The Traitor at the Court: A Tale of Moral Categories from the House of Kurds

ABSTRACT:This paper focuses on a particular moral category, “betrayal,” that has gained significant purchase on Kurdish public culture in Turkey. It examines the ways Kurds reconfigure the relationship between political conditions and personal guilt by using betrayal as an orienting framework expressive of this relationship. In this sense, this paper frames “betrayal” not as a label or an abstract idea, but a register of political engagement that allows Kurds to recognize the conditions as well as the ethics of their shared membership in a public. It argues that examining Kurds’ reflexive interactions about betrayal—how they debate, define, and describe it—reveals a great deal about the formative significance of moral categories to the work of negotiating group-life, a specific kind of intellectual work thus rendered salient. The goal of the paper is to point to some productive directions in the anthropological study of moral categories by foregrounding the co-indexical relations between these categories and the semiotic operations in which they gain public and ethical recognition.