Diane E King | University of Kentucky (original) (raw)

Books by Diane E King

The Kurds: History, Religion, Language, Politics, 2015

Kinship and Gender 6th edition, 2019

Book Description Does kinship still matter in today’s globalized, increasingly mobile world? Do f... more Book Description
Does kinship still matter in today’s globalized, increasingly mobile world? Do family structures continue to influence the varied roles that men and women play in different cultures? Answering with a resounding ‘yes!’, Linda Stone and Diane E. King offer a lively introduction to and working knowledge of kinship. They firmly link these concepts to cross-cultural gender studies, illuminating the malleable nature of gender roles around the world and over time.

Written to engage students, each chapter in Kinship and Gender provides key terms and useful generalizations gleaned through research on the interplay of kinship and gender in both traditional societies and contemporary communities. Detailed case studies and cross-cultural examples help students understand how such generalizations are experienced in real life. The authors also consider the ramifications of current social problems and recent developments in reproductive technology as they demonstrate the relevance of kinship and gender to students’ lives.

The fully-revised sixth edition contains new case studies on foster parenting in the United States and on domestic violence. It provides new material on pets as family members and an expanded discussion of the concept of lineal masculinity. There is also a comparison of the adoption of new reproductive technologies in Israel with other countries, along with a discussion of the issue of transnational movements in the use of these technologies.

Table of Contents
1. Gender, Reproduction, and Kinship. 2. The Evolution of Kinship and Gender. 3. The Power of Patrilines. 4. Through the Mother. 5. Double, Bilateral, and Cognatic Descent. 6. Marriage. 7. A History of Euro-American Kinship and Gender. 8. Kinship, Gender, and Contemporary Social Issues. 9. Kinship, Gender, and the New Reproductive Technologies. 10. The Globalization of Kinship. Glossary. Appendix.

Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq, 2014

"Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, wh... more "Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist Iraqi government by the United States and its allies in 2003, Kurdistan became a recognized part of the federal Iraqi system. The Region is now integrated through technology, media, and migration to the rest of the world.

Focusing on household life in Kurdistan’s towns and villages, King explores the ways that residents connect socially, particularly through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories. She emphasizes that patrilineages (male ancestral lines) seem well adapted to the Middle Eastern modern stage and viceversa. The idea of patrilineal descent influences the meaning of refuge-seeking and migration as well as how identity and place are understood, how women and men interact, and how “politicking” is conducted.

In the new Kurdistan, old values may be maintained, reformulated, or questioned. King offers a sensitive interpretation of the challenges resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity. Honor killings still occur when males believe their female relatives have dishonored their families, and female genital cutting endures. Yet, this is a region where modern technology has spread and seemingly everyone has a mobile phone.

Households may have a startling combination of illiterate older women and educated young women. New ideas about citizenship coexist with older forms of patronage.

King is one of the very few scholars who conducted research in Iraq under extremely difficult conditions during the Saddam Hussein regime. How she was able to work in the midst of danger and in the wake of genocide is woven throughout the stories she tells. Kurdistan on the Global Stage serves as a lesson in field research as well as a valuable ethnography."

Middle Eastern Belongings, 2010

"This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belon... more "This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belonging can mean fitting in, feeling at home, feeling a part; this kind of belonging is profoundly social. Belongings can be possessions, objects closely associated with one’s deepest notions of identity. Both kinds of belongings pertain to people and the kindreds, ethnic groups, and nations (and/or states) they call their own. Belongings of both kinds are, more often than not, emplaced and territorialized.

All of the chapters treat Middle Eastern collectivities as sites of anguished cultural projects. All use metaphor: national territory as woman, national resolve as cactus, and so on. None is reductionistic; belonging is rendered in its complexity, with its agonies as well as its joys. All could be identified with a growing genre of work on belonging. At the heart of each are the bonds that comprise belonging. Each one conveys both belonging’s messiness and its joys, and touches as much as it argues and elaborates."

