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The Ruins We Live In

A Conversation with Lori Khatchadourian
Les ruines dans lesquelles nous vivons : entretien avec Lori Khatchadourian
Lori Khatchadourian, Marie-Aude Baronian et Dzovinar Derderian
p. 123-143

Résumés

Lori Khatchadourian est une archéologue qui travaille à la croisée d’approches méthodologiques issues de l’anthropologie sociale, des études critiques du patrimoine et, bien sûr, de l’archéologie. Géographiquement, ses recherches se sont concentrées sur l’Arménie et le Caucase du Sud. Dans cet entretien elle discute longuement du rôle des objets matériels et du monde matériel dans ses recherches, de son intérêt constant pour la culture matérielle et son impact sur la vie sociale, ainsi que de ses recherches publiques et engagées menées dans le cadre du projet Caucasus Heritage Watch. L’entretien évoque l’excavation et la mise au jour d’objets (enfouis ou négligés), les histoires qu’ils racontent et celles qu’ils inspirent. Lori Khatchadourian aborde également ici les manières spécifiques et diverses dont la matérialité du passé (de l’Antiquité persane à la modernité socialiste) a façonné les questions et les relations politiques, économiques et éthiques contemporaines. Elle explique en quoi l’attention portée au présent permet d’appréhender et de reconsidérer les vestiges et les débris du passé de manière innovante.

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Notes de la rédaction

Lori Khatchadourian (Cornell University) is an archaeologist working at the intersection of methodological approaches emanating from social anthropology, critical heritage studies, and of course also archaeology. Geographically, her research has focused on Armenia and the South Caucasus. We sat down with Dr. Khatchadourian to discuss at length the role of material objects and the material world in her research, her ongoing interests in material culture and its impact on social life, as well as her public-facing, engaged research through the Caucasus Heritage Watch project. We talked about the excavation of (hidden or neglected) objects, the stories that can be told and the new inspirations that can be drawn from them. We also addressed the specific yet diverse ways in which the materiality of the past (be it Persian antiquity or socialist modernity) shapes contemporary political, economic, and ethical questions and relations, yet, at the same time, how being attentive to the present enables us to grasp and to reconsider the remnants and debris of the past in novel ways.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archeology of Empires (UC Press, 2016). Based on the archae (...)

Marie-Aude Baronian & Dzovinar Derderian - Your previous research and archeological work focused on ancient Persia,1 for which you had to deal with the material world in the absence of texts. How did it inform your approach to the more contemporary era with which your most recent research deals?

Lori Khatchadourian - First, I should say, even though we’re talking about objects here, when I think about the material world, the built environment and its material fabric is a central part of it. I think also of landscapes and of other-than-human or non-human things, including animals and plants. And so, even if we in our conversation may speak of things or objects as a shorthand, I think we should always have in mind that more expansive understanding of the material world that exceeds singular entities.

Archaeologists must extract all the information we possibly can from the material world, because material traces are our primary and sometimes our only source for attempting to know the past. So, that entails thinking about objects across the entire “chaîne opératoire”, which means (in archaeology) thinking about all the stages in the life cycle or biography of an object. I mean thinking about material things in terms of their production, their consumption or use, the flows that surround them, their discard and eventual deposition. When we focus on production, we think about not only how things are made technically, but also the social relations and the social actions entailed in the making of things. Production concerns both the technical steps as well as the social acts involved in the making of things or built environments and so forth. We think about the flows of materials. We think about the networks and interactions that are engaged in the making of a material order, and the new social configurations that emerge from these networks or assemblages of human and other-than-human actors. Discard, deposition, and reuse are also a part of thinking about the biography of things or the life cycle of things archaeologically. We pay attention to their context. We ask questions about whether they are uncovered in their original deposition context or have been moved or reused. Context is so important for archeological reasoning. Thinking about how to interpret objects in relation to the things that surround them, and in the context in which they reside, is one of the first things that any student of archaeology learns.

In the research and writing of Imperial Matter, I gave a great deal of attention to people’s entanglements with things and how these entanglements relate to matters of power and imperial sovereignty. How do we think about the everyday work of material objects in the relations of empire? How do they shape the formation of identities and either advance or potentially disrupt imperial designs? What role does the material world play in our political and social relations, and what kinds of demands do architecture and objects place on users to engage in certain practices that are politically consequential? The mutual dependencies between humans and things is something I wrote a lot about in Imperial Matter, focusing on contexts as disparate as the centers of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in Fars (e.g. Persepolis) and a remote corner of the empire’s Armenian province or “satrapy”, as the Greeks called it. (Indeed, much of what we know about the Achaemenid Persian Empire comes from Greco-Roman written sources, with all their biases, which is why archaeology is so important to its study.) For many years, I excavated an Achaemenid-era settlement near the town of Tsakhkahovit, in the Aragatsotn province of modern Armenia. This work was carried out under the auspices of an Armenian-American collaboration called Project ArAGATS, one of the most enduring such collaborative projects in the Caucasus. Like today, in antiquity Tsakhkahovit was an agropastoral village. The ancient settlement consisted of several well-preserved residential complexes whose stone architecture is still visible in traces on the surface of the landscape. I was particularly interested in how people who lived in this mountain village during the 6-4th centuries BCE engaged with the material world in ways that both reproduced Achaemenid sovereignty but also undermined it in subtle ways.

