I am a writer and observer as well as a student who is conducting her dissertation research in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia. The next seven months promise a wealth of information as I troll the collections of Tbilisi's museums, visit exhibits and festivals, patronize thousands of years old sulphur baths, and with growing expertise talk to Georgians in their bafflingly complex Kartvelian language. Although this work contributes to the study of the Caucasus as a world area, it is also very much about the impact of the West on how we perceive the nation. It is about those human constituents that make up the modern nation-state, who deserve to lay claim to the nation as their “own” and whom the nation itself must determine as its own.
Places like Georgia are directly linked to West through their acceptance of aid, but they are also impacted through the symbolic forces of style, film, television, and marketing. My goal is to understand how in this current atmosphere the Georgian heritage industry is at a crossroads, caught between the desire to authenticate the Georgian idea of itself as a continuous and ancient society and the Western liberal idea of the modern democracy. This area of the world is a natural laboratory, an exciting place to be and one of the most culturally pluralistic locations in the world, but foremost it is an excellent opportunity to encourage the asking of questions, the fountainhead of greater wisdom (see my footnote below on my academic and funding status).
Like many an anthropology student, I am enamored with difference. I want differences to persist and I think the world is a better world for it. Just as we may mourn the passing of a species of animal or organism, we may mourn the loss to a community when its mother tongue is no longer spoken. This was how the last Ubykh speaker was mourned in 1992. But I also acknowledge critical late 19th and 20th c. philosophical insights that demand we recognize reality as a constructed thing. As the post-struturalist thinker Homi Bhabha once said, “Nations, like narrative, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizon in the mind’s eye” (Bhabha 1990).
I belong to the visual ilk of the cultural branch of anthropology. We take a lot of pictures, look at other societies' aesthetic and expressive products, and use these tools to present stories and bridge gaps between ourselves and the people we observe. I often use pictures in the classroom as a literal and figurative demonstration of the limits of pictorial representation. Pictures, like Bhabha’s definition of the nation, convey the ambiguity of any attempt to construct or preserve reality. Nonetheless, writing and elucidating upon these ambiguities is very productive, especially in such controversial social settings as the Caucasus, and I have written a short essay on this subject in a professional newsletter (Sakarya 2008). For further reading, the Society for Cultural Anthropology provides interesting essays, links, and teaching materials on the Caucasus, visual anthropology and many other topics.
I inaugurate this blog by submitting a pair of images meant to convey the rapid changes underway in Georgia. The first picture, the "before" photo, conveys the remoteness of the Soviet past for the Western observer, its fixed monumentality and militant associations as soldiers practice formation in front of this Andropov-era sculpture (this photo was in fact taken in 1996, seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union but visually the association is still intact). The second picture nine years later conveys a 21st century spirit of reform and rebuilding. Together the images show the profound effects of collapse and the ensuing state of uncertainty and anticipation.
* I am funded by the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS and research for this blog was supported in part by the program it administers - the Title VIII Combined Research and Language Training Program, which is funded by the U.S. State Department, Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union. The opinions expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily express the views of either the U.S. Department of State or American Councils.
References Cited
Bhaba, Homi (1990). Nation and Narration. Routledge and Kegan.
Sakarya, Hulya (2008). “Research in a Politically Changing Caucasus”, Anthropology News, Society for Visual Anthropology Column, April 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment