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Introduction

Material Objects, Materiality, and Re-Materializing Armenian Studies

Objets matériels et matérialité : re-matérialiser les études arméniennes
Marie-Aude Baronian et Dzovinar Derderian
p. 7-21

Résumés

Ce volume thématique part de l’idée que les objets matériels favorisent les échanges entre disciplines, époques, terrains géographiques et paradigmatiques, ainsi qu’entre divers acteurs et interlocuteurs. La présente introduction plaide pour une attention accrue aux objets matériels dans les études arméniennes en soulignant ses apports innovants et inspirants. À cette fin, après avoir rappelé les questions soulevées par les travaux théoriques sur les objets matériels et la matérialité en général, nous mettons l’accent sur certains travaux existants en études arméniennes, y compris les contributions à ce numéro, qui font écho à cette perspective. Il s’agit ainsi de mettre en avant la dimension dialogique et dynamique que suscitent les objets matériels.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 We would like to thank Kathryn Babayan, then the director of the Armenian Studies Program, for invi (...)

1The current issue is a product of discussions that began in preparation for an international workshop at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 2019) that was sponsored by what was then the Armenian Studies Program.1 The themed issue originated from the idea that material objects foster conversations across different disciplines, epochs, geographical and paradigmatic terrains, and among various agents and interlocutors. In this introduction we present some of our ideas and aspirations on what it may mean to concentrate on material objects within Armenian Studies and why we contend that it may be productive and inspirational for the field. To this end, we bring forth questions raised by theoretical works in the field of material objects and materiality at large, as well as point to some of the existing literature in Armenian Studies and the works included in this issue that utilize the methodological lenses of material objects and materiality. In other words, the main instigator here is the dialogical and dynamic relationship that material objects spark.

2Material objects are sources from which we can draw all kinds of insights and entry points into history, art and culture, as well as into socio-political and economic issues. Objects are also subjects and topics to write about that contain their very own stories and specific narratives. But more importantly, objects unsettle hierarchical and social boundaries as well as temporal and spatial ones. If, undoubtedly, objects should be examined within historically determined contexts, they also always exceed those contexts as they travel and move constantly, and as they disturb and unravel the division between subjects and objects. Yet working with and through objects substantiates the importance to move beyond the object merely as a source or as a subject matter, as such an approach would possibly run the risk of forging univocal and mummified statements. Instead, we hope this issue can open up to Armenian Studies various commitments, methodological and disciplinary ways to engage with objects and materiality and thus bring innovative ideas and directions to Armenian Studies. This, in sum, is what the phrase “Re-Materializing Armenian Studies” implies in our title.

3Defining and delineating Armenian Studies might be simultaneously obvious or easy, and complicated or arduous. Obvious because one would expect such studies to necessarily include questions and issues related to Armenians and Armenia, but also complicated and uneasy since thanks to decades of scholarship and artistic production, we know that the meanings of those words are fluid and multi-dimensional. In the last few decades, Armenian Studies has grown into a multifaceted area of research and focus. Complimenting the wide range of changes that have happened in and to the field of Armenian Studies, we contend that taking material objects into consideration and closely dealing with them enables us to welcome and stimulate a wide range of perspectives, and, in turn, enrich and extend our understanding of Armenian Studies. Incidentally, as Michael Pifer had noted in his remarks during our workshop, “the non-human agents that mediate the historically contingent boundaries of the Armenian finally emerge onto center stage”. Therefore we are interested in the entanglements between the material world and the human world simply because they are intimately and inexorably bound to one another. That is, because material objects are not confined to one discipline, to one domain, to one framework or to one practice, they allow dynamic and creative engagements and they open the kind of avenues that drive us to do research in Armenian Studies in the first place. Material objects may function as a methodological or pedagogical thread for various disciplines to come together, a theme that emerges particularly in Kate Franklin’s interview in this issue. Yet they may also separate. Our take is not to say that objects automatically bring together a marked sense of community or solve any disciplinary disputes and orientations but precisely to question how and why they may be either centrifugal or centripetal.

