Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds

Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds

Lale Yalçın-Heckmann

Peter Lang

Although Kurdish national aspirations and their political difficulties have become relatively well-known, scientific studies of the Kurdish society are rare. Various aspects of their society such as the significance of tribal membership, the ways in which people use marriage and kinship, the interaction between tribal and ethnic identities are some of the themes of this book. The author uses her anthropological fieldwork in Hakkari to throw light on processes of Kurdish identity, tribe-state relations, and local politics in southeast Turkey.

Laie Yalçın-Heckmann studied sociology in Turkey and obtained her PhD in anthropology from the University of London. She is currently research assistant at the University of Bamberg and teaches at the University of Erlangen-Numberg.

Contents

List of Tables / 8
Illustrations, Maps and Figures / 9
Acknowledgements / 11
Notes on transliteration / 13

Introduction / 17

Chapter 1. Guns and loyalties / 27
The case of the Sisin’s guns / 27
Analysis: norms and contradictions / 36
Kinship, tribe and state / 39

Chapter 2. The history of politics in Hakkari / 41
Introductory remarks / 41
Some notes on the problems of sources / 42
Early history of Hakkari / 44
Some theories on the origins of Kurds in Hakkari / 45
Hakkari from the 12th to the 16th centuries / 46
Hakkari in the 16th century and the case of Zeynel Beg / 49
Hakkari as recounted by Evliya Çelebi in the 17th century / 56
Hakkari’s Nestorians from the mid-17th until the 19th centuries / 56
Hakkari in the 19th century / 57
The case of Nurullah Beg / 59
Hakkari’s Nestorians in the second half of the 19th century / 61
The politics of the Sadate Nehn family / 63
Hakkari after the First World War / 67
Hakkari and the formation of the Turkish Republic / 69

Chapter 3. The physical, social and economic landscape of Hakkari / 75
The physical landscape and the climate / 75
Population characteristics and settlement patterns / 78
Population movement and mobility in Hakkari / 80
Age group distribution and infant mortality in Hakkari / 82
Development indicators in Hakkari / 84
Summary / 95

Chapter 4. Tribes and tribal ideology in Hakkari / 97
Introduction / 97
Terminology and classification of tribal organization / 98
Criteria for the local denotations for tribes / 102
Tribal ideology and relations / 106
Residence, neighbourhood and zoma / 113
Disputes and segmentation / 115
Leadership in Hakkari / 120
Summary and concluding remarks / 132

Chapter 5. The village and the village household / 135
The village setting / 135
The house: the use and symbolism of its social space / 137
Seasonal changes and the household / 145
Household members and composition / 149
Gender roles and relations of rank and order / 159

Chapter 6. Relations of exchange between the households and village economy / 169
Exchange and reciprocity / 170
Domestic economy and economic differentiation between households / 175
Summary and concluding remarks / 182

Chapter 7. Kinship and affinity / 185
Kin and affinal categories and kinship terminology / 185
Kin and affinal interaction / 199
Concluding remarks / 209

Chapter 8. Marriage / 211
Local concepts relating to marriage and marital status / 211
Terms of reference and address related to marriage / 213
Age of marriage / 214
Civil and religious marriage ceremonies (nikah) / 215
Polygamy versus monogamy; wife-inheritance / 218
Father’s brother’s daughter, direct exchange and bride-price marriages in
Hakkari: theory and practice / 226
Wife kidnapping and elopement / 247
Summary / 253

Notes to Chapters / 257

Appendices
Appendix I. Rulers and the chronology of Hakkari / 295
Appendix II. Partial genealogy of the Sadate Nehrf / 296
Appendix III.Seasonal cycle of production and labour usage in / 297
Hakkari’s mountain villages
Appendix IV. Household histories from Sisin (1943-1983) / 299
Appendix V. Household labour and herd distribution among
Sisin households (January 1982) / 301
Appendix VI. Kurdish kinship terms from Hakkari / 303
Appendix VII.Village wedding ceremony / 304
Appendix VIII. An example of marriage payments in Hakkari / 307

Illustrations / 309

List of kinship abbreviations / 316

Glossary / 317

References

List of Tables

Table 3.1. Women and infant mortality in Hakkari / 83
Table 3.2. Literacy in Hakkari and Turkey / 87
Table 3.3. Work and economic activities in Hakkari / 90
Table 4.1. Tribal blocs in Hakkari / 101
Table 4.2. Mai membership among Sisin households / 108
Table 4.3. Sisin households’ lineage membership as distributed to two quarters / 109
Table 4.4. Lineage membership and zoma composition in Sisin / 109
Table 5.1a. Household composition in Sisin (early 1982) / 155
Table 5.1b. Totals, mean and percentages for Sisin households / 156
Table 6.1. Animal prices in Hakkari / 180
Table 6.2. Estimated (partial) costs and returns of a household in Sisin (1981) / 181
Table 8.1. Marriage types in Sisin / 228
Table 8.2. Kinship relations of women marrying within, into or outside Sisin / 232
Table 8.3. Direct wife exchange marriages in Sisin / 238

Illustrations, Maps and Figures

Illustrations
1. Yiiksekova / 309
2. A mountain village with terraced fields / 310
3. Winter in a mountain village / 311
4. A group of patrilineal cousins at the pasture camp / 312
5. Boys carrying bush from the mountain to the valley / 312
6. Women’s quarter of the tent / 313
7. Men dancing at a pasture wedding / 314
8. Woman grinding maize with a hand-mill / 315

