Anthropology of Kurdistan
Chris Houston
This is a copy of an online article published by the Oxford Bibliographies series, which came out in 2017.
Outside of the autonomous Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq, Kurdistan does not independently exist. In Iran it is a heavily policed province, whilst Turkey does not mark it on any official map. By contrast, for Kurdish nationalists Kurdistan is the imagined homeland of the Kurds, spanning southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria and Western Iran. What does the claim of Turkey that Kurdistan is a non-place, or the underplaying by some Kurdish nationalists of Kurdistan’s social and ethnic heterogeneity, in particular of the historical co-habitation of Armenians there, reveal about its anthropological study? Firstly, they indicate that the affirmation or denial of Kurdistan’s existence is a political act, and thus that the historiography of Kurdistan is an ideological quagmire. Secondly they reveal that the production of knowledge (or non-knowledge) about Kurdistan is linked to the foundational practices of nation building and state formation in the Middle East after the First World War by the new regional states of Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria. In the name of the Persian, Turkish and Arab nation each state has sought to control, assimilate, or annihilate different ethnic and religious minorities in the territory over which it exerts control. Accordingly, the anthropology of Kurdistan analyzes as one of its core themes the cultural revolutions spearheaded by these ethnic-states, as well as the responses to, and perceptual consequences of, those revolutions in the lives and practices of Kurdistan’s inhabitants. Equally importantly, the extent to which the political practices of those states have been supported or supplanted by imperialistic powers demonstrates how globally coordinated policy regimes and Western military aid or intervention have further reconstructed social and political relations in Kurdistan. The emergence of the Kurdistan Region in federal Iraq is a case in point – there, after the US-led invasion of Baath Iraq in 2003, Kurdish political parties have developed as virtual state entities, and for the first time in the modern period there is now an internationally recognized Kurdistan. The newly self-declared autonomous Kurdish cantons in northern Syria exist in a much more uncertain zone, unrecognized by the Syrian and Turkish governments in the ongoing civil war. Together, these intertwined processes explain why the anthropology of Kurdistan has been heavily concerned with i. practices of state-formation, nationalism and the social ramifications of authoritarian modernism; ii. ethnic exclusion, forced deportation, and serial regional violence; iii. trauma, memory, and life story narratives; iv. arts production and activism, including in literature, film and music; v. religious identities; and vi. gender politics. Anthropological work has also expanded to examine the transnational activities of Kurdistan’s diasporas abroad.. [1]