Papers by Diane E King

In this article, I use border crossings between Syria, Turkey, and Iraq during the period from 19... more In this article, I use border crossings between Syria, Turkey, and Iraq during the period from 1995 to 2006 to examine the modern state, identity, and territory at border crossing points. Borderlands represent a site where the core powers of states can display the reach, scope, face, and preferred expressions of their identities. Border crossing points between modern states that make strong ethnolinguistic and/or ethnosectarian identity assertions, as do the states on which I focus here, are often charged sites where the state may seek to impose a certain identity category on an individual, an identity that the individual may or may not claim. Kurdistan, the non-state area recognized by Kurds as their ethnic/national home, arcs across the states, and most of the people meeting at the borders are ethnically Kurdish. The state may deny hybridity, or use hybridity, especially multilingualism, for its own purposes. Ethnolinguistic and other collective identity categories in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq are assigned according to patrilineal descent, which means that singular categories are passed from one generation to the next. These categories are made much less malleable by their reliance on descent claims through one parent. In such a milieu, ethnic identities may be a factor to a greater degree than if their state systems allowed for more ethnic flexibility and hybridity.

Al-Raida Journal, 1970

By the most commonly-accepted definition, a refugee is a person who has been granted protection f... more By the most commonly-accepted definition, a refugee is a person who has been granted protection from violence after crossing a state border. Such people rarely live in villages; they are usually housed in cities or in camps.The women in the pic-ture are residents of a village built by ...

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2021

The “eshiret” (‘eşîret in the romanized Kurmanji Kurdish alphabet) is a highly variable and situa... more The “eshiret” (‘eşîret in the romanized Kurmanji Kurdish alphabet) is a highly variable and situated concept and social and political entity in Kurdistan, the homeland of ethnic Kurdish people. This essay is based on regular ethnographic fieldwork I have been conducting in part of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. My first research stint was in the mid-1990s, and I was there most recently in 2016. During the early period of my research, I had a great deal of contact with people in nonurban settings for whom an eshiret may be an important social category and contributor to individual identity.

Reconceiving Muslim Men, 2018

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 02 PM Page 625 Political-Social Movements: Peace Movements Central Asia T... more EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 02 PM Page 625 Political-Social Movements: Peace Movements Central Asia This entry is about women, gender, and the peace movements in Central Asia. Women have made substantial contributions to peacebuilding and conflict resolution in the five Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan as they have worldwide. International recognition of women's peacebuilding role is a recent phenomenon (Marshall 2000), and much of the recent global attention paid to it ...

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 544 544 peacekeeping and conflict management Democratic contro... more EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 544 544 peacekeeping and conflict management Democratic control of military and security establishments in transitional democracies, London 2003. C. Enloe, Maneuvers. The international politics of militarizing women's lives, Berkeley 2000. D. Gioseffi (ed.), Women on war, New York 2003. J. Hagan, Do not send us your weapons. The General Assembly Debates Peace and Security, United Nations Chronicle Online,< http://www. un. org/Pubs/chronicle/2002/issue4/0402p18. html>. H. ...

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 540 540 patronage and clientage cultural and religious traditi... more EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 540 540 patronage and clientage cultural and religious traditions. It is by no means established that Islamic societies display a higher frequency of clientelistic structures than Confucian, Buddhist, Christian, or Hindu societies. The ancient concept of clientelism, with its emphasis on informality in the legal regard, its individual personal relationships, and principal of volunteerism, has widely prevailed until today. Legally registered procedures such as the adoption of a child are an exception to ...

The Kurds: History, Religion, Language, Politics, 2015

Kinship and Gender 6th edition, 2019

Book Description Does kinship still matter in today’s globalized, increasingly mobile world? Do f... more Book Description
Does kinship still matter in today’s globalized, increasingly mobile world? Do family structures continue to influence the varied roles that men and women play in different cultures? Answering with a resounding ‘yes!’, Linda Stone and Diane E. King offer a lively introduction to and working knowledge of kinship. They firmly link these concepts to cross-cultural gender studies, illuminating the malleable nature of gender roles around the world and over time.

Written to engage students, each chapter in Kinship and Gender provides key terms and useful generalizations gleaned through research on the interplay of kinship and gender in both traditional societies and contemporary communities. Detailed case studies and cross-cultural examples help students understand how such generalizations are experienced in real life. The authors also consider the ramifications of current social problems and recent developments in reproductive technology as they demonstrate the relevance of kinship and gender to students’ lives.

