The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: The Politics of Minority

Re: The Politics of Minority
Posted by Jeffrey (Guest) - Sunday, June 28 2009, 20:59:07 (CEST)
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In pursuit of understanding the mechanisms of Chaldean identification, this study
begins by interrogating a set of suppositions. It first tests the assertion that modern and ancient Chaldeans are related. The historical continuity between ancient and modern Chaldeans is frequently cited by various Chaldean and non-Chaldean sources, yet it
remains disputable among other Chaldeans. What power mechanisms sanction the
posited ancient-new continuity in modern Chaldean discourses? What factors drive other
segments of Chaldeans (and Assyrians) to dispute this continuity and provide alternative
versions of continuity that are equally disputable? As the dissertation attends to the
ancient-new question, the issue of whether or not the modern Chaldeans and Assyrians
are historically the same people necessarily comes forth. This is so because the cultures
and languages of the ancient Chaldeans and Assyrians are to some extent conflated, and
because the languages and religious cultures of their modern counterparts also exhibit
similarities. For this reason, the discussion interrogates the assertion that modern
Chaldeans and Assyrians are historically, racially, linguistically and ethnically one
people, and that they could be traced to the same religious line whose followers once
comprised the Christians of the Church of the East (also known at some historical
junctures as the Nestorian Church, and as the Church of St. Thomas).
In the course of examining the history of the Church of the East, it becomes
evident that the modern revival of the appellations “Chaldean” and “Assyrian” was due to
a set of socio-religious encounters with the West that took place in recent history, mainly
during the nineteenth-century. Consequently, the dissertation turns to the scenes of
Western missionary and archeological enterprises in nineteenth-century Mesopotamia to
examine the extent to which they have prompted a certain collective identity discourse
among the modern Chaldeans whereby notions of firstness, continuity and lastness came
to animate their posited link with Chaldean antiquity.

... more available at http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61663/1/yhanoosh_1.pdf



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