Countries of Unrest – Forms of Ritualised Public Disobedience in Armenia: The Velvet Revolution
Countries of Unrest – Forms of Ritualised Public Disobedience in Armenia: The Velvet Revolution

Summary/Abstract: The protests, street movement and the civil society became a strong reality of the contemporary world both in countries with strong democratic system and quasi-democratic ones, both in countries with strong recent protest histories and in ones where revolts are quite rare. This article proposes an unconventional interpretation of the Armenian Velvet Revolution resorting to reading the street movement, its causes and its outcome, as a ritualised undertaking resembling the rite of passage structure. Based on ethnographic interviews, the article brings forth some images from the protest as organised in the three successive stages of van Gennep’s theory, recasting the social function of transformative needs in the Armenian society.

• Details
• Contents