Place renaming practices in post-war Karabakh/Artsakh

Abstract

The article touches a “flammable” cultural component in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, explaining the value added to names for places as an effect of modernization, a legacy of the region’s imperial past and as a long-term impact on local human knowledge and humanities. Approaching the ethnographically recorded materials, mapping and renaming practices in the conflict area from a historical anthropological perspective, this author argues for the need for a more layered investigation and further comparative studies of the cases of “confronting symbolism”. The cascading character of such topographical measures as place (re)naming, overrides the current instrumentalist revitalizations as a belated form of Orientalism and gives opportunities for merging the unfairly diverged viewpoints in modern socialcultural anthropology.