Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq

Notes

229 NOTES CHAPTER 1 KURDISTAN GLOCAL 1. How should ethnicity be rendered linguistically, as a noun (“Kurd”) or an adjective (“Kurdish”)? A noun can be understood to make an ontological statement about someone’s very being, and implies fixity. An adjective assigns to a person a trait, and implies flexibility. My preference would be to use the more flexible term, the adjective. However, during my time in Iraq I have come to see how deeply ontological ethnic identity is for many people, especially given that ethnicity has been the basis on which many have been victimized and killed. So, even though the English language seems to be moving away from ontological statements about ethnicity, and in English describing a person as “Kurdish” is becoming more common than describing someone as “a Kurd,” I would not feel comfortable doing so all the time. What would that take away from people for whom claiming to be “a Kurd” is a right that they have not always had and insist on, going forward? In the Kurdish spoken in Iraq, I still hear people saying “I am a Kurd” (Ez Kurd im) on a regular basis. (In Turkey, I have heard this less frequently . People will more often make a reference to speaking the Kurmanji dialect than to “being” Kurdish.) In this book, to both show respect for my friends and to convey the constructed nature of identity, I switch off between “Kurd” and “Kurdish.” A related term, “Kurdistani,” refers to people belonging to the population of Kurdistan without specifying ethnicity. 2. “Hewler” is the city’s name in Kurdish. It is known as “Erbil” in Arabic, a name that is sometimes used in Kurdish as well. “Arbela” is the city’s historic name in English-language literature. 3. Armenians were the majority in Eastern Anatolia, which from a Kurdish point of view is “northern Kurdistan.” Armenian and Turkish nationalists eschew the term “Kurdistan.” After the Ottoman regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II, followed by the Young Turks, massacred and attempted genocide against Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kurds became the majority. 4. Ismet Sheriff Vanly’s geographical and historical overview of Iraqi Kurdistan (1993) is a good source on population figures to the early 1990s. 5. As I point out in this book, identity categories in Iraq such as ethnicity and religion are constructed along patrilineal lines. Ethnicity may be passed on by a NOTES 230 father, imposed by the state, or acquired in some other way. Religion may be passed on by a parent (nearly always a father in Iraq) or chosen by a convert. Therefore, I offer these categories with the caution that they might not apply at the individual level. For example, a person born into a Muslim family may be an atheist, even though the “Muslim” label is applied to him or her socially. 6. There are now a number of fine studies of Yezidi life in Iraq, including Christine Allison’s (2001) work on oral tradition and Nelida Fuccaro’s study of colonial Iraq (1999). 7. These are my own population estimates, based on familiarity with the estimates repeated with the Kurdish community. There are no systematically gathered data of which I am aware on the Kurdish population in any country. 8. The region has gone by several different names. Starting in the 1970s it was known as the “Kurdish Autonomous Region” after the Kurdish resistance reached what turned out to be a short-lived autonomy agreement with the central Iraqi government. In the 1990s, following the 1991 uprising, the term “Iraqi Kurdistan” came into common use. “Northern Iraq” is frequently used as a reference to the Kurdish majority, excluding the city of Mosul or areas to its west that are also clearly in the northern portion of Iraq. In Turkey, this term is preferred because “Kurdistan” has long been taboo and even illegal. “Northern Iraq” is also widely used by Western diplomats and among NGOs to refer to the Kurdish-majority area. Finally, in 2005 the area defined in 1991, and additional adjacent areas that came under Kurdish control following the deposing of the Iraqi regime by the United States and its allies, acquired an official name, the “Kurdistan Region.” A few other terms are in use as well. 9. However, I agree with Christopher Houston (2009:21), who expreses concern that these translations may represent the neo-Orientalism against which Edward Said cautioned (Said 1979:322). Houston sees them as part of a...