Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the use of the Armenian Genocide as an ‘ancestral valuable’, an intangible tool that unifies Armenians. It focuses on the moral discourse of the Genocide, the conceptualisation of denial as immorality and denier as perpetrator, crystallising the moral obligations of commemoration

Paper long abstract:

Armenians around the world observed the centenary of the Armenian Genocide in April 2015. The official slogan of the commemoration was 'hishum em yew pahajum' (I remember and demand). This slogan was deliberately ambiguous so as to include all potential demands from every faction. Although the demand of recognition of the event as genocide by the Republic of Turkey remains a central theme, Armenian expectations of what Turkey owes in compensation or apology is hardly uniform.

This paper argues that the best way to understand the Armenian Genocide as a unifying event is as what Keane (1997) termed an ancestral valuable. The Armenian Genocide as a historical memory, a political cause and a social commemoration is an 'enduring, concrete manifestation of the ancestors' enacted through rituals aimed at tying the present to the past. It is heavily laden with the language of loss which in turn creates a significant motivation for social solidarity and action.

This paper focuses on the moral discourse of the Genocide, the conceptualisation of denial as a state of immorality, and the portrayal of the denier as perpetrator, as well as crystallising the moral obligations of commemoration.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork performed in Australia since 2007, and among Armenian communities in Iran in 2010 and 2014, this paper discusses mass human suffering as lived experience, a dialogue of generational trauma, and the construction of a moral economy based on recognition and acknowledgment.