A theme that is not sufficiently discussed in the three articles is the educative significance of collective action. Drawing on a wide definition of what education is, the mountains, the
prison, the communities and even the streets can be regarded as important alternative educational arenas for Kurds. Since article II, and III have discussed how the mountains and prisons may be regarded as educational sites, I will here show that the street constitutes another important and more informal educational site for the PKK.
Educational activities in the mountains, in prison, in Kurdistan and in Diaspora are inter-related with what is going on in the streets. New technology and the use of different media have become important educational tools in terms of communication, organisation and mobilising the overall struggle and binding Kurds together across borders. Simultaneous global television images fuel popular passions and reinforce action in the streets. Televised images have been proved capable of stirring up emotions, more so than print or oral communication, and they also reach the illiterate (Romano, 2002). In the context of a lack of formal educational and political arenas, the street has become a public room where Kurds learn how to strengthen the struggle through collective action.
During the last 20 years, Kurds have shown their disagreement by collectively taking to the streets. According to Melucci (1995, p. 53), one has to distinguish between the field of conflict and the actors that bring the conflict to the fore. No one could have anticipated the educative outcome of these actions, and how they would enforce, and raise, the Kurdish struggle to a new level. Serhildans (uprisings) have added an important dimension to the struggle, namely the force that lies in collective mobilisation, collective identity and collective memory. Even the PKK itself expressed surprise at the strength of the first uprising54 (Marcus, 2007, p. 140). People’s willingness to mobilise for a cause they believe in seems to create a strong sense of community among the participants and the collective uprisings have become an important educational site for tens of thousands. By learning how to organise, formulate claims, and show their emotions openly, people gradually develop political literacy, which is the ability to understand and react adequately in political situations and acquire new knowledge and new skills. The educative outcome of collective action seems to be an increasing political, cultural and historical awareness that also strengthens the feeling of belonging to a community regardless of physical borders (see article II).
Collective movements have an autonomy lacking in formal educational sites, as the distance between the movements and official control gives them a certain space in which to operate (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 38). Even if Turkish authorities probably monitor Kurdish
54 It took place in Nusaybin (close to the Syrian border) in spring 1990, as a reaction to the killing of thirteen PKK guerrillas. For the first time the relatives of guerrillas claimed the bodies. The uprising, later referred to as Serhildan, spread to the entire region (Marcus, 2007, p. 140).
political activities, also in Diaspora, the participants who have taken to the streets feel that they can operate more freely and perhaps even more safely when disseminating their messages. Collective actions thereby seem to give strength and courage to the individual participant. What people learn by taking to the streets cannot be copied within a formal educational institution. Learning on the streets is political education aiming at changing the society (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 175). That is also the reason why the PKK has organised literacy courses in Kurdish communities. In order to master the tools necessary to “read” their reality, people have to be literate.
Acting together with thousands of others with the same goal, entails an element of excitement, touching on the emotional aspects of education. There are of course many reasons why people take to the streets showing collective protest. Emotional reactions caused by horrible experiences are stirred when people get the chance to express them - individually or collectively (article I). The importance of emotions in collective actions, according to Peterson (2001), seems to be neglected. So is, I have argued, the educational outcome of such an activity – both for the individual and for the collective.
Besides various forms of PKK demonstrations and mass mobilisation in favour of the organisation, the funerals of PKK guerrillas have become the major events of gathering and voicing the peoples’ claims whether it takes place in Kurdistan, western Turkey or Diaspora (Gokalp, 2007). Even if the political outcome of collective actions can sometimes be put into question, the participants often experience the inner dynamic of the event more than the actual outcome of it. During the funeral for the victims of the previous mentioned riot, thousands of people took to the street in order to express their collective solidarity with the grieving families. The women attending the funeral expressed their emotions by crying, beating their chests and shouting slogans. They fuelled the emotional process by giving energy to the mass.
Even if people gathered in order to express their sorrow in a specific situation, the emotional atmosphere also gave space for the ‘historic pain’ of the people. In this way, collective mobilisation around an incident or a common cause often increases the participants’ critical awareness and enables them to perceive and act upon the actual social and political situation in a different way.
Popular confrontations and collective actions aiming at transforming society are laden with emotion. Peterson (2001) uses Durkheim’s term collective effervescence55, to describe what takes place in collective gatherings in moments of intensely shared experiences. An
55 Emile Durkheim developed the concept in the volume Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).
example of collective effervescence is, according to Tiryakian (1995), the velvet revolutions of1989, which swept over various East European countries. The fact that they spread from country to country shows the strong educative potential of collective action. Romano (2002) argues that people learn by the example of others. When people gather around shared beliefs or actions filled with emotions, the atmosphere often reaches a high energy level, creating a sense of emotional togetherness. In these emotional collective moments, political meaning is created and collective memory established (Halbwachs, 1992). Collective learning takes place when the participants discover the relationship between collective action, political meaning and change, and are able to transfer these experiences to the next collective event. This can be explained by Gramsci’s concept ‘the collective subject’ (SPN, 2005). The subject learns, not solely as an individual but as part of a collective. It is the power of the collective of conscious subjects which provides the recourses necessary to act upon and to transform society.