The nation‐family: Intimate encounters and genealogical perversion in Armenia

Abstract

Anthropological theorists have often dismissed the notion of nation‐as‐family as an abstraction or as evidence of nationalist sentiment. But in postsocialist Armenia, nation is practiced as family. Everyday intimate encounters in public carry narratives of genealogical belonging and expectations based on forms of kin relation. This is particularly notable in the experiences of queer subjects—those who fail to meet the demands and expectations to belong to the nation‐family and who thus disrupt national sensibilities of propriety and genealogical continuity. Those who are genealogically perverse experience the nation‐family as unbearably intimate. This intimacy, however, makes possible acts that introduce queer difference into what national propriety means. [queer, intimacy, nation, kinship, perversion, postsocialism, Armenia]

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…Much of the work thinking through dependency and the restrictions it imposes on freedom is explicitly in the language of kinship and its potential constraints (Flores ; Hamberger ; Kantor ; Krause and Bressan ; Miller ; Shirinian ). Kantor () showed how urban migrants in Bihar, India, use food consumption practices—specifically milk—to reaffirm connection with their rural family while also signaling upward mobility.…”

“…Of course, kinship language is mobilized in relation to the national community as well. Shirinian (, 59) showed how conceptualizations and practices of kinship as nation in postsocialist Armenia constrain citizens as family into conformity, even as some individuals find ways to transform these practices and find new queer practices of world‐making. Miller (, 598) worked with jihadis in Tunisia who are expelled from the national community because they are branded as terrorists abroad, showing how people engage in “kin‐work” that “sustains relations of care for sons engaged in jihad and seeks to pressure a resistant state into facilitating their repatriation.”…”

“…In a necessary dialectic, much work considered seepage or failures of containment through analytics of freedom (Furani ), the unruly (Cooper ; J. Fisher ; Scherz , 108; Stoetzer , 302), zaniness (Degani ), play (Rea ), transgression (Muir and Gupta ), porousness (Bjork‐James ), madness (Nuhrat ), rupture or breaking open (Kunreuther ; Kyriakides ; Ofstehage ; Saleh ), queering (Heywood ; Shirinian ), invasion (Sherouse ), excess (Gershon ), or contagion (Kivland ; Luna ; Rubin ; Rubinstein et al. ).…”

Intimate sovereigns: Patriarchy, the fraternal horde, and the limits of power in Armenia

“…Shared familiarity—an interior world kept separate from an exterior world–furthermore, corresponds to psychoanalytic notions of the family in which the father or father surrogate takes the symbolic position of the familiar and loving (that makes up a sense of the home) as well as the frightening and threatening (Freud, 2003[1919]; Lacan, 2013). In this sense, what I have previously argued is Armenia’s “nation-family”—in which Armenians practice nation through intimate encounters and expectations within public space (Shirinian, 2018b)—is also a space where those intimate encounters are governed by intimate sovereigns.…”

“…Many of my interlocutors pointed to how Pashinyan’s team was, like the old regime, working through their own networks—hiring their friends and giving funding and access to projects run within their own social networks instead of abiding by objective systems of merit. In other words, the new political regime was operating through KhTsB — khnami, tsanot , and barekam (in-laws, acquaintances, and friends)—an acronym often used to describe the Armenian way of doing things (Ishkanian, 2008; Shirinian, 2018b). “This is the same exact system.…”