Études arméniennes contemporaines - Much of medieval Armenian history is centered on texts, and one may add that this emanates from the rich variety of texts that exist for medieval Armenian history. While not ignoring the written sources, your book Everyday Cosmopolitanisms relies heavily on the material world. What pushed you to pay close attention to what you call “material things”, and to think of the history of Armenians and Armenia through materiality?
- 2 M. Bintley and K. Franklin, 2023.
Kate Franklin - My disciplinary training was rooted in anthropological archaeology, which is oriented (at least as I learned it) to the question of human lived experience in the world as understood by, and mediated through material culture generously defined: space, landscape, architecture, objects, and the technologies which accumulate at the permeable margins of human bodies/selves and more-than-human worlds. So, my entry into the medieval history of Armenians and Armenia, of the Silk Road and of medieval travel, was first shaped by those considerations. I think (I hope) this comes through in the book’s stance on what makes an “Armenian” in the Middle Ages: I am concerned first with what people did, how they lived, and the techniques by which they made their world, and then in my second breath concerned with how these doings/makings framed and were framed by their imaginings of the world. This is another way of talking about interdisciplinarity, about the different ways we as scholars navigate the tensions and slippages between our ways of knowing/being/doing and those of the people we study. Among these tensions, I found myself working with that between the ontology of people, things, and spaces as understood by medieval people, and the understanding of material and nonhuman agency as explored by archaeologists, art historians, and other kindred scholars. But then, my ongoing work is based in a more complex back-and-forth between medieval cultural and material ways of knowing – and especially the ways in which imagined and “real” landscapes, natures, and spaces are essentially impossible to prise apart.2 At the front of my mind right now are medieval ideas (which inexorably became modern ideas) about the space of the desert wilderness, and the space of the ruin. To treat descriptions of ruins or desert in medieval texts (for instance, in the medieval genre of lamentations) as straightforward description of the world around the writer is to misunderstand the creative work of intertextual writing in this period, the poetic interweaving of scriptural spacetimes (i.e. places and images from the Bible) into the “real” world, in ways that do not make that cultural world any less real.
- 3 A region in southern Armenia (note from the editors).
A significant aspect of historical archaeological work is the differential temporalities of materials and textual sources. Texts have a temporal complexity in the interleaving of history, memory, emotion; even if the writing of a text is datable, the world of the text is expansive and tangled. In different ways, archaeological deposits and material things have their own intersecting non-linear temporalities. What is the time of a building that was constructed in phases, mortared with broken crockery and chips of neolithic stone tools, chiseled with an inscribed date, inhabited and altered; which slowly collapsed in stages of abandonment, earthquake, of winter freezes and storms, of badger burrows and the re-use of its stones for houses, campfires? In the context of epigraphy, the study of inscriptions carved in stone, the finality of these texts can be fragile, subject to the agencies of weather, water and lichens, the curiosity of people and their fleeting memories. In Vayots Dzor,3 we work with textual accounts of architectural epigraphy, such as the Corpus of Armenian Inscriptions (Divan Hay Vimagrutyan), which can seem complete and authoritative, but the pages of which are filled with gaps, with instances where the compilers searched a hill or a ruin and failed to find a stone that had been there before, and so they patch that gap with a text written down a decade, a century, or seven hundred years ago. Then we come along and use someone else’s tip that instead indicates that the missing khachkar was dug up and made into a fountain in a hotel, then that hotel became a barracks, and we go and find it again.
In the context of medieval Armenian textual history, archaeological material evidence becomes necessary for filling out the understanding we have of this cultural world. Yes, there are a lot of medieval texts, but the kinds of texts that we have for medieval Armenia reflect a specific world view, and present a particular account (or not) of the lives of ordinary people. Eghishe’s early medieval history (The History of Vardan and the Armenian War) is a story of noble martyrs and holy geography; [thirteenth-century] Step‘annos Orbelyan’s universal history (The History of the Region of Sisakan) is the chronicle of his own princely family and the paradise they built. The scale of these historical texts is frequently aimed at the epic, the universal, the eternal, the heroic, all of which stand in complex relationships to the timescale of everyday maintenance and seasonal labor, the raising of children and tending of animals and plants, making and mending things.
- 4 A good starting place for colophons is A. K. Sanjian, 1969.