Re-Materializing Armenian Studies: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

4So far as it comes to things as Armenian, the field of Armenian Studies has been largely dedicated to a great degree to recovering and “restoring” the past through disclosing the historical and ancestral importance of the objects as foundational of that very culture: manuscripts, khatchkars, crosses, and the like are the most significant and representative. If their physical presence defines them as material objects, it is most often their visual, imaginary and symbolic mode that prevail. If certain disciplines, such as archaeology and ethnography, rely inherently on the physical existence of objects one still needs to question their materiality as active agents to how we relate to them and to the world. How does, for instance, the study of Armenian material objects and materiality enable us to approach art history, religion, and film from a different perspective, as Maranci, Sheklian, and De Rosa address in this issue? And, again, how does looking closely and critically at objects decenter certain paradigms and leave room for new ones?

  • 2 D. Parkin, 1999, 304.
  • 3 Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh defines survivor objects as follows: “Artifacts that have experienced a (...)
  • 4 H. Zeitlian Watenpaugh, 2017 and E. Semerdjian, 2023.
  • 5 D. Parkin, 1999, 318.
  • 6 Even if this search for evidence is part of what Marc Nichanian considers to be a manifestation of (...)
  • 7 L. A. Freeman, B. Nienass, R. Daniell, 2016, 4.

5In this issue, archeologists Lori Khatchadourian and Kate Franklin propose finding a balance between the tendency to either use objects as instruments for penetrating the cultures and habits of peoples or, from another viewpoint, to overinvest the agency of objects as if they didn’t interact with people’s lives. Such equilibrium ensures the mobile – disciplinary and affective – quality of material objects in terms of their position in time and space but also of their active role in the object-human kinship. Surely, we need here, historically and politically, to take into account the persistent memorial and mnemonic value of these objects and the reasons for being emotionally (over)invested. A “socio-material prosthesis”2 in the context of forced displacements and genocidal violence is at stake here, as Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh examines “survivor objects”3 and Elyse Semerdjian focuses on the materiality of the female body (i.e., tattoos, bones and skin) to talk of evidence and memory of the genocide.4 The material dispossession (including the lands) inevitably leads to counter-strategies of abandonment that is translated into the devoted gestures and eagerness towards what is left of the objects, in the objects as carriers and depositories of what has been prohibited, lost or destroyed. As anthropologist David Parkin puts it, “persons may withhold selfhood when faced with the possibility of collective annihilation, merging it in the materiality of concrete objects, hoping that in due course it should again be socially presented when and if the threat is lifted”.5 Turkey’s continued denial of the Armenian genocide inevitably results in the forced necessity of producing material evidence of the genocide,6 and the rupture of the genocide ineluctably leads to clinging to objects (including the remains of the deceased) that act as the only remnants of a lost past and the people who were lost through the Catastrophe. Thus, given the fact that the historical and political contexts deeply impact our relation to and consideration of objects, more generally speaking, we observe and experience that “memories are sparked and narrated through things”.7

  • 8 Armenia, September 22, 2018-January 13, 2019, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; H. C. Evans, 20 (...)
  • 9 Among the most outstanding of these works include the wonderful “Houshamadyan: A Project to Reconst (...)
  • 10 G. Shagoyan, 2011.

6Still, we must ask, what do we add and also what do we miss when we look at material objects, material culture as simply heritage or as a means to recover the past, if that’s at all possible to do? There have been immense old, new, and ongoing efforts of collecting material objects in museums and on websites (i.e., Mesrop Mashtots Manuscript Museum/Matenadaran, Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, Armenian Museum of America, Watertown, MA, Houshamadyan.org, etc.).8 Needless to stress that the museal presentation of such objects contribute to their visibility and knowledge and one would need to further reflect upon the various strategies and intentions of doing so – an aspect that is beyond the scope of this volume – but that we hope would be further investigated. Certainly some of these projects, like the project Houshamadyan, the Treasured Objects book, the edited volume Armenian Folk Arts, Culture and Identity, and the “Costume: Fragments of Identity” exhibition co-curated by Vigen Galstyan and Davit Poghosyan in Yerevan attempt to shift our attention more towards the everyday and towards social and cultural history, as well as pointing out the diversity of Armenianness and Armenian experiences.9 Such an expression of diversity through objects can be found, for example, in Gayane Shagoyan’s book on Armenian weddings, in which among other things her focus on objects and clothes utilized at Armenian weddings points to various changes across space and time.10 Doing so, material objects bear witness to the wide range of Armenians’ histories and stories and ensure their anchoring existence as tangible markers. What is more, objects cannot be solely aligned with one’s cultural identity, but they can be used for more critical analysis about the ways we tend to relegate them to instruments of identity formation.

