Prolegomena to the Study of the Kurds

Abstract

Iran and the Caucusus (print ISSN 1609-8498, online ISSN 1573-384X) is published semi-annually in two issues by Brill Academic Publishers, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 JC Leiden, The Netherlands, tel + 31 (0)71-5353500, fax +31 (0)71-5317532. Subscription ratesThe subscription price of volume 13 (2009) is EUR 111 / USD 163 for institutions (E-only: EUR 100 / USD 147) and EUR 37 / USD 54 for individuals, inclusive of postage and handling charges. All prices are exclusive of VAT in EUR-countries (VAT not applicable outside the EU). ClaimsClaims for missing issues will be met, free of charge, if made within three months of dispatch for European customers and five months for customers outside Europe. Online accessFor details on how to gain online access, please refer to the last page of this issue or check www.brill.nl/ic Subscription orders, payments, claims and customer serviceBrill Academic Publishers,

Where tulips and crocuses are popular food snacks: Kurdish traditional foraging reveals traces of mobile pastoralism in Southern Iraqi Kurdistan

“…In addition, the Kurdish region is located at the crossroad of four important cultural areas (Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Caucasian) and still hosts diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups who have peacefully lived together for centuries. In particular, we recently found that in Northern Iraq, affiliation to different religious communities, which possibly had an effect for centuries on kinship relations and then on the vertical transmission of Local/Traditional Environmental Knowledge and Practice (TEK) related to food within the household, has shaped different foraging patterns [14]. The differences we observed were especially remarkable between Christian Assyrians, whose wild food plants are mainly represented by synanthropic weeds, and Muslim Kurds, who favour wild plants growing in the mountains, and we postulated that this disparity could be related to the ethnogenesis of the two groups: post-Neolithic horticulturalists and nomadic pastoralists, respectively.…”

“…In the present study, which we conducted at the most southern edge of the Kurdish Autonomous Region in Iraq, we considered two diverse ethno-religious Kurdish groups: the Muslim and the Kakai (also named Yarsani) communities. The term kurd —possibly derived from the Middle Persian kwrt , meaning nomad or tent-dweller [14]—emerged in the sixteenth century to describe a few heterogeneous nomadic shepherding tribes living in the Central Persian Plateau, and their origins are probably to be found in different pre-existing civilizations, among them that of the Medes, which possibly also gave rise to the Baluchi people [15]. Kurds were mainly Islamicised by the Turks between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries [16] while Yarsanism is instead a monotheistic faith which specifically emerged from Shia Islam in Western Iran in the fourteenth century [16].…”

The Position of Kurdish Women in the View of the British in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

“…One such was a Dr. Ross who worked among the Bakhtyari Kurds (Asatrian, 2009), who were settled in the Lursitani bzurg, which is situated in the lands between Isfahan and the Karun River (Ross, 1921). While working there as a medic, she wrote a diary and dedicated most of her book to the Bakhtyari women and girls.…”

Introduction to Special Issue - Kurdish: A critical research overview

“…Finally, it is worth recalling that one of the most widespread traditional self-designations for the Zazas and their language is Kirmanj/Kirmanjkî We can reasonably assume that this is the same word as Kurmanj/Kurmanjî; the difference in the quality of the first vowel is minimal (the short centralised vowels are frequently interchangeable in a number of words), and the suffixes -kî and -î are the regular equivalents of each other in Zazaki and Kurmanji respectively. If this is the case, we can assume a common self-designation for both groups, possibly in the sense of a generic term for people associated with particular kinds of livelihoods, rather than terms targeting ethnic or linguistic identities (see Asatrian, 2009: 28-30 for a discussion of the term "Kurmanj"). Thus although we are far from anything approaching a reliable ethno-linguistic characterisation of premodern identity perception among the Zazas, and although there are undoubtedly considerable local wrinkles that more general statement would fail to capture, there is certainly good evidence for an inclusive perception of "Kurds" which generally subsumed the Zazas.…”