Memoryscapes of multiple modernities

In their past, the Kurds have faced many hardships, ranging from the denial of their ethnic identity and their hopes of building a nation state, to violations of their human rights, severe acts of punishment, as well as persecution, forced migration, deportation, and acts of genocide and ethnocide. All these are crucial aspects for the shaping of Kurdish history, self-awareness identity processes and belonging. This project aims to explore memory-building processes in the Kurdish transnation, which includes the Kurds in the different nation states of their homelands, as well as Kurdish diasporic and transnational communities. The dynamics of both remembering and forgetting the past will be investigated in an innovative manner. The hypothesis of this project is that today`s experience of the past in the Kurdish transnation has not only been shaped by the different kinds of political exclusions, persecutions and human rights violations that the Kurds have experienced, but also by intra-ethnic cultural diversity, internal power relations, and their integration into different states. Due to new communication technologies, it seems that new ways of dealing with the past are in the making, resulting in various impacts on the Kurdish transnation in general and on individuals in particular. The project will explore the differences, commonalities and dynamics of memory-building in the Kurdish homelands and diasporas, which not only involve strategies of coping with the past but are interlinked with identity-building processes in general. It is the aim of the project to trace the ways that remembering and forgetting have developed using a descriptive, a phenomenological, and a comparative approach. The project explores the long-term effects of mass violence in Kurdish society, in its inter-generational relations, and in intra- and inter-ethnic processes. The application of anthropological methods helps to examine these effects in both the original and subsequent generations, and to achieve new insights into how violent experiences are coped with. A comparative approach enables a view of the general direction of the long-term impact of these events on this society. Three cases have been chosen for the investigation: the persecution of the Yezidi Kurds during WWI, the mass atrocities against the Alevi Kurds in Dersim 1937/38, and the Anfal Operations (1988/89) against the Kurds in Iraq. The focus on different sub-groups and time-frames enables the analysis of memory-building processes in different temporalities, territorial settings in political discourses and social frameworks. The application of multiple methodological approaches, namely, intensive archive studies, multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, and comparisons within and between trans-national spaces, will shed new light on the dynamics and strategies of modes of remembrance, as well as the intersections in and interrelatedness between memoryscapes in multiple modernities.

The Kurdish and Yezidi society has experienced a plethora of state violence in the last century (genocidal and ethnocidal processes, violations of human rights, displacement, denial of the ethnic, religious or religious identity). The separation into different states as well as the enforced migration in the last few decades have brought forward various transnational communities, also dedicating themselves to their fateful past. As there were basically no academic institutions, historiographies, or active memory work in place, the long-term effects of violence have not been sufficiently studied. The project was designed to examine memory processes in the transnations (meaning the countries of origin and the diasporas) based on various methods to determine the trans-generative effects of violent experiences. This was done on the hypothesis that accounts of the past are not only marked by intra-ethnic and cultural differences, power relations, and the separation into different nation states, but also by (political) intra- and interethnic mechanisms of exclusion as well as the intense transgenerativetransmission of violent experiences. The project focused on three different periods of experienced state violence: the persecution of Yezidis during WWI, the mass atrocities against the Alevi Kurds in Dersim 1937/38, and the Anfal Operations 1988/89 (Kurds in Iraq). The project came to the conclusion that although state-imposed mechanisms of denial and silencing might conceal such violent processes, any forgetting or prolonged erasing even in later generations was impossible. There are countless mechanisms in place to conserve peoples memories going far beyond (acknowledged or semi-official) narratives, counter-histories, or official memory work: the significance of oral history, family narratives, implicit knowledge, everyday activities, music traditions, and art forms contributes to an emotional remembering and transgenerational transmission, even though people do not have access to all the hard facts. In consequence, it takes as long as the second or third generation to develop official forms of remembrance that are usually influenced or fostered by the transnational community and often related to recent violent experiences. All the violent processes are particularly slow to be integrated into an overall Kurdish historic consciousness due to the national differences in socialization, multilingualism (the various Kurdish dialects Kurmanc, Soran, Zazak, Ezdik, and the languages in the countries of residence), linguistic orientations, and the denomination of the analyzed societies. Against this backdrop, the transnationally oriented memory work (documentaries, social media, commemorations), various temporalities of remembrance, and complex power relations seem to foster both intra- and inter-ethnic differences and related identity processes.