  • 11 A. Suni, 2022, 194.
  • 12 A. Suni, 2022, 195.

7While over the years the museal and patrimony efforts (despite several economic and geo-political difficulties) have greatly benefited the preservation and restoration of Armenian objects, there are also other projects that seek to highlight the ways objects are aligned with societal and existential community buildings. Sometimes this community building occurs in response to objects that point to forms of destruction and disappearance. The theme of destruction of the material world being simultaneously a source for reinvention and creation appears in Lori Khatchatourian’s, Christina Maranci’s and Miriam De Rosa’s essays in this issue. Similarly, Anoush Suni in her work examines not how ruined Armenian churches, monasteries and chapels in modern-day eastern Turkey make part of the Armenian past or Armenian culture, but the roles these ruins play in the ways “local Kurds imagine, narrate, and enact the politics of the past”.11 Suni explores the afterlives of ruins in similar ways that Khatchadourian in her work and interview in this issue investigates Soviet ruins in Armenia in interaction with the everyday lives of people who live among the ruins. Suni and Khatchadourian ask what these ruins tell us not just about the past, but also about current political, social and economic processes. Relying on Ann Stoler’s conceptualization of ruins, they both see in ruins “new possibilities of alternative understandings of the past and new imaginations for the future”.12

  • 13 A. Gerritsen and G. Riello, 2001, 8.
  • 14 A. Gerritsen and G. Riello, 2001, 29.
  • 15 L. Hannan and S. Longair, 2017, 31.
  • 16 H. Green, 2012, 77-78.
  • 17 On this point, see for example Baronian, 2024.

8One of the challenges when focusing on material objects is how to acknowledge their pivotal role without reducing them to opportunistic tools and illustrative means to say something else (serving, for example, nationalistic or restrictive déjà-vu discourses). They are not “simple props of history”.13 This “material turn to history”, that Anne Riello and Giorgio Gerritsen stress, offers a series of added values. As these two authors demonstrate, concentrating on material objects creates additional relationships and dynamics between past and present; the objects, because of their various aspects (social, economic, cultural, but also affective and sensory) offer nuanced portraits of the way people live and how they interact with the material world; such objects enrich historical knowledge because they complement other sources, raise new and original questions,14 and introduce new themes and topics. Similarly, in History through Material Culture, Leonie Hannan and Sarah Longair insist on the fact that “rather than merely seeking to incorporate objects into historical research, historical research might benefit from responding to the distinct qualities of material as opposed to textual sources”.15 And as Harvey puts it, “this is not so much a material turn as a re-turn, a new shaping of historical – and historians’ – consciousness with new tools”.16 Even if Riello and Gerritsen are aware of the more practical limitations that go with studying objects (e.g. de-contextualization or the constraint of access), the material objects still produce alternative richness and density because they require interpretive and we could add imaginative skills. As such, when working and studying with material objects one needs to pay attention to details, to let the objects speak and touch us.17 Media scholar Miriam De Rosa, in the current issue, pays such detailed attention to objects appearing in the artistic and filmic œuvre of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, and art historian Christina Maranci scrutinizes in detail the objects in Vardges Sureniants’s paintings from the 19th century. We see the personal and the national-communal intertwined in the ways in which the works of the artists they analyzed used objects to speak of both their personal and collective narratives. Objects are not just embellishing or reduced to anecdotal matters, but they simultaneously provide the content and construct of the artworks. Such close readings of objects can question the myths and projections we put onto objects and, doing so, can be active companions for taking part and understanding the narratives that make up culture and history as well as unsettle our perceptions and experiences of the past and the present. The world of objects is not solely constituting what one would define as Armenian cultures and communities, but such objects enable, by themselves, to question and to unfold the multiple layers, trajectories and manifestations of what constitutes such cultures in the past and today.

