#2 Kinship & Gender in Iraqi Kurdistan w/Diane E. King

Anthropology on Air

In this episode you will meet associate professor at the University of Kentucky, Diane King. Diane’s research focuses on Kurdistan, which is the ethnic homeland of the Kurds encompassing parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Since the mid 1990s, Diane has done extensive fieldwork in the Kurdish communities in Iraq, and her work explores themes such as kinship, the state, migration, religion, and gender. She is the author of the 2014 book, On the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq and more recent publications include the book titled Kinship and Gender which Diane co-authored with Linda Stone.

In this conversation we speak with Diane on dominant kinship structures in Kurdistan, with a focus on how patriliny manifests and forms both the intimate lives and broader sociocultural context of her interlocutors. Diane also touches upon the relation between ethnic identity and state formation, and the benefits of reflecting on both the specificities and what is general across people and places in anthropological work.

This episode was recorded in early December 2022, when Diane was in Bergen to give the annual Fredrik Barth Memorial lecture, which she had titled “Ethnic Groups and Quandaries: Thoughts on Modern States and Hereditary Belonging”.