Maps

Map 1.Turkey (general) / 15
Map 2.Hakkari and its surroundings / 25
Map 3.Topography of Hakkari / 23

Figures

Figure 1.1. Persons mentioned in the story of Sisin’s guns / 31
Figure 4.1. Lineage A households in Sisin / 111
Figure 4.2. Sisin households linked through women / 111
Figure 5.1. Sketch plan and frontal view of a main building / 138
Figure 7.1. Genealogical kin terms / 189
Figure 7.2. Affines of patrilateral and matrilateral kin / 189
Figure 7.3. Male EGO’s affines / 189
Figure 7.4. Female EGO’s affines / 189
Figure 7.5. Extension of kin terms / 190
Figure 7.6. Extension of affinal terms / 190
Figure 7.7. Kinship terms used in consecutive or polygynous marriages / 192
Figure 7.8. Women and children in polygynous marriages / 192

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Throughout the various stages of this research and writing I have had financial and moral support from different institutions and persons. My study in England was made possible through a loan from the Turkish Ministry of Education. My fieldwork, however, was mainly financed by my parents and the villagers in Hakkari. The hospitality and help of many villagers and townspeople in Hakkari is memorable, and I extend my thanks to all of them anonymously. Especially the villagers of Sisin have given me a unique chance of leading a commoner’s life in Hakkari and introduced me to the pleasures of mountain life without having to climb any summit. I discussed my ideas and various versions of the manuscript with Nükhet Sirman, Nancy Tapper, Friedrich Heckmann and my supervisors Chris Fuller and Ernest Gellner. I have profited from their criticism, suggestions, and commentary and I thank them all here. Miriam Ryan and Angela Zerbe have been extremely helpful in correcting my English and I received valuable guidance from the Geography Department at the L.S.E. for drawing my maps. Enver Ozkahraman has been a loyal friend a great support throughout my stay in Hakkari and afterwards. He has kindly provided some of the pictures for this book. Rainer Kasan has spent long hours trying to solve the problems with my word processor. The final work of conversion, layout and printing the manuscript has been carried out by Attila Azrak. I express my gratitude to all of the above.

Introduction

Kurds have become visible once again to the world with their tragic exodus from northern Iraq, as a consequence of the Gulf War and years of oppression by the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. As I write these lines, their suffering and despair is being shown daily in the media. Their national and political chances of survival and a dignified life have become a concern for the western governments. The rugged mountains of the Iraqi-Turkish border and their barren and rocky hills covered with snow is for the western audience the backstage for the human misery of hundred thousands of Kurds. I know these mountains and the people who live there in a different way. The province of Hakkari, which lies on the Iraqi-Turkish border, was the setting for my anthropological research on Kurdish tribes and kinship system. In 1980 I went to Hakkari for the first time and was struck by the beauty of the landscape and its contrasting modes of human life. As I was waiting to make the right contacts and find a suitable village to stay, I heard many dramatic and tragic stories about tribal fights, raids, kidnapped women or deadly avalanches and have often been perplexed at the particular combination of beauty and ugliness of the life in these Kurdish mountain villages.

During the eighteen months I spent in the province, I gathered information on the research questions of my doctoral dissertation in anthropology. They concerned in general the social organization of an ethnic and tribal community in Hakkari. Although the Kurds are in majority in Hakkari, with their tribal social organization and underdeveloped infrastructure they are not "typical" for Turkey. In my doctoral dissertation I explored the significance of tribal ideology and tribal forms of organization among the Kurds of Turkey, who have a strong kinship ideology; the importance of semi-nomadism, combined with "illegal" international livestock trade, for the drawing and maintenance of tribal boundaries and relations; and the significance of affinal relations for the apparently patrilineal ideology of Kurdish tribal and non-tribal groups.

This book is a revised version of my dissertation.1 My initial interests in doing research in an eastern province of Turkey were related to the problems of Kurdish identity, processes of assimilation and national awareness, differences between Kurdish and Turkish cultures and customs and the degree of incorporation of Kurdish groups into the economic, political and social structures of modern Turkey. These topics which I have dealt with in a limited way in the dissertation have been further developed in the revised book form. The focus is, however, still on the micro-level issues. After a decade of learning, reading, and ...

Lale Yalçın-Heckmann

Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds

Peter Lang

Verlag Peter Lang
Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds
Lale Yalçın-Heckmann

European University Studies
Europaische Hochschulschriften
Publications Universitaires Europeennes

Series XIX
Anthropology-Ethnology
Section B: Ethnology

Série XIX Reihe XIX
Volkskunde / Ethnologie
Abt. B Ethnologie
Ethnologie, anthropologie culturelle et sociale
b / ethnologie-générale
Vol. / Bd. 27

Peter Lang
Frankfurt am Main - Bern - New York - Paris

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP- Einheitsaufnahme
Yalçın-Heckmann, Lale:

Tribe and kinship among the Kurds / Lale Yalçın-Heckmann.-
Frankfurt am Main; Bern; New York; Paris: Lang, 1991
(European university studies: Ser. 19: B; Bd. 27)
ISBN 3-631-42702-6
NE: European university studies / 19 / B

ISSN 0721-3549
ISBN 3-631-42702-6

© Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1991
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