Marie-Aude Baronian - Would you mind giving us an example of an object you worked on for the Imperial Matter book?

Lori Khatchadourian - Perhaps the most exciting discovery from the Tsaghkahovit excavations was a single small artifact that was lying in situ on the floor of a room in one of the complexes we excavated. The unique artifact was a mottled green stone plate made of serpentine. Accompanying the serpentine plate were other unusual objects, like a ceramic stand (perfectly suited for the plate in its diameter), fine pottery, and a basalt mortar. What was the meaning of this assemblage of things? How, if at all, did their use connect the people living in this semi-subterranean complex in the northern mountains of the Achaemenid realm to the imperial formation in which they lived?

To answer this question, first we sought to understand its production. My colleagues at Armenia’s Institute of Geological Sciences conducted mineralogical, chemical, and petrographic analysis of the stone and determined that the specific composition of the Tsakhkahovit plate most probably points to a source in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. Stylistically, the closest parallels are to be found in the corpus of green stone plates discovered at the Achaemenid capital of Persepolis. These lines of evidence combined to suggest that the plate was likely an import from the imperial heartland. On the basis of inscriptions on the plates at Persepolis, it could further be determined that the plate was made some time after 486 BCE. Thus far I have addressed the production of the plate, but what about its use? To address this element in the object’s story, context is key. The room in which the stone plate was found was unique in several respects. In one corner, beneath the floor was a large jar containing dark gray ashy contents suggestive of a cremation burial. In another corner, buried beneath the floor was a cache of iron stonemason’s tools with fancy ceramic bowls – perhaps the curated objects from a work feast. So let’s just say this is a special room in which ritual activities took place. But that still leaves open the question of how the plate was used. Here, the other objects found in association with it may provide a clue, including the special purpose stand and the mortar. Taken together, on the basis of comparison with other archaeological evidence from Persepolis, it’s possible to say that the plate and associated objects in the complex at Tsaghkahovit were likely used in a religious rite that derived from the imperial heartland and was relevant to the Achaemenid politico-religious project. This rite entailed crushing a plant with a mortar and pestle and consuming the resulting substance from a green stone plate (this may have had psychotropic effects). The ritual may connect to a rite known from later Avestan religion involving the crushing of the haoma (or soma) plant.

In any case, what matters here is that the plate and other objects afforded, through direct somatic encounter, a ritual practice that extended imperial religio-political values into this one village. In other words, the imported serpentine plate did political work through its use. It reaffirmed the social status of individuals at Tsakhkahovit who had privileged access to what may have been rather esoteric knowledge. The plate required that people and things come together into a particular entanglement that was closely connected to the metaphsyics of Achaemenid imperial sovereignty.

Marie-Aude Baronian & Dzovinar Derderian - It is clear, and rather obvious, that in archaeology (the field in which you were trained) material objects are central and pivotal. What are, according to you, the main issues, motifs and/or “do and don’ts” you have to take into consideration when material objects are the main foci of research and field work? Are there, for example, some traditions, authors, notions, directions or methodologies that you find inspirational and instrumental for stressing the decisive role of objects?

Lori Khatchadourian - There’s no single script or manual for engaging “correctly” with material objects in archaeology or any other field. To me, the point of new materialism – the broad theoretical framework that is concerned with the relationship between matter and being in ways that challenge traditional dualisms and rethink the capacities of all entities in the world—is not to dogmatically require a particular interpretive approach but to expand our understanding of how matter, broadly construed, makes a difference in the world. I don’t even think we necessarily need to do away with the semiotic or representational approaches to objects, which focus on how things communicate meaning through signs and symbols. This is not about entirely rejecting the representational qualities of things, the ways they can carry cultural or social meanings. Now that the dust has settled in the paradigm shift from the “semiotic” to the “material” turn, perhaps it’s not so radical to suggest that these two theoretical traditions can coexist. Just as humans can act both passively and actively, so too can things both passively project meaning, carry memory, and actively shape the world under different circumstances.

What I would say, however, is that all of us who engage with material objects should bring awareness to how we think about things. If nothing else, the material turn has taught us that our interpretive choices emerge from particular traditions of thought, of which Cartesian dualism has been particularly hegemonic, and should not be taken for granted as the “natural” or obvious way to study the material world. To the extent that representational approaches focused on symbolism and meaning remain the default interpretive disposition, the imperative now is to go further than this. Attending to the agentive capacities of other-than-human entities and beings, and exploring the profound entangements of existence, opens the imagination and deepens our analyses of the worlds we study.