To maybe give an example, this is about putting texts in the contexts of their makings. To draw on something I’ve just been thinking about, I (like many) am intrigued by medieval colophons, the additional texts written into the end pages of medieval manuscripts to track the continued life of the book (called hišatakarannerǝ in Armenian).4 These text fragments, especially in the high Middle Ages, present us with litanies of anguish, of alarm at historical events and circumstances. But the context of these colophons is something more complex. In the case of the dedicatory colophons, a writer has just finished a new book, a community of artists and artisans has just completed the tanning of leather and grinding of pigments and trimming of pages and long copying of holy text and painting of revelatory images, and bound them in silk and hide, even as this one person takes up the pen one final time to make a (allegorically?) mournful note of their historical circumstances. From the text alone the world is in disarray; from the material context, we see communal labor, of monks but also of shepherds, millers, farmers; someone made breakfast that day, did the laundry, we see the circulation of materials and skills, the time and focus and people required to make art in turbulent years.
EAC - From the outset of your book you make it clear that you want to write history with a feminist approach. Can you elaborate on what that feminist approach looks like for you, and what role do material objects and materiality play in writing such a history?
- 5 D. Haraway, 1991; K. Barad, 2007. Haraway argues that scientists need to pay attention to the diffe (...)
Kate Franklin - This is a difficult question, because feminism isn’t something I always consciously set out to do, even while I try to make it clear where possible in my writing that that is what I am doing. A lot of this I think is in the interest of making my readers (whether of the book or of some of my more specialist archaeological writing) understand why they are learning about something they didn’t think was relevant or important, something they didn’t think history or archaeology was “about”. As feminism informs methodology in the social sciences, it requires attention to what Donna Haraway called situatedness, to what Karen Barad calls entanglement.5 As they put it, we simply must consider where we stand as scholars, as embodied and social beings, and where our work stands as a story intersecting with other stories, other ways of telling.
- 6 S. Federici, 1975; S. Federici, 2004.
- 7 S. Lewis, 2019.
My feminism also entails a materialist history of a particular kind I suppose, though I want to stress that I am always trying to read and listen and learn more, so the kind of scholar that I am feels transitory, if not contradictory, over time. But anyway. I tried in Everyday Cosmopolitanisms to pay attention to and center forms of labor and work that have been feminized, even if the doers of this work in the past or present are not people who identify as women per se. So, drawing on the work of Sylvia Federici both as part of the Wages for Housework movement and as a materialist historian of the late Middle Ages,6 I want to call out the erasures and devaluations of certain kinds of labor in the past – in the case of the book, the maintenance labor that sustained and “made space for” the travelers and pilgrims and merchants and their animals and goods and memories and interactions that we now bundle into the idea of the Silk Road. In my ongoing work I am still thinking about the work that makes worlds – about reproductive labor of making people and making worlds, in the double sense of reproduction emphasized by the marxist writer Sophie Lewis.7 In the case of a social world that we “know” through the universal histories of medieval clerical authors, who creates that creation? How might we expand the capacity of world-maker to other humans and creaturely beings?
- 8 This is a fundamental intervention of E. Said, 1978 but see also A. Stahl, 2004; N. A. El-Haj, 2001 (...)
Finally, I am not alone in wanting to draw attention to the cultures and formations which structure knowledge production in archaeology, art history and history.8 What are the relationships of labor and re/production that result in our scholarly work? This is very relevant to the cultures of archaeological research in Armenia, where what is known and knowable about the past is tied up in legacies of imperial and colonial power (though my Armenian colleagues would not necessary use that latter term), in deep social relationships which run across institutional structures, and in the shifting interests and demands of funding, collaboration, and publication in an unstable academic landscape. And alongside all of this is the increasing urgency of understanding the agency of archaeological heritage and medieval historical narratives within the nation-making labors of states, all of which are embodied and gendered in complex ways, and in ways with different emergent capacities for violence and injustice.
- 9 K. Franklin, 2021, 104.
EAC - You write in Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: “When an archaeologist is looking at the total assembled artifacts from an excavation, the temptation when looking at a singular, identifiable object is to forensically associate that object with an individual, with one person’s story that we can tell.”9 In your work you develop a different way of treating objects. Can you elaborate on the analytical lens with which you approach objects that is setting your work on a track different from prior archeological works? What has shaped your approach to material objects?