The fully-revised sixth edition contains new case studies on foster parenting in the United States and on domestic violence. It provides new material on pets as family members and an expanded discussion of the concept of lineal masculinity. There is also a comparison of the adoption of new reproductive technologies in Israel with other countries, along with a discussion of the issue of transnational movements in the use of these technologies.

Table of Contents
1. Gender, Reproduction, and Kinship. 2. The Evolution of Kinship and Gender. 3. The Power of Patrilines. 4. Through the Mother. 5. Double, Bilateral, and Cognatic Descent. 6. Marriage. 7. A History of Euro-American Kinship and Gender. 8. Kinship, Gender, and Contemporary Social Issues. 9. Kinship, Gender, and the New Reproductive Technologies. 10. The Globalization of Kinship. Glossary. Appendix.

Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq, 2014

"Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, wh... more "Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist Iraqi government by the United States and its allies in 2003, Kurdistan became a recognized part of the federal Iraqi system. The Region is now integrated through technology, media, and migration to the rest of the world.

Focusing on household life in Kurdistan’s towns and villages, King explores the ways that residents connect socially, particularly through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories. She emphasizes that patrilineages (male ancestral lines) seem well adapted to the Middle Eastern modern stage and viceversa. The idea of patrilineal descent influences the meaning of refuge-seeking and migration as well as how identity and place are understood, how women and men interact, and how “politicking” is conducted.

In the new Kurdistan, old values may be maintained, reformulated, or questioned. King offers a sensitive interpretation of the challenges resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity. Honor killings still occur when males believe their female relatives have dishonored their families, and female genital cutting endures. Yet, this is a region where modern technology has spread and seemingly everyone has a mobile phone.

Households may have a startling combination of illiterate older women and educated young women. New ideas about citizenship coexist with older forms of patronage.

King is one of the very few scholars who conducted research in Iraq under extremely difficult conditions during the Saddam Hussein regime. How she was able to work in the midst of danger and in the wake of genocide is woven throughout the stories she tells. Kurdistan on the Global Stage serves as a lesson in field research as well as a valuable ethnography."

Middle Eastern Belongings, 2010

"This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belon... more "This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belonging can mean fitting in, feeling at home, feeling a part; this kind of belonging is profoundly social. Belongings can be possessions, objects closely associated with one’s deepest notions of identity. Both kinds of belongings pertain to people and the kindreds, ethnic groups, and nations (and/or states) they call their own. Belongings of both kinds are, more often than not, emplaced and territorialized.

All of the chapters treat Middle Eastern collectivities as sites of anguished cultural projects. All use metaphor: national territory as woman, national resolve as cactus, and so on. None is reductionistic; belonging is rendered in its complexity, with its agonies as well as its joys. All could be identified with a growing genre of work on belonging. At the heart of each are the bonds that comprise belonging. Each one conveys both belonging’s messiness and its joys, and touches as much as it argues and elaborates."

In this article, I use border crossings between Syria, Turkey, and Iraq during the period from 19... more In this article, I use border crossings between Syria, Turkey, and Iraq during the period from 1995 to 2006 to examine the modern state, identity, and territory at border crossing points. Borderlands represent a site where the core powers of states can display the reach, scope, face, and preferred expressions of their identities. Border crossing points between modern states that make strong ethnolinguistic and/or ethnosectarian identity assertions, as do the states on which I focus here, are often charged sites where the state may seek to impose a certain identity category on an individual, an identity that the individual may or may not claim. Kurdistan, the non-state area recognized by Kurds as their ethnic/national home, arcs across the states, and most of the people meeting at the borders are ethnically Kurdish. The state may deny hybridity, or use hybridity, especially multilingualism, for its own purposes. Ethnolinguistic and other collective identity categories in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq are assigned according to patrilineal descent, which means that singular categories are passed from one generation to the next. These categories are made much less malleable by their reliance on descent claims through one parent. In such a milieu, ethnic identities may be a factor to a greater degree than if their state systems allowed for more ethnic flexibility and hybridity.

