The Marble of Armenian History: Or Armenian History as World History

• 1 Lazy boy or “La-Z-Boy” is the trademark of a popular brand of American sofas and recliner chairs in (...)

1I would like to start by thanking David Myers for putting together this important event and for being a pillar of support during my time here at UCLA. I am also grateful to all of you for being here, and before proceeding with my talk I would like to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to my distinguished predecessor, Professor Richard Hovannisian, for many decades of dedication, labor, and sacrifice in the field of Armenian history. It is a great honor for me to inherit the position that he has so painstakingly created, and I promise to him that I have no intention of transforming the chair of Armenian History that I now occupy into the “Lazy boy”1 of Modern Armenian History. As someone who is pathologically addicted to his work and his vocation at the expense of many another thing (just ask my wife about it) I plan to contribute vigorously to the field.

• 3 M. Weber, 1946, p. 156.

5Needless to say, I do not make any claims to have discovered fully the grain of my own marble let alone to have come to terms with what the German sociologist Max Weber, whose name is usually not mentioned in the same breath as Foucault’s, calls “the demon who holds the fibers of [one’s] very life.”3 But at least I have been trying to get a feel for it for a long while now, and I would like to believe that my choice of being an Armenian historian with more than a passing interest in world history and how I see history and its uses in life are part and parcel of this long research into my own past.

• 4 For an excellent study of the Ethiopian-Armenian community, see B. Adjemian, 2013.

7I was born in Ethiopia. My grandparents and forebears on both sides were not Italian colonizers, European missionaries, or venture capitalists in search of lucrative markets. They were refugees who fled their homes in the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s, during a wave of massacres that took the lives of over 100,000 Armenians, and found a safe haven in Ethiopia in the early years of the twentieth century. My paternal grandfather’s brothers who had survived the 1890s massacres in their birthplace of Sepastea/Sivas perished in the genocide of 1915 after they repatriated to their homes in 1908 enticed by prospects of peace and protection of minorities proclaimed by the Young Turk leadership following their assumption of power. My maternal grandfather, Georges Djerrahian, was born in Addis Ababa in 1911 and in 1931 had opened (with his brother Elias) Ethiopia’s first commercial printing press. My father Bedros was also a printer and owned two printing presses with his brother Torkom. I’d like to think that the fact that much of my work deals with merchants and printers in the early modern period is, in part at least, motivated by this fact.4

• 5 For the concept of narrative emplotment, see H. White, 1975.
• 6 The notion of root paradigm is developed in V. Turner, 1974, 67-68 and passim.
• 7 R. W. Thomson, 1982, p. 41.
• 8 See Ełišē Vardapet, History of Vardan and the Armenian War, tr. and comm. R.W. Thomson, 1982.
• 9 My reading of Yeghishe is influenced by R. W. Thomson, 1982 and P. Cowe, 1997, p. 341-360.

8I grew up in Addis Ababa and attended the Matig Kevorkoff Armenian school there. While growing up, I was exposed to stories of the suffering my grandparents and others of their generation had endured. As a result, I came to look upon Turks, at the very least, rather suspiciously. I also came to internalize a less than scholarly version of Armenian history as a story of the heroic survival of a small nation against great odds. This story and its narrative arc bending over Armenian history has many small, finer elements unique to the Armenians. In many other ways, however, its overall tenor and narrative “emplotment,” to use Hayden White’s terms, are not exceptional but rather familiar elements in the histories of more that one persecuted minority.5 Its “root paradigm,” to borrow a term from anthropologist Victor Turner, contains a significant social drama pitting good against evil, purity against pollution, heroism and unity against cowardice, betrayal, and dissent.6 It is a story of a titanic struggle of a beleaguered small people in a world of towering empires. Contrary to what one might initially think, this framing of Armenian history as social drama about the preservation of an endangered identity was not born with the Genocide of 1915, even if it was reinforced by the Catastrophe in powerful ways that still shape our popular conception of Armenian history today. Rather, this root paradigm of survival was probably first given shape to in one of the “classics of Armenian literature,”7 Yeghishe Vardapet’s The History of Vardan and the Armenian War, which chronicled the revolt of the Armenians and their church in the fifth century against the rule and religion of Sassanian Iran.8 Yeghishe himself had in all likelihood borrowed his root paradigm for the struggle of the Armenians from an earlier struggle of the Jews against the Seleucid authorities as told in the Book of Maccabees, one of the first texts to be translated into Armenian using the newly forged script by the monk Mashtots who lived only a generation before the battle of Vardanants of 451 C.E.9

• 10 See F. Barth, 1969, and J. A. Armstrong, 1976.
• 11 M. Halbwachs, 1992.
• 12 See S. Aslanian, 2002.

