La fondation de la kurdologie turque et Ziya Gökalp

Kurdology, as a knowledge activity aiming to build the Kurds as the object of a specific science, appeared quite late in the Ottoman Empire (compared to the German or Russian Empires), spurred on by Ziya Gökalp, the theoretician of Turkish nationalism. Its development was clearly bond both to the Ottoman political crisis on which the Union and Progress Committee’s turcist project is built and moreover to the positivist character of the Unionists who believed in the efficiency of sociology – and more specifically of ‘ethnographic studies’ – to avoid the Empire’s breaking up. Ottoman kurdology appeared indeed at the very moment assimilationist policies towards the Kurds were established. This paper argues that kurdology was used in order both to establish a policy of ethnic engineering and to build the national ideology.