This panel contributes to the reconfiguring of an Armenian past through an analysis of traversing and transgressing of boundaries. Boundaries structuring and defining Armenian lives were multiple, spanning cultural, gendered, social, religious, political, and geographical spaces. They were also policed by any number of actors, who deployed repertoires of action to perpetuate existing power structures and discourses.
For historical actors to approach, challenge, or cross these boundaries necessitated not only manipulating a cultural field or engaging another set of actors, but also confronting the institutional and cultural forces invested in the maintenance of those boundaries. Actors’ interactions with and along boundaries reveal much about how Armenian identities—group or individual—were socially and culturally constructed, maintained, and changed. Thus, boundaries become sites where the condensation of social behavior and action collects.
Through an exploration of several types of boundary crossing, the papers on this panel expand the contours of early modern and modern Armenian history, by linking the act of boundary crossing with the fashioning of both collective and individual identities. The panel’s first paper examines an unpublished late eighteenth-century travelogue by Hovhannes Tovmachanian, an Armenian gem merchant from Istanbul. The paper probes how travelers like him relied on upon letters of recommendation to validate and establish their identities while traversing across boundaries constituting the early modern Armenian world. The second paper considers marriage practices in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. As the concept of divorce did not exist as a legal category in the Armenian Church, Armenians seeking to dissolve a union had to access other means to do so. In many cases this necessitated working through alternative religious regimes, such as Islamic courts, the informal power of Kurdish sheikhs, or conversion to another Christian denomination. This transgression of formal communal boundaries provides a mechanism for recapturing the agency of Ottoman Armenians. The third contribution investigates how Armenian priests used circulation as a method for challenging Ottoman reform projects. Taking Mkrtich Kefsizian as a case study, this paper demonstrates how actors traversed jurisdictional boundaries in the Armenian Church to link peripheral sites and thereby challenge programs of state centralization. Finally, the fourth presentation explores the crisscrossing of early twentieth-century Armenian revolutionaries and the circulation of global ideas such as socialism across imperial frontiers in Eurasia during the “little age of revolutions” (1905-1911).
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Dr. Richard Antaramian
Scholars are in general agreement that the programs of reform collectively known as the Tanzimat focused largely on two issues central to Ottoman imperial governance: state-centralization and the organization of non-Muslim communities. In the case of state-centralization, the imperial government deployed a variety of tools to expand formal institutions of control throughout the country. While this theoretically necessitated only the expansion and rationalization of the bureaucracy, in practice it entailed a series of carrot-and-stick measures to rein in provincial powerbrokers. Meanwhile, reorganizing the non-Muslim communities consisted of promulgating some kind of legal document that introduced formal democratic checks on the prerogatives of the clergy. Yet, these two issues have been studies in isolation from one another.
By looking at the career of Mkrtich Kefsizian, a clergyman who eventually became Catholicos of Cilicia (r. 1871-1894), this paper will demonstrate how the traversing of jurisdictional boundaries within the Armenian Church complicated programs of state centralization. Reorganization of the community went beyond placing checks on the clergy. Rather, it included creating and reinforcing jurisdictional boundaries that made the community more legible before the Patriarchate in Istanbul. This, in turn, made it possible for the reorganizing community to deepen its ties with the expanding bureaucracy and expand its role in governance.
In crossing these boundaries, Kefsizian undermined the Patriarchate’s claims to authority. This paper argues that in doing so, he not only weakened the institutions of the Armenian millet, but also those of the imperial government. By crossing these boundaries, Kefsizian also made them more porous. This in turn made it possible for well-to-do Armenians to consolidate political power within the community, which they could then link to their economic allies, local Muslim powerbrokers. Ensuring the weakness of millet institutions was thus central to the preservation of elite power at the local level, counter to the aims of state centralization.
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Dr. Dzovinar Derderian
In the mid-nineteenth century, along with the Ottoman centralization and standardization processes of the Tanzimat (reform) era, the Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate aimed to centralize and standardize marriage practices among Armenians in the empire. In particular church regulations targeted to reinforce the prevention of second marriages, which people often used as a means for divorce. Unlike in Islamic Sharia law, divorce as a legal category was absent in the Armenian Church’s legal canon. Other regulations included forbidding marriage among relatives, among underage boys and girl and reinforcing the church as a singular authority in the legitimization of marriages among Armenians. Yet, Armenians throughout the empire used the legally pluralistic and multi-confessional setting in which they inhabited to cross the legal and confessional boundaries of the Armenian Apostolic community. Armenians used not only Kadi courts (Islamic courts) and the Ottoman government to initiate or end a marriage, but they also used the assistance of Kurdish Sheikhs, local Protestants and Catholics in order to initiate or end marriages that the Armenian Church regulations forbade them to do. The existence of different centers of the Armenian Church, such as the local prelacies and the Edjmiatzin Armenian Catholicosate (the highest office of the church) in the Russian Empire, provided an additional medium for trespassing marriage law.
