Monthly Archives: August 2022

THE ANNALES SCHOOL ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE XXI CENTURY – 2022-2

Summary

“Critical Turn” or Frontal Reconstruction?

Smbat Kh. Hovhannisyan

The paper discusses the problems of the turning point of the late 1980s of the Annales school, which manifested itself in efforts to develop new historiography
tasks and research methods. This was a period that historians often call the “period of uncertainty”, the “crisis of intelligibility of historians” “epistemological anarchy”, etc. The crisis was the result of postmodern criticism of orientations and research paradigms, while at the same time an internal school reshuffle disrupted the old equilibrium. Historians, unable to find the necessary support in the social sciences, return to narrative and the traditional event. Therefore, judgments about the crisis acquire a completely different content and meaning, and the concept of “crisis” used is replaced by a “turn”, as it is more about forming a field of new possibilities of historiography. This is evidenced by the fact that at the end of 1989 various theoretical articles aimed at overcoming the crisis were found in the journal.

Despite all this, in the late 1980’s there were only signs of a fourth generation of annals, and perhaps some researchers are right to believe that such a generation
never took shape, because new historians have not articulated their unified response to the challenges facing history by changing the nature and meaning of their questions. So far, those huge difficulties that impede consolidation around a new alternative intellectual program have not been overcome.

AR FEDERATION (DASHNAKTSUTYUN) IN THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF EASTERN EUROPEAN AND NEAR ASIAN COUNTRIES IN THE LATE 19TH-EARLY 20TH CENTURY – 2022-2

Summary

Part One։ The process of formation of parties in Eastern Europe and Near East in the 1880s-1890

Gevorg S. Khoudinyan
The profound geopolitical shifts that are taking place in Europe and the Near East as a result of the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine are expanding our understanding of the region called “Eastern Europe” before our eyes. A new environment is being created for all countries from the Baltic to the Mediterranean Sea and the Near East, which were once part of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The second stage or cycle of crystallization of the national aspirations of the peoples of this world-wide region begins.

As a result, there was a need for a more in-depth study of the first stage of this process, in which, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, national parties were the main subjects of national aspirations of the countries and peoples of the region in the whole region from the Baltic to the Mediterranean Sea and the Near East. Therefore, the process of almost simultaneous emergence of national parties in these countries and peoples is not the result of a worldwide conspiracy, but a reflection of the objective regularity that A. Toynbee once characterized with simple concepts of challenge-response.

The author examines the national histories of national parties, which at the end of the First World War laid the foundations of statehood in the countries of Eastern Europe and Near Asia in a single channel of self-determination of peoples and the emergence of national states – giving a characteristic of each of its subjects. In the Armenian political reality, this process in 1890-1892 was led by AR Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), in Macedonia, which also fought against the
Ottoman yoke, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (1893).

It is no coincidence that it was then – in the late 1880s-early 1890s that the first circles of the Young Turks appeared in Turkish reality, which reflected the same process with the help of social Darwinist ideas of the struggle for the existence of biological species, because the pan-Islamism of the new Ottomans was gradually replaced by pan-Turkism, which was based on pagan ideas of nomadic Turkic tribes in a civilizational environment alien to them.

During the same period, the movement of the inhabitants of Crete intensified for the implementation of the so-called Megali idea of uniting the Greek population of the subject territories of the Ottoman Empire with Greece, which also included ethnic Macedonians and Albanians.

Another major center of inter-national friction contributing to the formation of national parties in Eastern Europe in the early 1890s was Galicia as the former territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The article analyzes the process of the emergence of the main Polish and Ukrainian national parties – the Polish Socialist Party (1892) and the RussianUkrainian Radical Party (1890).

At the end of the study, the political ties of the AR Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) with individual representatives of the populist movement in the Caucasus and the first contacts with Young Turk figures in Geneva in the period 1890-1897 are revealed.

THE TELLING ABOUT SCIENCE – 2022-2

Summary

As a social and humanitarian mediation

Mariam M. Karapetyan
In discussions about the role of science in Armenia and the ways of its development, the arrow of criticism and expectations is primarily directed at the state, expecting a significant increase in funding for the field of science. However, in addition to the main addressee and its functions, we can see other possible participants in the development of the field, often with less obvious and less specific functions. The given article discusses scientific journalism. Its role as a socio-humanitarian mediator between science and society is investigated. The coverage of natural sciences in the media is discussed as a social and humanitarian practice, its means and possible obligations are considered.

The discussed approach to socio-humanitarian mediation not only states that expectations from natural sciences in Armenian society are often unfounded, since real needs are of a socio-humanitarian nature, but also allows us to look for practical starting points for creating their relationship. The proposed approaches may lead to qualitatively new questions. For example, the realization that scientific journalism makes scientific practices public through social and humanitarian mediation raises the question of what kind of connection we want to create between society and scientific knowledge in each specific case of coverage. What stories turn scientific knowledge into unscientific? Who talks about science and how?

From the viewpoint of this issue, the analysis of direct and indirect knowledge transfer can be considered one of the important points of the article. The discussion of the problem can be summarized as follows: indirect knowledge transfer is the practice of considering and creating social contexts of knowledge and science, a practice capable of articulating the connections between the relations of different fields.

The practical directions of journalistic activity mentioned in the article, with the help of the theoretical questions presented, can become the basis for the development of conscious journalistic obligations. In particular, the promotion of the institutionalization of the fields of science and the promotion of scientific knowledge to the public may seem to be two important, yet opposite directions, but as a journalistic activity they can be quite comparable precisely because of the functions of journalism.