Ottoman History Podcast - Portraits of Unbelonging

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

with Zeynep Gürsel | The Ottoman archives contain just over a hundred photographs that look like old family portraits, but they were created for an entirely different purpose. They document the renunciation of Ottoman nationality, "terk-i tabiiyet," by Armenian emigrants bound for the US and elsewhere. As our guest Zeynep Devrim Gürsel explains, these photographs were "anticipatory arrest warrants for a crime yet to be committed"--the crime of returning to the Ottoman Empire. Gürsel's research goes far beyond the story of the small number of photographs that remain as she has documented over four thousand individuals who went through the process of "terk-i tabiiyet." In this Ottoman History Podcast-AnthroPod collaboration, we talk to Gürsel about her research project on the production, circulation and afterlives of these photographs titled "Portraits of Unbelonging." It is a double-sided history that explores not only the context of Armenian migration and policing during the late Ottoman period but also the experiences of those pictured and their descendants following their departure from the Ottoman Empire. (Recorded August 2019) This episode is dedicated to the memory of Mary Lou Savage (née Khantamour). « Click for More »

There's one more. This is really cool. Yes. I like your system. Zeynep Grusel is a visual anthropologist at Rutgers University. In August 2019, we met in Istanbul to discuss her ongoing research project. In 2019, we met in Istanbul to discuss her ongoing research project. She arrived with a small Tupperware container. In it are dozens of photographs with descriptions on the back.

I'm very much a tactile thinker. I cannot just think conceptually. I always print out the images that I'm working on. I often carry them on my person for years. I look at them constantly. I touch them constantly. I think about every hole and crease and where the glue was put on and how and all of

these things really about their production. I mean, I take the materiality of the image extremely seriously. The images at first glance are simple family portraits. The people in them are Armenians from the Ottoman Empire. The originals are held at the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul. Gürsel has made prints of the collection from digitized copies. Her aim is to learn everything she can about the photographs and what happened to the people in them. The photograph we're looking at is of a family of four. Bogos Şamşoy Shamshoğlu and his wife Margarit and their two sons Zakar and Harut. While some of the stories remain elusive, Gürsel has been able to learn something about

many of the people in the photographs. Their histories are invariably global, involving immigrant journeys to the United States and other countries. That's because these photographs were taken on the eve of emigration from the Ottoman Empire. And they're not ordinary family portraits. They're what Grusel dubs portraits of unbelonging. Her work centers on these turn-of-the-20th-century photographs from the Ottoman Empire and reconstructs the stories of what happened to the people in them after the shutter closed.

In this special Anthropod and Ottoman History podcast collaboration, we'll learn more about Gersel's unique approach to visual anthropology, and through these portraits of unbelonging, understand the lives of Ottoman Armenian migrants during the empire's last decades. I'm Chris Grayton. I'm Beth Dradarian. and through these portraits of unbelonging, understand the lives of Ottoman Armenian migrants during the empire's last decades. I'm Chris Grayton. I'm Beth Dradarian. Stay tuned.

Whether I'm looking at a medical portrait or images of criminals or pictures of students or as I'll talk to you about now, pictures of soon-to-be Armenian immigrants, what's critical to me is asking under what conditions are individuals brought into photographic visibility? Both to what ends are they brought into photographic visibility and in what context? On our website, you can find samples of the images we'll be talking about. The portraits themselves are pretty ordinary. You might find ones just like them in your own family photo album, but if you turn them over, you'll get an entirely different story. These

pictures were not made for the family photo album. They were created for the state archive. They look like family portraits. They look like standard late 19th century, early 20th century family portraits or family photos. And yet they were taken for purposes of the state, we believe paid for by the state. Ottoman documents say that these individuals were to be photographed so that they could be recognized in the event that they returned. So in that sense, we can think of them as anticipatory arrest warrants. They are like criminal mugshots for a crime that has yet to be committed, which is returning. During the late 19th century, states began keeping photographs of their subjects for all sorts of purposes.

The Ottoman Empire wasn't that special. But as historical artifacts, these particular photographs are utterly unique. This is probably one of the very first examples, if not the first example, of a state using photography to police borders. to police borders. But specifically, what's interesting in this case is that it's not a state photographing incoming strangers. So it's not photographs of immigrants. The Ottoman state photographed Ottoman Armenians who declared that they wanted to emigrate. And the photograph was actually the

first step in the process. So what's interesting is a state photographing its own subjects at the very moment that they are becoming non-subjects. That's why the project is called Portraits of Unbelonging, is because I'm interested in these photographs as documents of exclusion. The unbelonging of Ottoman Armenians was tied to the political transformation of the Ottoman Empire under Abdulhamid II during the late 19th century. After the Rum or Greek Orthodox community, Armenians comprised the largest non-Muslim group in the empire at the time.

