La mémoire collective à l'épreuve de la politique de l'oubli : le cas des Arméniens de Turquie à travers trois générations.

Résumé

This thesis studies the collective memory of the Armenian community in Turkey before and after the establishment of the Turkish nation-state. An intergenerational analysis was conducted for this research. Purpose of the research is to understand the ways the members of this community confronts the social, spatial, political, and cultural upheavals in the country and also to analyze in what ways they reproduced their experiences of identification, self-understanding, and sense-of-belonging. For this purpose, life-story narratives of three generations of Armenians were collected through oral history methodology. For this research, forty-five comprehensive interviews were conducted with people from Istanbul and also from Vakıfköy–a province of Hatay. In Turkey participatory observations were conducted in the cities of Muş, Bitlis, and Diyarbakır; and these observations continued in  Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. This dissertation with its multidisciplinary approach in the fields of history, social psychology, and sociology, is a critical analysis on how the public authorities in Turkey treated the memory of its citizens, particularly of the minority groups. This research also examines the concept of  « collective memory » by asking whether a traumatized memory could remain alive in the memories of the individuals concerned. We also questioned the reminiscence of the past by each generation and its transmission, as well as the official policy. We are asking whether the official policies lead to the politics of forgetting or whether these policies could oppose to the memory by revealing a buried past and by questioning the official history.

Jury

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• Nilüfer Göle, (directrice de thèse), EHESS, CNRS
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• Vincent Duclert, EHESS, CNRS
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• Ferhat Kentel, Université de Sehir, Istanbul
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• Marc Nichanian, Université de Sabanci, Istanbul
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• Taline Ter Minassian, INALCO
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