Kate Franklin - So, I wrote temptation because it is not something we are “supposed” to do within the discipline, but it seems like a common impulse in people confronted with archaeological objects, especially when they are not in a museum case. So, say, that fragment of glass bracelet, when it comes gleaming out of the dirt, the impulse is to rub the dirt off it and lay it on your wrist, to imagine how annoyed you would be if something so pretty broke and fell. Or last summer, we found a lovely little bone pin in the rubble of an abandoned village house at Arpa, in Vayots Dzor. What sort of person tucked that through their clothes, with what kind of small habitual gesture? But within a layer of dirt the span of my hand are maybe minutes (a house collapses in a landslide), maybe weeks (the trash filling a pit), potentially years (layers of dust and clay floor in the corners of a building) of archaeological time. So, if we are imagining past people and their lives, we must think in terms of accretions of habitual labor, of repeated tasks building up traces, as well as the singular people and singular incidents which we do sometimes see. Even the burial of a named individual in a grave marked by an inscribed stone is a moment in a complex process of change, of transforming landscape and activity of humans, animals, plants, weather. This leads back to a linked question of scales and modes of labor, and of analysis. Architects assert that a building is never “finished”; likewise the monumental architecture we have from the Middle Ages proclaims its processual nature. Medieval churches in Armenia flicker between volume and surface, whether you are focusing on their forms, lights and shadows, or on the proliferation of inscriptions and carved or painted images across their stones, attesting to centuries of augmentation, practice, remembrance, rebuilding, ritual and commemoration. In that way they are not so different from a clay tonir oven in a village house, that is built of wet clay slabs, fired in place, used until it breaks, then mended, patched, or knocked down so another oven can be built inside, because bread needs to be baked. Who is the “author” of that oven? Who are the “authors” of that church?
EAC - This question is fascinating yet remains complicated. How do you exactly define and approach that issue of authorship when it comes to material objects? After all, provenance and “signatures” are obviously not always easy (in some cases almost impossible) to trace but still we tend to assume that objects are marked by their authors – makers and/or users – and that they somehow exist through or thanks to them…
- 10 S. Merian, 2013. See also H. Watenpaugh, 2019.
Kate Franklin - For me, in the case of the manuscript, the juxtaposed question of the “author” of a clay oven or a building helps us return to the physicality of that written text, to the material conditions not just of the intellectual work of writing it but also to making it as a thing. Medieval manuscripts are good to think with in that sense because they remind us of how contingent the survival of a medieval text to the modern day is on a wild constellation of material factors. I really love Sylvie Merian’s work on manuscripts which live long lives as “house saints”, as members of communities who mark time by adorning the books with scraps of silver and jewelry and embroidered cloth till each is also a museum-in-miniature.10 So my use of the term “authorship” was more about destabilizing the status of the text than about textualizing the archaeological.
- 11 S. Blair and J. Bloom, 2003.
But this is still a pertinent question for objects from Armenia and surrounding regions which have been brought, through various discourses and labors, into the category of art. As was posited very effectively by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom decades ago, one of the challenges within “Islamic art” is the tracing of authorships, is the lack of signatures on artworks, whether paintings, carpets, ceramic vessels, or wood or stone carvings.11 As they discuss, this difficulty is deepened by curation and display practice (as well as by the history of collecting), as in general we will not see the ceramic painting, the manuscript painting, and the carvings of the same artist alongside one another in a gallery. This is of course also a problem within the overlapping category of “Armenian art” prior to the early modern period, both in the sense that so many objects lack the signs or names of their makers, and also that disciplinary traditions long separated the study of ceramics from manuscripts from sculpture from textiles. But then I would cite the remarkable gallery on the ground floor of the History Museum of Armenia which juxtaposes 19th-century carpets with Bronze Age vessels with khachkars with carved wooden doors. But the conceptual project of this gallery is not an interrogation of the category of art, it is a reification of the transhistorical ethnic unity of “Armenian art”, which generates different challenges.
- 12 Just a few indicative references: E. Hoffman, 2001; S. Redford, 2012; C. Maranci, 2023.