In many cases, their communities had been established in Anatolia well before the rise of the Ottomans. Armenian traders and tradesmen could be found in most Ottoman cities, and villages and towns with predominantly Armenian populations existed all across the the Ottomans. Armenian traders and tradesmen could be found in most Ottoman cities. And villages and towns with predominantly Armenian populations existed all across the eastern provinces of the empire. From the 1890s onward, roughly 100,000 of these Ottoman Armenians left for the Americas. In the US, they settled in Massachusetts, New York, California, and many other places. They formed enclaves that would later welcome waves of Armenian immigrants.

Survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and their descendants in the Arab world who lived in Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Beirut. Later migrants came from the once Soviet Republic of Armenia and Iran. They are all part of a broader Armenian diaspora that is many centuries old. Mercantile connections and work opportunities had long fueled migration within the Armenian diaspora, but during the 1890s, the numbers began to soar for political reasons. Under the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, numerous violent incidents targeted Armenians and other Christians. They're often referred to collectively as the Hamidian

Massacres. The dynamics of the massacres in provinces like Diyarbakir, Van, Erzurum, and Mamura-Tel Aziz varied from place to place. In some instances, irregular cavalry belonging to the Kurdish leaders of these regions, armed by the state to secure the eastern borderlands, played a role. In other cases, the violence seemed to take the shape of a pogrom, with Muslims from nearby towns and villages attacking neighboring Christian populations. Such events were unprecedented in these regions of the Ottoman Empire. regions of the Ottoman Empire. The wave of violence largely passed by the end of the 1890s, but many Armenians remember these massacres as a prelude to the genocide that would come two decades later, because

it was the first time that Ottoman Armenians endured violence on a mass scale, based solely on the fact that they were Armenian. on a mass scale, based solely on the fact that they were Armenian. Certainly the 1890s violence against Armenians caused an increase in the number migrating. The Hamidian massacres were the principal reason for the rise in Ottoman-Armenian emigration. Many people left because they feared for their lives. But the Ottoman government also grew fearful of its large Armenian population. Armenian revolutionary parties with transnational networks had established a presence in Anatolia and sought to draw support in areas where Armenians predominated. Many of the uprisings that

occurred resembled a much older pattern of peasant rebellion centered on a single village or town, and often under the threat of massacre. But the violence also reached the capital of Istanbul, where the Armenian Revolutionary Federation occupied the Ottoman Bank in 1896. For most Armenians of the provinces, the specter of violence only added to the incentive to immigrate. But at first, immigration itself presented a major risk. In 1888, there's an explicit ban of migration on the part of Armenians. Even before then, if you want to get a passport,

you have to get permission from the Sultan. But in 1888, there's an explicit ban saying, other than for those traveling for commercial purposes or business purposes, there will be a ban. They will not be given passports. What's interesting and where sort of I've really started my research is 1896, there is an amendment to the law that's published in the official newspaper that says

Armenians who want to leave may do so on the condition that they never return to the empire and they renounce their nationality. And the first step in the process is having your photograph taken. And can you say in Ottoman Turkish the name of that unique process of renouncing the nationality? Sure. the name of that unique process of renouncing the nationality? Sure. So this process is called Tarki Tabiet, and Tabiet is the word often translated as nationality, but it implies within a taba, its subject. So Tabiet is really to be under the sovereignty of.

So Tarki Tabiet, abandonment or renunciation of nationality, is the name of this process of renouncing Ottoman nationality. Armenians who chose to permanently emigrate were compelled to renounce their Ottoman nationality. The portrait's gursal studies are the main document attesting to that event, the unbelonging. So, here is an example from Sivas's Chichikli neighborhood, and you can see the individuals are actually numbered on the photograph, and on the back you see that the numbers identify each one of them. So we not only know who the family is, but we actually know each person and it'll say you know Armenian Agbabolu Bucakci Agapik son of Nishan born in 1856-57 from Sivasic Cicekli neighborhood. 2. his son Mugurduj. 3. his son Armenak and then we get the birth year of all of them. His daughter Artanush, right? Number five, above-mentioned Mugurdic's wife

Vartanush, and the standard photographs of the above-mentioned Agapik's photograph taken with four members of his family in order to renounce Ottoman nationality and emigrate to America, never to return to the Ottoman Empire. For me, these photographs are extremely... I mean, initially when I saw them, I couldn't stop thinking about them. I was not looking for them. I was working on something else entirely. I saw them, and I couldn't stop thinking about them.

