What is ‘Armenian’ in Armenian Identity?

In the past, the elites and institutions had influence and possessed authority in the discourse on identity. For instance, in the post WWII period, Armenian political parties had, arguably, a dominant position in community life in the Diaspora. Their ideological discourse was disseminated through party newspapers, schools, clubs and youth programs they ran. Although positions were sharply contested by rival parties, Khachig Tölölyan explains that “it was enthusiastically celebrated by [their] adherents and profoundly resented by [their] opponents, and the struggle served as the generator of polemics in which notions of diaspora were implicitly and explicitly elaborated.” Indeed, in the ideological discourse of one of the largest parties, the ARF, the Diaspora was a “temporary and transitory” condition. The Party preached an “eventual return to the homeland” and “declared [it] essential and inevitable.” Community institutions, like the ARF, had a strong influence on identity construction and, as Tölölyan describes, “even on the poems we would memorize, the songs we sang, and the books and newspapers we read.”

In sharp contrast, the 21st century is increasingly becoming a “world of self-reference” — that is, a world where trust in organizations, institutions or governments are increasingly declining and one’s own position and beliefs are considered more relevant than other sources. The conventional sources of institutional authority and influence, therefore of trust, are not taken for granted anymore. Top-down traditional influence on discourse and identity is in a process of reversal and is becoming more horizontal than vertical.

Institutions that are relevant to identity seem to be losing effectiveness under the weight of the enormous complexities of these changes. In this age of social media and rapid technological advancements, people no longer rely “on a few well-informed opinion shapers,” such as newspaper columnists, political actors, party or church leaders, but increasingly use, for instance, social media, peer-driven media, search engines, “where content is shaped by the search preferences of other users, or directly curated by friends or family.” Studies show that “peer voices today are more powerful than the opinion of traditional authority figures.” This is a world where “a person like yourself” is as credible as “an academic expert” and far more credible than, say, a community leader or government official. For sure, in the 21st century, there are more “informed Armenians” than “masses of followers.” Armenians in their 20s and 30s are highly educated, socially and professionally well-connected, news and media savvy, and economically comfortable.

What is ‘Armenian’ about Armenian Identity in the 21st century?

I shall try to explore this rather conceptually risky question by looking at the question of what is “Armenian” about Armenian culture. My approach is informed by the hypothesis that, in the Diaspora, culture — in the widest sense — serves the role of land for a country, even as it includes the imagined or real homeland in it.

From an anthropological/sociological perspective, culture could be defined as everything learned, actions, beliefs, behaviors that are maintained and transmitted through symbols and objects, not genes. Culture denotes all the knowledge, technologies, values, customs, behaviors and characteristics common to the members of a particular group or society. Through culture, groups define themselves, conform to society’s shared values, and contribute to society. Organizations and social institutions, such as the family, education, religion, work, so on, play important roles as they provide clusters of rules and cultural meanings associated with specific social activities.

So, what is “Armenian” about Armenian culture?

To answer this question, one could look into the various domains of culture: literature, music, architecture and visual arts to see what it is in these cultural traits or domains that make them “Armenian.”

In this short essay, I shall take only one area and provide a sociological reading of Armenian folk music as observed and analyzed by Komitas (Father Komitas Soghomonian, 1869-1936), a priest in the Armenian Church, who was an ethno-musicologist, singer, choir director, music teacher and composer. Komitas spent years in villages and towns collecting Armenian songs and dance music and attempted to penetrate into the depth of this significant cultural domain. I chose to focus on folk music because this genre is most relevant to the problematics of cultural production and identity in the Diaspora.

Komitas explains that, in general, Armenian folk music could be divided into two branches: Eastern and Western Armenia. “Western melodies are broad and complex, rich and serious, bright and brisk; Eastern melodies are compact and simple, unsophisticated and light, prosaic and peaceful.”[18] Indeed, one could make similar observations on other cultural aspects of East and West.

More important for the discussion here, the music of the “common people,” or as Komitas comments, the peasants’ music of both Western and Eastern Armenia “is extraordinarily rich and complex and condenses the entire inner and outer life of the Armenian. Each song is the genuine echo of his rustic heart and the clear mirror of his soul. Each song depicts a broad slice of life confined within a small frame.”

