Parables as indicators of popular wisdom: The making of piety culture in Turkish television dramas

Abstract

This article attempts to evaluate the articulation of folk cultural symbols in the context of TV drama to discuss the process whereby the act of storytelling becomes a tool for mediated and moralised teaching. Investigating the relatively new sphere of popular piety offers a suitable avenue for evaluating the nature of popular wisdom; the process by which popular TV dramas borrow from folk culture and popular religion has become a new area of investigation because new mediatised forms of folk culture are now a common feature of many television genres. Tracing the emergent patterns of storytelling, this article analyses narratives extracted from two well-known TV serials, Kurtlar Vadisi ( Valley of Wolves) and Deli Yürek ( Crazy Heart) in Turkey. It is argued that in both serials the meditative role of the mentor, which involves narrating parables for the hero’s benefit, constitutes one of the significant rhetorical strategies for reconstructing a piety culture.