The Political Trauma in the National Identity of Contemporary Armenian Diaspora in the USA

This study raises the following problem: despite the fact that, according to sociological studies, many representatives of the Armenian diasporas living in the host territory no longer speak the Armenian language, know little about the culture, traditions and history of Armenia, etc., a number of researchers still characterize them primarily as a Diaspora. On the other hand, we see that despite the diversity of political and sociological research on the Armenian Diaspora, such an important element as political trauma – a collective experience that has become a kind of sum of historical experiences of the people, is not fully studied by researchers. In this regard, we argue that at the moment there is a significant uncertainty about the place of the experience of this political trauma in the national identity of the modern Armenian Diaspora in the United States. The main contribution of this study is that we managed to overcome the misunderstanding of the place of collective experience in the national identity of the representatives of the modern Armenian Diaspora. Now we can safely say that political traumas are factors that demonstrate exclusively emotional involvement in the Armenian people, its culture, etc. We have not identified any element of "historical experience", which on the contrary is an element that forms the desire of American Armenians to assimilate in the living territory and, to some extent, "break the link" with historical roots. The trends that we wrote about at the beginning of our study, showing how modern representatives of the Armenian Diaspora in many ways no longer remember the language, culture, traditions of their country, are a consequence of the desire to provide themselves and their children with the most comfortable and safe living in the host territory.