Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

INTRODUCTIONSpeaking to One Another: Personal Memories of the Past inArmenia and TurkeyThis book is the product of the research project, “Adult Education and Oral History Contributing to Armenian-TurkishReconciliation” conducted with the support of dvv international (Institute for InternationalCooperation of the German Adult Education Association) between August 2009 and February 2010and financed by the German Federal Foreign Office. Local project partners in Turkey and Armenia wereAnadolu Kültür; a local NGO working in the sphere of culture and the arts, and the Center for EthnologicalStudies “Hazarashen” respectively. The main aim of the project is to build bridges between Turkishand Armenian societies through adult education, intercultural exchange and oral history research.The activities of the project included a student camp in Dilijan, Armenia during 8-14 October 2009,where ten university students from Armenia and ten university students from Turkey were trained inoral history. Between October 2009 and February 2010, a research team directed by Professor HranushKharatyan-Araqelyan from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Armenian National Academyof Sciences, Yerevan conducted oral history research in Armenia. During the same period, a researchteam directed by Professor Leyla Neyzi from Sabancı University, Istanbul conducted oral historyresearch in Turkey. University students took an active role in the research process in each country.Oral history is a relatively new and increasingly recognized research methodology in Armenia and Turkey.Oral historians study how ordinary individuals narrate historical events as a means of makingsense of the past in the present. In remembering the past, we make use of multiple sources: our own experiencesand memories, as well as other sources such as postmemory (memories transmitted by oldergenerations), history and the media.In this research, individuals in Turkey and Armenia from diverse backgrounds and regions were interviewedin order to record how they remembered and reconstructed recent history. One of the aims ofthe project was to investigate postmemory: how did individuals recount events they themselves did notexperience but which were transmitted to them by older generations? While the study aimed at investigatingmemories of the Armenian experience in Turkey in particular, the researchers conducted openendedlife history interviews which allowed interviewees to construct their own narratives and activelyengage in setting the research agenda. The deliberate choice to approach subjects without a pre-setagenda was particularly important given the political sensitivity of the subject and the limited range ofdiscussion of this complex subject in the public sphere, especially the media. Our goal was to simply listento ordinary individuals and to investigate how they subjectively experienced, remembered, narratedand interpreted this painful history.11