Years ago, in a speech, Hrant Dink said, “Every Armenian is a document.” Cultures and individuals remember different periods of their existence through personal experience and through stories told to them. Armenians are no exception. Memories of events people have experienced or heard about can help us understand the past and present more fully. In Dink’s words, each person can be seen as a document that sheds light on the past. This perspective is especially important for socioeconomic groups marginalized by official historical narratives.
As the Panavor team, we had previously participated in several oral-history projects and had the opportunity to edit two books on oral history. Much of our earlier work had been conducted in Turkey and in Turkish. The interviews planned for Panavor, however, would be conducted in Armenian—a language in which we had little prior experience—and outside Turkey. Before launching the project, we had a long list of questions in mind: Where are dishes once prepared in different Anatolian cities made today? How have recipes been passed down from one generation to the next? How was Paregentan celebrated in the villages of Musa Ler, and how is it celebrated today? How does a family that moved from Sasun to Istanbul in the 1960s continue its traditions today? Which songs were traditionally used to lull newborns to sleep in Anatolia and Mesopotamia?
To answer questions that official historiography had left in its shadow, we decided to interview Armenians living in Turkey and abroad, documenting the richness of Western Armenian culture. Made possible by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Panavor project began recording the varied dialects of Western Armenian spoken across continents, countries, and cities, as well as the intangible cultural heritage of the Western Armenian community.
The Significance of Oral History
The emergence of oral history as a methodology is often dated to 1948, when Allan Nevins launched “the oral history project” at Columbia University. Nevins chose oral history because he considered it the most practical way to learn “from the lips and papers” of living Americans who had made significant contributions to the country’s political, economic, and cultural life.[1] Daniel R. Kerr argues that crediting Nevins with the field’s inception overlooks oral history’s deeper historical roots. Nevins emphasized oral history’s evidentiary value and prioritized the stories of elites; treating this moment as the field’s origin risks misrepresenting its later evolution.[2] In contrast to Kerr’s genealogy, Alistair Thomson examines the development of oral-history methodology and identifies four paradigm shifts significant to both theory and practice.
Thomson asserts that the first paradigm change occurred following World War II, when academics first started to acknowledge the reliability of oral accounts regardless of their subjective bias. Paul Thompson’s seminal book The Voice of the Past: Oral History played a crucial role in this movement by challenging the Rankean tradition of treating archival research and written sources as the primary tools of historical inquiry.[3] In opposition to the traditional scholars who insisted on the unreliability of memory as a historical source, Thompson traces the roots of oral history back to ancient times and mentions the significance of historians like Herodotus and Bede who prepared their works by relying on eyewitness accounts only.[4] Thompson argues that oral history transforms both the content and process of historical writing, bringing recognition to large groups of people who had previously been ignored.[5]
The second paradigm shift emerged in response to traditional documentary historians. The main criticism against oral history was the assertion that “memory was distorted by physical deterioration and nostalgia in old age, by the personal bias of both interviewer and interviewee, and by the influence of collective and retrospective versions of the past”.[6] To respond to these critics, oral historians developed guidelines and adopted methodologies from sociology and anthropology. The most significant shift came in the 1970s, when oral historians argued that interviewees’ subjectivity and the fallibility of memory—once considered the methodology’s greatest weaknesses—were among its greatest strengths: different ways of narrating the past inevitably reveal how interviewees make sense of it. Luisa Passerini argues that the value of oral testimony may lie not in its fidelity to fact but in its divergence from it. Even “wrong” narratives may be psychologically “true,” and that truth can matter as much as factual reliability.[7] In other words, oral history examines not only what happened, but also what people thought and how they understood events. Reflecting on his own experience, Ronald J. Grele argues that oral history reveals not only how interviewees internalize and process what they have witnessed, but also how their personalities and social circumstances shape memory by enabling or constraining particular interpretations of the past.[8]
Thomson describes the third paradigm shift as the growing recognition among practitioners that interviews affect researchers and, in turn, their analysis. A related debate concerns the researcher’s positionality in the interview setting and its effect on the interviewee’s sense of self. Similarly, Lynn Abrams uses “catch-all term” to describe oral history: it refers both to conducting interviews that bring significant events in the interviewee’s life to light and to the account that emerges from that process.[9] Oral history, therefore, concerns not only the interviewee’s stories but also the process itself, which directly shapes what is narrated.
Thomson argues that the fourth paradigm shift is currently taking place as a result of technological advancements that provide new tools to the methodology.[10] In his article, Thomson discusses technology’s supporting role in recording, preserving, cataloguing, interpreting, sharing, and presenting oral-history interviews. The COVID-19 pandemic further increased the importance of these tools. When in-person social interaction was restricted, physical distancing became essential, while mask-wearing posed additional challenges.
