Structure of the Memory Discourse of Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh

The study of the representation of collective memory from a transdisciplinary perspective, alongside the specificity of the memory structure of Georgia, Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia, necessitates the use of elements from multiple theories. Combined with collective memory’s polysemy, understood as a cognitional category and cultural and political phenomenon, this results in a need to refer to ideas and terms that are definitionally debatable. Concurrently, most of the concepts used in this book belong to the host of basic issues in the social sciences and humanities and thus are subject to constant reinterpretation and redefinition in distinct contexts. The consequence of their watering down is having to choose a specific way of interpreting the categories in question, depending on the framework set out in the fieldwork. In the same breadth, the most widely held concepts concerning collective memory, such as Jan Assmann’s idea of cultural memory, Pierre Nora’s les lieux de mémoire, or be it studies devoted to Holocaust memory, were embedded in a specific cultural-political specificity (Assmann wrote mainly about memory in ancient cultures, while Nora addressed memory in post-war—and importantly, above all, metropolitan—France). Resulting from their travels, these ideas also found an outlet in other fields, conceived in both a geographical and disciplinary and contextual perspective. This is a tremendous advantage of globalising studies, also posing the intellectual challenge of self-restraint in the face of a tempting possibility of effectively rewriting theory, even in areas where this proves to be a somewhat excessive endeavour. Thus, the anthropological study of memory discourses is a perspective that, in addition to detailed immersion, also requires precise theoretical conceptualisation.