Endurance: Speaking Kurdish in a Warped World (Brill Kurdish Studies, 1)

Book info: Endurance: Speaking Kurdish in a Warped World (Brill Kurdish Studies, 1) (Hardcover, 244 pages) – Brill, 2024. Language: English.

In Endurance, Alex Pillen portrays a sense of being unique within Kurdish cultural spheres. How to feel unique despite devastating violence, cultural oppression and assimilation is a question faced by many communities globally. Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) is a focal point for such uniqueness. When a culture is under siege and many have lost a former way of life it may not be clear how a society looks itself in the mirror, finds its reflection. Alex Pillen’s portrayal of Speaking Kurdish in a Warped World locates such lines of reflection within everyday language. The fear of a random geopolitical pair of dice is global, a fear to be honed when reading this account of uniqueness in the face of totalising loss. Editorial Reviews About the Author Alex Pillen, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. She explores language in war-torn societies from a cultural perspective and is the author of A Space That Will Never Be Filled (2017).