  • 18 For recent examples of such scholarship in Armenian Studies see S. Aslanian, 2024 ; D. Derderian, 2 (...)
  • 19 H. Berberian and T. Grigor, 2022 and 2025.
  • 20 For example see S. Moughalian, 2019.

9Yet besides matters of identity in relation to the past and present, material objects and the materiality of objects also serve to bring to fore historical actors whose agency may remain hidden if we treat manuscripts, books and other textual material as simply texts. Thus, this examination of the materiality and of the material objects can reveal a whole set of socio-economic practices and relations. While these two are not per se mutually exclusive they each present different methodological approaches.18 Material objects, along other forms of sources, can help reveal narratives and agency of marginalized groups, such as women and minorities, as well as unfold connections among groups of social status that are not immediately available in textual sources.19 Objects can expose the forging of communities, reveal inter-personal and inter-communal relations, serve as a link between past and present, as well as human relations with the nature.20

The Diversity and Dynamicity of the Material World

  • 21 B. Olsen, 2003, 88.
  • 22 Ibid.

10We propose to take material objects as the central “case-objects” of study and consider them as active agents of the world we live in. Objects are not simply illustrating or rooting “something Armenian” as they participate in multiple ways to engage with Armenian culture, history and society. As archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen reminds us, “Things, objects, landscapes, possess ‘real’ qualities that affect and shape both our perception of them and our cohabitation with them.”21 What is more, aiming at what Olsen calls “a more egalitarian regime, a symmetrical archaeology, founded on the premise that things, all those physical entities we refer to as material culture, are beings in the world alongside other beings, such as humans, plants and animals. All these beings are kindred, sharing substance (‘flesh’) and membership in a dwelt-in world.”22 Following a similar line of thinking, we suggest to take objects as cardinal to question and to investigate sets of relations in our worlds, as well as social and political processes.

  • 23 B. Olsen, 2003, 99.
  • 24 Ibid., 100.
  • 25 An example of such use of material objects to demonstrate the shaping of different Armenian subject (...)
  • 26 A. Farge, 1989; S. Ahmed, 2010.
  • 27 K. Franklin, 2021.

11Re-materializing Armenian Studies is certainly not ignoring the immense, fundamental and seminal work that has been done by a wide range of experts, academics and professionals on disclosing, narrating and preserving Armenian objects. Re-materializing Armenian Studies doesn’t mean to celebrate with over-devotion what we already know (even if of course our dark times force us, more than ever, to embark on urgent preservationist actions) but also to be sensitive to what is there but not yet seen, to excavate the hidden, to recognize the material traces of past and present, and thus to leave room for the objects to act and to speak. It is about bearing witness to the importance of materiality in the ways in which we perceive and experience Armenian culture, Armenian history and “being Armenian” in all its multiplicity and diversity. Therefore, what is at stake here is not just registering the totality of physical (artistic and mundane) objects made by Armenian people and communities, as to interrogate and investigate such objects for fostering and deepening materiality itself and how it constructs Armenian subjects. Objects are with us, among us, in front of us, waiting to be touched, seen, discussed and recognized as such. To quote Olsen again, “we should envisage a whole brigade of actors: plates, forks, gravestones, humans, garbage pits, chamber pots, law books, musical instruments, etc., acting together in a relational web”.23 After all, it is about insisting not so much on how the social subjects construct the objects but more the opposite: “how objects construct the subject”.24 Material things have the ongoing capacity to shape human subjects, communities, to create social and subjective relations, as well as to confront them – a realization that may occur when we do acknowledge, once again, that they can’t be limited to mere accessories and decorative commodities of life.25 Re-materializing Armenian Studies may also extend to the subjectvity of the researcher, writer, or cultural practicioner which is shaped through the objects they are surrounded by and delving into as well as through the very materiality of those objects.26 This awareness of the material world surrounding the researcher is also something that Kate Franklin alluded to in her interview with us in this issue as well as in her book Everyday Cosmopolitanisms.27

  • 28 J. Hoskins, 2006, 76.
  • 29 Ibid.
  • 30 J. Frykman and Maya P. Frykman, 2016, 17.

