Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T04:10:20.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Deception and Violence in the Ottoman Empire: The People's Theory of Crowd Behavior during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2020

Ali Sipahi Open the ORCID record for Ali Sipahi [Opens in a new window]
Ali Sipahi*
Affiliation:
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Özyeğin University, Istanbul
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article is an historical ethnography of the popular conceptualizations of crowd behavior during the pogroms against the Armenians in the Ottoman East in 1895–1896. It draws on contemporary sources like official telegrams, governmental reports, letters of American missionaries, and Armenian periodicals to show that observers with otherwise highly conflicting views described the structure of the event in the exact same way: as an outcome of sinister deception. Without exception, all parties told some story of deception to explain the violent attacks of the Kurdish semi-nomadic crowds on the Armenian neighborhoods of the city of Harput. The article analyzes these cases of disguise, deluding, and inculcation to reveal how contemporary observers theorized crowd behavior in general and the atrocities they witnessed in particular. They did not perceive violence as an index of social distance or deep societal divisions. On the contrary, they described a world in which Armenians and Muslims lived a shared life, and where one attacked the other only when deceived. Methodologically, the article lifts barriers between intellectual history and social history on behalf of an historical ethnography of people's theories about their own society.

Keywords

HarputArmenian Massacresdeceptioncollective violencecrowd behaviorhistorical ethnographyanthropology of fakesimpostersGustave Le Bon
Type
Social Lives of Categories
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 810 - 835
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Quoted in Crook, Tony and Shaffner, Justin, “Preface: Roy Wagner's ‘Chess of Kinship’: An Opening Gambit,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1, 1 (2011): 160Google Scholar. At: https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau1.1.006 (last accessed 21 Mar. 2020).

2 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (1997): 735–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Bubandt, Nils, “From the Enemy's Point of View: Violence, Empathy, and the Ethnography of Fakes,” Cultural Anthropology 24, 3 (2009): 553–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 567.

4 Hollan, Douglas, “Emerging Issues in the Cross-Cultural Study of Empathy,” Emotion Review 4, 1 (2012): 70–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Throop, C. Jason and Zahavi, Dan, “Dark and Bright Empathy: Phenomenological and Anthropological Reflections,” Current Anthropology 61, 3 (2020): 283–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Bubandt, Nils and Willerslev, Rane, “The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 1 (2015): 5–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 26.

6 Fujii, Lee Ann, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 101Google Scholar, 121, 166.

7 Tambiah, Stanley J., Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 276CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1932]), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Simmel, Georg, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Wolff, Kurt H., ed. (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 408Google Scholar.

10 Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, 4 (1982): 777–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104Google Scholar.

11 Lackey, Jennifer, “Lies and Deception: An Unhappy Divorce,” Analysis 73, 2 (2013): 236–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carson, Thomas L., Lying and Deception: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mahon, James Edwin, “Two Definitions of Lying,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 22, 2 (2008): 211–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sorensen, Roy, “Bald-Faced Lies! Lying without the Intent to Deceive,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88, 2 (2007): 251–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Arendt, Hannah, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 1977), 250Google Scholar.

13 Cora, Yaşar Tolga, Derderian, Dzovinar, and Sipahi, Ali, “Introduction: Ottoman Historiography's Black Hole,” in Cora, Yaşar Tolga, Derderian, Dzovinar, and Sipahi, Ali, eds., The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 1Google Scholar.

14 George Aghjayan, “Harput—Demography,” Houshamadyan (2016), at: https://www.houshamadyan.org/mapottomanempire/vilayetofmamuratulazizharput/harputkaza/locale/demography.html (last accessed 22 Mar. 2020).

15 For a classic study of colonial dual-cities, see Janet Abu-Lughod, “Tale of Two Cities: The Origins of Modern Cairo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, 4 (1965): 429–57.

16 Sipahi, Ali, “Suburbanization and Urban Duality in the Harput Area,” in Cora, Yaşar Tolga, Derderian, Dzovinar, and Sipahi, Ali, eds., The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 247–67Google Scholar.

17 Candea, Matei, “Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-Site,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, 1 (2007): 179–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), ch. 3Google Scholar.

19 Ali Sipahi, “At Arm's Length: Historical Ethnography of Proximity in Harput” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), pt. I, ch. 3.