  • 2 G. Harman 2018.
  • 3 L. Khatchadourian 2020; in press.
  • 4 E.g. Z. Todd, 2016.

At the same time, one cautionary note for new materialist approaches (and the closely related body of thought known as post-humanism) is not to write humans out of the stories we tell. I say this in part because it’s an important critique of the material turn within my own discipline of archaeology. The backlash against the “turn to things” from some quarters is that it runs the risk of shifting attention away from the human experience of harms, as well as from the humans who bear responsibility for injustices, past and present. Certain strands of new materialism like object-oriented ontology2 and others that have influenced archaeology do run the risk of imagining a world without humans, and that has grave ethical implications because if we focus only on the capacities of things we lose sight of human culpability for injustices. Who or what is accountable for harms? If things have power, do they also bear responsibility? The ethical critique has been leveled, and I and others have responded to it.3 I think we do need to be careful not to collapse agency and responsibility. Things can have agentive powers. They have effects in the world. They shape the world in ways that exceed human plans for them. But they do not bear culpability. We can have distributed agency where all different kinds of entities or “actants”, as Bruno Latour calls them (2005), have agentive qualities, but culpability belongs squarely with humans. We should remain alert to the potential ethical cost of new materialist inquiry. There is room to reclaim a place for things while also retaining the place for people. We can write about power. We can write about oppression and attend to the role that things play in those societal harms without collapsing culpability and agency. And while we’re on the subject of ethics, it’s also important to note that Western new materialist scholarship has sustained critique from indigenous scholars for its tendency to either disregard or take from the work of indigenous thinkers on the nature of being.4

In terms of my own field of archaeology, there are many archaeologists who’ve done some really interesting writing around materiality. I’ll highlight just a few. Some thinkers who’ve shaped my work include Ian Hodder, an archaeologist who has had a tremendous influence on archaeological thought over the course of decades, and whose 2012 book, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Humans and Things is particularly germane to our conversation today. As the title implies, this book attends to the profound codependences between things and other things, and between things and humans, bound together in complex, entangled webs. What I appreciate about this book is that it does not write the human out, even as it recognizes a very prominent place for things in the production of social worlds. Yet Hodder is not so attentive to power, which is perhaps understandable given his primary focus on entangelments in the Neolithic. In Imperial Matter I explored how the kinds of entanglements that Hodder theorizes shape political life under empire, but draw also from Jane Bennett’s (2010) attention to the power and politics of “vibrant matter”. Adam T. Smith has also written extensively on materiality and politics. His 2015 book, The Political Machine: Assembling Sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus offers a nuanced account of the role of material culture in the practices of political sovereignty. I could go on. So many archaeologists have done cutting edge research in recent years, both conceptually and empirically, that is informed by new materialist thinking, like Bjønar Olsen, Astrid Van Oyen, Tamara Bray, Andrew Bauer, Steve Kosiba, Eva Mol, Rachel Crellin, to name just a few who come to mind.

Marie-Aude Baronian & Dzovinar Derderian - In the last few years, you have been working extensively on Soviet-era “industrial ruins” in the context of the post-Soviet era. Your work seems to demonstrate that such material ruins (including other related left-over objects and debris) say a great deal about that specific moment in time but also raise some fundamental questions about how we should consider them to address the present and the future. If the materiality of industrial ruins is undoubtedly different from that of the ancient era, how do they impact our understanding of objects as significant matters and traces of the past?

Lori Khatchadourian - Maybe I should briefly explain this shift from practicing archaeology in the traditional way, excavating the traces of an ancient past, to studying contemporary ruination. The idea that the archaeological gaze can be cast upon the Soviet and post-Soviet eras may be confounding for many readers because of the way archaeology is conventionally perceived. For over two decades, however, at least since Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’s seminal 2001 book, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, a new subfield has taken shape in the discipline of archaeology that takes seriously the ruins and remnants of the 20th century as objects of archaeological inquiry. The archaeology of the contemporary past embraces a wide diversity of approaches. Particularly compelling, in my view, are contemporary archaeologies that focus on what Alfredo González-Ruibal has called the “dark side” of modernity (2019). Archaeologies of the recent past can bring to the surface 20th-century state violence and the destructive effects of late capitalism. Through excavation, yes, but also through the discipline’s ways of foregrounding the material world, archaeology can make manifest things we think we already know about injustices in the present and recent past, but in new, affectively different ways.

In some parts of the world, archaeologists are hard-pressed not to notice and respond to contemporary ruination, and the former Soviet Union is one of those places. Over the course of the many years that I was researching the ruins of an ancient imperial past in Armenia, I became increasingly mindful of the fact that the ruins of a modern empire were all around me – a proliferation of what Ann Stoler (2013) has called “imperial debris” – particularly in the form of abandoned Soviet factories. These abject ruins can be found all across Armenia, from towns like Aparan, where our excavation team lived in the summers, to small industrial cities like Charentsavan, to major industrial centers like Yerevan, Gyumri, and Vanadzor. As an archaeologist, once you start noticing the ruins of the contemporary world – ruins that we inhabit, or at least live amidst, you realize that this, too, is part of the archaeological record. But rather than unearthing the record, in the case of Soviet industrial ruins the archaeologist can witness its object of study in its formation. As an archaeologist, if you’re alert to the materiality of power, if you’re attending to the materiality of imperial projection and imperial decline, it is not such a leap to move from ancient Persia to the Soviet Empire.