The methodology of Panavor
At Panavor, we conducted approximately half of the interviews in person and the other half online, using Zoom. Online and in-person interviews each have advantages and drawbacks that shape the interview dynamic. Face-to-face interviews make it easier to assess responses and formulate useful follow-up questions because they allow the interviewer to observe the interviewee’s body language. Being physically close to interviewees, spending time in their private spaces, and observing their tone and facial expressions are among the advantages of in-person interviews. Physical proximity can foster a sense of trust, helping conversations flow and rapport develop more quickly. However, too much equipment—cameras, audio recorders, and tripods—can affect interviewees’ narratives, especially when they are recounting traumatic experiences. At the same time, dispersed locations, long distances, time constraints, and travel restrictions make online interviews an efficient way to connect with people and build an archive.
Online interviewing allowed us to speak with Armenians around the world in a short period—about a year. We could interview someone in Lebanon in the morning and someone in Canada that same evening. We were able to conduct these interviews smoothly because we had previously used Zoom to interview people for the book Kınalada Armenians Speak, produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We would also like to interview people in their homes and conduct fieldwork in Argentina, Lebanon, and Canada, and we hope to do so in the coming years. Online interviews also enabled us to speak with people in countries where we could not be physically present, record their Armenian dialects, and hear their family histories and recollections of culinary culture, lullabies, and prayers.
Before beginning the interviews, we identified the dimensions we wanted to consider—country, city, age, and gender—and began compiling a list of potential interviewees. Before interviewing 24 people across six countries, we first contacted Istanbul Armenians, who could provide valuable information. It was considerably easier to find interviewees in Istanbul than in other countries or locations.
For online interviews, we connected with interviewees through friends living in different cities and through people we had already interviewed. Before interviewing in Vakıflı Village, for example, we contacted Lora Baytar, a member of the local cooperative, who helped us meet villagers. During our stay in Vakıflı, we visited several places, including the coffeehouse, motel, church, cooperative, and museum. We told the people we met about the project and, in turn, reached new interviewees.
Thanks to Azniv Stepanyan, we connected with Syrian Armenians who had immigrated to Armenia during the Syrian Civil War and arranged several interviews. Through relationships established in the project’s initial phase, we interviewed people from nine different countries.
Through these interviews, we heard a range of stories, built an archive of family histories, and developed an alternative reading of history. At Panavor, we sought an interview approach centered more on individuals’ testimonies than on the questions themselves. Before the interviews began, we chose the themes we wanted to explore and prepared a corresponding list of keywords. We nevertheless avoided allowing those keywords to steer interviewees’ narratives, using them only when necessary.
A culture in danger
Western Armenian communities now live across many countries, leaving them with less space to develop their own culture. Western Armenians, whose histories are often absent from the official narratives of the countries where they live, preserve their culture primarily through institutions such as schools, churches, and associations, and by passing traditions on to younger family members. Oral history is especially important for preserving and protecting Armenian culture in the particular conditions facing Western Armenians. For example, Arpi Mangassarian, who lives in Lebanon and has roots in Kayseri, knows by heart a Turkish prayer taught to her by her great-aunt. Although she does not know Turkish, she draws courage from reciting it. Through oral-history interviews, we preserved elements of intangible cultural heritage—including prayers, lullabies, recipes, and traditions—that had been passed down within families but had not been documented in the literature.
The effort to prevent the disappearance of important elements of Armenian culture—elements carried by older people whose numbers are declining each year—is another important outcome of this study. The deaths of Antranik Kileciyan and Iskender Aghazarian are striking examples of this loss. We interviewed Antranik Kileciyan in Armenia, although he was born and raised in Syria and had roots in Antep. Iskender Aghazarian was born in Sogukoluk, a village in Hatay, and died in Canada. Had we begun the project today, we would have missed the invaluable contributions of these two storytellers, who had Mesopotamian roots and lived in widely separated parts of the world.
Notes
[1] Saul Benison, “Reflections on Oral History,” The American Archivist 28, no. 1 (1965): 71.
[2] Daniel R. Kerr, “Allan Nevins Is Not My Grandfather: The Roots of Radical Oral History Practice in the United States,” The Oral History Review 43, no. 2 (2016), p. 369.
[3] Alistair Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” The Oral History Review 34, no. 1 (2007), p. 51.
[4] Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd edition (Oxford England; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 31.
[5] Thompson, Ibid., pp. 8-12.
[6] Ibid., p. 53
[7] Luisa Passerini, “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” History Workshop, no. 8 (1979), p. 84.
[8] Ronald J. Grele, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, 2nd Edition (New York; Westport, Connecticut; London: Praeger, 1991), p. 245.
[9] Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 2.
[10] Thompson, Ibid., p. 68.