20 Arsen Yarman, ed., Palu—Harput 1878: Çarsancak, Çemişgezek, Çapakçur, Erzincan, Hizan ve Civar Bölgeler, vol. 2 (İstanbul: Derlem Yayınları, 2010), 180–81.

21 Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 155Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 154.

23 Gutman, David, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885–1915: Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), ch. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Merguerian, Barbara J., “Kharpert: The View from the United States Consulate,” in Hovannisian, Richard G., ed., Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2002), 273–325Google Scholar; Merguerian, Barbara J., “Saving Souls or Cultivating Minds? Missionary Crosby H. Wheeler in Kharpert,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 6 (1993): 33–60Google Scholar; Barton, James L., Story of Near East Relief (1915–1930) (New York: Macmillan, 1930)Google Scholar; Riggs, Henry H., Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915–17 (London: Gomidas Institute, 1997)Google Scholar.

25 Beledian, Krikor, “From Image to Loss: The Writers of Kharpert and Provincial Literature,” in Hovannisian, Richard G., ed., Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2002), 239–72Google Scholar; Cowe, S. Peter, “T'lgadints’i as Ideologue of the Regional Movement in Armenian Literature,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 12 (2003): 31–42Google Scholar.

26 Gutman, David, “Travel Documents, Mobility Control, and the Ottoman State in an Age of Global Migration, 1880–1915,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 3, 2 (2016): 347–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 358.

27 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Making a Self for the Times: Impersonation and Imposture in 20th-Century Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, 3 (2001): 469–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 479.

28 Ali Sipahi, “The Making of a National City: From Mezre to Elazığ,” in Joost Jongerden, ed., Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Turkey (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

29 Çetinkaya and Der Matossian's recent works have given a new impulse to the literature: Doğan Çetinkaya, “Atrocity Propaganda and the Nationalization of the Masses in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars (1912–13),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, 4 (2014): 759–78; Çetinkaya, Doğan, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the Social Class in the Formation of Modern Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013)Google Scholar; Der Matossian, Bedross, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Gelvin, James L., Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 For the question of legitimacy in the Abdülhamid period, see Deringil, Selim, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998)Google Scholar.

31 Özbek, Nadir, “Philantrophic Activity, Ottoman Patriotism, and the Hamidian Regime, 1876–1909,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, 1 (2005): 59–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 62.

32 van Bruinessen, Martin, Agha, Shaikh and the State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1992), 133–202Google Scholar.

33 Klein, Janet, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

34 Toygun Altıntaş, “Crisis and (Dis)Order: Armenian Revolutionaries and the Hamidian Regime in the Ottoman Empire, 1887–1896” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2018), 120.

35 Miller, Owen, “Rethinking the Violence in the Sasun Mountains (1893–1894),” Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2017): 97–123Google Scholar; Altıntaş, “Crisis and (Dis)Order,” 224–92.

36 Ali Karaca, Anadolu Islahatı ve Ahmet Şakir Paşa (1838–1899) (İstanbul: Eren Yayınları, 1993), 45–51.

37 Garabet K. Moumdjian, “Struggling for a Constitutional Regime: Armenian-Young Turk Relations in the Era of Abdulhamid II, 1895–1909” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2012), 56–57.

38 Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, The Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74–75Google Scholar.

39 Nalbandian, Louise, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 122–26Google Scholar.

40 For a perfect summary of the literature on the massacres, see Verheij, Jelle, “Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis of 1895,” in Verheij, Jelle and Jongerden, Joost, eds., Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 85–146CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent revisionist interpretation of the Hamidian Massacres, see Edip Gölbaşı, “1895–1896 Katliamları: Doğu Vilayetlerinde Cemaatler Arası ‘Şiddet İklimi’ ve Ermeni Karşıtı Ayaklanmalar,” in Oktay Özel and Fikret Adanır, eds., 1915: Siyaset, Tehcir, Soykırım (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2015), 140–63; Edip Gölbaşı, “The Official Conceptualization of the Anti-Armenian Riots of 1895–1897,” Études arméniennes contemporaines, 10 (2018): 33–62. Among other important contributions, particularly see Hans-Lukas Kieser, Iskalanmış Barış: Doğu Vilayetleri'nde Misyonerlik, Etnik Kimlik ve Devlet 1839–1938 (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005), 210–20; Selim Deringil, “‘The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed’: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 2 (2009): 344–71; Nadir Özbek, “The Politics of Taxation and the ‘Armenian Question’ during the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876–1908,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 4 (2012): 770–97.

