How does one apprehend the lives of Eastern Mediterranean minorities who managed, or were allowed to stay where they resided despite the upheavals brought by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? On the face of it the task might appear easier than the one facing scholars of actively persecuted populations. Traumatic events like the massacres and expulsions of Muslim and Christian populations from the Balkans and Anatolia that have marked the abolition of the Sultanate never say their name -often given to them subsequently by historians or activists- in the written record. The latter’s destruction was often indeed planned, an integral part of the nationalistic demographic engineering at work in these events. By contrast “minorities,” as were sometimes designated after the Great War ethnically distinct groups allowed to remain in the successor-states of the Ottoman empire, are much more visible in the archive. Indeed, official concerns regarding their size, wealth, activities and indeed loyalty, meant that they were constantly surveilled. In this sense, the written record contributed very much to fabricating minorities, namely discrete, legible and ultimately controllable groups. This was not a uniquely top-down process however. Minority groups themselves, using the official channels of communication available to them, and performing -sometimes tactically- the social function they had been ascribed as a strategy of survival in their interactions with state authorities or official and unofficial third parties, participated in the entrenchment of their identity. How does one apprehend the lives of Eastern Mediterranean minorities who managed, or were allowed to stay where they resided despite the upheavals brought by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? On the face of it the task might appear easier than the one facing scholars of actively persecuted populations. Traumatic events like the massacres and expulsions of Muslim and Christian populations from the Balkans and Anatolia that have marked the abolition of the Sultanate never say their name -often given to them subsequently by historians or activists- in the written record. The latter’s destruction was often indeed planned, an integral part of the nationalistic demographic engineering at work in these events. By contrast “minorities,” as were sometimes designated after the Great War ethnically distinct groups allowed to remain in the successor-states of the Ottoman empire, are much more visible in the archive. Indeed, official concerns regarding their size, wealth, activities and indeed loyalty, meant that they were constantly surveilled. In this sense, the written record contributed very much to fabricating minorities, namely discrete, legible and ultimately controllable groups. This was not a uniquely top-down process however. Minority groups themselves, using the official channels of communication available to them, and performing -sometimes tactically- the social function they had been ascribed as a strategy of survival in their interactions with state authorities or official and unofficial third parties, participated in the entrenchment of their identity.
This one-day workshop invites contributions from scholars and archivists interested in exploring the archival lives of Eastern Mediterranean minorities who became entrenched in the successor-states of the Ottoman Empire, from Southeast Europe to North Africa, through Anatolia and the Near East. Its focus is not so much on the minorities as such. Rather it seeks to engage an epistemological discussion on the records, official and unofficial, public and private, written, oral and built, that can be used to document state methods of surveillance of minority groups, but also the strategies of entrenchment devised by minorities themselves. We are therefore interested in “archives,” in the broadest sense of the word, produced by post-Ottoman successor states, minority groups themselves and their institutions -secular, religious, economic- or even third-party observers. Our goal is two-fold. Empirical first, as we seek to map out archival repositories relevant to the trajectories of post-Ottoman, Eastern Mediterranean minorities. Epistemological, second, as we aim to tackle the linguistic, but also conceptual and methodological challenges raised by a study of these groups through the existing records.
Themes of interest for this workshop include, but are not limited to:
- The transformation of the archival identity of Eastern Mediterranean minorities at the time of imperial transitions
- Accessibility and archival policy of private and public institutions of archives
- Reading strategies -ethnographic/extractive- in apprehending the lives of minorities in written records: against or along the archival grain
- The role of state records in fabricating minorities
- The congruence and incongruence between the written records and oral testimonies emanating from minorities and minority institutions
- Apprehending minorities in third-party repositories (League of Nations, Red Cross, Red Crescent, Permanent Mandates Commission, etc.), namely outside of the dual relationship between states and minorities
- Linguistic challenges in the exploitation of minority-related archives
This workshop, with its driving theme, is the second major event of a five-year project entitled 1922: In the Wake of the Death of an Empire: Political Transitions and Minority Strategies of Entrenchment in the Eastern Mediterranean which is funded by the Ecole française d’Athènes, the CNRS-IHMC and Koç University and run by Angelos Dalachanis (CNRS-IHMC) and Alexis Rappas (Koç University).
Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by the organizers.
Deadline for sending abstract: 30 March 2023 to angelos.dalachanis@cnrs.fr or arappas@ku.edu.tr
Response to participants: by end of April 2023
Supporting institutions: Ecole française d’Athènes (EfA), Koç University, Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (IHMC), Swedish Research Institute-Istanbul (SRII), Institut français d’études anatoliennes (IFEA).