  • 5 L. Khatchadourian, 2022.
  • 6 See G. Simmel, 1965 [1911]; S. Buck-Morss, 1991.

I suppose my approach to the factories follows the framework I laid out at the start, namely, that archaeologists look at how material culture is produced, used or consumed, and how things and places are discarded or abandoned. How is a ruin produced? The representation of ruins that photography, critique, and some philosophers offer us performs an affective sleight of hand. The aesthetic ignites a “ruins sublime” premised on haunting stillness, lifelessness, the anxiety of loss, and the inescapabale mortality of pasts, present, and futures. But ruins are in fact sites of convergence for a turbulent swarm of energies that propel change, support life, and erode it. This is what I am learning from my archaeological and ethnographic research in the post-Soviet industrial ruins of Armenia, which appear to be anything but places of inertia (or, for that matter, sublime beauty). Soviet modernity’s industrial ruins teem with a host of forces that exert themselves on the rotting remnants, from the humans who plunder the derelict factories or dwell and work within them, to the plants and animals that repopulate them, to the elements that erode and oxidize them, to the toxic chemicals that pollute them. In documenting the passage of Soviet industry into ruination and charting the post-socialist biographies of its machinic material culture, we learn how people live with the spaces and detritus of Soviet labor, how the materials of industrial ruin have helped create and perpetuate oligarchic power structures, and how the remnants get drawn into capitalist relations of production and consumption. As I have written,5 archaeology and ethnography in such spaces can make manifest the lifeforms and lifeways that the delapidated space and persistent things of proletariat life make possible, and the conditions of precarity that Soviet ruins sustain. Armenia’s industrial ruins do not submit easily to the framing of the ruin offered by various philosophers, from Georg Simmel’s romantic vision of the ruin as representing the triumph of the will of nature over the human spirit, to Walter Benjamin’s influential ideas of the ruin as allegory for the oppressive logics of capital.6

Marie-Aude Baronian - What you say makes me think of ruins as archives, but also ruins, for many disciplines, resist to become an archive, right? What you say about ruins relates to the issue of what we do to preserve. And this is the same with archives. Why do we put something in the archive? What don’t we put in the archive? I see a connection between this idea of the industrial ruin, because they’re not seen, for example, like art or an artistic object, but what is their dynamic relationship with the archive, as a valuable and legitimate cultural form of preservation?

Dzovinar Derderian - And, I would add, from my own experience as a historian, why do we pay attention to some folders of the archives, and not others, right?

Lori Khatchadourian - Indeed, and the ontological status of the ruin in this regard is something very liminal, right? It’s certainly not the hegemonic archive. It’s certainly at the margins as a source for knowledge production. So, to that extent it’s almost like a counter archive or a renegade of sorts. This is particularly interesting in the Armenian context, because the “proper” archive of the 1990s (the so called dark years) is rather silent on the corrupt processes of privatization and asset stripping that account for Armenia’s industrial ruins today. The media archive is practically silent on the orgies of plunder, I mean large-scale asset stripping, which began in the 1990s (and continues even until today at some old factories). So the material record itself, coupled with the voices of those who lived through those years, are the main sources we have concerning the formation of Armenia’s industrial ruins. To try and piece together the story of what happened in the decimation of Armenia’s industrial economy and its associated societal harms, archaeology and ethnography are absolutely critical. I don’t mean to say that we can’t derive the context from media sources and historical accounts. But how things actually came apart; how landscapes that were once communal spaces of collective work, turned into spaces of abjection… that story is not going to be found in the archive proper. The ruin is a counter archive in the sense that it refuses to abide the silence and secrecy of state actors and others who enjoy power and privilege.

Marie-Aude Baronian - What is at stake for the preservation of such objects today? Should they be revitalized in some way?

Lori Khatchadourian - That’s such a good question, and one that touches on the concept of cultural heritage and its limits. Thus far, Armenia has not embraced its Soviet industrial past as part of its cultural heritage. Industrial ruins may be sites of dark tourism, off-the-beaten-path attractions for more intrepid tourists, for instance in the city of Vanadzor, with its iconic chemical factories. But industrial ruins have not found a place in Armenia’s dominant conception of heritage, with its focus on national identity from the Iron Age to the medieval era. There are many explanations for this exclusion. Contemporary ruins are perhaps just too recent to be conceived as cultural heritage, whose value often derives from its age. Then there is the fact that industrial ruins resist national narratives. They cannot be folded into ethnicized discourse to the extent that they are the heritage of the proletariat, the heritage of all industrial and post-industrial societies. There’s no scope in that discourse, no room yet in the Armenian context for thinking about the heritage of modernity as part of the Armenian story. Finally, industrial ruins resist revitalization as heritage because they are simply too abject and aesthetically deviant.