41 Miller, “Rethinking the Violence”; Verheij, Jelle, “‘The Year of the Firman:’ The 1895 Massacres in Hizan and Şirvan (Bitlis Vilayet),” Études Arméniennes Contemporaines 10 (2018): 125–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Verheij, “Diyarbekir”; Ümit Kurt, “Reform and Violence in the Hamidian Era: The Political Context of the 1895 Armenian Massacres in Aintab,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 32, 3 (2018): 404–23; Altıntaş, “Crisis and (Dis)Order,” 293–99.

42 Sipahi, Ali, “Narrative Construction in the 1895 Massacres in Harput: The Coming and Disappearance of the Kurds,” Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2017): 59–91Google Scholar.

43 The earliest scholarly critique of the provocation thesis was published in this journal: Melson, Robert, “A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, 3 (1982): 481–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more recent evaluations, see Libaridian, Gerard J., “What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties in the Ottoman Empire?” in Suny, Ronald Grigor, Göçek, Fatma Müge, and Naimark, Norman M., eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 82–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ronald Grigor Suny, “Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” in ibid., 15–41; Gölbaşı, “Official Conceptualization.”

44 Sipahi, “Narrative Construction.”

45 Hanioğlu, Young Turks in Opposition, 77.

46 Libaridian, “What Was Revolutionary?” 92.

47 See the first five issues of the periodical: Meşveret 1–5 (1 Dec. 1895–2 Feb. 1896).

48 Mardin, Şerif, Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri 1895–1908 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1989), 111Google Scholar.

49 For example, Hanioğlu, Young Turks in Opposition, 206; Zürcher, Erik J., The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk's Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Mardin, Jön Türklerin, 24, 111, 164, 176–81; Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 308Google Scholar; Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, Bir Siyasal Düşünür Olarak Doktor Abdullah Cevdet ve Dönemi (İstanbul: Üçdal Neşriyat, 1981), 403Google Scholar; Zürcher, Young Turk Legacy, 114.

51 Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Mineola, N.Y.: Courier Dover Publications, 2002[1895])Google Scholar.

52 The Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives [PMOA], DH.EO, 290/52, 8 Nov. 1895.

53 For the local governor's account, see PMOA, Y.PRK.UM, 33/83, 12 Nov. 1895; for the petition to Istanbul, PMOA, Y.A.HUS, 344/4, 14 Jan. 1896.

54 PMOA, DH.EO, 293, 5 Dec. 1895.

55 Altıntaş, “Crisis and (Dis)Order,” 253.

56 Vartenie, Yestere (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), 158, 178, 193. I am grateful to Burak Onaran for providing me with an electronic copy of this book from Germany.

57 For examples, see Ahmet Kolbaşı, 1892–1893 Ermeni Yafta Olayları (Merzifon-Yozgat-Kayseri) (İstanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2011); Dilşen İnce Erdoğan, Amerikan Misyonerlerinin Faaliyetleri ve Van Ermeni İsyanları (1896) (İstanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2008), 271–376; Ahmet Halaçoğlu, Bir Ermeninin İtirafları (1895 Maraş ve Zeytun Olayları) (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2007), 48–49.

58 Altıntaş, for example, takes the disguise and deceptive behavior of Hampartsum Boyajian as a fabrication of Zeki Pasha, even though some Muslim as well as Armenian peasants testified along the same lines before the commission. Altıntaş, “Crisis and (Dis)Order,” 259–80. In fact, even the way a sentence about disguise is structured may raise suspicion about the authenticity of the case. For example, that “The culprits were said to be government soldiers dressed as Kurdish nomads” (my emphasis) leaves the impression of referring to a hearsay, even if that is not intended by the author. Miller, “Rethinking the Violence,” 97.

59 Verheij, “Diyarbekir,” 122–23.

60 The tendency to take as fabricated the unwanted details in the documents has even led Selim Deringil, in his work on Armenians’ conversion after the massacres of 1894–1896, to accept the high frequency of “voluntary” or “without pressure” in the archival texts as evidence of the opposite, namely conversion by force. Deringil, “‘Armenian Question,’” 354.

