Abstract
This chapter examines the experiences of Anatolian Armenians to offer critical perspectives on seeing and writing about post-Ottoman societies. Building on the literature of post-colonial studies, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which one cannot write Armenian history in Turkey without first considering the predicament of the Muslim populations of the Balkan and the Kurds in Anatolia. Such “intertwined histories and overlapping territories,” to use Edward Said’s words, contribute to the decolonization and denationalization of area studies.
This material is a revised version of an earlier chapter from A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East edited by Soraya Altorki (2015) with permission of John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
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- 1.
All names employed throughout this chapter have been changed to protect anonymity.
- 2.
Similarly, the Armenians who survived in the diaspora forged new connections and relations to their home and host societies in places such as Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, France, and the United States that require mapping.
- 3.
Dale Eickelman, The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach (New York: Pearson, 2001).
- 4.
Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 206.
- 5.
So as to move beyond the nation-state-centric approach, I advocate that the study of the non-Arab Middle East should not only include non-Arab states such as Turkey, Iran, and Israel, but the populations that do not affiliate with Arabic culture and language in “Arab majority” societies, especially when they constitute a demographic majority in the regions they live in, such as the Kurds in northern Iraq, Berbers in some parts of Algeria, and Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel.
- 6.
Steney Shami and Nefissa Naguib, “Occluding Difference: Ethnic Identity and the Shifting Zones of Theory on the Middle East and North Africa,” in Sherine Hafez and Susan Slyomovics, eds., Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 39, 43–44.
- 7.
I employ the term “ethno-sectarian” to indicate the racialization of the sectarian communal identification that turned the affiliation to a sect into an inherent marker of ethnic nationalism. I prefer the term “sectarian” to “religious” in this case, because post-Ottoman societies witnessed the ruling in the name of a “sect” among the other sects within the larger religious tradition, and not merely ruling in the name of a religious affiliation or organization. For example, Turkey and Greece were established on the rule of Sunni Islam and Eastern-Roman Orthodoxy respectively, and not merely Islam and Christianity, to the extent that other sects of the same religion were rendered as outliers within the body of each state, as is the case with Alevis in Turkey and Catholics or Armenians (albeit their small numbers) in Greece. The second reason is that the term “sectarian” is indicative of the existence of a multiplicity within a given society (in a similar ways that racist ideologies assume the existence of “a multiplicity of racialized populations”; see Robert Miles, Racism After “Race Relations” (London: Routledge, 1993), 60) where there are competitive efforts of superiority that accompany the inclusion and exclusion of rights among sectarian and racialized groups, which was the case in the late Ottoman period. As I shall state toward the end of the chapter, employing the term “ethno-sectarian,” rather than “ethno-religious,” brings to surface “other” sects within Islam that are excluded and discriminated against as a legacy of the late Ottoman millet governance.
- 8.
Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, “Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 537–538, 549.
- 9.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 72.
- 10.
Edward W. Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 29. See also to the commentary of Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 52–77.
- 11.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 6.
- 12.
Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 6.
- 13.
Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), xxxiv, discusses the ambiguity of the Balkans as being “in Europe but not of it.” For a discussion of the way Greece and the Balkans are considered to be part of Europe yet remain marginal to it, see Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical ethnography in the margins of Europe (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1987) and Sarah Green, Notes from the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
- 14.
Said, “Secular Criticism,” 29.
- 15.
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.
- 16.
Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.
- 17.
Erik J. Zürcher, “The Late Ottoman Empire as Laboratory of Demographic Engineering,” a paper presented at Le Regioni Multilingui Come Faglia E Motore Della Storia Europea Nel XIX–XX Secolo (Napels September 16–18, 2008), 9. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucuses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), xx. Ronald G. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015).
- 18.
The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1909 and 1918. This period witnessed the Armenian massacres in Adana in 1909, and some of CUP’s members were responsible for the Armenian genocide and deportations during World War I.
- 19.
Mehmet Talat Paşa (1874–1921) was the Ottoman interior minister during World War I (1914–1918). He fled to Germany in 1918 and was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1921 for his involvement in the Armenian massacres during the war; see Erik Zürcher, “How Europeans Adopted Anatolia and Created Turkey,” European Review 13 no. 3 (2005) 392. The assassin of Talat Paşa was found not guilty by a German court.
- 20.
Zürcher, “How Europeans,” 121. See also Zürcher’s “Who were the Young Turks” and “The Young Turk Mindset” in The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London and New York: IB Tauris, 2010).
- 21.
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112–199.
- 22.
The Turkish for Young Turks is Jön Türkler, from the French Jeunes Turcs.
- 23.
Young Turk politicians, such as the interior minister and party leader Talat Paşa (who is known to have given the orders to exterminate Anatolian Armenians); administrators such as Evrenoszadeh Rahmi, the governor of Smyrna (Izmir); and army officers such as Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), all of whom were born in the Balkan provinces, are prime examples. See Zürcher, “The Late Ottoman Empire as Laboratory of Demographic Engineering,” 7.
- 24.
Mazower, The Balkans, xxxvii–xxxviii.
- 25.
Zürcher, “How Europeans.”
