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Print Capital, Corporate Identity, and the Democratization of Discourse in Early Modern Armenian Society

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Print Capital, Corporate Identity, and the Democratization of Discourse in Early Modern Armenian Society PRINT CAPITAL, CORPORATE IDENTITY, AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF DISCOURSE IN EARLY MODERN ARMENIAN SOCIETY Historical Introduction The period under consideration, spanning the 16th-18th centuries, was one of significant change in most parts of the world, in most spheres of life, and in most social strata. In particular, it initiated a more sustained spectrum of contacts integrating geographically distant regions of the earth into what was to become the globalized network of today. This process was facilitated by oceanic optics that led West European maritime powers to establish trade colonies which gradually evolved into imperial projects abroad supported by mercantilist economics at home, protecting domestic markets from competition. A parallel outcome was a renewed focus on mission, spurred on by the debates between Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation, which extended far beyond the borders of Europe. In counterpoint with this, the era was also marked by techno- logical advance and greater secularization of discourse in the context of the Enlightenment. At the same time, it witnessed the growth of three new Islamicate empires, Ottoman, Safavid, and Moghul with their attendant repercussions for the tenor of life on the old hemisphere. These dynamic developments form an important frame of reference for the inception of Armenian printing, as all of them directly or indirectly impacted its course as a new means of communication engaging the liter- ate strata of society in dialogue over the most pressing issues of the day. Though the latter were traditionally represented by the old clerical and aristocratic elite, now they were joined by the merchant middle class, who began to play a much more crucial, variegated role in this period. More- over, as the Early Modern period stands between the medieval and the modern, in terms of Armenian statehood, it occupies the gap between the fall of the Cilician kingdom and the establishment of the First Republic in 1918 and thereby raises a series of questions regarding how to define the Armenian collective and how to come to terms with the major trans- formations the Armenian polity experienced over this timeframe. The impact of these was an increasing diversification of the body politic both on the Armenian Plateau and in the dispersed communities outside it, each undergoing a different process of change at a different pace. Le Muséon 126 (3-4), 319-368. doi: 10.2143/MUS.126.3.3005392 - Tous droits réservés. © Le Muséon, 2013. 996680.indb6680.indb 331919 118/12/138/12/13 009:389:38 320 S.P. COWE The 16th century witnessed several major military, economic, religious, and cultural metamorphoses on the Plateau, which continued more rap- idly over the next two centuries, undermining ethnic cohesion among the underdeveloped agricultural and small town artisan population. The expan- sionist policies of the Ottomans and Safavids exacerbated Leng Timur’s disruption of the traditional homeland at the turn of the 15th century, as they clashed over establishing firm international borders on the most advantageous terms. This further loosened the tie to the land of the local Armenian communities already undermined by the loss of semi-inde- pendent status on the part of most of the Armenian nobility in the pre- vious century, who had long functioned as focus of unity. Moreover, the tax regime often drove indigenous Christian peasants to appeal for relief to moneylenders, only to be compelled to abandon their plots to the high rates of interest and move to the city in search of employment. Other householders, seeking to forestall destitution, would leave their family in the village and depart alone to the city. Martyrologies and other sources also inform us of the greater incidence of Armenian assimilation to Islam either through financial inducements, the desire to escape legal penalties, under physical duress or peer pressure1. Concomitant with this, in certain regions such as Cilicia, the Armenian population lost fluency in its dialect and became Turkophone2. In consequence, in the Ottoman sphere in par- ticular, the overall impression is of Armenian distinctiveness being under- mined according to several key indices. 1. Early Modern Armenian Diasporas These demographic displacements signal the phenomenon of diaspora, which, as we shall see, contemporaries often viewed as a uniform condi- tion, but which, in light of Cohen’s recent sociological study, should more properly be subdivided according to a variety of criteria. The classic victim diaspora is widespread in the Turko-Persian wars of the 16th cen- tury, which result in the uprooting of so many Armenian border com- munities3, along with several examples of diasporas of forced deportation 1 For these phenomena, see MANANDEAN – ACAREAN, Hayoc‘ nor vkaner¢. Apart from those, there are cases of part-Christian part-Muslim communities in Mardin and Hromkla. 