5 The Role of Material Culture and Oral Histories in Cultivating Empathy: Docume
5 The Role of Material Culture and Oral Histories in Cultivating Empathy: Documentation of The Armenian Genocide
Donna, on Armen’s Survival and Immigration
“We heard stories of our grandmother. . . Armen had to hide under her parents’ dead bodies, you know, in a pit, in order to survive, and I don’t know if she knew that’s what she was doing, she just knew she had to be quiet and her parents weren’t responding.”
“How old was she?”
“She was little. I think she was under ten. . . I know of that story and then she don’t want to talk about it, so I don’t know who raised her. I think she and her sister survived, I think her brother didn’t.”
Shock. Confusion. Fear. The emotions flooded me as my relative Donna explained how our family members survived and did not survive the Armenian Genocide. I did not anticipate for this project to reach as deep as it did. This Pressbook serves to document this process.
Stories like Armen’s are all too common among oppressed and marginalized identities around the world. While some stories make mass media and garner attention for the sake of morality reclaimation, many go unseen and unheard. Museums, in their stated institutional goals to be centers of education and the democratic spread of knowledge, are key players in sharing these stories. Through the lens of the documentation of the Armenian Genocide, I examine how conventional museum practices cultivate empathy, or, fail to, and I look to how oral histories can play a role in fostering cross-cultural empathy.
I chose this topic for a couple reasons. Firstly, I hope to make a small intervention in discovering how to make people empathetic. Could material culture and oral histories be a partial solution? Secondly, I seek to bring awareness to a marginalized civilization. Armenia does not typically capture the worldwide imagination. Furthermore, Armenian Genocide denial is still rampent and re-traumatizing an entire population. Armenia has a cultural impact that very few of us are aware of. Even right here in Los Angeles, there is a massive Armenian presence, with lots of bold, outdoor shopping malls run by Armenian families. Thirdly, I am of Armenian descent. I desire to see my family’s connection to our history.
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The Armenian Genocide was the systematic killing of Armenian people living in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The death toll stands at around 1.2 million people (USHMM). As Christian minorities, Armenians were oppressed by several forms of abuse. Many males were executed right away, while women, children, and the elderly were deported. If not slaughtered immediately, Armenians were “subjected to every manner of misery – kidnapping, rape, torture, murder and death from exposure, starvation and thirst” (Sidebotham). Those who escaped deportation were forcibly converted to Islam, a process which stripped them of cultural and religious identity.
Donna, on Christian suppression an