12Of course emotions and affect make up a significant part of examining such subjectivities. As Janet Hoskins argues, “we need to pay more attention to the phenomenological dimension of our interactions with the material world, and interrogate the objects which fascinate us as well as our reasons for feeling this fascination”.28 That is, as she puts it, “[t]hese things have agency because they produce effects, they cause us to feel happy, angry, fearful or lustful”.29 Objects are inevitably bearers of affects: “objects embody or trigger affects and produce affective atmospheres”.30 Thus, far from isolating the material world from the human one, re-materializing what constitutes objects that surround us and live with us means that such objects have a prominent place in the way we relate simultaneously to both worlds.

  • 31 B. Latour, 1996; G. Harman 2018; S. Fowles, 2016.
  • 32 B. Olsen et al., 2012, 1.

13While objects may help explore human subjectivity, at the same time there has been a need to work beyond human subjectivity when it comes to the study of the material world. Chris Sheklian, Kate Franklin and Lori Khatchadourian in this special issue are referring to a few key and relatively recent changes in our understanding of objects and materiality whose purpose is to decenter human subjectivity, to overcome the object-subject divide and to conceive of material things as not reduced to our representations (e.g. new materialism, Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, Harman’s object-oriented ontology and environmental humanities).31 Nevertheless, none of them – on the contrary even– intend at leaving out the disciplinary foundations and methods infused by fields that have always-already worked closely and meticulously with material objects, such as archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, history, museum curating and art history. Thus, this issue’s aim is about exposing Armenian Studies and Armenian objects to these various “fields that now place emphasis on object-oriented approaches, taking things, their objecthood and materiality seriously”.32

  • 33 H. Lefebvre, 1987, 9.
  • 34 See https://maryamshahinyan.com/ and Anahit Ghazaryan’s paper she presented in the 2019 workshop ti (...)
  • 35 Smbat Hakobyan “Photograph of the Dead: Grief, Remembrance and Ritual”; Hasmik Knyazyan, “‘Hanging (...)
  • 36 V. Galstyan, February 18, 2021 and July 20, 2021.
  • 37 L. Khatchadourian, 2022.

14It is such approaches to objects that enable to highlight the everyday and the marginalized. As Henri Lefebvre in The Critique of Everyday Life has famously written: “The everyday is [...] the most universal and the most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the most hidden.”33 Material objects precisely bring to life these different aspects of the everyday. Considering material objects may also help accelerate the paradigm shift within Armenian Studies that looks into the multiplicity and fluidity of Armenian subjectivities, whether by introducing queerness in Armenian Studies (as the presentation by Anahit Ghazaryan on Maryam Shahinian’s photography did),34 or by being more attuned to, for instance, non-elite and everyday experiences and practices.35 Vigen Galstyan scrutinizes everyday objects such as clocks, handbags and other functional or ornamental objects and their design to address economic, social and ideological transformation in Soviet era Armenia.36 Lori Khatchadourian’s work exemplifies the ways in which attention to the material world allows us to consider affect, to understand people's relations with changing economic systems from socialism to capitalism, and even to get a sense of people’s relation to and conception of time.37 By examining the relationship of residents of Armenia with the Soviet factories in ruins, Khatchadourian analyzes the continuities and ruptures from Soviet to post-Soviet eras, from socialist to capitalist systems and the way ordinary people deal with these transitions.

  • 38 B. Olsen, 2003, 89.

