Abstract
In this thesis, I offer the first anthropological study of the Armenian pilgrimage as a diverse and dynamic social phenomenon that expands beyond the religious sphere to encompass a wide range of differently motivated forms of human mobility. I ask several interrelated questions: How do Armenians make, sense, and make sense of their pilgrimages? How do these forms of mobility make them who they are? Why do pilgrimage practices unfold as they do, change, or fade away? What intentions, meanings, and values are evoked by pilgrimage in modern Armenian culture? And what is so sacred for Armenians that it turns a movement towards it into a pilgrimage?Taking as my starting point the Armenian Christian understanding that pilgrimage is ukhtagnatsutyun – or ‘a journey to fulfil a vow’ – in chapter one, I offer a novel conceptualisation of pilgrimage as an act of cathexis in and kinetic interaction with the sacred. The concept of cathexis as an investment of mental or emotional energy in something or someone relates here to the idea of a vow as a promise that sets pilgrim’s intention. At the same time, I widen the idea of a journey as a constitutive element of pilgrimage by speaking of kinetic interaction, which includes not only travel but also all other kinds of bodily movements and pious gestures aimed at approaching the sacred, especially those performed at pilgrimage sites. The notion of the sacred allows me to reach beyond thinking about pilgrimage as an exclusively religious practice. I argue that the sacred and, by extension, pilgrimage as an act of evaluating something as sacred and the practice of approaching it can be both religious and secular. Such an understanding of the sacred portrays it as ‘hyper-meaningful’ (Di Giovine & Choe 2019: 362), unique, and of utmost value or extraordinary power. This conceptualisation of pilgrimage forms a general itinerary, in Thomas Tweed’s (2008: 9-20) terms, for my examination of the three paths – religion, reunion, and roots – along which pilgrimage unfolds in today’s Armenian culture. These paths lead Armenians to religious shrines and sacred thing–beings (chapters two and three), to each other (chapter four), and to their roots in the lost homeland (chapters five and six).
I begin chapter two with a historical overview of Armenian Christian pilgrimage culture as it developed from the fourth century, when the Armenian Kingdom adopted Christianity as a state religion, to the early twentieth century, marked by the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Following this introduction, I examine pilgrimage as a lens through which we can look at religious dynamics in Soviet (1920-1991) and post-Soviet (1991-present) Armenia, a small country in the South Caucasus, the borderland of Europe and Asia. Against this backdrop, I discuss in chapter three how some Armenian Christian books and scrolls became objects of pilgrimage to churches of the Armenian Apostolic Church, shrines of the so-called ‘home-saints’, and even the exhibition halls of the Matenadaran – the central state institution responsible for presenting, preserving, and studying Armenian manuscripts. Then, I show in chapter four that Armenian religious pilgrimages can also unfold today as community or kin group reunions in Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. I conceptualise these gatherings as ‘reunion pilgrimages’ and interpret their locations as ‘chronotopes’ in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1982) terms. Finally, in two chapters devoted to ‘roots pilgrimage’, I discuss diasporic journeys to Ergir – the ancestral homeland of Armenians, which they lost because of the Armenian Genocide. These highly emotional and potentially transformative journeys take the descendants of the genocide survivors to the eastern provinces of today’s Turkey, where they search for their ancestral homes and visit Armenian historical landmarks, which serve as ‘unintentional monuments’ (Riegl 1996: 72) to their loss.
Throughout this thesis, I offer a detailed examination of how the Armenian pilgrimage reflects and responds to the most salient issues in modern Armenian culture today, from the precarious living conditions of post-communist Armenia to the long history of migration that gave rise to the transnational Armenian Christian community, and the trauma of the genocide that in many ways defines Armenian identity and religiosity. Based on more than ten years of research in Armenia, Romania, the UK, and the USA, this thesis crosses disciplinary boundaries to present a critical reading of the theoretical literature in pilgrimage studies, the anthropology of religion, and the research on memory, identity, material culture, and diaspora. In offering a detailed ethnographic perspective from an area still rarely visited by social anthropologists and scholars of religion, it contributes in a new way to the question of what pilgrimage is and what it does as a worldwide cultural phenomenon.
| Date of Award | 1 Dec 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Katherine Swancutt (Supervisor) & Marat Shterin (Supervisor) |