4 - History, Memory and Collective Consciousness

Summary

The 23rd April – that particular day in the calendar Iranian Armenian schools every year commemorate the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. I remember that, when I was an elementary school student, our Armenian teachers would coordinate with the Apostolic Church to take us to the service. My elementary school was the Arax Armenian Girls’ School; hence, the closest church to the school was the Surb Sarkis Church on Karim Khan Zand Street. My friends and I would line up together with all other classes and walk from our school to the church. Our teachers would also provide us with flowers to place on the gravestone of some important Armenian figure or the victims of the Genocide in the courtyard of the church. My middle school years were spent in the Kooshesh Girls’ School, and we had a church adjacent to our building which made it much easier for us to walk to the service. And my high school was the Tovmasian Girls’ High School, also in walking distance from the Surb Targmanch’ats Apostolic Church in Zarkish. This was a routine in all Armenian schools every year.

Building and maintaining collective identity is based on shared consciousness, memory and knowledge. Historical knowledge of the homeland is a major facet of identity for a minoritised diasporic community such as the Armenians. ‘Collective consciousness’ implies a consciousness that is both internal to the individual and shared by an entire community. Social theorists such as Emile Durkheim and psychoanalysts such as Carl Jung have delineated the ways in which an autonomous individual identifies with their larger community; they believed collective consciousness to be the internal representation of external forces exerted on individuals and assimilated into their consciousness. Following Durkheim's ideas, societies and communities are constantly influenced by people who are no longer alive but who have influenced the consciousness of the society or community. He posits that any given society consists of the characteristics of individuals who compose it; however, the whole may be different from the sum of those individuals. Durkheim postulates that there are certain conditions imposed on members to form a group identity, and that these conditions were established long before the current members of society were born. Hence, group identity and consciousness are always greater than individual identity.