Kurdish life in contemporary Turkey

‘Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey: Migration, Gender and Ethnic Identity’ by Anna Grabolle-Çeliker
(I.B. Tauris, £62, 299 pages)

Today, almost 80 percent of Turkey’s population lives in urban areas, up from just 20 percent in 1955. The effects of this urban-rural sea change have been pored over by sociologists, but generally too little mainstream attention is paid to it. This despite the fact that it can be argued, with a little generalization, that Turkey’s two most significant political movements of the past 30 years – Islamism and Kurdish nationalism – are at least partly the result of identity renegotiation prompted by the move from the periphery to the urban center (or the edge of the center). This stimulating book by sociologist Anna Grabolle-Çeliker is the result of 12 years’ involvement with migrant and non-migrant Kurds from the southeastern province of Van. An academic text, the lay reader might wish it would succumb to a little more generalizing, and the author sometimes seems oddly reluctant to place the experiences of her subjects in a wider Turkish context. But her book is nevertheless full of insight, focusing on the deep and too-often underappreciated effects that migration has had on Kurdish identity, the role of women, and the popular understanding of religion.

Grabolle-Çeliker’s research was conducted among communities in three locations: A village in Van province and migrant districts in the cities of Van and Istanbul. Settlement in urban areas, she finds, has forced migrants to ask all kinds of fundamental questions about themselves. In village life, “Kurdish ethnicity [is] an everyday experience based on shared experiences of language, religiosity, socialarity, and...