Nefissa Naguib: Portable Permanence: The anthropology of memory and skills
An enduring question in anthropology has been how cultural groups respond to historical ruptures. Armenians, who were scattered throughout the world after experiencing the collective trauma of genocide and deportation from Turkey in 1915, are an example of a people who have lived through the loss and suffering of such a rupture. Displaced by catastrophe, these peoples’ memories of suffering continue to bind them together on some level, yet few scholars have examined the ways in which these memories are concretized in order to preserve the culture and relationships within it. This paper contributes not only to the question of peoples’ responses to historical ruptures but also to the question of how specific crafts inform and sustain memory from generation to generation within a distinct cultural group. Based on fieldwork among Armenian communities in the Diaspora, I explain how jewellery making is a traditional family trade that results in portable permanence; small objects that preserve the past while enabling survival in the present. My presupposition is that traditional skills involve and offer some of the most quotidian points of entry into the multi-layered temporalities of human experiences. From this first presupposition derives a second postulation: namely that certain characteristic professions, such as jewellery, evolve around nodes of memories in a web of individual experiences, commercial encounters and their ensuing narratives.