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PREFACE
For making it possible for a cultural anthropologist to join the Danish Dokan Expedition, I express my gratitude to Professors Harald Ingholt and Jørgen Læssøe, the leaders of the Expedition.
To Kaj Birket - Smith, Ph. D., D. Sc., I express my sincere thanks for his suggestion to undertake this work and for his faith in believing that I would be able to carry out succesfully an investigation of the cultural pattern of Muslim women. To him, I owe much gratitude for friendly encouragement and good advice, not only on this occasion, but for many years.
Prior to my departure from Denmark, Professor K. Barr initiated me into the Kurdish language, and later, he kindly normalised the Kurdish terms which occur in my material. For this, I tender my sincere appreciation.
The Carlsberg Foundation enabled me to travel to Iraq and, by a generous grant, made it possible for me to spend four and a half month in Iraqi Kurdistan. This Foundation has also supported me in the course of my work with the material collected, and has defrayed the cost of printing. The translation of the Danish manuscript has been done by Major C. L. Bayliss with a grant from the Raskørsted Foundation. To these Foundations, a deep debt of gratitude is acknowledged.
I further wish to express my appreciation to H. E. Tawfiq Wahbi, formerly member of the Iraqi Cabinet, himself a Kurd, for introducing me to a woman interpreter Maliha Kareem Said.
This book owes much to Mr. J. G. Campbell, Resident Engineer of the Dokan Dam Project, who made arrangements for my stay among Kurds in a village from which the Project derived many of its workers.
Invaluable assistance was given by Mr. J. Taylor, a member of the Resident Engineer's staff, and his wife during my stay at the Dokan Dam Site.
Above all, I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to my unforgettable interpreter Miss Maliha Kareem Said, to her relatives and friends, as well as to Sheikh Taifur and his family in Topzawa who received me as a friend and in every way facilitated my research.
I express my gratitude to my fellow-members of the Expedition, the architects Mr. Mogens Friis and Mrs. Anne-Tinne Friis and Mr. Flemming Johansen. Together with the two leaders, they made my stay pleasant and helped me when help was needed.
Last but not least I thank my son, P. U. Hansen, an architect, who has turned my provisional drawings of Kurdish houses into ground-plans and sections of scientific use.
1961
Henny Harald Hansen
Introduction
In the spring and summer of 1957 the Danish Dokan Expedition was working under Professors Harald Ingholt and Jørgen Læssøe on the Rania plain west of Lesser Zab, a tributary of the Tigris in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Expedition concentrated on the excavation of the mound Tell Shemshāra1. Before the expedition left Denmark it offered to take with it a cultural anthropologist from the Ethnographical Department of the National Museum, who, based on the excavation camp on the right bank of the Lesser Zab, would have an opportunity to investigate Kurdish villages in the vicinity. The assistance of the Carlsberg Foundation enabled my association with the Danish Dokan Expedition.
Being a woman anthropologist, I was given, in addition to general investigations of Kurdish ethnography, the special task of studying woman's cultural pattern, which in Muslim areas is difficult for male investigators to undertake.
The necessary female interpreter for such investigations was obtained through the former Kurdish Minister, Tawfik Wahbi, who at that time was living in Baghdad and was in touch with the Danish Charge d'Affaires, F. Lystø, succeeded later in the summer of 1957 by F. de Jonquières. I left Denmark in May to join the expedition at the Dokan Dam Site, which is near the dam building over Lesser Zab, the Anglo-French2 engineering project in the Kurdish mountains started by the Iraq Development Board.
As it transpired that the neighbouring twin villages Topzawa-Rakawa, from which the British and French engineers obtained some of their workmen, offered excellent possibilities for study, it was arranged through the Resident Engineer of the Dokan Dam Site, Mr. J. G. Campbell, that, whilst waiting for a woman interpreter, I should be taken as a paying guest in Sheikh Taifūr's home in Topsawa as a member of this village-owner's family.
In the course of three weeks, through the good offices of Tawfik Wahbi and the mayor of Sulaimani3, the capital of the Liwa of Sulaimani, touch was gained with a young Kurdish woman school teacher, Malīha Karim Sa'īd, who, accompanied by her 13 year old half-brother, agreed to go with me to the villages mentioned and stay with me in the sheikh's home as long as my work out there went on. When this had ended, supplemented by a visit to and stay at the now evacuated and flooded ferry village, Mirza Rustam, with trips over the mountains to Shadala and Sargalu, the field of work was transferred to my interpreter's home in Sulaimani, a Kurdish provincial home. From here journeys ... |
