Rethinking homecoming: diasporic cosmopolitanism in post-Soviet Armenia

Abstract

This paper focuses on a transformation of the nostalgic concept of diasporic homecoming in the context of a new cosmopolitanism. By bringing economic and social capital into a land with a high rate of poverty, the US Armenian Americans of the second and third generation have come to feel incorporated into ‘ancestral homeland’ in Armenia in a variety of different ways. They combine ‘homeland imaginaries’ and ‘ancestral tourism’ with an assertion that to reclaim Armenian soil is to contribute to the environment of the entire planet and its inhabitants. Newcomers in post-socialist Armenia are engaged in acts of rejuvenating the local landscape for a ‘better future’ spurred by a cosmopolitan capacity to assume responsibility for the fate of the globe. This article questions under what circumstances ethnic ties negate cosmopolitan identifications and how and when diasporic travellers reclaim their homeland as a place for expression of solidarity with the planet.

Keywords:

• Homecoming
• diaspora
• environment
• cosmopolitanism
• Armenia
• transnationalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a project award within the collaborative research centre Changing Representations of Social Orders, Humboldt University Berlin (SFB 640), which provided support for implementation of the research for this paper. I would also like to thank Anders Stefansson for his valuable comments on an initial version of this paper, which was presented at the EASA conference in Lijubljana, Slovenia, 26–30 September 2008. I am thankful to anonymous Ethnic and Racial Studies reviewers for comments and to co-editors Nina Glick Schiller and Sandra Gruner-Domic for valuable critiques on various versions of the paper.

Notes

1. See http://www.armenianvolunteer.org

2. The Armenian diaspora, along with the Jewish and Greek diasporas, is considered to be a paradigmatic ‘victim diaspora’ whose members survived and were displaced by a catastrophe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the memory of which continues to bind them together on some significant level (Cohen 1997; Pattie 2004).

3. The Armenian word nerghakht comes from gaghtel or gaghut, which stems from the Hebrew galut, exile. The Armenian suffix -ner means ‘inside’.

4. According to official statistics, between 1995 and 2005, approximately 750 ‘repatriates’ from the US, Canada, Iran and Europe settled in Armenia.

5. Dashnaktsutyun Party is the political organ of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) founded at the end of the nineteenth century in Tiflis (Georgia). Dashnaktsutyun is the most politically oriented of the diasporic organizations and traditionally has been one of the active supporters of Armenian nationalism. In spite of its socialist slogans, Dashnaks were always in opposition to Soviet power.

6. See http://www.armeniatree.org (last accessed 22 August 2010).

7. Although only three employees are working in the Watertown ATP office, more than forty local employees were hired in Yerevan.

8. According to the ATP's own estimation, the survival rate for trees three years after planting is 86 per cent, which is very high indeed.

9. See Rival (1998) for more about the symbolic significance of trees in a number of cultures.

10. It was introduced by Julius Sterling Morton (1832–1902), a Nebraska journalist and politician originally from Michigan at the end of the nineteenth century. Arbor Day was proclaimed by President Richard Nixon as National Arbor Day in 1970 and was fixed on the last Friday in April. Arbor Day is also now celebrated in other countries. Variations of this day are celebrated as ‘Greening Week’ in Japan and ‘The New Year's Days of Trees’ in Israel.