He identifies six genres of folk music: Peasant, Ritual, Epic, Ballads, Ditties, and Antounis. These songs related to virtually all aspects of life. They reflected the social-cultural context of peasants and enforced connections with everyday life, rituals and traditions. Singing, as Komitas puts it, “is routine” for the peasant “as bread and water.” He explains the significance:

Villagers adhere strictly to the prescribed use of the different types of songs. Each song must be learned or sung in its proper place and time. They will sing work songs during work, and domestic songs while at home, and so forth. No villager will sing a threshing song when at home, for the place to sing the threshing song is on the threshing floor. Therefore, villagers will most often refuse to sing songs that a non-peasant may request, for it is strange to them to be asked to sing songs when neither the time nor the place is appropriate. Each song is tied to the moment in village life and is related to just that moment. The peasant cannot comprehend, create, or utilize a song that is removed from that moment.

In modern times, new technologies, e.g. CDs, DVDs, MP3 have influenced and continue to impact music making and performance, and have altered the social (sociological) dimension of music. The idea of live music has been altered or modified by the reality of recorded music; even at some “live” concerts artists sing with playback, where voice is live, but music is recorded.

In the 21st century, the 20-30 years olds — unlike the ones described by Komitas — do not sing at functions anymore; they listen to music and dance to recorded music; the song does not have anything to do with the occasion or the gathering, or any particular relevance to aspects of daily living, but is rhythmically relevant to the dance. Rhythm or tempo is more important than the words or meaning of the song itself. Thus, today music listened to (or used) during social gatherings or “clubbing” is not expressions of daily life, or community rituals, but reproduced and reshaped, mixed and matched to consumer needs and expectations. In the past, as Komitas notes, “the peasant gives more attention to the words of the song than to the tune and, not surprisingly, the texts of the songs live longer than their melodies.” Today it is the opposite in most cases.

Komitas draws a delicately nuanced and elaborate definition of what “the Spirit of National Folk Song” is: The spirit of national music is the aggregate of patterns that a nation instinctively employs in singing. It is the particular movement of pitch and tone, it is the relationship between those tones and the phonemes of the language (grammatical expressive accent, musical accent). The spirit of national music is the rational articulation of the text and the corresponding improvised melody, which is the articulation of the heart. [It] is the choice of tone color (nasal, guttural, or chesty sounds). [It] is the genres of songs, and so on… All things which have an immediate association with a song, provided that they are immediate, non-artificial, intrinsic reflections of the internal and external life of the folk, express the spirit of national music.

Clearly, the relationship of word/text to melody, to rituals/occasions, memory and creativity is significant. In the 21st century, one would ask what are the connections, the relationships, the occasions in diasporic life that would make a piece of music, “Armenian music?” Is it the composer or the musician who makes the song “Armenian” or is it the “connections” a piece of music makes that define the song? These are questions that, I believe, need further exploration.

Music, as observed by Komitas in the life of the villagers, is one of the domains of culture that contains some of “the codes” as it were, of Armenianness. While in the past, communal singing was part of living out one’s daily life as an Armenian, today this medium has lost its functional meaning in the lives of new generations of Armenians dispersed globally. If for Armenian peasants, culture in the form of music and dance was as natural and organic as going about their daily chores and life, in the 21st century Diaspora it is a matter of planning, choosing, adapting and performing. In short, beyond being and feeling Armenian, it requires thinking.

In conclusion, even as it is impossible to describe exhaustively and in its totality what “Armenian” is in Armenian identity, I suggest, it is the connections, the relationships, the occasions in diasporic life in the 21st century that makes a piece of music or a painting, or literature or a bowl of harissa “Armenian.” It is the memory, thought and message that a cultural object or creation represents that makes it “Armenian” by connecting it to a meaning system that is larger than an individual’s personal world.

Over two decades ago, Anny Bakalian suggested that the generational changes in the Diaspora indicated that Armenians are moving “from being to feeling Armenian.” I would add that, in the 21st century, what is “Armenian” in Armenian identity is what you think Armenian is — as such, one could say the process has moved from feeling to thinking Armenian.

While the dream of an eventual return to the real or imagined homeland might still be dreamed by many, the vast majority of Armenians in the Diaspora will continue to be integrated into their societies, even as Armenia will probably remain to be a source of revitalization of Armenian identity in dispersion.

The realities of the 21st century require a new thinking and understanding of identity from the perspective of the specific places and context where Armenians live rather than on the basis of the rigid binaries of the dominant discourse.

Finally, a broader understanding of “Armenian identity” would benefit from a process of de-ethnicization of identity in order to fully appreciate its Armenianness[23] — that is, rather than essentialist or substantive definition of identity, a more functional and open-ended definition would provide a better catchment for the varieties of Armenian identities in the 21st century.

(Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian is a scholar at University of Oxford [www.hratch.info].)