Al-Raida Journal, 1970

By the most commonly-accepted definition, a refugee is a person who has been granted protection f... more By the most commonly-accepted definition, a refugee is a person who has been granted protection from violence after crossing a state border. Such people rarely live in villages; they are usually housed in cities or in camps.The women in the pic-ture are residents of a village built by ...

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2021

The “eshiret” (‘eşîret in the romanized Kurmanji Kurdish alphabet) is a highly variable and situa... more The “eshiret” (‘eşîret in the romanized Kurmanji Kurdish alphabet) is a highly variable and situated concept and social and political entity in Kurdistan, the homeland of ethnic Kurdish people. This essay is based on regular ethnographic fieldwork I have been conducting in part of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. My first research stint was in the mid-1990s, and I was there most recently in 2016. During the early period of my research, I had a great deal of contact with people in nonurban settings for whom an eshiret may be an important social category and contributor to individual identity.

Reconceiving Muslim Men, 2018

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 02 PM Page 625 Political-Social Movements: Peace Movements Central Asia T... more EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 02 PM Page 625 Political-Social Movements: Peace Movements Central Asia This entry is about women, gender, and the peace movements in Central Asia. Women have made substantial contributions to peacebuilding and conflict resolution in the five Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan as they have worldwide. International recognition of women's peacebuilding role is a recent phenomenon (Marshall 2000), and much of the recent global attention paid to it ...

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 544 544 peacekeeping and conflict management Democratic contro... more EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 544 544 peacekeeping and conflict management Democratic control of military and security establishments in transitional democracies, London 2003. C. Enloe, Maneuvers. The international politics of militarizing women's lives, Berkeley 2000. D. Gioseffi (ed.), Women on war, New York 2003. J. Hagan, Do not send us your weapons. The General Assembly Debates Peace and Security, United Nations Chronicle Online,< http://www. un. org/Pubs/chronicle/2002/issue4/0402p18. html>. H. ...

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 540 540 patronage and clientage cultural and religious traditi... more EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 540 540 patronage and clientage cultural and religious traditions. It is by no means established that Islamic societies display a higher frequency of clientelistic structures than Confucian, Buddhist, Christian, or Hindu societies. The ancient concept of clientelism, with its emphasis on informality in the legal regard, its individual personal relationships, and principal of volunteerism, has widely prevailed until today. Legally registered procedures such as the adoption of a child are an exception to ...

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 347 Kinship and State Arab States Although the Arab world is g... more EWIC2_1-804 11/26/04 9: 01 PM Page 347 Kinship and State Arab States Although the Arab world is geographically vast and features considerable sociocultural diversity, its peoples have in common patrilineal kinship, a way of organizing kin relations that places emphasis on agnatic descent groups. Patrilineages have long formed the basis for other modes of social organization, including the tribe and the state (Khoury and Kostiner 1990). They may have been preceded by matrilineages in pre-Islamic Arabia (Keddie 1991), ...

Human Organization, 2005

This article examines the phenomenon of Iraqi Kurdish out-migration to the West between 1991 and ... more This article examines the phenomenon of Iraqi Kurdish out-migration to the West between 1991 and 2003. It argues that migrants looked to the West and Westerners as potential patrons and were incited to migrate by their conceptualizations of patronage and clientage roles. Iraqi Kurdish migrants to the West constituted one of the largest flows of asylum-seeking clandestine migrants in the world by the late 1990s. European governments first accepted their asylum claims as “legitimate,” but later accused the migrants of being a “ ...

"This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. ... more "This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belonging can mean fitting in, feeling at home, feeling a part; this kind of belonging is profoundly social. Belongings can be possessions, objects closely associated with one's deepest notions of identity. Both kinds of belongings pertain to people and the kindreds, ethnic groups, and nations (and/or states) they call their own. Belongings of both kinds are, more often than not, emplaced and territorialized. ... All of the chapters treat Middle Eastern collectivities as sites of ...

Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Anthropology on Air, 2023

In this episode you will meet associate professor at the University of Kentucky, Diane King. Dian... more 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”.

