FIELDWORK UNDER FIRE
By Orin Starn
The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 14, 2005, Friday
Where, exactly, is Armenia?
I have to admit that I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map for you
until a few months ago.
That changed in a hurry last summer. Almost overnight, it seemed,
I found myself on an Austrian Airlines flight into Armenia’s capital,
Yerevan. A student of mine, Yektan Turkyilmaz, was about to be put on
trial there. The secret police had arrested Yektan two months before
just as he was leaving Armenia, having finished his anthropology
dissertation research on the early 20th-century history of the
region. A kind, passionate, and brilliant young scholar, Yektan had
been held in a miserable basement dungeon. He shared a cell – and the
jars of Nutella a friend brought now and then – with two Armenian
prisoners locked up for petty crimes. Many nights Yektan and his
cellmates could hear the screams of other men being tortured upstairs.
Yektan’s crime? Trying to smuggle old books out of Armenia, according
to the government. The real reason was a poisonous brew of politics,
corruption, and paranoia. Yektan is Turkish, albeit of Kurdish
descent. Even today, many Armenians hate Turks for 1915, when more
than a million Armenians were rounded up for slaughter in the 20th
century’s first genocide. That a Turk, Duke University student or not,
would come to Yerevan to study the period’s fraught history had made
him an object of speculation and suspicion from the very start.
The great irony is that Yektan is one of a few brave Turkish scholars
now calling for Turkey to face up to its responsibility for the
Armenian genocide. Speaking about 1915 has been mostly taboo in Turkey,
with absurd denial and countercharges of Armenian duplicity instead
the order of the day. That Yektan was committed to real understanding
of Eastern Anatolia’s tragic history had won him research permission
from the director of the Armenian National Archive. He was the first
Turkish scholar ever allowed to work there.
None of this mattered to the secret police. Although renamed the
National Security Service, everyone in Yerevan just calls them the
KGB, an unhappy legacy of Armenia’s long cold-war decades as part
of the Soviet Union. Closely tied to President Robert Kocharian,
a former Communist Party official, the secret police are a shadow
state. They harass and brass-knuckle opponents, control plum jobs,
and extort money in bribes and kickbacks in the topsy-turvy gangster
capitalism of these new post-Soviet times.
Over his several months in Yerevan, Yektan had bought about 100 used
books from secondhand booksellers, all related to his research about
Armenian culture, politics, and history. The secret police had probably
been following Yektan, and, just after boarding his flight home, he was
dragged off the plane and taken to KGB headquarters. An obscure law
restricting the export from Armenia of any book older than 50 years
provided the pretext for keeping Yektan prisoner. His interrogators
were convinced that they had captured a major book smuggler, or,
more likely, a Turkish spy.
Then came rafts of letters demanding Yektan’s release from the likes
of Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke; Craig Calhoun, president of
the Social Science Research Council; Rep. David E. Price, Democrat of
North Carolina; and Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator and a longtime
friend of Armenia. At that point, Yektan recalls, the secret police
began to interrogate him about a third possibilitynamely, that he
was an American spy. How else to explain such concern from halfway
around the world? “Mean and stupid,” one Armenian I met in Yerevan
snickered privately about the KGB.
The tale of Yektan’s arrest might appear like some bizarre outlier,
a freak episode of the Keystone Kops and Gulag Archipelago rolled
into one. I think, however, that the story points to larger changes in
the field of anthropology. In the hoary old days of the pith helmet,
native porters, and steamer-trunk expeditions to Samoa and Congo,
anthropologists noted the minutiae of kinship structures and tribal
ritual down to the last cowrie shell. Those old-time anthropologists
tended to shy away from writing about the less comfortable realities
of poverty, war, disease, racism, and colonial oppression in the
third-world societies that they studied.
It’s little wonder that anthropologists back then seldom got into
trouble. No one besides a small universe of other scholars back in
Oxford and New Haven cared about the exact explanation for why some
New Guinea hill tribes liked to chew betel nut at male-initiation
ceremonies and others did not.
Everything has changed over the last few decades. The turbulence of
the Vietnam War years brought loud calls for, as the title of one
influential anthology had it, “reinventing anthropology” in a more
activist, politically engaged image. Then, too, the changing trade
winds of feminist, Marxist, and later postmodern and postcolonial
theory began to propel questions about social protest and nationalism,
violence and memory, and power and politics to the center of the field.
