Books by Nutsa Batiashvili
This book is about a divided nation and polarized nationhood. Its principal purpose is to examine... more This book is about a divided nation and polarized nationhood. Its principal purpose is to examine division and polarization as forms of imagining that are configured within culture and framed by history. This is what bivocality signifies—two distinct discursive voices through which nationhood is articulated; voices that are nonetheless grounded in a culturally common symbolic field. The volume offers an ethnographically centered analysis of the ways in which Georgians make use of these voices in critical discourses of nationhood. By illuminating the cultural semantics behind these discourses, Nutsa Batiashvili offers a new constellation of conceptual terms for understanding modern forms of nationalism and nation-building in the marginal or liminal landscapes between the Orient and the Occident.
Routledge, 2019
In this edited volume, an assessment of Orthodox religion “in its own right” (Stoeckl 2016: 132) ... more In this edited volume, an assessment of Orthodox religion “in its own right” (Stoeckl 2016: 132) is demanded that, first, pays attention to different factions inside Eastern Orthodox religious communities and, second, addresses the agency of Orthodox communities in a more detailed perspective. In so doing, we have attempted to find new approaches for interpreting the interplay between Orthodox religion, politics and secularisation in contemporary Eastern Europe any beyond. For this the concept of ‘entangled authorities’ has been developed that draws attention to the fact that too many different ideas have been put into one single concept. On the one hand, there has been a tendency to focus on cooperation and entanglements; and to neglect unintended consequences and conflict. Instead we suggest looking at both, cooperation and conflict. On the other hand, at least three different forms of entanglements have been intermingled which have to be delineated and analysed separately: Personal, ideological and institutional entanglements. Only then, so it is suggested, will we be able to describe, analyse and grasp the interplay between Orthodox religion and politics more fully and more accurately.
Papers by Nutsa Batiashvili
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 24, 2022
Brepols Publishers eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Medieval Svaneti: Objects, Images, and Bodies in Dialogue with Built and Natural Spaces, eds. M. Studer-Karlen, M. Bacci, N. Chitishvili, 2023
This well-known Georgian proverb was a constant companion on our extraordinary and unforgettable ... more This well-known Georgian proverb was a constant companion on our extraordinary and unforgettable journey to Svaneti and during the subsequent conference in Tbilisi in September 2022. We received an extremely warm welcome from our hosts, notably from the mək'ilär who so generously opened to us their churches and thus their incredible treasures. This book is warmly dedicated to them all. Without the partnership of important institutions, this excursion and the publication of the present book would never have been possible. Great thanks are due to the G. Chubinashvili National Research Centre for Georgian Art History and Heritage Preservation in Tbilisi, and the Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography in Mest'ia. Working cooperatively with these important institutions was of unbelievable value for us. Moreover, we thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support for this publication. My deepest thanks go to Ekaterine Gedevanishvili, Irene Giviashvili, Mariam Japaridze, and Tsitsino Guledani, for their manifold and tireless help and support during the trip and the conference. I wish to thank Ivan Foletti for including this volume in the Convivium Supplementum series, and I am deeply grateful in particular to Natália Gachallová who has cared for this publication with foresight and thoroughness. Finally, I would like to thank all the authors for their thoughtful contributions to this volume, and especially, of course, my two co-editors, Natalia Chitishvili and Michele Bacci, for their excellent and nice collaboration.