Seminar: The Genocide and Anfal campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan UK Parliament 16th March 2010

LSE Contemporary Turkish Studies Public Seminar Organized jointly with LSE Middle East Centre Mon... more LSE Contemporary Turkish Studies Public Seminar
Organized jointly with LSE Middle East Centre
Monday, 7 March 2016
17:30-19:00
Venue: Room COW1.11, 1st Floor, Cañada Blanch Room,
Cowdray House, LSE
Speaker: Associate Professor Diane E. King (Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky)
Chair: Associate Professor Esra Özyürek (LSE)

In this event, Associate Professor Diane E. King discusses her 2014 book, ‘Kurdistan on the Global Stage’ and present parts of her current project dealing with patrilineal descent groups, citizenship, and state formation in the Middle East. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq is currently a place of tremendous geopolitical importance, adjacent to areas controlled by the Islamic State, and holding the future of the Iraqi state in its hands. This talk will deal with both the Kurdistani everyday and the geopolitical, as King argues that notions of descent and conceptions of citizenship can be deeply interconnected.

American Ethnologist, 2010

There is a short and a long way to convey the import of this fine new historical study of Minangk... more There is a short and a long way to convey the import of this fine new historical study of Minangkabau society in West Sumatra. The latter will constitute the rest of this review; the short is that the historian Jeffrey Hadler answers two puzzles concerning the Minangkabau: (1) How did matriliny survive determined critiques and attacks by both reformist Muslims and patriarchal colonizers? and (2) Why has this region produced political, social, and literary leaders for Indonesia far out of proportion with its population?

Adem Uzun, “Living Freedom”: The Evolution of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey and the Efforts to R... more Adem Uzun, “Living Freedom”: The Evolution of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey and the Efforts to Resolve it. Berghof Transitions Series No. 11. Berlin: Berghof Foundation, 2014. 48 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-941514-16-4).

Ebru Sönmez, Idris-i Bidlisi: Ottoman Kurdistan and Islamic Legiti-macy, Libra Kitap, Istanbul, 2012, 190 pp., (ISBN: 978-605-4326-56-3).

Sabri Ateş, The Ottoman–Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843-1914, New York; Cambridge University Press, 2013. 366., (ISBN: 978-1107033658).

Choman Hardi, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington Vermont: Ashgate, 2011, xii + 217 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-7546-7715-4).

Harriet Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2014, 299 pp., (ISBN: 978-1780765631).

Khanna Omarkhali (ed.), Religious Minorities in Kurdistan: Beyond the Mainstream [Studies in Oriental Religions, Volume 68], Wiesbaden: Har-rassowitz, 2014, xxxviii + 423 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-447-10125-7).

Anna Grabole-Çeliker, Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey: Migra-tion, Gender and Ethnic Identity, London: I.B. Taurus, 2013, 299 pp., (ISBN: 978-1780760926).

Anthropology of Consciousness, Jan 1, 1998

Kurdish Studies 2(2):235-237

235 periphery relations and state formation processes in general and Kurdish history in particula... more 235 periphery relations and state formation processes in general and Kurdish history in particular. Ateş pays great attention to the claims of borderland communities and aims to make them visible actors throughout his study. However, since there are too many names of individuals, communities and places mentioned, at certain points this makes the book difficult to follow. Yet, twelve different maps included in the book not only enable the reader to follow the changes the border went through but also the claims made by the Ottomans and Iranians on the borderlands.

The Middle East Journal, Apr 1, 2002

The Middle East Journal, Oct 1, 2004

International Herald Tribune, Dec 1, 2007

PULLMAN, Washington--Iraq's diverse cultures share a way of understanding the family," ... more PULLMAN, Washington--Iraq's diverse cultures share a way of understanding the family," patriliny," in which identities ranging from religion to ethnicity to clan are conferred by fathers alone, not mothers. Understanding patriliny can help shed light on inter-group conflict in Iraq, specifically on the inter-sectarian rapes and killings that take place every day.

State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood. John L. Brooke, Julia C. Strauss,‎ and Greg Anderson, eds. Pp. 305-316. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2018

The Kurdish Question Revisited. Gareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef, eds. Pp. 105-114. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017