Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Abstract

My habilitation project ethnographically engages with and analyzes the different ways in which Armenian material remains are encountered, elicited, and mobilized in a Kurdish region of Turkey in ways that speaks of the emergence of a racialized property regime over the long transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state with the Armenian genocide of 1915-x constituting its critical juncture. My focus lies on the different modalities whereby such remnants are targeted for renewed dispossession, speculation, appropriation, valorization and commodification. I contextualize these modalities within contemporary processes of neoliberal governance and the war waged by the central state against the Kurdish political movement. Departing from this present conjuncture of accumulation by dispossession and regional economies of violence, I trace genealogies that highlight the crucial role of the Armenian genocide in the history of Turkish state-formation and the constitution of Turkey’s national economy. I show its role in the emergence of a racialized property regime that, to this day, effectively positions Armenians, Turks, and Kurds differently with regards to access and entitlement to land and property.Theoretically, I thereby raise the question as to both the ‘outside’ and ‘capital’ that are brought together in concepts of primitive accumulation and extraction, both of which are concerned with how value is seized by capital beyond its control. Looking at the dispossession of Armenians in 1915 and contemporary efforts at extracting value from Armenian material remains leads me to highlight the role of sovereign violence in constituting this outside as well as the role of the state in acts of seizure. Attempts at valorizing and extracting value from land, property, and material remains thus constitute an important site through which we can study and analyze how late capitalist governance and accumulation remain invested in the historicities of sovereign violence. The project thereby also shows what can be gained by bringing Turkey and the Ottoman Empire to debates on settler colonialism, indigenous dispossession and imperial formations.

Kontakt: Dr. Alice von Bieberstein