Narratives of Translocation, Dislocation and Location: Armenian Youth Cultural Identities in Southern Russia

The findings presented here are based on ethnographic research and are concerned with subjective definitions of ethnic belonging of young Armenians in Krasnodar krai. It is demonstrated that Armenian ethnic identifications are not ‘fixed’ but rather entwined within a complex web of diverse cultural attachments, involving many ‘routes’ of translocation, dislocation and location. It was found that most of the research participants saw themselves as Armenian while drawing occasionally on cosmopolitanism as an identity resource. This enabled them to construct a sense of belonging both in terms of ethnicity and of multicultural location.