CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Verhagen, Jacob John William |
|---|---|
| Title | Just One Word: Genocide as a category of practice in the 2015 Armenian Genocide commemorations in Istanbul |
| Summary | Creating a static definition of the term ‘genocide,’ for both legal and scholarly applicability, has proved to be a tenuous endeavor for scholars in the field of genocide studies. This thesis, proposes to look at another related phenomenon, how the term ‘genocide’ is used in the realm of collective memory. This thesis proposes that while the concept of genocide is treated in most of the literature as a category of analysis, the term also has a life in the colloquial realm as a category of practice, and that its use is reflexive with perceived social relations and identities. Primarily, I will establish the issues present in debates over the term’s meaning. From there, I will establish the groundwork for looking at genocide for its emic qualities, and the symbolic power the word has in the vernacular. States have an interest in controlling the word’s use as its implications can be disastrous when the events it categorizes are aligned with a national founding myth. Finally, I will use the example of the centennial commemorations for the victims of the Armenian Genocide in Istanbul, Turkey. Conducting qualitative interviews and participant observation recorded an instance of the word’s utterance in a hostile market, exploring the dynamics of the utterance and how it is negotiated at the societal level as a site of contested memory. |
| Supervisor | Pap, András László |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/verhagen_jacob.pdf |
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