In my own work I am trying to put different categories of material and textual culture back into their lively relationships with one another, for reasons as much art historical as archaeological. On the one hand, following on the work of folks like Eva Hoffman and Scott Redford and then of course Christina Maranci,12 a result of taking all of these object out of their gallery spaces, of re-binding the pages dispersed to a million artistocratic albums and museum archives, of putting the sculpture and frescoes and tiles and carpets back in the buildings, and reuniting the inlaid musical instruments and lusterware bowls from the fine art museum with the farm tools and milk strainers and cooking pots from the archaeological storage, is that we start to understand how visual cultures exist in this vibrant interrelationality across media, linked up by human daily life and ritual practice. In my case, this is asking, not only what do we learn by comparing the stone carving with the architecture with the manuscript paintings of the fourteenth-century Armenian artist Momik, but also what do we learn from asking whether Momik’s clothes were wool or linen, what he ate for dinner, off of what kind of dish, made in which village? On the other hand, we are then confronted by the simultaneous thriving of all these artistic forms across different cultural contexts, such that it becomes more and more difficult to trace a single origin point or ethnic wellspring for a motif, an image, the shape of a bowl, the curve of a woven flower on a carpet, even the recipe of a ceramic glaze or the twist of the thousands of knots in that same carpet. This is my experience researching, writing about and teaching the art of the “Silk Road”; under such scrutiny, any easy image of a linear “east-west trade route” explodes into a Milky Way, a coral reef, of local worlds linked in infinite connections.
EAC - For us, one of the main incentive and concerns for looking closely at material objects within Armenian Studies is to question various approaches and discourses in order to avoid the too quickly mere ethnocentric, nationalist-folkloric-driven or hagiographic associations and approaches to objects as inevitable emblems of Armenian culture. Our intention is rather to show, from a wide range of disciplines, that materiality and material objects are not solely the expected signifiers of one’s culture and history but also active agents in the ways we understand and experience the cultural world. What would be your (theoretical, methodological, or practical) suggestions to rethink or pursue Armenian Studies through and with material objects?
Kate Franklin - This is a tough question, but I am in strong solidarity with your project. I still have so much to learn from the ongoing conversations that intersect within Armenian Studies. I think the best way forward, the only way forward, is mutual curiosity and collaboration. Which is to say, I think (I know) that archaeologists have as much to learn from innovative approaches in history and art history as vice versa.
- 13 The exemplar text here would be C. W. Bynum, 1987.
- 14 See N. Zemon Davis, 1987.
- 15 See A. Honarchian, 2021.
I understand where you are coming from, but folklore and hagiography are also real ways of making meaning in the world. These are modes of storytelling and narrative, of world-making and craft, which can be resigned to “nonmodern” or “superstitious” ways of thinking about the world associated with periods like the Middle Ages, and also with the (deeply, deliberately rooted in those same periods) logics of nation and empire. Within the field of medieval history, it is easy to point to the work of Carolyn Walker Bynum13 as a call to pivot in the ways we consider hagiography; the methodology of cultural poetics emerges as a conversation about ways of making knowledge, a conversation to which material culture is indispensable. Another astounding set of interventions was made by Natalie Zemon Davis, drawing on wider conversations in what got called “microhistory” – but in particular, in taking seriously vernacular (“folk”) ways of knowing, storytelling, which leak into authoritative archives.14 In the context of Armenian history, my friend and collaborator Ani Honarchian works on the complex interactions between hagiography, folklore, and materiality in the construction of national pasts and landscapes in the conversion period of the fifth-sixth century;15 she has also lately been gifting me with these beautiful thoughts about the “folk epic” Sasna Tsrer as opening space for counterhistory, for otherwise-embodied experiences of conquest, conversion, co-living. For some context: the Armenian poetic cycle known as Daredevils of Sassun was hailed by Soviet editors as an “anticlerical” narrative of the Middle Ages and early modern period, a version of history that was of the people, not of those elite authors I was talking about above. Of course we understand why that was important in the Soviet period, but the idea of a folklorical story of cultural survival told by shepherds and peasants remains so compelling, so rich in possibilities for writing this history in a different mode from the hagiographic or the heroic.
