Critical Approach on Polanyian Embeddedness through Kurdish Moral Economy: Fictitious Commodity, Reciprocity and Redistribution

This paper will analyse the (non)transformation of Kurdish political economy considering the role of the Kurdish character, social structure, political agents and the responsibility of these internal dynamics in a historical and anthropological context. In doing so, it also argues that Polanyi’s mechanism does not work for the Kurdish model during the nineteenth century, as the Kurds had not accomplished economic development and political improvement through industrialisation, modernisation and institutionalisation processes; hence there was no progress, according to the nineteenth century’s ‘new world order’.