15In this issue, Chris Sheklian studies the role that Armenian Christology can play in thinking more philosophically about materiality, and the different theological discussions that have merged and converged to shape understandings of the material world in different times and different places. While Sheklian draws on several recent theories and approaches on matter and materiality and applies them to question elements of Armenian Christology, Christina Maranci reminds us that the question of materiality and material objects is, in a way, inherently part of doing art history. This confirms, once more, that looking into material objects and materiality is at once always connected to what the study of cultures entails and also keeps pushing us to question it in light of the most recent social and political developments, as both of our interviews with Khatchadourian and Franklin have brought to surface. And this is, in a sense, comparable to Sheklian’s article arguing that medieval Armenian theological discussions of materiality can help us to reflect upon our current and urgent concerns with the environment. The special issue ends with a conversation with archeology scholar Khatchadourian since, according to Olsen, “Archaeology is, of course, the discipline of things par excellence38 but also because she herself moves between different methodologies and traditions and, doing so, invites us to include recent paradigmatic shifts in working and thinking with objects.

  • 39 B. Olsen et al., 2012, 12.
  • 40 Ibid., 16.
  • 41 Ibid., 4.

16We want to encourage precisely this large ecology of approaches and practices that revolves around two questions: how does centering material objects and materiality change and re-orient the way we do Armenian Studies? And how do Armenian objects (that is, objects that are culturally, socially, historically but also affectively perceived as Armenian) enable us to re-think our own disciplines and ways of doing research and analysis? This resonates with the wordings of the authors of Archeology: The Discipline of Things: “What we suggest is rather an act of recognition, to acknowledge the varied qualities always possessed by things, and thus the radical differences they make to the world – both among themselves and to humans.”39 They call for an “ethics encompassing things in their own being; that things are valuable in and of themselves” and for a “sensitive, responsive and nondiscriminatory way of attending to things”.40 Moreover, as Olsen et al. argue, there is “a commitment, a fidelity to the materials we engage” and a “feeling of care and concern for legion material entities, from the monumental to the utterly mundane”.41 In sum, zooming into material objects can disclose several questions about human relations, agency, resistance, the afterlife of objects, and in turn raise questions about ethics that urge researchers to adopt responsible stances towards the narratives that emerge from studying objects.

17Analogous and true to the aim of this issue to envisage multiple avenues to approach, perceive and interpret the complexity of Armenian cultures and subjectivities through material objects and to foster new alliances and engagements in Armenian Studies, we decided not to have a fixed and delineated thematic thread. Ultimately, our wish is to treat the objects that are at our disposal, that we are living with, that we use and contemplate in challenging, novel and alternative ways. At the same time, we also hope to encourage to further integrate or disclose and excavate (at once from the ground, from the hidden archives or from the untouched and unseen) other material objects and other forms of materiality – that is, to continuously re-materialize Armenian Studies.

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Bibliographie

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Harman Graham, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, London: Pelican Books, 2018.

Hartmann Elke, “Shaping the Armenian Warrior: Clothing and Photographic Self-Portraits of Armenian fedayis in the late 19th and early 20th Century”, in Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittman (eds.) Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives, Würzburg: Ergon Verlag Würzburg in Kommission, 2016, 117-148.

Hoskins Janet, “Agency, Biography and Objects”, in Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands and Patricia Spyer (eds.), Handbook of Material Culture, London: SAGE Publications, 2006, 76-84.

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Notes

1 We would like to thank Kathryn Babayan, then the director of the Armenian Studies Program, for inviting us to lead a graduate student workshop on this theme. We would also like to thank our keynote speaker Christina Maranci, all the presenters that included Rik Adriaans, Bihten Esener, Anahit Ghazaryan, Irem Gülersonmez, Smbat Hakobyan, Gohar Harutyunyan, Hasmik Knyazyan, Helen Makhdoumian, Hazal Özdemir, Konrad Siekierski, Anoush Tamar Suni and Anna Torosyan. We would also like to thank our discussants Michael Pifer, Helmut Puff, Christopher Sheklian and Ana Vinea.

