Assessing the impact of cultural change on parasitism has been a central goal in archaeoparasitology. The influence of civilization and the development of empires on parasitism has not been evaluated. Presented here is a preliminary analysis of the change in human parasitism associated with the Inca conquest of the Lluta Valley in Northern Chile. Changes in parasite prevalence are described. It can be seen that the change in life imposed on the inhabitants of the Lluta Valley by the Incas caused an increase in parasitism.

The impact of expanding civilization on the health of American indigenous societies has long been studied. Most studies have focused on infections and malnutrition that occurred when less complex societies were incorporated into more complex civilizations. The details of dietary change, however, have rarely been explored. Using the analysis of starch residues recovered from coprolites, here we evaluate the dietary adaptations of indigenous farmers in northern Chile's Atacama Desert during the time that the Inka Empire incorporated these communities into their economic system. This system has been described as “complementarity” because it involves interaction and trade in goods produced at different Andean elevations. We find that as local farming societies adapted to this new asymmetric system, a portion of their labor had to be given up to the Inka elite through a corvée tax system for maize production. In return, the Inka system of complementarity introduced previously rare foods from the Andean highlands into local economies. These changes caused a disruption of traditional communities as they instituted a state-level economic system on local farmers. Combined with previously published infection information for the same populations under Inka rule, the data suggest that there may have been a dual health impact from disruption of nutrition and introduction of crowd disease.

Iraqi Kurdistan is a “homeland” for a growing diaspora of Kurdish people living throughout the West. In this article I argue for return migrants’ narratives about life in the West as a constitutive element of a Kurdish diasporic imaginary in the homeland itself in addition to in the West. The first significant numbers of Kurds to out-migrate were mainly young men who fled the 1975 collapse of the Kurdish rebellion against the central government in which many of their peers perished. Most settled in Europe and the United States. Theirs was probably the last generation of Iraqi Kurdish out-migrants to experience a thorough rupture from their past that was sustained by Iraq’s ongoing political unrest, totalitarianism, and relatively sealed borders. This changed dramatically in 1991 when the Kurdish region of Iraq became functionally independent from Baghdad. Thousands of migrants left Iraqi Kurdistan (now known officially as the Kurdistan Region) for the West during the following decade. During the same period, Kurds who had migrated to the West in both the present and previous decades returned, most on short-term visits. Throngs of neighbours, friends and kin peppered each returnee with questions and listened raptly to accounts of life in the West, which they referred to simply as “the outside.” These encounters instilled those remaining “inside” with a new communal consciousness formulated vis-à-vis the West. This and accompanying political and technological changes have resulted in Iraqi Kurds’ becoming a diasporic people even though most have never left “home.”

"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."

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 “problem” and ceased granting asylum to most applicants. This article demonstrates how participants in the Iraqi Kurdish body politic posture themselves as clients and formulate the ideal roles of patrons in the migration process based on prior experience as clients of the state, tribal leaders, and other figures. Patronage and clientage roles provide both an interpretive frame and a motivator for the act of migrating.

In this article I propose a new model of namus, the concept recognized in some circum-Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Central and South Asian cultures and usually translated as “honor.” One way to understand namus is to regard it as patrilineal sovereignty, particularly reproductive sovereignty. After an “honor killing,” a “defense of honor” explanatory narrative is told by both perpetrator and community alike. I argue that an honor killing represents a show of reproductive sovereignty by people who belong to a patrilineage. I first describe ethnographic contexts in which “honor killings” are operative, and then, relying on Delaney’s (1991) model of namus as deeply bound up with patrogenerative theories of procreation, argue that a hymen is both a symbolic and real border to membership in the group. Finally, I apply this new conceptualization to statecraft, specifically to killings carried out in Iraqi Kurdistan following the founding of the Kurdish statelet there in 1991. Here, reproductive sovereignty and defense of borders were operative writ large as “honor killing” logic was expanded from lineage to state.

“In 1963 much of our area was destroyed by the government because of their war with the peshmerga (Kurdish anti-Iraqi-government fighters). In 1967 there was even worse fighting there, and most people fled to the mountains, some to Dohuk. Our house was destroyed then…[In 1970] we returned… and rebuilt our house. In 1975 the government destroyed our village again, and everyone fled. We went to Mosul this time. In 1976 the government ordered us to return to our villages, so we went, and again rebuilt our house.

It is a great honor to have been asked to edit this issue of VOICES, the newsletter of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. We have not had a" regular" issue of VOICES in a couple of years; in 2002, Sandi Morgen edited a special issue of VOICES on the critical topic of" Women and Impoverishment."[This special issue is still available for purchase.

"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."

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.