From these ongoing approaches and from others we get all these good tools for thinking, talking, and writing about these techniques of worlding, and we can share our tools. An archaeology-ish saying from the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart that I love is, “thinking in the company of others accrues sediment”16 – they are referring to the sharing of writing, of sharing work and the labor of thinking. If such is the case for thinking, then working on texts and objects with a kindred colleague from another discipline for me is the intellectual equivalent of being up to my elbows in cool squishy clay, feeling the emergent form between our interweaving searching fingers of something strange and new and awesome, maybe of something “useful and beautiful” but at least something confounding in generative ways.
- 17 R. Williams, 1973. Also, this is so strange, but on a different day I might possibly (but probably (...)
To move from the metaphorical to the methodological, I am really inspired by works of praxis in scholarship, by scholars who can engage with their own situatedness not in an auto-ethnographic (or auto-hagiographic way), but in a way that moves the work forward. I’ll limit myself to one example, and one that is, I know, shared by many people in my “kin group” of scholars working on landscape, ecology, and cultural history. It’s Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City,17 and for this example, especially the introductory chapter. Williams was a novelist, a beautiful, tender writer, and he puts that to work across the whole book but especially in this first chapter where he wants you, the reader, to understand why the work matters to him, but also (and this is the same thing) where he comes from and where he sits, literally and figuratively. He makes it clear that to be a scholar of literature and history one must know oneself enough to understand how your perception of place and time are different from those of George Eliot or Thomas Hardy; at the same time, this means your reader must know enough of you to understand that their reading may be their own, different from yours. So, to the extent that I can within the requirements of academic practice, I try to do this, to tell my reader where I sit.
EAC - Throughout your book your effort to center the voices of scholars in Armenia, the voices of archeologists as well as the individuals you encounter on your path of archeological research is striking and commendable because often in Armenian Studies, as well as of course in many other area studies fields, the knowledge production that occurs in the places that we examine get sidelined to the advantage of scholarship produced by scholars in the West. This of course speaks to ethical and political concerns to which your book is attentive. Having these dynamics in mind, can you please talk about the ethical and political issues materiality and material objects as units of analysis and research have the potential to raise and address.
Kate Franklin - It’s very gratifying that this comes through in the writing! I cannot overstate how extensively my work is framed by hospitality. I am writing this sentence from a house in Yerevan that has been opened to me, where I can wake up and listen to swallows calling in the morning and come back after work and process what I have learned in conversation over coffee and food and wine, and spontaneously turn from conversation to writing and back again. When we (Astghik Babajanyan and I) excavate we live in villages, dry our ceramic sherds on stairs where people work, think our archaeological thoughts in the same space as conversations about bad water making children sick, about war as something that “mothers could end if they got us together”. On the one hand, this means paying attention to the spaces where we think our science. On the other, it means acknowledging the labor of those who talk to/with us, give us directions, make space for us. This is not to say that I have never had a good or useful idea alone while walking to the grocery store or out for a run (I have), but the best ideas I have had I am pretty sure were all in conversation with somebody. I try to be honest about that, and about how the stakes for that person might be, are very probably different from mine.
On a more scholarly level this is an impulse against the separation of ways of seeing and ways of knowing, against the division between cultural worlds (where we live in our mushy bodies and leaky memories) and laboratory/site/landscape/archive (where we “find facts” and think and write). In archaeology at least, this separation is partially borne of a colonial and masculinist abnegation of body, of the vulnerable interdependencies and reliances on other selves and bodies which sustain work, which compromise heroic acts of discovery and invention. So yes, I am trying to be attentive to the communities of practice within which our knowledge is made, and the relations of production of that knowledge, whether in universities or institutes, archives or museums.
It’s hard to think about this now without thinking about the stakes of material culture and history in the post-Soviet Caucasus. In the holy war of a unified church-state, khachkars are cast as soldiers, churches as martyrs, fragments of unearthed epigraphy or typological artifacts as weapons in public messaging and emotional warfare. How do we reorient conversations about material culture towards justice? How do we untangle imperial and colonial ways of seeing that have structured the layout of museums and the words we use to speak for and with objects?
