Paper short abstract:

This paper concerns a linguistic anthropology of the presentation of evidence by Kurdish refugees in London. Evidence-based medical practice as well as human rights work, are thereby considered from the perspective of a linguistic anthropology of evidentiality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper concerns the articulation of chronic pain by Kurdish women in North London. As survivors of human rights abuses in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, Kurdish women suffer from 'burning hearts'. They regularly present this predicament in primary health care settings. Their testimonies concern chronic pain and are presented on the basis of a Kurdish linguistic ideology. As a linguistic anthropologist, I focus on reported speech and the allocation of responsibility within such discourses. The narratological expectations of the Kurdish language include an epistemology - an indication of the sources and limits of knowledge - and an understanding of the nature of evidence. My paper discusses evidentials in Kurmanci, the Northern dialect of Kurdish. Evidentials are the grammatical markers that indicate the kind of evidence that exists for a statement. Kurdish is an Indo-European language, with an extensive history of contact with Ottoman Turkish, modern Turkish, Persian and Arabic. These historical layers are sedimented in the evidential system of Kurdish, and call for a linguistic anthropology. This analysis then needs to be juxtaposed to a consideration of our need for evidence within both medical and human rights practice. These needs go along with modern language ideologies and make particular demands on Kurdish traditions of oral history and verbal art. This paper thereby addresses the significant amount of 'irrelevant testimony', as it is commonly called, on the basis of an anthropology of evidentiality.