Circassian memory
Working on materials for lectures on collective memory and historical politics, an idea came to mind.
Thanks to the works of Jan Assmann, we know that oral real memory (albeit in a multitude of its subjective variants) is available for three generations, or more precisely for one person’s memory within 80–100 years. After that, it turns into history — an artificial, often politicized, collection of facts extracted from surviving records and academic interpretations, gathered to serve the immediate tasks of the present.
Following this logic, in order to understand the actual social collapse of the Circassian ethnos against the background of the events of the 1860s, its Western subethnic groups, we need to collect the maximum number of memories of its representatives, both in the Russian Empire\USSR and in the numerous diaspora, from about 1850 to 1930–50. That is, witnesses must have been at least 10 years old at the time of the social catastrophe.
Collecting such testimonies is relatively easy, as many have survived and are scattered across various publications, ethnographic records, and archival documents.
But here another problem arises. Due to the lack of mass literacy in the Circassian ethos until the 1930s, we can only rely on the rare memoirs of the elite. Otherwise, popular memory appears before us distorted through the filters of other describers, as a silent subaltern, whose voice is replaced by the oppressor.
Any such text, narrated by officials, researchers, and writers, regardless of their origin, will be distorted by subjective perception. Firstly, it is the perception of a colonial official interpreting the narrator’s text from the perspective of a “naive savage, who has gained or is gaining civilization from him”. Secondly, it is the perception of an orientalist for whom the Caucasus is part of Asia, the imaginary stereotypical “East”, as Edward Said understood the term.
And this is regardless of whether the official or writer is Russian or an English traveler — their discourse is roughly similar.
As for the Soviet period, we are confronted with the strong influence of ideology, which seems to have given the oppressed freedom of speech but put it within the strict framework of ideology — first class-based, and then also anti-religious.
Therefore, when collecting and publishing such texts, they should not remain without comments that require clarification of the influence of time and reasons for their recording, the subject and object of the recording, the content of distortions inherent in the text due to its writing by an external actor.
In a way, this is a process of decolonizing memory, which is already actively underway in Latin America. Oral memory there is revealed within texts that colonizers used to describe local peoples. They are interpreted, broken down into meanings, and thus the subjective view of the author is separated from the real oral memory that recorded the worldview of the people being described.
This is a large and interesting work that should be started today, as the rapid loss of the Circassian language and its cultural component will inevitably lead to a total loss of identity within 1–2 generations.
Moreover, although this process is simple, it is lengthy. It is built solely on a voluntary basis, as we will not see others today.
Circassian solidarity, similar to Armenian or Jewish, is now a myth; I cannot even imagine organizations that could organizationally and materially support such projects. The same applies to the academic environment, regardless of the country and institutions. In most cases, modern science is terribly bureaucratized and politicized, primarily focusing on applied tasks, and the preservation of individual languages and cultures does not fit well into them.
So, the salvation of the drowning is the business of the drowning themselves. I will try to start in the next month to set an example. I hope others will follow, and we will be able to collect a fund of memory texts of the Circassian people, which will allow us to establish a living connection between the lost worldview and bring cultural memory out of oblivion, often replaced by distorted fantasies of the past.
Know Russian language? Read more:
on Telegram — https://t.me/ethno_notes ;
or Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/shtybin_v/
