Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a cultural anthropologist about rituals. We discussed how any new government often seeks to downplay, cancel, or alter the rituals of the previous era and introduce new ones in their place. In other words, they aim to sanctify certain things while “desacralizing” others.
This got me thinking about the rituals created after 2018, the shrines, and the symbols. One example is the statue of the “Walking Man” with a backpack and bacball cap near the entrance sign of Ijevan, which is regularly damaged. A more effective symbol is the statue of a daring girl in front of one of the administrative buildings, with the inscription: “I am a citizen, I am not afraid of the authorities, I am a claimant.”
However, it is unlikely that this statue will become a shrine or a place of “initiation” for young, proud citizens, as the Lenin statue in Lenin Square was for young pioneers during Soviet times.
Several attempts to sacralize the “Velvet Revolution” have been made. For instance, in the summer of 2018, there was a plan to organize an exhibition dedicated to that revolution at the Museum of History. According to Lilit Makunts, the Minister of Culture at that time, “Diaspora’s interest in Armenia is great at this stage due to the processes of the Velvet Revolution. Especially these realities bring foreigners to Armenia. So this exhibition will allow them to connect with what happened.” But the idea was never implemented, and the expected thousands of Diaspora Armenian pilgrims were left without that “sightseeing place.”
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What remained was Citizen’s Day, a holiday meant to replace the Bolsheviks’ November 7th, the annual anniversary of the Glorious Revolution. However, to say that it became a popular holiday would be a gross exaggeration.
People can be united not only by joy but also by sorrow: April 24 has been such a unifying factor for at least six decades. For me personally, September 2023 is the new April 24, because we lost Artsakh and 120,000 of Artsakh’s people had to leave their homes. It was a pure genocide. But it is clear that no government will want to refer to the tragedy that happened during its tenure.
Thus, the current authorities have failed to create rituals around any unifying idea. Instead, the ritual of hatred and division is carried out daily on the Internet. The targets are the “formers,” the Russians, and the “5th Column.” This, of course, is not new and is described in detail in George Orwell’s novel “1984,” where it was called “Two Minutes of Hate.”
Aram Abrahamyan
