COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND MEMORY POLITICS IN THE CENTRAL CAUCASIAN COUNTRIES
Abstract
The recent media reports1 about the progress made by a group of academics from Armenia, Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan working on a joint textbook on the history of the Caucasus from the ancient times to 1921 revealed how much tension this topic has created in the region.
The project known as the Tbilisi Initiative launched in 1997 was encouraged and funded by the Council of Europe within a program for promoting education reforms in the former Soviet republics. This work designed to provide objective and reliable information about the local nations’ past was expected to help develop tolerance and openness and overcome xenophobia, prejudice, nationalism, chauvinism, etc.2 The published interview,3 however, revealed that the dis agreements about the interpretations of history were too deep to be overcome: each national team set about writing its own history of the Caucasus.
This symbolic fact opened up a large layer of cultural, historical, political, and other aspects typical of the region that normally remains concealed. This shows that the sides cannot agree on an interpretation of even their distant past, to say nothing of the present.
In the present context of ethnic conflicts and war, it would be too much to expect the project to be an instant success: too many regional conflicts were accompanied by what is known as a “war of historians,”4 in which historical facts were retrieved from archives to justify territorial claims. In other words, in Caucasian history is part of today’s politics; and the stakes are too high to expect the project to succeed in the near future.
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Golos Armenii [URL: http://armenianhouse.org/fo-rum/], 10 June, 2005.
See: M.V. Novikov, T.B. Perfilova, “Sovet Evropy i Rossia: reformirovanie shkol’nogo istoricheskogo obra-zovania,” Iaroslavskiy pedagogicheskiy vestnik, Nos. 3-4,1999, pp. 22-31.
In his interview with Golos Armenii newspaper, S.
elikian, one of the project’s members who represented the Ministry of Education and Science of Armenia, said:
It was an uphill job from the very beginning. This espe-cially held true for the Armenian team. You want to know why? It seems that the main reason for this was the Coun-cil of Europe’s view of the history of these four countries,from which it followed that the joint work should go ahead smoothly without conflicts. This was how it wanted to or-ganize a dialog between the Armenian, Georgian, and Az-eri historians… At first, it was suggested that the texts should be agreed upon in the following way: historians from Armenia should approve the texts of their Georgian,Russian, and Azeri colleagues. I can’t accept this… At best we can accept the following pattern: each of the sides sub-mits its text and is fully responsible for it; other teams have no right to suggest amendments, they should merely take the text into consideration … such amendments will not be needed... We could not agree with the Azeris on many is-sues. For example, they falsified the entire ancient period,not only of Armenia, but also of neighboring Iran… The Georgian team also indulged in falsifications … they great-ly distorted many problems related to the history of Az-erbaijan and Georgia... If our demands are accepted, the textbook will be published, and Armenia will take part in other projects. Yet I have my doubts. This textbook will probably be published, but without Armenia’s participa-tion” (see: [URL: http://armenianhouse.org/forum/], 10 June,2005).
History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for America’s Past, ed. by E.T. Linenthal, T. Engelhardt, Met-ropolitan Books, New York, 1996.
I have mentioned only few on the long list of research studies and ideas of collective memory: M. Bilig, “Collec-tive Memory, Ideology and the British Royal Family,” Collective Remembering, ed. by D. Middleton, D. Edvards, Sage Publications, London, 1990, pp. 60-80; J. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992; J. Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001; A. Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review, 1997, pp. 1386-1403; P. Connerton, How Societies Remem-ber, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989; M.A. Conway, “The Inventory of Experience: Memory and Identity,”in: Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, ed. by J.W. Pennebaker, D. Paez, B. Rime,Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mawah, N.J., 1997, pp. 21-45; M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Edited, translated and with introduction by L.A. Coser, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992; J.K. Olick, “Collective memory: The Two Cultures,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1999, pp. 333-348; Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psycho-logical Perspectives.
See: A.D. Smith, “Nations and History,” in: Understanding Nationalism, ed. by M. Guibernau, J. Hutchinson, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 9-31.
See: M. Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996;J.V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
See: J.V. Wertsch, op. cit.
See: J.V. Wertsch, op. cit., p. 62.
Ibid., p. 93.
See: R.R. Garagozov, “Collective Memory and the Russian ‘Schematic Narrative Template,’” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 5, 2002, pp. 55-89.
See: A.M. Lobok, Antropologia mifa, Education Department of the Oktiabrskiy District Administration, Ekater-inburg, 1997.
See: R. Garagozov, Metamorfozy kollektivnoy pamiati v Rossii i na Tsentral’nom Kavkaze, Nurlan Publishers, Baku,2005.
See: L.N. Gumilev, Drevniaia Rus i velikaia step, Terra Publishers, Moscow, 2000; V.I. Koretskiy, “V.N. Tati-shchev i nachalo izuchenia russkikh letopisey,” in: Letopisi i khroniki. 1980, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1981, pp. 5-13;V.K. Romanov, “Stat’ia 1224 g. o bitve pri Kalke Ipat’evskoy letopisi,” in: Letopisi i khroniki, pp. 79-103.
See: R. Garagozov, Metamorfozy kollektivnoy pamiati.
See: R. Garagozov, Metamorfozy kollektivnoy pamiati.
See: Th. Artsruni, History of the House of the Artsrunik’, Translation and Commentary by R.W. Thompson, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1985.
See: R. Garagozov, Metamorfozy kollektivnoy pamiati.
See: R. Garagozov, Metamorfozy kollektivnoy pamiati.
See: R. Benedict, Patterns of Culture, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York, 1934.
See: A.L. Kroeber, C. Kluckhohn, “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” Papers Peabody Mus.,Vol. 47, No. 1, 1952, pp. 181-198.
See: R. Benedict, op. cit.