I literally, in the summer of 2014, I would wake up at night thinking about these photographs. Not only was I captivated by the individuals in the photographs, but I also think, as somebody who had been working on photography already for almost 20 years at that time, there's this statement that John Tagg makes that's always been very powerful for me. I'm gonna paraphrase the phrase. So John Tagg's statement is, photographs are not merely evidence of history, they are themselves historical. And nothing made me understand that statement as these portraits, in the sense that at the very moment that this portrait is taken, these individuals are beginning a process of renouncing their nationality.

What's captured here is not just a portrait of an individual, but a very specific portrait of a relationship between a state and the subjects in the photographs. It is a portrait of unbelonging in the sense that it is a portrait of the moment of the changing of the relationship between the state and these subjects. What I'm doing with these photographs is telling a double-sided history. So if one side of this story, let's say the backside of the photograph in Ottoman, faces the Ottoman past, the front of the photograph, the picture of somebody who has just renounced their Ottoman citizenship, Ottoman nationality, the picture of somebody who has just renounced their Ottoman citizenship, Ottoman nationality, the picture of somebody who has renounced their Ottoman nationality

and is about to go to the United States is really an American migration story. It's the history of U.S. immigration. The portraits were created for what the Ottoman government understood as security purposes. Yet in the present context, they take on another meaning. So they're like mugshots, but they're not of criminals. These people have not committed a crime. They are like family portraits, except they're state documents taken by the state, paid for by the state. What all of them are is kinship documents.

for by the state. What all of them are is kinship documents. So I know exactly who is married to whom, whose child is whose, what the birth order is of the children. I sort of find it ironic that here I am a cultural anthropologist and I'm having to go back to sort of classic anthropology texts on kinship because I really need to think about these as kinship documents. Grusso is committed to sharing these photographs with relatives and descendants of those pictured. Her project involves combining visual ethnography with oral histories. And she begins her search for descendants using the information recorded by Ottoman police on the reverse of the images. for descendants using the information recorded by Ottoman police on the reverse of the images.

This amalgam of methods is unique and it diverges from some standard ethnographic modalities. While anthropologists often anonymize their sources and subjects, it is the real people and their family histories that Gürsel is most concerned with here. She uses their real names and has developed close relationships with these families. I didn't feel like I could ethically work on these photographs without at least attempting to get these into the hands of somebody who knew the person in the photograph. Even the babies in the photographs have now passed away. It's almost 120 years later. But some of them have children in their 70s, 80s, and mostly

90s who are still alive. And so I decided that I would sort of reverse the normal order of a research project. And the first thing I've been trying to do is I've spent the last two years looking for the descendants of the people in the photographs, reaching out to them, asking if I could visit them and bring them a copy of this photograph that I found in the Ottoman State Archive, asking if I could film the moment of encounter with this photograph and with what I know about the photograph that I'm able to share with them. It's been a thrilling experience. I started with 108 photographs. Thanks to the help of my wonderful students at Macalester College, we were able to find

migration information for 53 of the families and locate living descendants for 36 families. I've met with 11. And so I've had 11 different opportunities to take a copy of this Ottoman state document and get their reaction to the photograph. The task of getting the photos to the people who might value them most is as pressing as it is challenging. Because even the children of the children in these photographs are now in their 80s or 90s. Between the time of Gerstle's interview

and the release of this podcast, another descendant she worked with has passed away. One of the portraits that Gerstle was eager to show me belongs to the Shamshoyan family. We located the Shamshoyan family. We located the Shemshoyan family. As I said, they settled in Fresno. On a family tree posted by a family member online, they shared this photograph taken in Central Falls, Rhode Island, in front of the boarding house that they were all living in shortly after they arrived.

