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E-book Making a Homeland : Roots and Routes of Transnational Armenian Engagement
This emotional statement describes the long-distance ‘homecoming’ experi-ence of a young volunteer, a third-generation Armenian American from theBoston area, who arrived in Yerevan at the Zvartnots International Airport inJune 2007 to ‘discover’ his ‘ancestral homeland’ and to ‘move mountains’ inmodernArmenia.Thiswasnotajourneyalongapilgrimagetour.However,theperception of encountering the ‘holy’ land, which has never been the countryof his grandparents’ exodus, is comparable to the meaningful experiences ofa pilgrim making a long journey to a sacred site. Armenia as an imaginedhomeland, merged with the iconic symbol of sacred Mount Ararat to becomethe mythical land of one’s cultural roots, appears to be a tangible place: aterritory marked by immigration officers and national borders that one canhear,smell and interact with.Post-SovietArmeniaisusuallyperceivedasaregionofout-migration,withalargenumberoflabourmigrantsmovingtoRussia,sendingremittancesthatare important to the Armenian economy. In this book, Armenia is conceptu-alised as a destination country for descendants of post-migrants commonly referredtointheRepublicofArmeniaasspiurk–theArmeniandiaspora.Overthelasttwodecades,anewmigrationprocessfromtheNorthtotheSouthhasbeen gaining ground.This is the arrival of Armenian post-migrants from eco-nomically more developed countries (the US or Canada) in post-socialist ‘de-veloping’Armenia.Studiesofpost-socialistmigrationusuallydealwithimmi-gration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East to Western countries,whileoverlookingthefactthatEasternEuropeandEurasiabecameadestinationfordiasporic people.Particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union,a new generation of USAmerican diasporic organisations and individuals have emploed a variety ofmechanisms to engage with the ‘ancestral homeland’: travelling, volunteeringand investing money. This new generation of diasporic Armenians claims to‘feel’connected to the‘homeland’despite a century of living outside,mainly inthe US or Canada. Due to the challenging political situation in countries likeTurkey or Iran, they do not engage with the actual homeland of their grand-parents. Instead, they turn their desires and activities to neighbouring post-Soviet Armenia. The Republic of Armenia, once the Erivan Governorate of theRussian Empire, existed from 1918–1920 after the collapse of the Russian Em-pire and was then a Soviet republic until it became a sovereign nation-state in 1991.
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