61 Allen letter to “dear Brothers …,” Harpoot, 14 Nov. 1895, the archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission [ABCFM], reel 695.

62 Ibid.

63 H. N. Barnum letter to J. L. Barton, Harpoot, 29 Apr. 1896, ABCFM, reel 696. See also Barnum's letter to Rev. J. K. Brown, Harpoot, 13 Nov. 1895, ABCFM, reel 696.

64 O. P. Allen letter to H.G.O. Dwight, Harpoot, 26 Nov. 1895, ABCFM, reel 695.

65 Letter from H. N. Barnum, Harpoot, 15 Sept. 1896, ABCFM, reel 696.

66 “Facts Regarding a Massacre at Sassone,” 1895, ABCFM, reel 694.

67 Hagop Parejamyan, Kharperti Godoradzen: 1895 Hogdemper 30 (Boston: n.p., 1916), 22. I am grateful to Marc Mamigonian for referring me to this book, and to Ohannes Kılıçdağı for providing me with an electronic copy from the Harvard University Library.

68 Quataert, Donald, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, 3 (1997): 403–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 PMOA, Y.PRK.BŞK, 34/28, 18 Nov. 1895.

70 PMOA, A.MKT.MHM, 657/45, 28 Nov.–2 Dec. 1895.

71 PMOA, Y.PRK.ASK, 109/61, 17 Jan. 1896. See also Abdullah Pasha's second report, which closely follows Zeki Pasha's arguments: PMOA, Y.PRK.ASK, 109/69, 25 Jan. 1896.

72 H. N. Barnum letter to J. Smith, Harpoot, 23 Jan. 1891, ABCFM, reel 695.

73 H. N. Barnum letter to J. Smith, Harpoot, 13 Mar. 1891, ABCFM, reel 695.

74 Ibid.

75 H. N. Barnum letter to J. L. Barton, Harpoot, 28 June 1895, ABCFM, reel 696.

76 In 1898 Barnum wrote, “The revolutionary sentiment never gained any foothold here. Before the troubles in 1895 two young men came from America, and began to stir up other young men, but they found little sympathy and left. I reported them to the Vali, and they were frightened.… If there was a single revolutionist in all this region I failed to hear of him.” Letter to Dr. Hepworth, Turkey, 26 Jan. 1898, ABCFM, reel 696.

77 C. R. Allen letter to J. Smith, Van, 10 Feb. 1891, ABCFM, reel 695.

78 PMOA, Y.A.HUS, 344/141, 12 Jan. 1896.

79 Gutman, David, “Migrants, Revolutionaries, and Spies: Surveillance, Politics, and Ottoman Identity in the United States,” in Isom-Verhaaren, Christine and Schull, Kent F., eds., Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 291–94Google Scholar.

80 Bogigian, Hagop, In Quest of the Soul of Civilization (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1925), 241–42Google Scholar, 246.

81 Allen letter to “dear Brothers…,” Harpoot, 14 Nov. 1895, ABCFM, reel 695 (original underlining).

82 Ibid. (original underlining).

83 Ibid.

84 Lepsius, Johannes, Armenia and Europe: An Indictment (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897), 48, 62Google Scholar.

85 Bakhtikian, Sargis A., Arabkir yev shrdjakay giughery: patmakan-azgagrakan hamarot tesutiun (Beirut: Tparan Vahagn, 1934), 24Google Scholar.

86 PMOA, A.MKT.MHM, 659/3, Sept. 1896–June 1897.

87 “Agn Kağaki Godoradzı,” Droshak, 26 (15 Nov. 1896).

88 McGranahan, Carole, “An Anthropology of Lying: Trump and the Political Sociality of Moral Outrage,” American Ethnologist 44, 2 (2017): 243–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 243.

89 Mair, Jonathan, “Post-Truth Anthropology,” Anthropology Today 33, 3 (2017): 3–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 4 (my emphasis).

90 Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, “A Responsibility to Protest? The Public, the Powers and the Armenians in the Era of Abdülhamit II,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, 3 (2015): 259–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 269 (her emphasis).