CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Conklin, Tyler Joseph |
|---|---|
| Title | The Politics of Loyalty: The Confessional and Ethnic Loyalties of the Kurds in Seventeenth-Century Eastern Anatolia |
| Summary | This thesis seeks to uncover the ways in which the Kurds of seventeenth-century Ottoman Eastern Anatolia defined themselves and how the imperial state defined them. This investigation reveals the web of labels and loyalties which defined the region and its people. Confessional and ethnic markers were used both by regional and imperial actors to demarcate the boundaries of imperial loyalty and rebellion. Moreover, this thesis forgoes the terminology of ‘identity’ and replaces it with a discussion of ‘loyalty’ which proves more valuable for a discussion of identifactory labels in early modern empires. Furthermore, this discussion is in the context of the Ottoman-Safavid confrontation in the Eastern Anatolian borderlands in which self-fashioning and the ramifications of confessionalization are vitally important. To analyze these aspects, this thesis separates its narrative source base between imperial perspectives and regional perspectives on the Kurds. It is through this method that the multiform and varied nature of loyalty in the borderlands is revealed. The sources ranging from the travel account of Evliya Çelebi to a local translator’s introduction on the Kurdish language in his translation of the Şerefname provide evidence about the fluidity and political relevance of ethnic and confessional labels and loyalties in seventeenth-century Eastern Anatolia. |
| Supervisor | Krstic, Tijana; Esmer, Tolga |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/conklin_tyler.pdf |
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