Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeNuméros5

5 | 2015
Le témoignage des victimes dans la connaissance des violences de masse

Victim Testimony and Understanding Mass Violence
Edited by Alexandra Garbarini and Boris Adjemian
couverture EAC 5
More about this picture
160x240mm - 244 p. - 20 €

Until relatively recently, the appropriateness of using victim testimony as a source for studying and understanding the episodes of mass violence that punctuated the twentieth century proved deeply controversial. It inspired and continues to inspire methodological and epistemological debates among scholars across the social sciences and humanities, including historians, legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars. The questions posed in this issue of Études arméniennes contemporaines open up for consideration the status of victim testimonies, and in particular their reception and uses in the historiographical realm over the course of the last century. Yet because historians tend primarily to look to testimony as a window onto the past that has the potential to reveal new information or objective truths, it is essential to look beyond the field of history to the other social sciences and humanities, to explore what, in its multiplicity, documentation coming from victims contributes to our understanding of the experience of catastrophe, thereby also integrating into our study of such violence an analysis of the individual and collective meanings residing in the very act of bearing witness.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search