3 Lake Bazaleti is located some 60 kilometers northwest of Tbilisi, with a surrounding recreation... more 3 Lake Bazaleti is located some 60 kilometers northwest of Tbilisi, with a surrounding recreation area and a village (with the same name). 2 historians who like to write "myths" about "how we [Georgians] survived because every single Georgian fought till the last drop of blood". For the members of this group these myths represented notions of "exaggerated Georgianness 4 ". "We have to finish this textbook as soon as possible " said Kakha Bendukidze, the founder and owner of the university, a right-wing neoliberal, a venture-capitalist who made his fortune in Russia and came back to Georgia to serve as a Minister of Economy (for more on Bendukidze and the Free University see chapter 1). He urged the group to finish "because there is another group working on the same thing. Their version is how Georgians fought relentlessly, shedding blood and all that", he noted with a glimmer of humor everyone enjoyed. "We have to distance ourselves significantly from the stereotype that exists which involves a confrontation of refined, God-loving, brave and educated Georgians with the savage and uneducated..." "...rest of the world" Leri, 5 a professor of philosophy in his 70s teaching at Free University, helped him finish the sentence. "Yes, the rest of the world" agreed Bendukidze. "So we are not writing a 'mother-history' [Georgian deda-istoria]", queried Giorgi, a 27year-old poet, founder of a renowned website for literature and poetry and someone who a few years later was appointed Director of Georgian National Library. "Just like Argo mounting a siege of Colchis, 6 " said Gaga, a psychologist in his 50s teaching at Free University as he took an even more humorous tone toward "mother-history." 7 Everyone laughed.
Orthodox Religion and Politics in Contemporary Eastern Europe, 2018
History and Anthropology, 2022
This paper is about treason and anxiety in a small country. In particular, it examines how anxiet... more This paper is about treason and anxiety in a small country. In particular, it examines how anxiety of treason as a core political affect and as a form of collective sentimentality has been shaping Georgia’s political culture, especially since independence. I approach treason first and foremost as a category embedded in the collective memory narratives to demonstrate how it has been used to frame political processes. At the same time, I treat controversies involving accusations of treason as ramifications of collective anxiety over the notions of peoplehood and sovereignty in a small country.
Orthodox Religion and Politics in Contemporary Eastern Europe, 2018
This book explores the relationship between Orthodox religion and politics in Eastern Europe, Rus... more This book explores the relationship between Orthodox religion and politics in Eastern Europe, Russia and Georgia. It demonstrates how as these societies undergo substantial transformation Orthodox religion can be both a limiting and an enabling factor, how the relationship between religion and politics is complex, and how the spheres of religion and politics complement, reinforce, influence and sometimes contradict each other. Considering a range of thematic issues, with examples from a wide range of countries with significant Orthodox religious groups, and setting the present situation in its full historical context, the book provides a rich picture of a subject which has been too often oversimplified.
The Companion to Juri Lotman, 2021
Identities and Representations in Georgia from the 19th Century to the Present, 2020
The Bivocal Nation, 2017
This chapter (and the next) try to demonstrate that the discourse on the nationhood is based on d... more This chapter (and the next) try to demonstrate that the discourse on the nationhood is based on dialogic imagination; a dialogism that not only entails a gaze toward the external other and internal otherness, but supposes bivocality entrenched in culturally mediated forms of speech. This bivocal dialogism is what defines how the twenty-first-century young Georgians imagine “Georgian people” and Georgian statehood in the setting of existing geopolitical structures and how the nineteenth-century intellectual elite engages with its imaginary public to advance it to the condition of nationhood. In both cases, it is the outward gaze to the “North” and to the “West” harboring the voices of self-imagination that conceives Georgianness as simultaneously ideal and flawed. There is the simultaneity of two poles, because everything Georgian—history or culture, mentality or habits, kings or people, provincial or urban—is imagined as fundamentally incomplete in comparison with one thing and fundamentally complete in comparison to another.
This chapter brings several episodes of situated ‘history’ debates to the forefront to make sense... more This chapter brings several episodes of situated ‘history’ debates to the forefront to make sense of the Georgian memory game. It begins with a heated debate between two kinds of elitist groups—the “old intelligentsia” and the “new intellectuals” —on school history textbooks. The episode leads to a letter from the Soviet-trained, yet nationalistic historians addressed to the Georgian government. In this letter they problematize the issue of “instilling right memories” and claim their “rights” to the nation’s memory. Taking these vignettes as a starting point, this chapter discusses bivocality—two voices present in this debate both rooted in national myths and culturally embedded discursive strategies—and analyzes an ideological and a narrative rift between the two elitist formations and two forms of nationalisms that the practice of memory-making embodies.
