Abstract:

With the fall of the Soviet Union Yezids from Armenia found their way to Siberia and managed to establish a remarkable community, that formed an economic elite, that is able to form and set the frame for their identity search that turns out in yet blurred nationalism. Those achievements and changes influenced the patriarchal community structures and challenges next to the Yezidi cast order social-religious boundaries of gender relations within the community.

As a migrant community in Siberia, the community faces the influence on women and young men from the hosting country as well as the distance to Armenia and further the spiritual homeland of Iraq opens new perspectives in gender dynamics for Yezids in Siberia. Along the discourse over education for women and girls goes questions of wage giving labor for them. Yet education and the external framework, led to questions about marriage practices, love, shame and honor that are essential to the order of the community. Navigating changes of values in the community it is still men who represent the religion and the community in Russia as such and shift the struggles of women, girls and young men to publicly closed field. In the frame of my PhD research on the social economic organization of Yezids in Siberia, I conducted several field trips and interviews in wish result, women and girls had a huge part in the conservation of Yezidi identity in a migration context, such as the transmission of language, values, the strict compliance to social-religious norms, but yet are not included in the representation of the religious community and kept in patriarchal social patterns. Changes a rare but outstanding examples and discourses show the difficult balance act between the conservation of religious Yezidi identity and the opening and development of this community in a globalized world.