Narratives of home: home-making practices and political violence in a Kurdish border town in Turkey

dc.contributor.advisorAli, Kamran Asdar, 1961-en
dc.contributor.committeeMemberStewart, Kathleen Cen
dc.creatorOzcan, Omer, M.A.en
dc.date.accessioned2016-07-25T20:41:38Z
dc.date.available2016-07-25T20:41:38Z
dc.date.issued2011-05
dc.date.submittedMay 2011
dc.date.updated2016-07-25T20:41:39Z
dc.description.abstractThis essay analyzes a series of home narratives I gathered in Yüksekova (Gever in Kurdish) district of Hakkari (Colemêrg), a small Kurdish town located on the Iraqi-Turkish border. This essay presents and discusses the ways in which people have been struggling to create, maintain, and talk about their homes during and after a series of violent moments that have marked the local time-space of Yüksekova over the last century. Drawing an ethnographic picture of survival and home-making practices, I will trace the changing semantics of home and the social/spatial relationships and cultural imaginaries associated with it. To this end, I will focus on home-making in three violent moments in the cultural and political history of the town that are most emphasized in the narratives I gathered: 1) The massacre and deportation of Armenian and other non-Muslim peoples of Hakkari in 1915 that turned the region into a home only for Muslim Kurds 2) the destruction of homes as rural Kurds of Hakkari were displaced as a part of the recent counterinsurgency warfare against Kurdish guerillas; and 3) the struggles of people to make homes in Yüksekova. Informed by a body of literature on space that defines space meaningfully only in and through social relations, this paper aims to take an ethnographic look at home as a space that is situated in human agency and practices and which is open to change as it is shaped and reshaped as part of the dynamism of social, political and daily life.en
dc.description.departmentAnthropologyen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifierdoi:10.15781/T2QR4NQ8Ten
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2152/39222en
dc.subjectHome
dc.subjectPolitical violence
dc.subjectSpace
dc.subjectNarrative
dc.subjectSubjectivity
dc.subjectState of emergency
dc.subjectState
dc.subjectPower
dc.subjectResistance
dc.subjectPublic space
dc.subjectPrivate space
dc.subjectIntimate prison
dc.subjectHomemaking
dc.subjectDisplacement
dc.subjectHouse raids
dc.subjectCurfew
dc.subjectAnthropology of everyday life
dc.subjectEthnography
dc.subjectKurds
dc.subjectKurdistan
dc.subjectTurkey
dc.subjectYuksekova
dc.subjectGever
dc.subjectHakkari
dc.titleNarratives of home: home-making practices and political violence in a Kurdish border town in Turkeyen
dc.typeThesisen
dc.type.materialtexten
thesis.degree.departmentAnthropologyen
thesis.degree.disciplineAnthropologyen
thesis.degree.grantorThe University of Texas at Austinen
thesis.degree.levelMastersen
thesis.degree.nameMaster of Artsen

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