| CHAPTER 1
Introductory
The following account is based upon a five weeks field survey carried out during the summer of 1938. It was intended to follow this up with an intensive study of one locality over a period of twelve months. Political developments in Europe made this project impracticable at the time and the scheme has now been abandoned.
For the facilities afforded me in Iraq I am particularly indebted to Mr. C. J. Edmonds, Adviser to the Iraq Government, Captain. Vyvyan Holt, Oriental Secretary at the British Embassy Baghdad, and His Excellency Ahmed Beg i Taufiq Beg, Mutasarrif of Erbil, in whose province this research was carried out.
The justification for publishing the somewhat superficial data contained in this monograph lies in the absence of any strictly comparable material elsewhere. The general form of Kurdish social organisation as here described is probably fairly typical of that of a large number of Mohammedan peoples scattered throughout the mountainous areas of western Asia Concerning such peoples there is at present available very little ethnographic material of any kind and the postulate that the Kurdish form of society is typical is put forward as an hypothesis open to correction in the light of further study.
Of more immediate relevance is the close correlation that undoubtedly exists between Kurdish social forms and those of Arabia in general. This fact is of interest since linguistically the Kurds are of "aryan" rather than "semitic" stock. Concerning the "manners and customs" of various Bedouin and Semitic groups there is of course an enormous mass of literature available, some of it of the highest scientific quality, but the emphasis in every case has been to make an historical record of ethnographic fact rather than to study any particular group as a society in functioning existence at the present time. The work of Jaussen, Musil, Lane, Drower and Murray to name but a few, though admirably detailed, is by modern standards somewhat lifeless, since it describes the pattern of various cultural norms without, as a rule, showing their social significance or demonstrating the fundamental interrelationship between them. | 