They shared two photographs. In this photograph, you see Bogos Shamshoyan with his wife Marguerite and the two boys Zakar and Harut. And you also see Marguerite's father Bog Bogos Sahagian, and his other daughter, Mariam. By following the family member who had posted it, I found out that that family member had gotten the photograph from a gentleman named Alan Uzunian. I contacted Alan Uzunian, who has been working on Armenian genealogy for I think more than four decades now and he is not only incredibly knowledgeable about all things Armenian migration related he also happens to be Maryam Sahagian's grandson. He told me that Bogos Sahagian left for the United States shortly after Maryam was born because his wife died in childbirth.

Eighteen years later, he sent money for Marguerite and Maryam, two sisters, to come to the United States in 1908. Here is a photograph of Bogosahagian with his two daughters, Margaret and Mariam. Looking at this photograph, I realized I had seen this young woman before I knew Mariam's face, because in fact we also have Mariam's Tarky Tabiat photograph. We also have the photograph of Mariam taken before she left for the United States. The two photographs are taken on the same day, and because of the biographical information on the back, you can see that all of the details match. What happened to these people after they came to the United States? So they stayed in the East Coast for some time, but eventually moved to Fresno, settled in Fresno. They had a vineyard in Fresno, which was something that they knew from back in their time in Montes de Aziz.

What I wanted to tell you is when we looked at the passenger ship manifest, when we looked at the passenger ship manifest, we were also able, and through interviews with Alan Uzunian, we were able to identify these two other cousins, another Mariam and Anna, who also traveled with their aunt Marguerite and her family. And so it was only because we found the living descendant today that we were able to realize all four of these photographs together are a family, are one family. And of course this opens up all kinds of questions. Why are the single unmarried women photographed individually? Whereas there are many examples where we have certainly married women

photographed with their families, but also older widowed, photographed with their families, but unmarried, single women are photographed individually. One of the things about this project that makes it intriguing for me is that if you look at migration history, a lot of it is male-dominated. Oftentimes, and this is also true in the case of Armenian migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States, the large number of migrants were single men or young men going for work, usually labor migration, going for some time to come back or to send remittances. to come back or to send remittances. It's very hard to find women in migration history because even looking for their descendants is difficult because when they get married their name changes etc. What these photographs have enabled me

to do is sort of render visible the women and children in this history of Ottoman Armenian migration. The photographs reveal much about how kinship and kinship relations were transformed by the legal and social context of immigration. This is a photograph that had me thinking a lot about photographs not just making and unmaking nationals, but also making and unmaking families. So here is the Asarolu or Asaryan family from Sivas, and so we have Dikran Asaryan, his wife, and three, sorry, four of their children. But we also have number seven, the aforementioned Dikran's stepson Surin, son of deceased Avadis, born in 1901-1902.

We translated this as stepson, but actually it's Manevi Evlat. So we know that his father Avadis died, and it appears that Dikran Asaryan has sort of taken this child under his wing, and the fact that he is included in the family's Takitabiyet photograph would have meant that he can travel with this family. And so he has now been made into a part of the Asaryan family, even though we're not talking about adoption in a legal sense. The Asarian family is very interesting to me and has me thinking about how all of these photographs are about making and unmaking nationals, homelands, citizenship, but also photographs that make families.

photographs that make families. As a visual anthropologist, Gersel is also deeply concerned with the photographs themselves. A previous research project studied what turned out to be a doctored medical photograph from the late Ottoman Empire. The portraits, some taken in studios

but most carried out by police photographers, contain many mysteries. Here is the Takitabiyat photograph of Simon Simonian and his family. Simon Simonian, and the photograph gives you hints to this. Simon Simonian was a wealthy businessman living in Samsun. He was married to a Greek woman and had eight children. And the photograph includes his wife, his mother-in-law, and all eight of his children. One of the reasons this photograph is very interesting to me is because there's a mystery in it that I haven't been able to solve,

and so I'm hoping that maybe somebody who's listening to this podcast will be able to come up with something I haven't thought of yet. Can you guess what I'm going to point at? Exactly. What's going on with the white sheet in the background? It does appear like there is someone back there underneath that sheet and if you look at the photograph enlarged it looks like there is a knee just behind one of the daughter's shoulders. And in fact, if you look very closely, it appears that the same fabric was

used to sew whatever they're wearing as the mother-in-law's skirt. It would appear that this is a child. But why would you include this person in the photograph in the first place? So you think this is a child but why would you include this person in the photograph in the first place so you think this is a sheet in the original picture and not like they did some cheap kind of touch-up somehow to definitely not a touch-up because if you look down here if you look at the folds yeah these are actual folds in a drape there does appear to be something strange going on here. This is so