In offering this diagnosis, I’m hardly advocating for the “heritagization” of ruined factories as fossilized relics calling out for preservation and conservation. But I do think revitalization efforts are important, and should take a different form. The reimagining of Armenia’s factory ruins provides an opportunity to reckon with the harms of the recent past, from the environmental abuses of industrialization to the avaricious and corrupt process of privatization that enclosed the collective assests of Armenia’s citizens while decimating wage labor. Who gets to decide what should happen to the built remnants of Armenia’s Soviet past? The public has a claim to these urban and rural landscapes. How can they be revitalized in a way that returns them to the people, as places for recreation, creative practice, and activism? How can they be transformed into places where young generations can learn about the lives that their grandparents lived and the losses they experienced when the Soviet Union collapsed? To return to your question, what is at stake in the revitalization of at least some of Armenia’s industrial ruins is the work of reparation for the harms of both Soviet modernization and the unscrupulous process through which it came undone. There are models to turn to in Europe. Perhaps the most well-known example of post-industrial revitalization is the Landschaft Park, Duisburg-Nord, in Germany, where a shuttered coal and steel production plant was redesigned into a public park intended to understand and heal from the industrial past.

Marie-Aude Baronian - So perhaps these ruins can give the possibility of looking at the past with a different eye, and not per se nostalgically, but revitalizing them, and reckoning with their roles, their functionality even their design, right?

  • 7 A. Golubev, 2020.

Lori Khatchadourian - It’s true, there’s so much we can learn about the 20th century from its machinic, industrial materiality. In the Soviet context, the story can center on compulsory modernization as a form of colonialism. Industrial materiality also opens a window onto studying environmental degredation, biodiversity loss, toxicity, health. I am particularly interested in what Soviet materiality can teach us about the persistence of things. The Soviets were exceptionally adept at extending the lifecyle of things as long as possible, as others have written.7 The logics underlying Soviet materiality were the very opposite of planned obsolescence. Maybe there’s something to learn from this, as the world grapples with the enormous waste of capitalist excess.

Marie-Aude Baronian & Dzovinar Derderian - Your work stresses the importance of acknowledging materiality as what shapes current questions linked to social, economic, and even ethical matters. In the complicated world we live in (thinking of the recent devastating events in Artsakh), can you expand on the political dimension of materiality and material objects?

  • 8 E.g. K. Behar, 2016, R. Braidotti, 2019, C. Ellis, 2018.

Lori Khatchadourian - I touched on some of these issues earlier, in suggesting that the decaying material order of 20th-century excess can become a resource for reckoning with matters of public concern, from environmental degredation and toxicity to the inequalities of privatization and market liberalization. Taking a step back, it could even be said that the “material turn” is inseparable from politics to the extent that the intellectual project to decenter the human emerged in part as critique of the mess that humans have made of our planet. It’s worth mentioning, as well, the approaches that theorize the politics behind the very category of the “human” and its exclusions through feminist and Black Studies critique.8

  • 9 E. Weizman, 2017.

But in invoking Nagorno-Karabakh you open a different set of issues concerning politics and materiality. Here we can think about how the material world becomes a locus of political contestation. Objects and buildings can become actors in what I call “trials of ruination”. These trials can take many forms but here I refer to struggles over truth and justice that play out through the destruction of objects, buildings, landscapes, etc. Trial has important juridical resonances, but trials can unfold not only in the courtroom but also in the public sphere. These are trials over what can persist and what must be de-materialized – undone or transformed. The example that comes immediately to mind is the damage and destruction of cultural heritage in the context of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but one could just as well look to other contexts of heritage destruction, from Syria to Afghanistan, Ukraine to Xinjiang, China, the Balkans to Palestine to Turkey and beyond. As will be well known to readers of this journal, in Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhchivan virtually the entire Armenian heritage-scape of medieval and early modern churches, monasteries, and cemeteries was completely erased beginning in 1997. In this and other cases, buildings and artifacts are threatening. They threaten certain imaginations of both the past and the future. They are threatening not only because of what they symbolize, but because of what they do as “players” in political affairs–supporting claims, defying post-truths, helping to constitute a “public”, etc. One of the most interesting efforts to theorize the political work of materials in trials of ruination can be found in the investigations of Forensic Architecture,9 and especially Fuller and Weizman’s (2021) recent book Investigative Aesthetics, where we learn that, in places of state violence, all material things – from buildings, to roads, to trees, etc. – are akin to sensors, detecting and registering changes by their very materiality in ways that bear upon the politics of truth. In this sense, ruination can sometimes become a resource in political debate. Within materiality theory, I think there is still more conceptual work to be done around destruction and the de-materialization or undoing of things. Whether manifesting as waste or ruin, the decay, degregation, and ruination of things is inseparable from political problems.

