At Arm's Length: Historical Ethnography of Proximity in Harput.

Abstract

In recent years, the multifaceted nature of cultural otherization in trans-regional encounters has attracted renewed interest by anthropologists. Epistemological distance has ceased to be an object of unhesitant condemnation; instead, scholars have begun exploring the diverse forms of distancing the other. This dissertation expands the analytical framework for understanding otherization by focusing on spatial and social proximity in and of a provincial dual town, Harput-Mezre, in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It scrutinizes the reverberations of social distance in relatively close and intimate relations—‘short-distance relations’—between suburban and urban people, between missionaries and converts, and between Armenians and Kurds from the locals’ point of view. Moreover, it traces the history of spatial duality and proximity in Harput region by underlining the local origins of place-making strategies and spatial separation. The dissertation thus contributes to the literature on bringing back ‘the other’ into theory of anthropology, on the one hand, and on provincializing imperial and global centers, on the other. The dissertation consists of five parts; the first and the last part unravel the rise and demise of Harput-Mezre as a dual town, while the other three deal each with a specific form of short-distance relations. Part I sets the socio-historical scene for the emergence of Mezre in the 1830s-50s. Part II addresses the socio-spatial relationship between Harput and Mezre and reveals the suburbanization process in the entire region in the nineteenth century. Part III reconstructs the emergence of a highly powerful group of American missionaries—the Harput clique—in the 1850s and 60s, and discusses their distancing relationship with Protestant Armenians in the city. Part IV focuses on the 1895 Armenian Massacres by examining various local narratives of the event to reveal the perceptions of actors about the enemy others. Finally, Part V traces the process of nationalization of space in the early twentieth century whereby the dual town transformed into a new unified city called Elazığ. Hence, the dissertation analyzes the formation of spatial, ethnic and cultural distance in local, regional and trans-regional encounters.