Late Night Conference Abstracting

In June, I was contacted by another researcher doing similar work to mine in Tbilisi about a conference in September. The deadline for conference abstracts was May 20th, but I was told I could send something by the 20th of August. Tomorrow!

I'm exhausted but here is my abstract. The theme of the conference, co-organized by Tbilisi State University and Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany is "Changing Representations of Social Orders."

Tbilisi’s Cultural Heritage as Resource in the Global Era

Hülya Sakarya / Temple University

Georgia is uniquely positioned to advance the idea of the modern global city. Cultural heritage programming in Tbilisi – the reorganization of the Georgian National Museum against the contemporary European and American model, the promotion of Abanotubani as a historic haven, and the maintenance of diverse places of worship – promises Georgia’s compliance with global standards and understandings of civil society practice and inclusion. But what are the prospects for such an orientation in the cultural heritage industries of Tbilisi? What are its political and social implications for the country? This paper will address the interstitial nature of cultural heritage programming in Tbilisi today and the domestic and international role it plays with respect to recent military conflicts. While the culture industries remain an impotant way in which Georgians assert their identity and cultural pride, Georgia’s management of this potent technology is linked to the idea of culture as resource, or as George Yudice states, the uses of culture in the global era (Yudice 2003). Put in this perspective, nationhood is less understood as a yardstick of a community’s authenticity, territoriality, or historicity than its strategic position within the global ecumene.

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I figure that by the date of the conference (end of September) I can make some preliminary observations. There is plenty to observe. Although anthropologically speaking, I have not spoken to enough "average Giorgi's or Nana's on the street" to understand the people's own perception of heritage as it is presented through the technologies and industries of the state.

One of my preliminary observations is of the "peopling" of Georgia through street sculpture like the one shown above. They seem to be creeping into every avenue, square, and bridge in Tbilisi. The one above is from the Ethnographic Museum.

The Stage Behind the Stage

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.