Civilization Machines: Value and Recognition on the Armenian Highland from the Bronze Age to Today

This article provides a summary of the Dalrymple Lectures delivered November 18–21, 2019. It examines the troubled, and troubling, idea of ‘civilization’, charting a path toward rehabilitation not as a descriptive category but as an analytic concept. Returning to the term's 18th century origins, civilization here describes neither a state of being nor a set of personal qualities but an apparatus, a machine that generates recognition by setting the material terms for who is like and who is Other. It does so through the generation of at least three forms of value – metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical. By retheorizing civilization as a means instead of an ends, as an apparatus that generates the values at the heart of large-scale publics instead of an exclusionary monumental aesthetic, new analytic terrain is opened for a discredited term. The operation of civilization machines is interrogated through studies situated in the South Caucasus and Armenian Highland that extend from the Early Bronze Age to the present.