Author
Sipahi, Ali
Publication Date
2020-10
Publication Place
-
Cambridge University Press
Subject
Harput, Armenian Massacres, Deception, Collective violence, Crowd behavior, Historical ethnography, Anthropology of fakes, Imposters, Gustave Le Bon
Type
Periodical
Language
English
Digital
Yes
Manuscript
No
Library
Özyeğin University
Library Asset ID
0010-4175
Record ID
a9e7f0de-8792-4ca8-a087-620f3793d8fe
Library Location
Humanities and Social Sciences
Date
2020-10
Notes
Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship from the University of Michigan ; Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koc University ; American Research Institute in Turkey
Sample Text
This article is an historical ethnography of the popular conceptualizations of crowd behavior during the pogroms against the Armenians in the Ottoman East in 1895-1896. It draws on contemporary sources like official telegrams, governmental reports, letters of American missionaries, and Armenian periodicals to show that observers with otherwise highly conflicting views described the structure of the event in the exact same way: as an outcome of sinister deception. Without exception, all parties told some story of deception to explain the violent attacks of the Kurdish semi-nomadic crowds on the Armenian neighborhoods of the city of Harput. The article analyzes these cases of disguise, deluding, and inculcation to reveal how contemporary observers theorized crowd behavior in general and the atrocities they witnessed in particular. They did not perceive violence as an index of social distance or deep societal divisions. On the contrary, they described a world in which Armenians and Muslims lived a shared life, and where one attacked the other only when deceived. Methodologically, the article lifts barriers between intellectual history and social history on behalf of an historical ethnography of people's theories about their own society.
DOI
10.1017/S0010417520000298
Cilt
62
