Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation

Abstract

family photographs into hidden nooks of ancestral homes. Others assemble stones and personal objects. One pilgrim is welcomed into his father’s childhood house, where he and its current Turkish resident, whose family had welcomed the man’s father and sister on prior pilgrimages, together plant a walnut tree. Bertram’s ethnography is nuanced and sensitive to the inherited traumas that linger over each of her interlocutors. Yet at times, awkward attempts to shoehorn their experiences into theoretical frameworks—for instance, a repeated invocation of Mircea Eliade’s juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane—do not always serve her argument well. In one section, Bertram describes at length an interlocutor who states that by bringing family photographs to her “ancestral house-world,” she has carried her family members home (102-111). Bertram abruptly dismisses this interpretation, however, employing theoretical scholarship on the medium of photography to reframe, and even minimize the power of the pilgrim’s experience. Bertram argues instead that in this context, “the photographs actually lose their possibilities of being surrogates for the people they represent” (107). If an interlocutor believes their photographs to be surrogates, however, especially to mitigate inherited traumas of genocide, why should Bertram devalue that personal meaning-making? What makes Bertram’s book so powerful, however, is its ethnographic documentation of a fleeting and important phenomenon for diasporan Armenians. Armen Aroyan no longer leads pilgrimages into Turkey. At the time of his retirement in 2018, the power of his trips had diminished, as had the freedom to safely undertake them. The last generation of survivors living in the Diaspora had passed, and that of their children was fading. In Turkey, the few, scattered “Hidden Armenians” who spent their twilight years meeting with Aroyan’s pilgrims were gone. And while some of their descendants seemed willing to broach the subject of their obscured Armenian ancestries, and a precious few were eager to embrace it, more had bowed to changing political realities within Turkey which challenged the freedom and well-being of ethnic and religious minorities. Published at a time when the power and meaning of such pilgrimages has changed, A House in the Homeland speaks to a pressing concern for many Armenians: How to sustain memory of an event that is difficult to trace on its landscape, and which is officially denied by its perpetrator. Bertram has shown that the gap between historical fact and material evidence can be spanned by memorialization and pilgrimage, by witness and dialogue, and for her interlocutors, by keeping their ancestors alive through their family memory-stories.