October 14, 2005

Fieldwork Under Fire

By ORIN STARN

Where, exactly, is Armenia?

I have to admit that I couldn't have pointed it out on a map for you until a few months ago.

That changed in a hurry last summer. Almost overnight, it seemed, I found myself on an Austrian Airlines flight into Armenia's capital, Yerevan. A student of mine, Yektan Turkyilmaz, was about to be put on trial there. The secret police had arrested Yektan two months before just as he was leaving Armenia, having finished his anthropology dissertation research