Dzovinar Derderian - But it seems to me like you are approaching destruction in a little bit of a different way than Armenian Studies has approached. You are looking at it from a productive aspect.

Lori Khatchadourian - Perhaps, if by “productive” we mean that destruction can not only trigger the retrospective affect of loss but also serve as a call to action in the present. But what forms can such action take? With respect to cultural heritage destruction, a common response is to try and recreate what was lost as a way to hold on to it. Restoration, conservation, preservation – these are all practices of re-materialization, striving to reconstite a material form as it once was in the unattainable quest for authenticity.

Marie-Aude Baronian - This question of “rematerialization” is definitely an important one. One could think of several obvious and concrete examples. When there is, say, a church, an old Armenian church, instead of revitalizing as it stands now, and trying to integrate it in the way we connect today to one another, to the world, to other existing and environmental entities, etc., there is this tendency to overdo it. It’s like a “super rematerialization”. While the rematerialization you’re talking about is about the recognition of those objects in our environment, in our ecosystem, and accepting also their own fragility, and acknowledging the imperfection, and I think this may have a lot to do with this feminist post-human turn about e.g. the imperfect body, about refusing the hegemonic order of things that needs to be spotless, etc. Right? So I feel that your understanding of rematerialization is not necessarily the same thing as, for example, a certain idea of restoration in architecture but more accepting their existence (be it “incomplete”) on our land, and the new kind of thoughts and feelings that emerge from there…

1Lori Khatchadourian - Yes, that’s one way that I’m thinking about it and accepting change, not necessarily needing to halt or fossilize things, but allow them to take their course. This is another tradition in the ruins discourse. I’m thinking of the work of Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (2017), that provides an approach to heritage that rejects the impulse of hyper-restoration. What you’re referring to, the effort to fossilize something as it is or was rather than allow it to take its course, this too has its own philosophical roots in the 19th century preservation movement and the work of architects and art critics like Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin. Thinking creatively about how to re-materialize ruins and remnants in ways that embrace change, allow for new social and cultural formations that are not beholden to the past, yet remain in dialogue and material engagement with that past… such a shift requires more artists and fewer heritage “managers”. But, of course, this understanding of rematerialization is obstructed when preservation efforts are so top down and orchestrated and heavy-handed by the state apparatus and its agendas.

Marie-Aude Baronian & Dzovinar Derderian - You are also working on “heritage forensics” in the framework of the project Caucasus Heritage Watch. Can you tell us a bit more about what it entails and in which way it does involve lots of other concerns such as law and politics?

Lori Khatchadourian - Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) is a research initiative that I formed with my colleagues Adam T. Smith and Ian Lindsay in November 2020, immediately after the ceasefire to the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. We are all archaeologists, with decades of experience conducting research in Armenia and the Caucasus. After the ceasefire, as concerns mounted about the cultural heritage crisis spawned by the transfer of territories to Azerbaijan’s jurisdiction, we immediately got together and talked about how we could use our skills as archaeologists in spatial analysis and satellite remote sensing to respond to the situation. Taking inspiration from what archaeologists have done in other conflict zones, particularly in Syria and Iraq, we formed a project that uses high-resolution satellite imagery to document and monitor the treatment of cultural heritage in this intractable conflict.

From the start, we understood that we had several major tasks. First, we needed to systematically document the fate of both Armenian and Azerbaijani/Islamic heritage following the first Nagorno-Karabakh war of the 1990s. This had never been done before, and yet it was important to establish the basis for the current fears over the Armenian monuments now under Azerbaijan’s control. Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman’s 2019 investigation in Hyperallergic on the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in Nakhchivan was so important, but site-by-site evidence was still needed. Likewise, despite Azerbaijan’s efforts since the 1990s to bring attention to the abuses to mosques and other cultural sites under de facto Armenian control at the United Nations, there had never been a systematic investigation of what had been lost and what remained, and the existing claims were suffused with propaganda. Each of these historic, forensic investigations took a year to complete, and required close analysis of a wide range of sources, including satellite imagery, Soviet topoghraphic maps, scholarly publications, and open source intelligence. We brough Dr. Husik Ghulyan onto our team, a political geographer with extensive regional knowledge and spatial expertise. These efforts resulted in two 400+ page reports, called Silent Erasure and Between the Wars, which can be downloaded from the Caucasus Heritage Watch website. We also created websites for each forensic investigation (also accessible from the CHW homepage) that detail our findings, methods, and all of the supporting evidence.

Our second task was to mount a satellite monitoring program to document impacts to the hundreds of medieval and early modern Armenian churches, monasteries, cemeteries, and other cultural sites that had passed to Azerbaijani jurisdiction as a result of the war. But we faced the challenge of conducting satellite monitoring in a region of the world where open-source satellite imagery, for instance on GoogleEarth, is relatively scarce. Our solution is to use satellite “tasking”. We work with the commercial satellite provider, Planet Labs, to collect imagery for hundreds of at-risk sites twice a year. It’s costly, but tasking is the only way to maintain regular surveillence. For the first few years, we monitored some 280 sites. Following the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, that figure has risen to over 500.

