Towards a history of the Kurdish Bedirhani family in Ottoman and post-imperial contexts: narrative continuities and discontinuities

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The Bedirhanis were an important Kurdish notable family in late Ottoman eastern Anatolia. They are known in particular for the losing battle their eponymos Bedirhan Bey fought against the Ottoman state in 1847 and the leading role a number of his descendants played in the emerging Kurdish national movement.With the interest in the Bedirhani family being largely been restricted to the two aspects mentioned above, research has remained biased and fragmentary. No note has for instance been taken of the fact that a number of family members held high-ranking positions in the Ottoman imperial bureaucracy after 1847. By investigating ego-documents, archival sources and other relevant material, this project seeks to include also those family members that did not play a role in the Kurdish national movement and take the variety of their life-worlds and ideological formations into account. The case study of the Bedirhani family history from ca. 1850 to 1930 will thus cast new light on a period of transition from the imperial Ottoman context to post-Ottoman, national reference systems. Processes of transformation, continuities, and discontinuities that accompanied the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new, post-imperial realities will be traced by looking at narratives of the family history as well as network structures members of the family operated in.