A.L. Kroeber, C. Kluckhohn, op. cit., p. 181.
See: J. Chris, Culture, Routledge, London, New York, 1993, p. 27. Quoted from: A. Kroeber, C. Kluckhohn,op. cit.
See: Agathangelos, History of the Armenians, Translation and Commentary by R.W. Thompson, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1976; K.N. Iuzbashian, “Introduction,” in: Egishe, O Vardane i voyne armianskoy, Transla-tion from Old Armenian by Academician I.A. Orbeli, Prepared for press, introduced and commented by K.N. Iuzbashian,Academy of Sciences of the Arm.S.S.R., Erevan, 1971, pp. 4-23; Moses Khorenats’i, History of the Armenians, Transla-tion and Commentary on the literary sources by R.W. Thompson, Harvard University Press, London, 1978.
See: C.J. Walker, Armenia. The Survival of a Nation, St. Martyn’s Press, New York, 1990.
See: R.W. Thompson, “Introduction,” in: Elishe, History of Vardan and the Armenian War, Translation and Com-mentary by R.W. Thompson, Harvard University Press, London, 1982.
See: R.G. Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1993.
Ibidem.
One example of this influence, which can be seen in how the Armenians perceive themselves and others, is given by the researcher: “Most Armenians rejected (and by and large still do reject) the Middle Eastern elements in their herit-age, choosing to see themselves as an island of civilized Christian ‘Europeans’ in a hostile sea of barbarous Muslim Asiat-ics… All the strands of Armenian nationalism are to some extent irredentist: all consider the territory currently occupied by the Republic of Armenia to be only a fraction of what Armenians can legitimately claim and nurture hopes of one day recovering some of the land lost to Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan” (E.M. Herzig, “Armenia and the Armenians,” in:G Smith, The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States, Longman, London, 1996, p. 253).
Dastans—an epic genre of a mainly heroic nature, the most important among the Azeri (Oguz-Turkic) epic cre-ations being the Dede Korkut dastan, which includes 12 individual songs recounted by a legendary holy wise man Kor-kut. Since such works had plots (each of the Dede Korkut’s songs has a plot and heroes), we can assume that they did contain narrative templates of sorts. For example, many of the heroic dastans dated to different historical periods and created in various sociocultural, political, and other contexts (Kerogly, Molla Nur, Gachag Nabi, and others) follow an identical plot: the hero or his near and dear ones suffer injustice (or loss). He rises to struggle (alone or as the head of the group he knocked together), takes revenge on his enemies and, in general, shows himself as a brave man of inordi-nate physical strength.
See: A.L. Altstadt, The Azerbaijani Turks, Stanford Hoover University Press, Stanford, 1992; H.B. Paksoy, Al-pamysh: Central Asian Identity under Russian Rule, Association for the Advancement of Central Asian Research, Hartford,Conn., 1989, pp. 1-2.
A. Niabiyev, Gatyr Miammiad dastany. Kitabda: gatyr Miammiad, Aziarniashr, Baku, 1985, pp. 3-17.
See: Z.M. Buniatov, Azerbaidzhan v VII-IX vekakh, AS Azerb. S.S.R., Baku, 1965.
See: A.D. Smith, Nations & Nationalism in Global Era, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995.
The new post-Soviet textbooks on the history of Azerbaijan are full of contradictions; this makes it hard to acquire an integral picture of the country’s past. This probably explains the fact cited by the Minister of Education of Azerbaijan at the ministry’s 2003 fall meeting: students prefer to avoid maths exams (the old practice) and history (this is a new de-velopment).
See: Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History: Or How the Past Is Taught to Children, Routledge and Kegan Paul,London, 1984 (quoted from: M. Ferro, Kak rasskazyvaiut istoriiu detiam v raznykh stranakh mira, Vysshaia Shkola Pub-lishers, Moscow, 1992, p. 178).
See, for example, a recently published work by G.Kh. Sarkisian, K.S. Khudaverdian, and K.N. Iuzbashian, Potomki Khayka, Armianskaia entsiklopedia Publishers, Erevan, 1998.
This is a bitter conflict which developed into accusations hurled at Western historiography engaged in Armenian studies. See, for example, the article “Intellektual’naia agressia protiv Armianskoy nauchnoy mysli finansiruetsia Gosde-pom SShA,” which appeared on-line in Zemskoe obozrenie (No. 38, 2003). The article quotes from a statement by a group of Armenian historians published within the framework of the first international congress of experts in Armenian studies (held in Erevan on 15-20 September, 2003) that said: “Intellectual aggression against Armenian scholarly thought and his-toriography is funded, in part, by the U.S. State Department and is reflected in consistent distortions of the key issues of Armenian history starting in the ancient times” [URL:http://www.regnum.ru], 2 April, 2004.
See: E.M. Herzig, op. cit.
J.R. Gillis, “Memory & Identity. The History of Relationship,” in: Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. by J.R. Gillis, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994, pp. 3-24.
Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective, ed. by V.M. Mog-hadam Boulder, Westview Press, 1994; E.E. Sampson, “Identity Politics. Challenges to Psychology’s Understanding,” Amer-ican Psychologist, Vol. 48, No. 12, 1993, pp. 1219-1230.
S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Touchstone Books, New York, 1996.
See: D. Senghaas, The Clash within Civilizations. Coming to Terms with Cultural Conflicts, Routledge, London,2002.
See: J.R. Gillis, op. cit.
See: B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London,1991; J.R. Gillis, op. cit.
It should be said in this connection that less “ethnic” nationalism in any society creates greater opportunities for achieving “civil” nationalism. In the final analysis, according to R. Poole (R. Poole, Nation and Identity, Routledge, Lon-don, 1999), the drift toward one or the other nationalism is determined not so much by history or geography as by the morals and politics prevalent in any given society.
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