Martyrdom and emotional resistance in the case of Northern Kurdistan: hidden and public emotional resistance

Abstract

Violence, deaths, fear and sorrow characterise the everyday lives of those in Turkey’s Kurdish region, also known as Northern Kurdistan. Through ethnographic field research, this article explores connections between resistance and emotions by scrutinising empirical observations and activists’ narratives during and after participation in a ceremony for a 16-year-old Kurdish boy who had been killed by Turkish forces – a ‘martyr’ in the eyes of the activists. By fusing empirical ethnographic data with James Scott’s theoretical works on hidden resistance and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s theorisations of emotional management, two distinct forms of what will be termed emotional resistance will be pointed out. Emotional resistance refers to conscious attempts to manipulate or manoeuvre around one’s own emotional expressions or reactions in order to undermine the power of psychological or direct violence in political contexts.

Keywords:

• Emotional management
• emotional resistance
• hidden resistance
• martyrdom
• the Kurdish movement
• social movements
• deep acting
• surface acting

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all my Kurdish interview partners and friends who made it possible to do the research for this article. I would also like to thank Annika Vestel, Mona Lilja, Maria Eriksson Baaz, Camilla Orjuela, Stellan Vinthagen, Majken Jul Sörensen, Jörgen Johansen, Daniel Ritter, Jens Sörensen, Viggo Vestel, Ben and Laura for useful comments and feedback on this article.