Our team systematically examines the condition of each and every site by comparing previous imagery with new imagery. If anyone on the team detects damage, destruction, or heightened threat (for instance, earth moving activity in the immediate vicinity of a site), we confer as a team. If there is consensus, the site is flagged as impacted, which means it will appear in our report, our website, and sometimes on the social media platforms (e.g. X, Bluesky, Facebook) where we disseminate our findings. Thus far we have produced eight reports, the most recent in July 2025. We have already documented some 14 destroyed sites, 14 damaged, and over 35 sites that are increasingly threatened, as earth moving projects and bulldozers terraform the landscape of Nagorno-Karabakh. Cemeteries have borne the greatest brunt. We’ve documented several bulldozered cemeteries and others that have been partially bulldozered. Our next monitoring mission will be in Fall 2025.

We have come to describe this research practice as heritage forensics. We define heritage forensics as a form of research that operates at the intersection of archaeology, law, politics, and cultural aerospace, and where heritage is the corpus of materials and practices that are curated from the past into the present. The forensic part refers to disruptions of that legacy by state and non-state actors. Influenced by the group Forensic Architecture, which I mentioned earlier, we think of this work as a kind of counter forensics in which researchers invert the forensic gaze back on the state. Typically, we think of surveillance as the prerogative of the state, and certainly satellite technology emerges from the military-industrial complex. Surveillance is conventionally the prerogative of governmentality, in the Foucauldian tradition of the penal panopticon. Well what heritage forensics ask is: Can civil society and researchers, for example, look back at state actors? So, this is the work of heritage forensics. It’s the use of technological and humanistic methods to investigate evidence concerning abuses of cultural heritage and produce evidence that can be used in a court of law, or by publics that are seeking truth and justice and reconciliation.

Heritage forensics is deeply engaged with contemporary politics. We are engaged in public-facing research that unfolds in the maelstrom of conflict. It’s taken some time to adjust to this mode of research. As researchers in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, we’re not trained to respond to the exigencies of the moment. And yet our findings have been taken up in a wide range of fora, from reports of the U.S. State Department, to congressional hearings, to a meeting of the House of Lords, etc. Our findings have also been submitted as evidence in the ongoing case, Armenia v. Azerbaijan, at the International Court of Justice, in which cultural heritage abuse is one of the elements of the case that Armenia has brought before the World Court. Heritage forensics takes shape in multiple fora, from the courtroom, to the university, from halls of government to the public sphere. Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture has referred to the “forensic turn” that is taking place in some corners of the academy. The forensic turn entails an alliance between people like us, researchers in the human sciences and human rights advocates and lawyers. We see the work of heritage forensics as part of that forensic turn. And yes, we will continue doing this work for the foreseeable future, unfortunately. Readers can learn more in our book, Heritage Forensics: Culture on the Front Lines of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict, which is in press with Cornell University Press and due to be released next year.

Marie-Aude Baronian & Dzovinar Derderian - For us, one of the main incentives 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 ethnocentric or hagiographic approaches to objects as inevitably 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? What new directions do you think the study of materiality and material objects can bring to the field of Armenian Studies?

Lori Khatchadourian - I admit this question is a bit difficult for me because, until recently, I feel I have inhabited the margins of Armenian Studies, as an archaeologist and anthropologist. It’s hard to fairly diagnose a disciplinary state of affairs without being immersed in that field. But from a semi-outsider perspective, it’s exciting to see Armenian Studies in the United States broadening in recent years, to include not only history, art history, languages and literatures, but also anthropology (I’m thinking of the work of folks like Melissa Bilal, Hakem Al-Rustom, Shushan Karapetian, Hrag Papazian, Ayșe Parla, Nelli Sargsyan, Tamar Shirinian, Anoush Suni, among others). So, I feel like Armenian Studies is changing in ways that make room for the study of contemporary Armenian experiences in both the Ottoman/Turkish and Russian/Soviet/post-Soviet spheres. And at the same time, as the focus of my own research shifts from the deep past to the recent past and present, it’s exciting to move into this vibrant scholarly space of Armenian Studies. What does this have to do with materiality? It may be indirect, and what I am about to say may also raise some hackles, but I do think anthropology can bring new ways of thinking to Armenian Studies that theorize and challenge received concepts and categories.

