Stational liturgy and the minority right to the city

Abstract

Armenian Apostolic Christians in Istanbul implicitly assert their “right to the city” through the liturgical itinerary that moves around the megalopolis of Istanbul. Though the right to the city has been taken up in a plethora of ways, its applicability to religion and religious practices is underexplored. While many Armenians in the Republic of Turkey explicitly take up the language of rights, the urban liturgical movements described in this article do not sit easily with either ideas of universal human rights or the minority rights framework operative in the Republic of Turkey. The concept of the right to the city, which already sits at the limits of conventional notions of rights, helps articulate how these religious practices claim an urban minority presence. By considering Armenian Christian liturgical practice in Istanbul simultaneously as “stational liturgy” and as a claim to the “right to the city,” this article offers an ethnographic account of urban minority presence-making that encounters the legal strictures of rights discourse without being fully enmeshed in them. In so doing, the article uses the ethnography to make a broader argument about the limits of rights discourse to account fully for forms of presence-making that are grounded in minority traditions.