10This idea of “monumental” or heroic history with which I grew up and continued to hold onto well into my adolescence in Dubai and even into my first years in college in Montreal was probably an effective means of imposing internal group solidarity and discipline and consequently safeguarding an identity perceived to be endangered, although one may debate the relative merits of such an approach. However, it also had several less than desirable consequences. It fostered first and foremost a rather narrow and one-dimensional kind of identity that was aimed almost exclusively at collective self-protection and self-preservation. It was, much like Yeghishe’s history was meant to be, what anthropologist Frederik Barth and following him John Armstrong have called, a “boundary maintenance mechanism,” (a topic to which I shall return later) a bulwark against the ever-present forces of assimilation.10 Moreover, and most important perhaps, it was not suitable for fostering in the mind of a curious young man like myself a conception of history as professional historians recognize critical history to be. What it contributed to shaping instead, was what sociologists of the study of memory call “collective” or “historical memory,” a political tool that most if not all communities from time to time employ to promote their own future agendas and to remember and commemorate an event and root paradigm they regard to be vital to the maintenance of their collective identity.11 For most Armenians today, that event is the Genocide of up to a million and a half Armenians almost a hundred years ago and the long and debilitating shadow it and especially its continued denial have cast on Armenian life. This denial has created a hypertrophied or bloated historical memory for most Armenians and has held them captive to the past. Even more vexing is the fact that in some circles in Armenia the trauma of the genocide has lent itself to shoring up a politics of paranoiac nationalism.12

• 13 My thoughts here are profoundly influenced by Y.H. Yerushalmi, 1996.

11The unresolved trauma of the Genocide, in some cases, has also encouraged parochial insulation from the larger world. As a historian who studies the Armenian past, I am reminded of the classic text by Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Written in the heels of the nineteenth century’s fixation on monumental history, of the “flooding of memory,” and the proliferation of mnemonic practices (monuments, museums, archives, and most notably the hegemonic genre of nationalist historiography), Nietzsche’s text reads like an early twenty-first century meditation on the “uses of forgetting.”13

• 14 “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in F. Nietzsche, 1997, p. 62.
• 15 Ibid.
• 16 Quoted in Y.H. Yerushalmi, 1996, p. 107.

12For Nietzsche, a bloated historical memory has the potential of becoming the “gravedigger of the present.”14 His thoughts foreshadow the work of the brilliant and inimitable Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ fascinating fictional tale about a certain Funes el memorioso who one day falls from his horse and instead of suffering from amnesia becomes a repository of the whole world’s memory. Unable to filter out anything from his memory, Funes becomes a living encyclopedia of all the events, sensations, moments and so on that have taken place since the beginning of the world. His memory is disabling. For both Nietzsche and Borges, too much memory uproots the ground of the future and enervates, or worse cripples, the life instinct for creation. Those who allow memory to choke their present and future, Nietzsche warns us, live as though their motto were “let the dead bury the living.”15 That is why for Nietzsche “Life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness.”16

• 17 See Sebouh Aslanian, “From Autonomous to Interactive Histories: World History’s Challenge to Armeni (...)
• 18 Quoted in D. Engel, 2006, p. 247. For an application of Baron’s views to post-1967 Jewish revisioni (...)

13In singling out the at times unbearable weight of the Genocide on contemporary Armenian life, I am certainly not advocating here a downplaying of its study, much less praising the virtues of oblivion. What I am saying, however, is that we should not allow a bloated memory of the events of 1915 either to neglect the existence of Armenian history prior to and after the genocide, or when we do remember it, to study it in a way that is not seen exclusively through the Yeghishean lens of the root paradigm of genocide survival. This focus as I have explained at more length elsewhere tends to lead to two unfortunate problems with the way Armenian historians have often represented the past.17 The first is what I call following the historian of the Jewish diaspora, Salo Baron, the “lachrymose” conception of Armenian history, in which the Armenian past before the Genocide is represented as a “sheer succession of miseries and persecutions,” especially in the diasporas of the Islamicate Middle East.18 Consider, for instance, the following programmatic statement from a standard (and widely-cited) popular work on the history of Armenian diaspora settlements published during the Soviet period:

• 20 S. Subrahmanyam, 1997; for the above author’s views on the complex genealogy of global history, one (...)

