ABSTRACT
This chapter engages Walter Benjamin’s theory of history with fieldwork on the trail of the Armenian genocide in south Turkey. In looking for a methodology for the study of the aftermath of genocide in a context, like Turkey, where it continues to be denied, Navaro brings Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History into conversation with her fieldwork in Musa Dagh, the mountain near the town of Antakya where the local Armenians defended themselves against the onslaught of the Ottoman army in 1915. A century later, Musa Dagh’s past reveals itself to the anthropologist only in errant, bitty, fragmentary, and hushed-up forms, which Navaro foregrounds via Benjamin’s critique of holistic historical frameworks. A methodology against the grain unfolds through this staging of a conversation between Musa Dagh and Benjamin.