2 The church began printing books in that medium for pastoral purposes, continuing as earlier tradition in manuscript form. In contrast, Mxit‘ar Sebastac‘i published the first volume of his modern Armenian (asxarhabar) grammar in that medium as a means of introducing them to the new idiom. See OSKANYAN, Hay girk‘¢ 1512-1800 t‘vakannerin, p. 272-273. 3 COHEN, Global Diasporas, p. 31-55. 996680.indb6680.indb 332020 118/12/138/12/13 009:389:38 PRINT CAPITAL, CORPORATE IDENTITY 321 (such as the famous case of New Julfa [1604] and the Russian relocation of the Armenian community of the Crimea to the new settlement of Nor Naxijevan near Rostov in 17804). A third type is the labor diaspora of economic migrants, such as those referred to above, who gravitate from the countryside to the large cities, esp. Constantinople and Smyrna, in search of more lucrative employment, a process still featuring in the Armenian economic landscape of the Soviet and current post-Soviet periods5. The fourth main class is then that of trade diasporas with con- tours integrated into the emergent world economy6. Thus, Armenian merchant colonies in this period began to reconfigure in response to mar- ket forces, exploiting the advances in oceanic communication to lay the foundations for a network that was to stretch from India and the East Indies to France and Holland and, taking advantage of Russian possession of the Volga in the 1550s, added a stable Northern extension to the pre- existing East-West axis through the Baltic to reach buyers in the southern ports of the North Sea. Hence, in terms of profile, operation, and self- reflection, these four diasporas diverge from one another significantly in ways which were not clearly perceived at the time, but which are vital for our purposes. 2. Successive Armenian Literary Media Armenia enjoyed a rich oral culture before the creation of an indigenous alphabet in the fifth century CE7. Over the ensuing centuries a complex interchange developed between the two media as oral epic, lament, and other poetic genres impacted the development of a new literate tradition informed by foreign models that composed and transmitted works in manu- script form primarily in association with the institution of the monastery, which Armenian captures perfectly in the term matenagrut‘iwn8. Although initially limited to clerical and aristocratic circles, writing gradually became more diffused by the Cilician period as a new diversified secular literate class emerged that for various reasons needed to maintain written records9. 4 Ibidem, p. 44. 5 Ibidem, p. 57-81 and BARSOUMIAN, Eastern Question, p. 190-191. 6 COHEN, Global Diasporas, p. 83-104. 7 BOYCE, Parthian gosan. 8 LORD, Singer of Tales, p. 124-138. 9 A powerful example of the former situation is pilgrim inscriptions from Sinai, of which two have plausibly been ascribed to a 7th century prince and bishop of Siwnik‘. See STONE, Armenian Inscriptions. For the tradition of writing among physicians, see COWE, ‘On Nature’ by Isox/Iso‘, p. 100-102, 129-131. The scribal preparation of diplomatic 996680.indb6680.indb 332121 118/12/138/12/13 009:389:38 322 S.P. COWE This process gained new momentum from the 16th century onwards with the Armenians’ embrace of print technology10. This third literary medium emerged as more uniform, accurate, flexible, and affordably priced than the second and more durable than the first. Moreover, not only did it afford a more effective means of propagating the traditional religious fields of liturgy, theology, and education, but began to serve as a vehicle to improve communication among the expanding merchant middle class, catering to their needs and tastes and at the same time molding their col- lective identity, in part by integrating them increasingly into the modes of thought and intellectual, social, and cultural debates characteristic of the early modern era ongoing in the broader milieu in which many of those Armenian merchants lived and worked and where the books were published. Book circulation then resulted in those ideas being dissemi- nated to their communities throughout Eurasia as well as South and East Asia thereby advancing the modernist project and promoting civil society. Consequently, while all three media coexisted in this timeframe, their comparative authority, utility, and distribution was being majorly rea- ligned. As a result, by the mid-19th century print had established itself as the most viable mode of literary transmission, completely marginalizing the role of manuscript production11. 3. Migrants as a Theme of Poetry One of the characteristics of oral poetry is its setting and function within a particular social ambience. The widespread phenomenon of eco- nomic migration, Cohen’s labor diaspora, acted as a powerful impulse in generating songs of pandxtut‘iwn (being severed from the home environ- ment12) reaffirming the strength of family bonds as well as expressing the kin’s forebodings regarding the physical dangers and emotional anxieties awaiting the breadwinner once separated from the warm, supportive family environment13.
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