You can see the results now. At Duke alone we have students doing
dissertations about Mexico’s Zapatista rebels and anti-globalization
activism; everyday life and women’s rights in Castro’s Cuba; and
Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon, among many other charged
topics. It’s a long way from the age of anthropologists with lordly
names like E.E. Evans-Pritchard and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and heated
hallway debate about the particulars of Crow kinship reckoning.
A degree of risk accompanies the new, more politically minded
anthropology. A recent Ph.D. from our Duke program, Daniel Hoffman,
had to be evacuated by helicopter from Sierra Leone a few years ago.
Hoffman was near death with cerebral malaria he had contracted in the
backcountry while investigating the kamajor militia movement and their
tough, violent world. Myrna Mack, a Guatemalan anthropologist, was
stabbed to death by an army death squad in retaliation for her research
into the slaughter of Mayan Indians in military counterinsurgency
campaigns. Last summer Kregg Hetherington, a graduate student at
the University of California at Davis studying Paraguayan agrarian
activism, was with peasant protestors when they were attacked by
landlord goons, who shot and killed two village friends standing
close by him. Fieldwork under fire is by no means uncommon these days.
It’s always wise to be wary about coming down too hard on
one’s disciplinary ancestors. Whatever their failings, those
early-20th-century anthropologists believed in human equality and
the value of other cultures in an age when the hateful ideology about
white superiority to the “savages” and “primitives” of “lesser races”
was so prevalent. We shouldn’t be too complacent about our own era’s
failures either, since the field is hardly a model of democracy and
political righteousness. Our many shortcomings include a tiresome
addiction to ugly, pretentious, jargon-laden prose that makes far
too much of what we write unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t have
one of those secret postmodern jargon decoder rings.
I do think it’s good that we’ve moved to a more direct engagement
with the world’s social problems. Surely these times demand more than
ever the effort to understand the power of xenophobia and nationalist
hatred, the tensions of wealth and want in the global economy, the
limits and possibilities of social movements, and a long list of
other pressing issues. If not in grace of prose, anthropologists
have the advantage over journalists in the deeper, more intimate
view gained by months and often years of fieldwork. We can play at
least a modest role in expanding awareness, critical understanding,
and a stronger sense of mutual accountability and responsibility in
this irreversibly interconnected world.
But what, then, of Yektan? I watched him being led into the courtroom
in handcuffs surrounded by five policemen as if he were some dangerous
murderer. All the booksellers from whom Yektan had bought books
testified that they had never told him about any law limiting their
export, or in some cases not even known about it themselves.
The smug, overfed, theatrical prosecutor appeared to have watched
too many old Perry Mason reruns. He punctuated his incoherent closing
statement with plenty of pregnant pauses, accusatory stares, and the
dark suggestion that Yektan was not really a student at all. Then he
drove off without even bothering to stick around for the verdict.
Everyone knew, after all, that higher powers had almost certainly
decided the outcome beforehand in the archetypal Stalinist show-trial
tradition. Two years in jail, the judge announced, but with a
suspended sentence, meaning no more prison time. The verdict allowed
the government to pretend that Yektan’s arrest had been justified
while ceding to the heavy international pressure for his freedom.
With a few Armenian friends who’d stood with him through his ordeal,
Yektan walked out of the courthouse into the sweltering August
afternoon. He blinked and squinted, unaccustomed to the sun after
two months in a prison cell.
Now Yektan is back at Duke. He lost 20 pounds in prison, and his eyes
still dart nervously as if someone may be following him, but he says he
went to Armenia knowing it could be risky for him there. What Yektan
learned in his research will help him fill in the story of political
ambition, disputed borders, and nationalism gone awry that led to
the genocide of 1915. Does he have advice for other anthropologists
working in dangerous places? “Just be careful.” His own concerns are
turning to more prosaic matters familiar to any graduate student.
“I want,” he says, “to finish my dissertation and get on with my life.”
Orin Starn is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke
University. He is the author of Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s
Last “Wild” Indian, published last year by W.W. Norton.