Kurds are an ethnic group native to a mountainous region of Western Asia known as Kurdistan, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria. There are also exclaves of Kurds in central Anatolia and Khorasan. Additionally, there are significant Kurdish diaspora communities in the cities of western Turkey, in particular Istanbul, while a Kurdish diaspora has developed in Western Europe, primarily in Germany. Numerically, the Kurds are estimated to number between 30 and 45 million.
The Middle East is a transcontinental region which includes Western Asia and all of Egypt. The term has come into wider usage as a replacement of the term Near East beginning in the early 20th century. The broader concept of the "Greater Middle East" also adds the Maghreb, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and sometimes even Central Asia and Transcaucasia into the region. The term "Middle East" has led to some confusion over its changing definitions.
Azerbaijanis or Azeris are a Turkic people living mainly in the Iranian region of Azerbaijan and the sovereign Republic of Azerbaijan. They are the second-most numerous ethnic group among the Turkic peoples after Turkish people and predominantly Shia Muslims. They comprise the largest ethnic group in the Republic of Azerbaijan and the second-largest ethnic group in neighboring Iran and Georgia. The world's largest number of ethnic Azerbaijanis live in Iran, followed by the Republic of Azerbaijan. They speak the Azerbaijani language, belonging to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages.
Qizilbash or Kizilbash were a wide variety of Shi'i militant groups that flourished in Iranian Azerbaijan, Anatolia and Kurdistan from the late 15th century onwards, some of which contributed to the foundation of the Safavid dynasty of Iran.
Sami Zubaida is an Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London and, as a Visiting Hauser Global Professor of Law in Spring 2006, taught Law and Politics in the Islamic World at New York University School of Law. He is a regular participant at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and organized a conference at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, in 1992, which focused on the culinary cultures of the Middle East. The conference papers were published in book form in 1994.
Turkification, or Turkicization, is a cultural and language shift whereby populations or states adopted a historical Turkic culture, such as in the Ottoman Empire. As the Turkic states developed and grew, there were many instances of this cultural shift. An early form of Turkification occurred in the time of the Seljuk Empire among the local population of Anatolia, involving intermarriages, religious conversion, linguistic shift and interethnic relationships, which today is reflected in the genetic makeup of the modern Turkish people.Diverse peoples were affected by Turkification including Anatolian, Balkan, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern peoples with different ethnic origins, such as Albanians, Armenians, Assyrians, Circassians, Georgians, Greeks, Jews, Romani, Slavs, Kurds living in Anatolia, as well as Lazs from all the regions of the Ottoman Empire.
Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan is an anthropological and complexity science book by social anthropologists Douglas R. White, University of California, Irvine, and Ulla Johansen of the University of Cologne. It is considered an important publication in anthropology and the political science of Central Asia.
Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo.
Ottoman cuisine is the cuisine of the Ottoman Empire and its continuation in the cuisines of Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and parts of the Caucasus and the Middle East.
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught courses on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East and is an expert on Iranian culture. Roy Mottahedeh served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1987 to 1990, and as the inaugural director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University from 2005 to 2011.
The composite Turco-Persian tradition refers to a distinctive culture that arose in the 9th and 10th centuries in Khorasan and Transoxiana. It was Persianate in that it was centered on a lettered tradition of Iranian origin and it was Turkic insofar as it was founded by and for many generations patronized by rulers of Turkic heredity. In subsequent centuries, the Turco-Persian culture would be carried on further by the conquering peoples to neighbouring regions, eventually becoming the predominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of South Asia, specifically North India, Central Asia and Tarim basin and large parts of West Asia.
Persianization or persification, is a sociological process of cultural change in which some people or culture becomes a "Persianate society". It is a specific form of cultural assimilation that often includes language assimilation. The term applies not only to cultures but also to individuals, as they acclimate to Persian culture and become "persianized" or "persified".
Yaylak is a Turkic term meaning "summer highland pasture". The converse term is gishlag, a winter pasture. The latter one gave rise to the term kishlak for rural settlements in Central Asia. Transcriptions of the term include yaylak, yaylaq, یایلاق, ailoq, jaylaw, or jayloo, and yeylāq (Persian).
Hafizullah Emadi is a scholar and development consultant for International Non-Governmental Organizations.
Philip Carl Salzman is professor of anthropology at McGill University.
Pashtunization, also called Pathanization, is a process of cultural or linguistic change in which someone or something non-Pashtun becomes accultured to Pashtun influence. The Pashtun people are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan.
Eastern world is an umbrella term for various cultures or social structures, nations and philosophical systems, which vary depending on the context. It most often includes at least part of Asia or, geographically, the countries and cultures east of Europe, the Mediterranean region and Arab world, specifically in historical (pre-modern) contexts, and in modern times in the context of Orientalism. Africa may rarely be included. It is often seen as a counterpart to the Western world, and correlates strongly to the southern half of the North–South divide.
Kurdish separatism in Iran or the Kurdish–Iranian conflict is an ongoing, long running, separatist dispute between the Kurdish opposition in Western Iran and the governments of Iran, lasting since the emergence of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1918.
Brian J. Spooner is a Professor of Anthropology, Undergraduate Chair at Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator of Near Eastern Ethnology at the Penn Museum. His many works are on subjects including Cultural and social anthropology; globalization, Islam, Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia; social organization, religion, ethnohistory, ecology, non-industrial economies.
Pedram Khosronejad is a socio-cultural and visual anthropologist of contemporary Iran. He is of Iranian origin and commenced his studies in Painting and in Visual Art Research before moving to France with a PhD grant in 2000. He obtained his D.E.A. at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and obtained his PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). His research interests include cultural and social anthropology, the anthropology of death and dying, visual anthropology, visual piety, devotional artefacts, and religious material culture, with a particular interest in Iran, Persianate societies and the Islamic world.