16In place of the above, I propose instead an interactive approach to Armenian history that incorporates methodological insights from the burgeoning and relatively new subfield of history known as the “new” world or global history and its cognate field of “connected histories,” whose most celebrated practitioner is our very own colleague here Sanjay Subrahmanyam.20 But what is world history really and how is it useful to Armenian history? Also if the methodological perspectives of world history are useful to Armenian history as I argue, is the opposite also true? Is knowledge of Armenian history not only relevant for world historians but also possibly necessary? And if so, why?

• 21 See J. Bentley, 2002.
• 22 The above summary of world history is a distillation of a section in Aslanian, “From Autonomous to (...)
• 23 For a perceptive study of go-betweens, see K. Raj, 2009.

17To dispel a common misunderstanding, world history is not the same thing as the “history of the world.”21 For the purposes of our discussion, the most succinct and necessarily simplified definition of what the “new” world history is would include some or all of the following interrelated points: 1) it is a subfield of historical writing arguably conceived at the University of Chicago in the 1960s that came of age right here in California in the 1990s and seems to have swept across university campuses in North America and increasingly in Europe; 2) unlike the conventional field of history as a professional discipline, world history does not take the national state or national community as its default unit of historical analysis; rather, it focuses on larger units such as hemispheres, oceans, continents and sometimes the entire globe itself; 3) it is, simply put, usually a macro-scale study of the comparisons, interactions, encounters, and connectedness between regions, cultures, and peoples with one other on a large scale and in such a fashion whereby cross-cultural interactions and exchanges help to define and mutually shape the interacting parties; 4) interactions among cultures and societies are most commonly studied through the framework of what I have elsewhere referred to as “networks of circulation and exchange” as opposed to the more conventional notion of unidirectional diffusion and influence, where one party is seen as having the agency of acting and influencing, while the other is usually represented as a reactive and passive borrower.22 In short, world historians usually study communities or individuals who are adept “boundary-” or “border-” “crossers” and whose history makes them “go-betweens”23 or cross-cultural brokers living across the porous frontiers of languages and cultures that have shaped the development of humankind.

• 24 For Garsoïan’s seminal work in the field, see “Prolegomena to a Study of the Iranian Aspects in Ars (...)

18Given their chronic history of dispersion, the skill and expertise with which some Armenians have historically navigated between multiple cultural, religious, and regional divides, and their ability to speak numerous languages, not to mention the geographic location of their homeland on the hinge of the great Eurasian continent, where Greco-Roman empires and civilizations and their heirs have periodically bumped up against Perso-Arabic, Islamic and Turco-Mongol civilizations and empires, a fact that has both wreaked havoc with Armenian political, institutional, and environmental history but also enriched its culture and identity as Nina Garsoian’s formidable work has taught us – given all of this, Armenians are unusually suited to be the ideal-typical subjects of world historical analysis.24

• 25 On centralizing states, noble families and juridical institutions and their role in constructing ar (...)
• 26 S. Aslanian, 2011, p. 18-22.
• 27 For early modern global Armenian print, see S.D. Aslanian, 2014a, 2014b and 2014c.

19In some ways, this is paradoxical, not to say ironic, because as I mentioned earlier in connection with the feats of Vardan Mamigonian (Mamikonian) and Yeghishe Vardapet’s retelling of his ill-fated war, a retelling that came with the injunction against cultural and religious border-crossing, Armenians have been historically rather talented border-crossers. No matter how one looks at them they almost always appear as sophisticated “go-betweens.” World history and its interactive approach to analyzing the past almost seems like it was crafted with Armenians and others like them, such as the Jews, in mind. But have the Armenians anything of theirs to offer world history? They may not have rich archives of their own since the custodians of the latter have usually been either aristocratic families or more commonly states and their juridical bodies, neither of which has existed much for the Armenians since the fourteenth century at least.25 But they do have a rich heritage of scribal culture some of which has survived many wars and the shifting of political frontiers and has come down to us in the form of approximately 31,000 manuscripts preserved in half a dozen collections the world over. There are also tens of thousands of primary source documents written by the border-crossers themselves in their own language, dialect, or script and preserved in over thirty archives of the host states and societies where Armenian merchants not only succeeded but also prospered during the early modern period as my recent book on Julfans demonstrates.26 The surfeit of these sources makes Armenian history not only relevant but also necessary for world history where the bulk of primary sources used has usually been of European provenance often with little in the way of original primary source documentation written by non-European actors themselves. At least this seems to be the case for the two areas where I can claim some degree of expertise, namely global trade in the early modern Indian Ocean and the history of early modern global print culture.27