But to try and steer closer to your question, what can the material turn offer to Armenian Studies, I suppose it is precisely what you note – a particular pattern of thought that rejects taken-for-granted “social” formations, such as the ethnic category “Armenian”, and instead helps us see that groupings are always emergent through the constantly changing collaborations between humans and other-than-humans. So long as the representational or semiotic approach to the material world remains unchallenged in Armenian Studies… so long as things can be nothing more than “hapless bearers of symbolic projection” (to quote Latour), or passive recepticles for imprinting meaning, the referent behind that symbolic work can remain as an ontologically stable thing (e.g. “Ottoman Armenians”). But once things – like illuminated manuscripts, books, inscriptions, churches, khachkars, heirlooms, vessels, jewelry, embroidery, clothing, flags, paintings, not to mention mountains, rivers, plants, animals etc. – are viewed differently, as active participants in shaping realities, it becomes possible to denormalize putatively fixed social formations and see them as the result so many agentive forces linked together in complex networks. We can begin to ask not only who but also what are the actors and “actants” that come together to constitute and reproduce the practices, events, experiences we study. I’m particularly taken by a distinction Latour (2000) draws between an intermediary and a mediator. An intermediary is basically the thing as it currently exists in Armenian Studies. It’s merely a vehicle for passively transmitting a meaning. It doesn’t actually produce any change. The intermediary is just the vehicle that moves meaning from one place to another. The mediator in Latour’s formulation is the agentive thing. It’s the thing that mediates relations between humans. It doesn’t only project a given meaning that’s imprinted on it, but produces some transformation by virtue of its own capacities. In Latour’s formulation the humans and things in these networks are constant mediators. There can never be a fixed social form. Indeed, he rejects the very word “social”, because it presumes some fixed formation when, in fact, “Armenian” communities, “Armenian” culture, these things have no inherent permanence to them, but are constantly produced. We can look at objects in Armenian Studies and ask not only what they reflect, symbolize and mean, but what kind of mediations they produce in forming particular configurations at particular moments in time. Once you start asking such questions the narrative that will emerge will be a different one. The thing we gloss as “Armenian” becomes a transforming, multiple configuration of existence emerging out of the work of so many entities that have greater or lesser efficacy and endurance. You break up the homogeneity that is implied in the term Armenian, or in terms like Armenian culture, Armenian society and these become dynamic and constantly changing formations. There are other ways to get there. One doesn’t need new materialism to get there. But new materialism is one way to get there.

The other way in which I think new materialist thought can revitalize or offer new avenues in Armenian Studies is precisely what I was saying before, which is the strand in posthumanism that is strongly inflected by feminist thought and recognizes attending to things as a means of doing social justice work. Here I’m thinking of Elyse Semerdjian’s book Remnants (2023), which I read just recently. I want to give a shout out to that book here in this conversation, because so much of it, even if not explicitly framed as a new materialist project per se, is about the power of things, in this case bodies, skin, and bones. Her discussion of the dehumanization of Armenian bodies and especially Armenian women’s bodies is very much in the tradition of feminist post-humanism. Semerdjian’s book is so uniquely attentive to the materiality of the genocide and to the problem of the human. I see Remnants as one work that is already opening space for thinking in new ways about materiality in Armenian Studies.

I should also add that taking things seriously could also mean that we broaden our gaze beyond the forms of “high art” that tend to dominate our perception of Armenian culture to also attend to quotidian things – the kinds of everyday artifacts that speak to social and economic histories. My family has a collection of heirlooms – remarkable yet unremarkable pewter and copper vessels from my paternal ancestral home of Dikranagerd/Diyarbakir. These too are calling out for scholarly attention. What work did they do in affording particular practices of commensality, or reproducing unequal gender roles, or preserving memories in diaspora? There are so many such “survivor objects”, to quote Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, whose book The Missing Pages (2019), focused on the biography of a single object, also brings materiality to Armenian Studies in a way that is attentive to politics and justice. On this score, I would be remiss not to mention Tamar Shirinian's recently published book, Survival of a Perverse Nation, which offers a “materialist” (here in the broadly Marxian sense) queer analysis of national survival and its possible, more just alternatives.

Ultimately, materialism offers conceptual resources that can allow for a more dynamic and a more relational approach to thinking about Armenian pasts, presents, and futures in all their multiplicities.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archeology of Empires (UC Press, 2016). Based on the archaeology of ancient Persia and the South Caucasus, the book advances an approach to the study of imperialism that focuses on how things – from everyday objects to architecture – shape social and political life under empire. 

2 G. Harman 2018.

3 L. Khatchadourian 2020; in press.

4 E.g. Z. Todd, 2016.

5 L. Khatchadourian, 2022.

6 See G. Simmel, 1965 [1911]; S. Buck-Morss, 1991.

7 A. Golubev, 2020.

8 E.g. K. Behar, 2016, R. Braidotti, 2019, C. Ellis, 2018.

9 E. Weizman, 2017.

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Lori Khatchadourian, Marie-Aude Baronian et Dzovinar Derderian, « The Ruins We Live In »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 123-143.

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Lori Khatchadourian, Marie-Aude Baronian et Dzovinar Derderian, « The Ruins We Live In »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 09 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/4012 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gmh

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Lori Khatchadourian

Cornell University

Marie-Aude Baronian

University of Amsterdam

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Dzovinar Derderian

University of California Berkeley

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