Armenian crafts in the Ottoman Empire: Armenian identity and cultural exchange

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes how the dominant narrative of Armenian national identity shapes perceptions of Armenian culture and offers examples of Ottoman Armenian craft art to bring to light an under acknowledged, yet intrinsically valuable, dynamic within Armenian cultural identity. Within studies of art history, cultural exchange between Ottoman Armenians and Turks has been ignored due to its inconvenience to the conflictual understanding of Armenian-Ottoman relations central to Armenian national identity. These artifacts speak out against reductive norms and offer an important addendum to the understanding of what it meant and continues to mean to be Armenian.     

The humanitarian road to Nagorno-Karabakh: media,morality and infrastructural promise in the Armenian diaspora

The Armenia Fund Telethon is an annual media event broadcast from Los Angeles that calls on all Armenians to give donations for humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects in Armenia and the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork during the 2013 and 2014 editions dedicated to the new Vardenis–Martakert highway connecting the two territories, this article examines the transnational ritual sphere through which de facto state formation in Nagorno-Karabakh is transformed from a political issue into a humanitarian question for diaspora households worldwide. While the new road facilitates mobility, its participatory materialisation appeals to distant addressees with the promise of helping Karabakh Armenians stay put and strengthening Armenian claims on de jure Azerbaijani territories. Challenging scholarly accounts of the Armenian diaspora as past-centred, subjective and symbolic, the Telethon’s humanitarian governance constructs Nagorno-Karabakh as materially diasporic and subjectivities in Los Angeles as objectively tied to the present-day conflict in the South Caucasus.     

Northern Ireland 1968–2008. The politics of entrenchment

The aim of this article is to propose and apply a conceptual model to evaluate how national identity, state interests and territory, including both state territory and national homeland, may be interwoven in a particular conflict. The frozen conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in the south Caucasus, the selected case study, appears to defy resolution efforts based on an assessment of self-determination of nations or on territorial integrity of the state. The article begins with the view that one-dimensional conceptions of ‘state’ and ‘nation’ are insufficient for understanding complex relations underlying territorial conflict. It is suggested that a more comprehensive understanding may be obtained and applied toward conflict resolution through a consideration of multiple scales and dimensions of activity in a particular conflict. The article focuses not only on the roles of states and nations, but also considers the meanings of territory and, most importantly, contributing factors to a sufficient capacity to compromise.     

Myth and Reality: Armenian Identity in the Early Middle Ages

A Christian isolationism, adherence to doctrine the Roman/Byzantine Empire deemed heretical, has popularly been assumed to have been integral to medieval Armenian identity. However, Armenians’ isolation was only partial: pilgrimage to the Holy Land joined them to the wider Christian world; missionary work was limited rather by politics and internal problems; orthodoxy and desire for church union were strong in Armenian history. ‘National’ unity was not an ideal, but distinctiveness was asserted by propagating, in literature and sculpture, an Old Testament, Hebraic descent for rival aristocratic families, and an equivalence between their leaders and Old Testament figures.     

Khash,history and Armenian national identity: reconsidering post-socialist gender,food practices and the domestic

This article explores how improvisation with food and cooking is a way for Armenian women to appeal to ‘public’ national narratives from within their ‘private’ spaces. Such appeal to the grand narrative of Armenian identity is in many ways predicated on their skilful abilities to survive or ‘make do’ with what is available and it is these skills that establish connections between individuals, the community and the nation. When these skills are enacted, women have the power to invoke national feelings of Armenianness and feminine morality through their ability to find and cook a proper Armenian meal. These skills also give women the ability to obligate individuals both within their families and amongst their peers at the same time that they can use them to express creativity and personal identities through their cooking. In other words, through cooking and from within the kitchen, I argue that women engage with powerful ‘public’ or national discourses that are often assumed to suppress them.     

The Forced Resettlement of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, 1948–1953

This article investigates the underlying reasons and processes for the resettlement of Azerbaijanis from Armenia in 1948–1953—an undertaking sanctioned by Josef Stalin under the official mantle of strengthening the cotton-growing industry in the Kura-Araz lowland region of Azerbaijan. The decree, which the Soviet leader signed in 1947, also contained a clause on the necessity of vacating places in Armenia for foreign repatriates—a project launched by Moscow in pursuit of territorial claims on Turkey in 1946–1949. This resettlement project reignited the ethno-territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan during Soviet rule; however, in its immediate aftermath, the Soviet authorities were able to keep the situation under control.     

Disabled people’s inclusion in education: a global perspective

This article describes my embodied experience as a disabled academic on a recent academic visit to Armenia. I was led to reflect on interesting contrasts and parallels between the Armenian and British systems, in relation to disabled staff, students and the inclusion of children in the education system. This article begins by contextualising the reasons for and nature of my visit to Yerevan, Armenia. The article then draws on differences and similarities I observed and experienced in such areas as physical access, attitudes, participation in education and the opportunities for disabled students and staff to contribute to academic activities. The article concludes by highlighting some valuable lessons learned from this insightful trip.