one lingering, coloring what follows. Comparing spaces of ritual utterance (Qaderi dhikr) with communal settings (wedding repertoires), I attune to the symbolic as well as strategic dimensions of alternating between Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish musical vernaculars. In mapping the interplay of spheres according to logics of function and strength, I suggest that where one is decentered and presumed subordinate, its evocative power becomes more pronounced. In the Qaderi context, the vastness of commemorative terrain demands the juxtaposition of disjunct melodic, affective, and linguistic enclosures permeated by the same source of spiritual power and gravitas but articulated through divergent modes of utterance. Kurdish weddings in Turkey become forums in which Kurdish language, identity, and musicality is given full reign but the presence of Arabic and Turkish idioms is at times insisted upon. In different ways, these case studies—drawn from my fieldwork over the years—involve a kindred co-contextualization, prompting us to reflect on kinship and relationality (Strathern 2020), not just between group formations, but between expressive modalities.