Exorcism of cultural otherness'': social integration and economic survival of the refugees in post-Soviet Armenia

The paper introduces some of negative stereotyping models and prejudices that refugees encounter when resettling from Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) to post-Soviet Armenia. The author has conducted ethnographic fieldwork over approximately five months in 2014 and 2015, seeking contextual understandings of stereotype concepts in the Vardenis district of Armenia populated by two socio-cultural groups of Armenians, that are the local inhabitants and the refugees. The research is based on an analysis of social and cultural dichotomy of those two groups. The fieldwork reveals a relationship structure between newcomers and the local population, resulting in the formation of kinship and social solidarity networks that lie at the basis of the new economy and social structure of the region. A combination of participant observation and in-depth interviews was used to explore the refugee strategies employed to survive in the host society. An ethnographic approach was used to contextualize the everyday experiences of the refugees and made it possible to present detailed descriptions of gender-specific discourses. The biographies, recorded more than two decades after moving to a new territory, not only shed light on the past of those people but also demonstrate the complicated process of their integration into a new society.