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Jehovah’s Witnesses in Post-Soviet Armenia
Get PDFIn my doctoral research, I focus on the formation and development of the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in post-Soviet Armenia. The main research question has two parts. 1) What accounts for changing state policies towards JWs in post-Soviet Armenian and for particular public intolerance towards JWs compared to other religious minorities? 2) What personal, social, institutional, cultural, and contingency factors affected one’s decision to become a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ community or to leave it? I answer these questions based on the materials collected during my intermittent field work in Armenia from 2016 until 2022 in the Russian, Armenian, and English congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Yerevan as well as other towns in Armenia. The data include hundreds of interviews with Jehovah’s Witnesses, state officials, journalists, anti-Jehovah’s Witnesses activists, non- Jehovah’s Witness Armenians, and members of the Armenian Apostolic Church. I also draw on statistical information, media, and reports generated by international NGOs and governmental organizations about post-Soviet Armenia.As one of the most controversial and contentious religious groups of the last hundred years, Jehovah’s Witnesses have been persecuted in democratic Christian-majority countries and in totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Academic literature identifies the Armenian Church as the main driver of religious antagonism in post-Soviet Armenia (Kharatyan 2007; Lusyan 2011; Namoradze 2008), while the Armenian state is portrayed as a protector of the Armenian Church that does not have its own agenda in the religious field. Yet, a closer examination reveals that Armenian political elites chose to support the Armenian Church only when it corresponded to their political and ideological interests. My analysis strongly suggests that while the dominant national Church plays a significant role in shaping religious freedom in Armenia, it is a directed rather than a directing power.
Throughout the post-Soviet period, the policies of the Armenian state towards Jehovah’s Witnesses have been inconsistent. In the media and everyday discourse, Jehovah’s Witnesses were described as the traitors of the Motherland seeking to destroy the Armenian nation. Because of their conspicuous public proselytism, Jehovah’s Witnesses were singled out as the most “harmful” non-traditional religious group in Armenia. The animosity towards Jehovah’s Witnesses quickly turned into a self-perpetuating cycle that required little external support. Individual state officials used the power of their office to push back against what they perceived as a threat to the country and nation. The overall liberalization of religious policies in Armenia has been contingent upon Armenia’s relationship with the European Union.
There are multiple incentives for people in Armenia to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ community, such as a relatively egalitarian distribution of religious power at the level of the congregation, an alternative ideological message, a close-knit community, a clear guide for those who seek moral improvement, and moral empowerment for women to counter patriarchy and low social status. The most significant factor has been that of deprivation. Widely understood as one’s insufficient embeddedness or involvement in society, deprivation causes low social status and limits economic opportunities, as well as entails a lack of respect and social interaction. The fluctuation in the intensity of deprivation serves as a good explanation for the dynamic of the growth in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ community in post-Soviet Armenia
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"How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?": A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles
Get PDFThis dissertation introduces Armenian, specifically Eastern Armenian in the Los Angeles context, into the landscape of heritage languages in the United States. Given the lack of knowledge about Armenian as a heritage language, both in the fields of Heritage Language Research and Armenian Studies, this study offers the first comprehensive examination of Armenian heritage language speakers in a variety of capacities. Each chapter presents a dimension of its own, highlighting particular qualities of this group of speakers while expanding knowledge about heritage languages and speakers in general. The study begins by assessing the overall landscape of Armenian and Armenians in Los Angeles, including an evaluation of the linguistic presence and use of the language, as well as signs of loss. The research then examines the incomplete acquisition process among heritage speakers by delineating linguistic features in the categories of phonology, morphology, register, and borrowings from English. Additionally, patterns of language use are investigated with the proposal of multiple domains of linguistic compartmentalization. Moreover, this study explores the persistent anxiety connected with using the heritage language and identifies the damaging cycle it generates. Finally, this research considers inconsistent attitudes and beliefs concerning the heritage language with an analysis of the impact of competing majority and minority language ideologies. The primary source of data for this dissertation stems from a series of in-depth audio-recorded interviews with college-age heritage language learners of Eastern Armenian, consisting of questions related to background, education, use of, and attitude to the heritage language. The entire corpus of interviews was transcribed and analyzed using qualitative research conventions and methods
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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