Again, it remains important to continually assert that the work that things do, is also always a story about the work that people do. This is in part why I try to keep in play that tension between human and nonhuman/material agency. As has been pointed out by archaeologists like Severin Fowles, a close focus on “thing theory” and an (albeit recuperative) over-priviledging of materiality as agentive in constructing and transmitting culture/habitus, can lead to a fetishization of the simple, silent thing over the messy lives of the people that made it and the impossibility of representing those lives in text.18 My own take is, the yearning for a flat ontology between people and things (in other words, to say that I am no more an author of this text than my computer, its heavy metals, the mine they came from, the table, its mother-tree, etc) is a fun and even salutary game if your personhood has never been in doubt, if you have never had thingness put on you, if your body hasn’t recently or ever been territorialized by somebody’s allegorical project. We can see a bit of that fetishism of the objective object in academic, “post-national” archaeological and art historical approaches to material culture in the Caucasus that yearn to let “things speak for themselves”. On the one hand, it is true that a bowl or a stone exists apart from human perception and has no genes or blood or womb or seed or creed. But bowls do not circulate, stones do not stand, as signs independent of the work, desires, and doings of people. So the question I tend to return to is, how are objecthood and personhood, agency and animacy, messily mapped onto landscapes, objects, creatures, as well as onto human bodies? What does this work look like in the past, what does it look like now? I think a more concrete way of framing this might be, how might a theoretical orientation to materiality take ethical direction from a re-assertion of its roots in labor, in decolonization, in eco-thinking, and in intersectional feminism?
EAC - What you say here is fundamental for us. First, there is the necessity of finding a middle and common ground where humans and objects meet and interact and, second, there is this requisite to include, more than ever, the role of let’s say “ecocriticism” to stress the inexorable entanglement between people, objects and nature. Can you elaborate a bit more on how it further impacts the way you conceive of your discipline and your current and upcoming projects? Or, how does “the more-than-human” that you seem to be so keen about influence your research and, ultimately, produce a conscious sense of justice?
- 19 For a good review of these conversations, see M. Johnson, 2008.
- 20 That phraseology of “more than human” comes from a few places including David Abram’s ethnographic (...)
- 21 A key orienting reading on this is W. Cronon, 1995.
Kate Franklin - It feels good to create kinships through these conversations! I am keen about ecocriticism, an approach which is better defined in the doing than the describing, but which emerged from literary criticism and art history in the last few years, and which (to inevitably oversimplify) is a curiosity about the ecological entanglements which generate and situate cultural representation (i.e., art and literature expansively defined). To engage in an ecocritical reading as a landscape archaeologist and a cultural historian is to accept that we can learn critical things about humans and their worlds in the past from cultural artifacts (including literary texts, and art), as well as from what archaeologists call “ecofacts” (carbonized seeds, ice cores, animal bones, waterlogged tree stumps) or what historians would consider ecological data (almanacs, observations of temperature, weather or seismological events, economic records of crops, population statistics). For decades now, archaeologists have asserted that landscape is not a passive backdrop to human events, and that ways of seeing, understanding, interacting and remembering landscapes are culturally and historically situated.19 Among these “ways of seeing” are the tangled and conjoined cultural ideas about more-than-human worlds20 that fall under the term “nature”, but which are some of the most centrally cultural ideas humans have.21 I am fascinated by the ways that people in the Middle Ages perceived and imagined landscapes and nature, and by the many ways that our understandings of places are shaped by those perceptions and imaginings. I am trying to forefront their cultural ways of knowing, not in a postmodern argument that we can’t ever know the landscapes of the past, but as an attempt to better orient my research questions around the cultural-historical, aesthetic, political lives of those medieval people. Basically, I have been trying to balance the decentering of human agency with work to reconstruct how medieval people might have perceived and even represented that decentring. It’s a work in progress! But a work allied with your commitment to material worlds, clearly – in extending both the capacity of agency as well as our ethical consideration to creatures and vibrant planetary matter alongside the lively objects that make worlds with us.
And of course this is a question of justice. Just to briefly open up something I talk about in the field with Astghik – our medieval interlocutors in Vayots Dzor were deeply concerned with land and water as life-sustaining resources. The bishop Step‘annos Orbelyan pays as much attention to the creation of gardens and the canalizing of sweet water to villages and monasteries as he does to the building of churches. What if this could re-emerge as part of medieval heritage? What if the water drunk by people living in villages in Armenia or the toxicity of their soil were as of much concern to pious patriots as the ruined or reconstructed state of their medieval church? A huge question, I know, and a subjective and situated concern – but one which I think can stand alongside the concern for material agency and ethical regard for objects we have been discussing across my long rambles – for the enabling of which I am very grateful.