Traversing Boundaries and Selves: Iranian-Armenian Identities during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution

Cosmopolitanism has therefore become a rare phenomenon, something of the past, when borders had not yet been clearly demarcated and identities had not yet been defined or jealously defended. In this distant past, the pressure to conform was less, and the opportunities to exist in the niches between communities larger.

—Roel Meijer, Cosmpolitanism, Identity, and Authenticity in the Middle East

Nationalist historiography has viewed Iranian-Armenian identity as exclusively and unchangingly Armenian, with little if any multiplicity. Nationalist Armenian historiography has presented Iranian-Armenians as foremost and primarily Armenian with only secondary, and therefore, less significant, attachments to Iran. In a similar manner, nationalist Iranian historiography has dealt with the Iranian-Armenians as an ethnically and religiously different minority and has neglected to recognize their role in the formation of Iranian national identity. By placing the focus on a Perso-Muslim identity of Iran, it has for the most part failed to acknowledge minority, in this case Armenian, perspectives and identities not because they necessarily opposed Iranian nationalist ideals, but because they challenged along with other Iranians an exclusive, homogeneous concept of Iran.

Both historiographies have assumed identity to be fixed and primordial. Terms such as awakening, rebirth, and even consciousness are often used by proponents of nationalist causes and movements as well as scholars and imply that people had been asleep or in an unconscious state or even that they had lost their "true" identity, which in turn implies that ethnic identity is primordial and therefore durable, natural, and intrinsically cultural and, therefore, emotional and essential. Although as social scientist Richard Jenkins admits, one cannot "deny the longevity and stubbornness, under particular circumstances, of ethnic attachments," it is necessary to recognize that the common misconception within nationalist historiography that ethnic identity has always been the primary and fixed identity of Armenians is problematic and denies the reality of internal and external political, intellectual, and social circumstances and transformations that, as this study shows, have created a multiplicity of identities, coexisting and competing for primacy in different periods.¹ Similarities exist with other diasporas as pointed out by anthropologist James Clifford, who contends, "Whatever their ideologies of purity, diasporic cultural forms can never, in practice, be exclusively nationalist. They are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms."²

This study examines the way in which Armenians in Iran perceived themselves, their community, their present and future role and status in Iranian society and politics, and their relationship with the Iranian nation being forged during the constitutional period of 1906–11. The study takes into account and discusses the way in which Iranian-Armenian identity was socially constructed, that is, as social anthropologist Fredrik Barth explains in his work on the anthropology of ethnicity, "produced under particular interactional, historical, economic and political circumstances."³ The study also explores the way in which identity was deeply influenced by context and setting, that is, was "highly situational"; multiple, fluid, and negotiable; a matter of individual and elite choice based on a perception of interests and benefits. In other words, identity must, according to Barth, "depend on ascription and self-ascription: only insofar as individuals embrace it, are constrained by it, act on it, and experience it will ethnicity [or in our case any form of identification] make organizational difference."⁴ In this way, Iranian-Armenian identity shares much with other ethnic and group identities; therefore, many aspects of the social science scholarship on ethnicity and identity apply to the Iranian-Armenian case in this period.⁵

While this study often refers to theory, the intention here is not to try to fit the Iranian-Armenian case into a model. Rather, it is to bring together the evidence and theoretical perspectives in order...