Categories and Their Interstices: The Armenian Genocide Beyond Resistance and Accommodation

During the Armenian Genocide, some deportees were afforded the opportunity to avoid subsequent waves of deportation and massacres by working for the Ottoman Turkish military (or civilian) authorities, who needed their skills and were willing to “pay” for it by sparing their lives. Having secured a job in the military’s hospitals and workshops thanks to their training, connections, and often bribes, these deportees often paid it forward, providing compatriots with food and medication, offering hideouts, facilitating their escape from concentration camps, and sometimes managing to procure jobs for them in the military. This chapter proposes referring to these actors as interstitials—those operating in the interstices of collaboration and resistance. The study of these actors offers insight into an underexplored phenomenon in Armenian genocide studies, long dominated by cookie-cutter categories. Serving the Ottoman war effort and assisting those whom the state targeted for annihilation, interstitials invite us to think about mass atrocity not only through less stringent categories—a recent trend in the scholarship—but outside of them. In this approach, we entertain the possibility that members of the targeted group can, at the same time, work to save their own skin and help other victims, collaborate with perpetrators and resist their genocidal policies.