Memory and trauma in the Kurdistan genocide

Abstract

Memory and trauma are often considered to be interconnected social phenomena. Collective memory exists in every society, but when a particularly catastrophic event occurs, it leaves an impact on behavior, and enduring memories of a cultural trauma. This paper considers the changing social meanings of the Anfal, an act of genocide which occurred in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988, and inquires whether the legacy of the Anfal can be most accurately characterized as a social memory or a cultural trauma. The paper uses a mixed methodology of historical research and a recent survey carried out among young people in Iraqi Kurdistan.

A History of Research on the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls

“…Additionally, it is helpful to consider the arguments of Perrin and Machiela alongside an extensive scholarship on the affinities and points of contact between various pairs and clusters of Aramaic compositions from Qumran. Some of these studies are in explicit dialogue with the work of Dimant, Machiela, etc., while others predate or are otherwise independent of the above-cited research on the Aramaic Scrolls as corpus: the Books of Watchers and the Aramaic Levi Document (Nickelsburg 1981;Stone 1988;Wright 1997); the Astronomical Book and the Aramaic Levi Document (Drawnel 2006a;Ben-Dov 2008a); the early Enoch literature and Tobit (Nickelsburg 1996;2003); the Aramaic Levi Document, the Testament of Qahat, and the Visions of Amram (Milik 1972;Drawnel 2006b;Tervanotko 2014;Hama 2022;Perrin 2022b); the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi Document (Machiela and Jones 2023); the Genesis Apocryphon and the Book of Giants (Machiela and Perrin 2011); the Genesis Apocryphon and Tobit (Machiela and Perrin 2014); the Visions of Amram and Tobit (Goldman 2013); the Visions of Amram and Four Kingdoms (Machiela 2021b) (Perrin 2019). The scholars responsible for these studies express a range of views on the relationship between the compositions under their consideration, but taken together, this catalogue of scholarship offers some sense of the complexity of the 'patterns of association' (to use Machiela's term) at play within the Qumran Aramaic corpus, and it represents an important complement to the scholarship focusing on the Aramaic Scrolls as a whole (e.g., Dimant, Tigchelaar, Ben-Dov, García Martínez, Machiela, etc.…”