Abstract
Here I discuss how the narrative of suffering and resurrection does not only have a binding factor for the Armenians in the diasporic community, but also how it causes contention within the community. In the Netherlands, there are more Armenians of Turkish descent than within the Armenian community in London, which has given rise to more division in what I consider the political and cultural discourse of the Self.
We are a very, very divided community. Sometimes I don’t even know myself any more what it means to be Armenian.
Informant Misa (the Netherlands) on 30 April 2003
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Notes
- 1.
In his article “Grammars of Identity/Alterity” (2004) Baumann tries to give a structural approach to identities and identification. This may seem a contradiction compared to his book The Multicultural Riddle (1999), wherein he describes the contextual nature of identities, were it not that his approach in his article is in fact an structuralist answer to the riddle he himself proposed in 1999. In The Multicultural Riddle he writes: “In replacing the word “identities” with the word “identification,” however, we have taken a liberating analytical step (…) If we thought of culture as something we have and are members of, we can now think of culture as something we make and are shapers of” (ibid.: 137). In this article, he tries to explain how we shape culture through identification processes (which he calls grammars).
- 2.
Baumann placed orientalization outside the genocidal process, while I see orientalization in the center of the genocidal process as I showed in Chap. 3 About genocide he writes: “If the three grammars are truly useful in distinguishing the different starting-points and consequences of selfings- and otherings, then we must look for cases in which our three grammars hypothesis can pre-specify its own criteria of falsification and defeat. Everyone knows such examples, and they are easy to find under key words such as genocide, ethnocide, political, racial or religious extermination or annihilation. Each of these spells a breakdown of all three grammars and a return to the anti-grammar of: “we are good, so they are bad” with the genocidal conclusion: “we must live, so they must die” (Baumann 2004: 42). By stating this though, he doesn’t connect genocide with identity-making, while identity is at the core of genocide. He considers genocide as a breakdown, an implosion of the grammatical structures. What comes after the implosion however, especially since identity-making is a subconscious process, remains a mystery and does not explain the violence.
- 3.
Besides statistical data, the FAON also state that they did “some” interviews and group discussions in order to give an interpretation of the statistical data (FAON 2008: 63). It is unclear however, how many interviews or group discussions took place. It is also unclear how this qualitative data actually contributed to the interpretation of the statistical data. There is very little analysis of the statistics.
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Holslag, A. (2018). The Struggle for Identity. In: The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide. Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69260-9_7
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