2 D. Parkin, 1999, 304.

3 Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh defines survivor objects as follows: “Artifacts that have experienced atrocities, even genocide, and survived, acquire the power to recall the horrors of the past, and to recollect the absent persons, things, and places that were lost. They symbolize violence, but also survival and resilience. Material objects that have endured looting, mutilation, displacement, and separation from the communities where they functioned as sacred relics, liturgical aids, or prized artworks from a special category.” H. Zeitlian Watenpaugh, 2017, 752.

4 H. Zeitlian Watenpaugh, 2017 and E. Semerdjian, 2023.

5 D. Parkin, 1999, 318.

6 Even if this search for evidence is part of what Marc Nichanian considers to be a manifestation of historiographic perversion. M. Nichanian, 2009. See also M.-A. Baronian (2014) on this.

7 L. A. Freeman, B. Nienass, R. Daniell, 2016, 4.

8 Armenia, September 22, 2018-January 13, 2019, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; H. C. Evans, 2021.

9 Among the most outstanding of these works include the wonderful “Houshamadyan: A Project to Reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life” (www.houshamadyan.org); V. K. Davidian et al., 2012; L. Abrahamian and N. Sweezy, 2001; “Costume: Fragments of Identity”, History Museum of Armenia, Yerevan, 1st July to 31 October 2021.

10 G. Shagoyan, 2011.

11 A. Suni, 2022, 194.

12 A. Suni, 2022, 195.

13 A. Gerritsen and G. Riello, 2001, 8.

14 A. Gerritsen and G. Riello, 2001, 29.

15 L. Hannan and S. Longair, 2017, 31.

16 H. Green, 2012, 77-78.

17 On this point, see for example Baronian, 2024.

18 For recent examples of such scholarship in Armenian Studies see S. Aslanian, 2024 ; D. Derderian, 2019, Chapter 2; D. Kouymjian, 2014.

19 H. Berberian and T. Grigor, 2022 and 2025.

20 For example see S. Moughalian, 2019.

21 B. Olsen, 2003, 88.

22 Ibid.

23 B. Olsen, 2003, 99.

24 Ibid., 100.

25 An example of such use of material objects to demonstrate the shaping of different Armenian subjectivities and representation of identities is present in Elke Hartmann’s work (2016).

26 A. Farge, 1989; S. Ahmed, 2010.

27 K. Franklin, 2021.

28 J. Hoskins, 2006, 76.

29 Ibid.

30 J. Frykman and Maya P. Frykman, 2016, 17.

31 B. Latour, 1996; G. Harman 2018; S. Fowles, 2016.

32 B. Olsen et al., 2012, 1.

33 H. Lefebvre, 1987, 9.

34 See https://maryamshahinyan.com/ and Anahit Ghazaryan’s paper she presented in the 2019 workshop titled “1,139 Boxes of Maryam Shahinyan’s Negatives: Witnessing the Margins of Istanbul”.

35 Smbat Hakobyan “Photograph of the Dead: Grief, Remembrance and Ritual”; Hasmik Knyazyan, “‘Hanging out to dry, or…?: The Socio-Cultural Aspects of Hanging Laundry (The Armenian Case)” presented at the 2019 workshop spoke of changing family structures in Armenia, changing communal relations in urban settings, as well as changing role of women in contemporary Armenia.

36 V. Galstyan, February 18, 2021 and July 20, 2021.

37 L. Khatchadourian, 2022.

38 B. Olsen, 2003, 89.

39 B. Olsen et al., 2012, 12.

40 Ibid., 16.

41 Ibid., 4.

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Marie-Aude Baronian et Dzovinar Derderian, « Material Objects, Materiality, and Re-Materializing Armenian Studies »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 7-21.

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Marie-Aude Baronian et Dzovinar Derderian, « Material Objects, Materiality, and Re-Materializing Armenian Studies »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 11 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/4164 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gmj

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Auteurs

Marie-Aude Baronian

University of Amsterdam

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Dzovinar Derderian

University of California Berkeley

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