geometrical. I know. It's not photoshopped. The foxing on the curtain or the drape, whatever has been placed over the person or whatever it is being hidden is similar to that on the wallpaper over here. So it's not something, it appears to be something that was there when the photograph was taken. This is a mystery I have not been able to solve. What I was able to do is meet with not one, but two children of the children in this photograph. Sorry, I'm going to give you one second. I want to pull up the card for you. I was just showing it yesterday. So this is the downside of the method. Yes, the method needs its madness, obviously. Here we go. Make sure you look at every single photograph every time. No,

that's part of the point of having the point of having the pile but so i had uh the great pleasure of meeting epi's son walter who's in his 80s and lives near fresno today. And I heard the history of the family from him. And I also traveled up to Bellingham, Washington, and met with Maria Simonian's daughter, Marion Savage, who is a very young 90-something, full of life, and both of them told me about this family that moved to Fresno, where Simon Simonian had a store in front of which he would often take naps or play tableau. And they told me lots of things about the family but both of them emphasized that the family had never talked about why they decided to emigrate or neither one remembered a conversation about that was very

exciting was the moment when I when I go and I meet with a family I asked if they would be willing to share their family photo albums so that I can look at these Takitabiyet photographs against the background of the family's own family portraits proper. And so Marion Savage a few years ago, meaning about 20 years ago, prepared these photo albums, one for each of her three daughters, each titled From Whence You Came. And the very first photograph in the album is a photograph of the family in front of their mansion in Somsum. And every single individual we see in the Renunciation of Nationality photograph,

we see here in front of their home in Samsun. And from Marian's album I was able to see that here the Simonian family was obviously wealthy and liked being photographed. I mean this was a photograph this was a family very well versed in photography. They had their photographs taken often. I was able to encounter Simon Simonian, his wife, and their children at many different stages in their life. And then I saw this photograph. Here is a photograph that Marian Savage has in her possession. It's larger than the Takitabiyet photograph that I found in the Ottoman State Archives, but the photographs appear extremely similar. In fact, you might be fooled into thinking they're the same

photograph. Many of the individuals sitting in the photograph are wearing the same clothes. And yet, if you look very closely, some of the girls have their hair up in one but not in the other. And most importantly, Socrates, Simonian, the little boy in the front, is wearing white shoes in one photograph, black shoes in another photograph, has a white ribbon in one and not a white ribbon in the other, and most tellingly seems to have had a haircut sometime in between the two photographs. Or perhaps he had the haircut first and then his hair grew.

So these are definitely not two photographs taken on the same day, but they are taken in the same space, I would imagine, by the same photographer. I would imagine, again, it's a Dill Dill Young photograph. And clearly this is a photographer with whom they had a long relationship because other family portraits are taken in front of the same background. other family portraits are taken in front of the same background. And yet the mystery remains now for the family as well as for me what is underneath that sheet. Each photograph in Grussell's Portraits of Unbelonging tells the story of a family, but they are pieces of a much larger history.

Maybe this is a good time to say that this is not just a story of 108 photographs or about 400 people. I have documentation and now lists of names of at least 4,000 people who went through the Takhtabiyat process, 4,000 people whose photographs were taken. So it's still a smaller story within the large story of Ottoman Armenian migration to the United States. But why I think it's very important is it forces us to think about in 1896 when this avenue opens for some people to migrate legally on the condition that they renounce their nationality and never return to the Ottoman Empire.

It doesn't actually stem the flow of people who are leaving illegally, right? Firati. These people emigrate, hijret, itmek. It makes you ask the question, who travels under what circumstances? And it makes sense, perhaps, that a lot of women and children travel legally because then they're not navigating smuggler networks or, I know, clandestine modes of crossing borders. They have paperwork that allows them, grants them mobility, but under this very clear, on their passport, it's stamped, they will never return to the Ottoman Empire, never to return to the Ottoman Empire. And so their mobility comes with this anticipated future not to be able to return.

Our listeners can look forward to more from Zeynep Gursul and the Portraits of Unbelonging project in the future. Visit our website to learn more. And additional thanks to OHP's Editor-in-Chief, Sam Dolby, for helping with this script. And finally, thanks to you, the listeners of the Ottoman History Podcast and Anthropod, for joining in this collaboration. I'm Beth Tredarian. I'm Chris Greighton. That's all for this episode. Join us next time. Thank you.