- 26.
The eastern provinces are defined as Sivas, Erzurum, Mamuretu’l-Azız (Harput), Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekır, Trabzon, and Aleppo. The first six provinces, which had a substantial Armenian population, are known as the Six Provinces (Vilayat-ı Sitte). The Ottoman census of 1914 estimated that Armenians made up 17.1% of the population of the Six Provinces, while the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul estimated the number to be 39.93%, making Armenians the largest ethnic group in the Six Provinces. See Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Seeing Like a Nation-State: Young Turk Social Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913–50,” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 1 (2008): 15–39, and Zürcher, “How Europeans.” A summary of these statistics is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_vilayets (visited September 22, 2017).
- 27.
Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 111.
- 28.
The meeting of the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal on April 23, 1920, became the foundation of the Grand National Assembly (Büyük Millet Meclisi), which also became the interim “Ankara Government” (1920–1923) and existed parallel to the imperial Ottoman government in Istanbul. The Assembly became Turkey’s parliament when the republic was declared on October 29, 1923.
- 29.
Erik Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London and New York: IB Tauris, 1993), 144.
- 30.
Quoted in Ayşe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 19, emphasis added.
- 31.
See Renée Hirschon, “The Consequences of the Lausanne Convention,” in Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 14–15; Zürcher, “The Late Ottoman Empire as Laboratory of Demographic Engineering,” 12. For an excellent in-depth study of the population exchange in the Lausanne Treaty, see Onur Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934 (London: Routledge, 2006). Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey and the Minorities They Expelled (London: Granta Books, 2006) offers an overview of the treaty, with personal narratives from the exchangees. He also highlights the arbitrary choices made by the Greek and Turkish diplomats concerning who should and should not be exchanged.
- 32.
Some of the recent works that discuss some aspects of the Armenian question in Lausanne include: Fatma Müge Göçek, “The Politics of History and Memory: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Lausanne Peace Conference (1922–23),” in H. Erdem, I. Gershoni, and U. Wokoeck, eds., Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions (New York: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); Fatma Müge Göçek, “Reconstructing the Turkish Historiography on the Armenian Deaths and Massacres of 1915,” in Richard Hovannisian, ed., Confronting the Armenian Genocide: Looking Backward, Moving Forward (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003); Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004); Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement.
- 33.
Ottoman governance divided the population based on confessional belonging; Sunni Muslims were the “ruling sect” (millet-i hakime) of the empire. Other Muslim sects were not officially recognized separately but under the broader umbrella of Islam. Non-Muslims however where divided into Jewish, Armenians, and Eastern-Roman Orthodox (“Greeks”). For the evolution of the term millet in the Ottoman Empire, see Benjamin Braude, “Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982).
- 34.
For details on the Armenian question during the Lausanne Conference negotiations, see Hakem Al-Rustom, “Anatolian Fragments: Armenians between Turkey and France,” (Ph.D. Diss., London School of Economics, 2013).
- 35.
Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement, 12–13.
- 36.
This also explains why Jammu and Kashmir, as a Muslim-majority state, has been important for India. I am indebted to Ankur Datta for bringing this to my attention.
- 37.
Zerrin Özlem Biner “Acts of Defacement, Memory of Loss: Ghostly Effects of the ‘Armenian Crisis’ in Mardin, Southeastern Turkey,” History and Memory 22, no. 2 (2010): 75.
- 38.
Since Biner frames her ethnography in terms of Michael Taussig’s concept of “public secrecy,” which he develops in Defacement, then it is also likely that the “hidden” Armenian is known but not spoken about; silence here does not mean lack of knowledge.
- 39.
Janet Klein, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford: Stanford University of Press, 2011).
- 40.
See Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Cetin, Torunlar (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2009), translated into English by Maureen Freely as The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of ‘Lost’ Armenians in Turkey (New Jersey: Transaction, 2014).
- 41.
Green, Notes from the Balkans.
- 42.
The number of Armenian deaths varies depending on the source: Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1990 (London: Abacus 1994), 50, explains that the killings were an “uncounted number of Armenians by Turkey—the most usual figure is 1.5 millions.” Mark Mazower Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1998), 61, estimates the deaths between 800,000 and 1.3 million. Zürcher’s, Turkey, 120, estimate is between 600,000 and 800,000 noting that the Turkish official historians’ estimate is as low as 200,000. The mainstream estimate among Armenian historians is 1.5 million, see for example Vahakn N. Dadrian The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, RI & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995).
- 43.
Çağlar Keyder quotes these statistics from his earlier work State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalism (London: Verso, 1987).
- 44.
Alan Mikhail and Christine Philliou, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 4 (2012): 738.
- 45.
George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 113–114.
- 46.
Haraway, Situated Knowledges, 584.
- 47.
Haraway, Situated Knowledges, 584.
- 48.
Green, Notes from the Balkans.
- 49.
Franz Fanon is quoted in Fernando Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 51.
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Al-Rustom, H. (2018). Between Anatolia and the Balkans: Tracing Armenians in a Post-Ottoman Order. In: Babayan, K., Pifer, M. (eds) An Armenian Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_7
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