
Armenian Identity In a Changing World
Levon Abrahamian
History
We start with the path that defines the four types of genealogical national trees or models of national-identity formation correlating with the Russian, Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani approaches to history and identity. The second and the third paths discuss the strategies of naming and renaming as a kind of “semiotic nationalism” both in medieval and modern times. The fourth path observes a wide spectrum of language nationalism – from language policies to the “alphabet identity” and cult of translation and books in the present-day Armenia. The focus of the fifth, the musical, path is the r‘abiz musical style, which has grown into a characteristic of social stratification and into an identity factor.