Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey
Product details
- ISBN 9780415824187
- Weight: 600g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 17 Oct 2013
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey examines political violence, the politics of fear and the Kurdish experience of pain through an analysis of life stories, personal narratives and testimonies of Kurdish subjects in contemporary Turkey. It traces the physical and psychological impacts of the war between the state security forces and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas in the last three decades, in Kurdish populated areas in the south-eastern part of Turkey.
Focusing on the instrumentalization of violence, the ensuing and manufactured culture of fear, gendered experiences of state violence, pain, incarceration, and corporeal punishment, Ramazan Aras argues that these phenomena have shaped contemporary Kurdish history and memory. Analysing occurrences of various forms of protracted state violence and fear not only as personal and differential markers experienced by individuals, but also as communally-felt phenomena which have engendered collective suffering, this book asserts that these traumatic experiences have marked the social body and produced a prevailing narrative of Kurdishness.
Providing an anthropological study of political violence, fear, and pain amongst the Kurdish community in Turkey, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Kurdish Studies, Middle East Studies and Anthropology.
Ramazan Aras is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Sociology at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. He is also Founding Director of Center for Oral History and Social Memory Studies at İHU. He received his Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from the University of Western Ontario in February 2010. Previously, he has worked at the Departments of Anthropology at both Western University (Canada) and at Mardin Artuklu University (Turkey).
He is the author of The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey: Political Violence, Fear and Pain (Routledge, 2013), Crossing Borders: Socio-cultural Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Approaches in Turkey (Edit., 2014, in Turkish), Landmine and Smuggler: The Making and Unmaking Practices of Turkish-Syrian Border (2015, in Turkish). He has also published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on different issues in Turkey.