Through the use of petitions sent to the Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate, to the Ottoman government, as well as judicial reports of cases regarding marriage, this paper explores the myriad ways in which Armenians transgressed the legal and communal boundaries to fulfill their individual or family interests. This allows us to detect the agency of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire who are often presented as victims and therefore lack agency in the existing historiography. The paper argues that such individual actions in their collectivity posited a significant challenge to the rigid millet system that the Ottoman government and the Armenian Church aimed to impose. In this system—that never fully materialized—what were considered communal administrative matters, such as marriage, had to be dealt with strictly within the religious code and confessional boundaries of each community.
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Dr. Houri Berberian
In the short period between 1905 and 1911, the Middle East and Caucasus experienced three revolutions: the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman. One of the key factors that helped shape and connect them was the circulation of revolutionaries – in the case of this paper, Armenians – arms, print, and ideas that crossed geographic frontiers and in the case of ideas intellectual and ideological frontiers, too. Ideologies, like socialism, made their way from the South Caucasus and Western Europe to Iran and to a lesser extent to Anatolia and were adapted, adjusted, and altered according to political, social, and economic circumstances. Early twentieth-century socialism not only arrived by various means, that is, through roving revolutionaries, workers, and print – all taking advantage of new technologies of communication and transportation, that is, railways, steamships, and telegraph – but it also came in many varieties, was often vaguely expressed, and commonly intersected with nationalist and even anarchist concepts. Therefore, our revolutionaries not only crossed physical boundaries, but they also traversed ideological ones through experimentation with popular global ideas that may be viewed either as eclecticism or synthesis.
Armenian revolutionaries in Iran and the Caucasus ran the gamut from the minority social democrats to the socialist-nationalist Dashnaks and everything in-between like the Hnchaks. Moreover, within these groups, one could find a spectrum of ideological tendencies. What versions of socialism they espoused or what aspects of anarchism they found appealing was for the most part due to changing local, regional, and global circumstances and needs as well as their relationship with the national question. Familiarity with global ideologies like socialism and anarchism and ideas like decentralization and federalism came not only from reading but also involved face-to-face encounters, correspondence, and even collaboration between revolutionaries in Iran and the Caucasus on the one hand and European revolutionary thinkers on the other. They disseminated these ideas through their own translations, publications, and circulation of major socialist and anarchist theoreticians.
Based on Dashnak archival documentation and Armenian-language contemporary periodicals and other publications in Europe, South Caucasus, Ottoman Empire, and Iran, this paper explores the crisscrossing of revolutionaries and the circulation and transformation of revolutionary ideas as they traversed across imperial frontiers in Eurasia.
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Dr. Sebouh Aslanian
As a number of scholars have noted in recent years, the significant growth of geographic mobility during the early modern period and the movement of greater number of peoples beyond the familiar and intimate boundaries of community life not only helped reshape a sense of collective and individual identity for many during the early modern period but also compelled state authorities as well as societies to create portable instruments of identification to reduce risks of imposters and trickster travelers. Passports and letters of recommendation were two such forms of “paperwork” that came to be used with increasing frequency by early modern boundary crossers whether these were travelers, merchants, pilgrims, or missionaries.
This paper examines mobility and boundary crossing in an unpublished late eighteenth-century travelogue by Hovhannes Tovmachanian (1717-1806), an Armenian gem merchant from Istanbul. Written in 1790 in Venice, The History of Ter Hovannis Tovmachanian, Who for Thirty Years in his Life Traveled to Europe, Asia, in the Indies, and in Ethiopia in Africa, Written by Himself is a remarkable memoir of a peripatetic man of the world whose forty-year travels took him across “thirty sovereign kingdoms” and much of the global Armenian diaspora of the early modern age. The work still remains as an unpublished manuscript in the Library of the Mekhitarists in San Lazzarro in Venice where the author retired after becoming a monk late in his life. The paper probes Tovmachanian’s memoir and examines the author’s use of letters of recommendation to validate and establish his identity while traveling through and across the networks that constituted both the early modern Armenian diaspora as well as the world of trade beyond its frontiers and networks. It argues that letters of recommendation that have hardly attracted scholarly attention were ubiquitous and a necessary part of every traveler’s baggage. In an age defined largely by mobility, letters of recommendation were much like identity papers and surety documents; for global travelers like Tovmachanian, they provided access to networks of trust and community beyond the boundaries of face-to-face intimacy.
