Contesting Armenianness: plurality, segregation and multilateral boundary making among Armenians in contemporary Turkey

During the last three decades, Turkey’s Armenian landscape witnessed an unprecedented process of diversification, triggered by developments on the national and regional levels. Whereas members of the Christian Armenian minority had traditionally been the sole representatives of Armenian identity in Turkey, they now find themselves next to two other groups of Armenians: first, officially Muslim and hence ‘non-Armenian’ citizens of the Republic of Turkey who, drawing on their Armenian ancestors Islamised or Alevised decades or centuries earlier, have recently started to publicly identify as Armenians in growing numbers and to approach the established Christian Armenian community; and second, citizens of neighbouring Armenia who engaged in a labour migration towards Turkey after the independence of their country and its sinking into a political, economic, and energy crisis in the early 1990s. Going beyond the official categorisation of Armenians in Turkey, limited in scope and imposing a particular interpretation of Armenianness, this ethnography studies the various people self-identifying as Armenians in contemporary Turkey, revealing their plurality, heterogeneity and internal divisions. It studies the often-differing meanings, interpretations, productions and experiences of Armenianness among the Christian Armenians, the Muslim/Alevi Armenians, and the migrant Armenians. Furthermore, it not only describes and illustrates, but also aims to understand and explain their segregation and internal boundary making processes. In that endeavour, it argues that the making of symbolic and social boundaries between the three Armenian factions is conditioned both by irreconcilable differences between each one’s understanding and expectations of Armenianness, and by practical factors related to interest and security. Finally, broadening its scope of analysis, the dissertation argues that the making of intra-Armenian boundaries is also influenced or conditioned by the particular Armenian factions’ relations and boundaries with third parties (e.g. the Turks, the Kurds, the Turkish state), thus advancing a theory of multilateral social boundary making.