Yezidi religion and history had been largely transmitted orally until the
late 20th century due to the closeness, isolation, and marginalization
of the community in their various home countries. It was the advent of
digitization that sparked a radical switch and concurrent emergence of
a new class of protagonists who used social media as a tool to theorize
and generalize sacred knowledge. The new actors often do not belong to
the traditional class of clergy in charge of preserving and transmitting
this information. In this chapter, I argue that their use of social media
to spread deliberate knowledge has contributed to the development of
new forms of identity and loyalty among Yezidi groups in Syria and Iraq.
13. Mapping Genocide? Giving Visual Memory to Oral Culture
