The Archive Problem:
Ottoman archives document Kurdistan. British Mandate archives document Kurdistan. Turkish state archives document Kurdistan. Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian state archives document Kurdistan.
But these archives don’t document the same thing. They create different “Kurdistans” through what they record, how they categorize, which connections they trace, which movements they erase.
Kurdish oral histories document something else entirely—not “Kurdistan” as a bounded entity, but networks of kinship, seasonal movement, shared water sources, marriage alliances that don’t map onto any state archive’s categories.
ACTIVITY III
Your task for 20-30 minutes: Each of you at best brings a different provocation. Together, work through this: How do networks, selective signals, and distributed emergence help you understand what’s happening with these archives?
SPECIFIC ANGLES TO EXPLORE:
For the person from Group 1 (Networks):
- Archives are infrastructure. They determine what becomes “knowable.” Which scholars get access to which archives? If you’re a Kurdish researcher, which infrastructure do you depend on—Ottoman? Turkish? Iraqi? Western academic databases? How does that dependency shape what you can say? If the archive feeds some narratives and starves others, what does “scholarship” mean?
For the person from Group 2 (Signals):
- Kurdish oral histories exist in forms that state archives can’t capture—not because they’re secret, but because archival infrastructure can’t process them. Stories passed through kinship networks. Knowledge embedded in seasonal practices. Memory carried in place names that official maps erased. Is this a failure of preservation? Or successful communication that protects itself by being illegible to state power?
For the person from Group 3 (Emergence):
- Kurdish political movements have repeatedly decided to “emerge”—1920s, 1960s, 1990s, 2010s. Each time: partial information, conflicting signals, irreversible consequences. Were these centralized decisions or distributed ones? Who was weighing which signals? When nationalist movements claim to speak for “Kurdistan,” whose emergence are they talking about—and whose are they not?
WHAT YOU NEED TO FIGURE OUT TOGETHER:
- If studying “Kurdistan” means choosing which archive to depend on (which network to be fed by), and that choice determines what you can see—where is the “real” Kurdistan? In the Ottoman documents? The oral histories? The underground networks that no archive captures?
- If these different archives create different objects (different “Kurdistans”), not just perspectives on one object—what does it mean to claim you’re studying “the same thing”?
- What would Kurdish autonomy even mean when Kurdish survival has always depended on networks (trade routes, kinship alliances, language practices) that cross the borders claiming to contain “Kurdistan”?
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OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (3. Februar 2026). Materials for the session on Feb 3 – part 02. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 9. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15ly2