This concluding section once again examines the notion of bivocality as developed throughout the ... more This concluding section once again examines the notion of bivocality as developed throughout the book and grounds it in the analysis of the discourse that problematizes one of Georgia’s highly paradigmatic yet contested historic figures: King Erekle II. His image and the memory of his actions turn into an interpretive battleground not as a result of academic entertainment, but as a part of strenuous contemplations on Russian-Georgian relations because his decision to sign an agreement with the Russian Empire at the end of eighteenth century marks a crucial moment of history in Georgian collective memory and national imaginaries that gives substance to the experiences of fragmentation and discord. Erekle is himself a bivocal figure who embodies in his own single image two registers of Georgianness, and it is the debate around him in the context of aggravating crisis with Russia that this concluding section tackles.
This chapter is an invitation to view not unity and commonality, but a sense of division and frag... more This chapter is an invitation to view not unity and commonality, but a sense of division and fragmentation as part of the ‘banal nationalism’, where the rhetoric of boundary-making draws the lines between us and our internal others/otherness; where references to internal division become both a form of self-deprecating rhetoric and a discursive construct that mediates imagining a community. The author describes this mode of self-addressivity using the term ‘bivocal’, indicating simultaneity of two distinctive voices in a single discursive practice. By highlighting historical trajectories of the Georgian nationalism, this chapter outlines the ways in which colonial and postcolonial contexts created conditions for particular forms of discursive habits to evolve. It demonstrates that while Georgian nationalism emerged with the colonial intelligentsia’s attempt to adapt European models of peoplehood by imitating the very forms that it offered, these attempts at imitation were nevertheless moulded into the culturally specific, historically and geographically conditioned perceptual frames
This chapter is built around the idea of two voices through which a nation is imagined and offers... more This chapter is built around the idea of two voices through which a nation is imagined and offers an analysis of a geopolitically contextualized “memory project” which involves the writing of the textbooks on 200 years of Russian Occupation. The project stems from the political and ideological crisis and enacts the node between the state, its imagined publics, the intelligentsia, and modern intellectuals. In the subterranean polemic where the Soviet generation of intelligentsia and liberal intellectuals animate the past of Russian-Georgian relations in two distinct ways, the past becomes a critical terrain where the struggle over Georgia’s geopolitical belonging and the resulting disputes on national identity take place. This analysis not only fleshes out recent discursive rifts, linking them to broader political processes, but traces the genealogies of the narrative practices that enable two idioms of nationalist discourse.
The argument here is that the bivocality present in the modern Georgian imaginary has its roots i... more The argument here is that the bivocality present in the modern Georgian imaginary has its roots in the nineteenth-century genres of discourse, especially in the politically motivated prose and correspondence. It is in these texts and through these texts by founding fathers that the particular “textual community” has been forged (Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and it is through the repeated reproduction of the imagery produced in them and the constant re-voicing of the speech genres inherent in them that bounds modern Georgian “mnemonic community” (Zerubavel, Time Maps : Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). It is in the context of the multifaceted and interchanging dynamics of the imperial order and shifting forms of colonial subjectivity that one can understand the nuances of the dialogic s...
Nationalities Papers, 2019
This article examines an ideological and a narrative rift between two elitist formations and two ... more This article examines an ideological and a narrative rift between two elitist formations and two forms of nationalism that a practice of memory-making embodies. In the subterranean polemic where Soviet generation intelligentsia and liberal intellectuals animate the past on Russian–Georgian relations in two distinct ways, past becomes a critical terrain where the struggle over Georgia’s geopolitical belonging and the resulting disputes on national identity take place. This analysis not only flashes out recent discursive rifts, linking them to the broader political processes, but traces the genealogies of the narrative practices that enable two idioms of nationalist discourse. It is both an analysis of post-socialist class formations and of the semantic fields within which their idioms are embedded.
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Books by Nutsa Batiashvili
Papers by Nutsa Batiashvili
In my attempt to look “behind the façades of national unanimity” (Herzfeld, 1997) I analyze the public sphere where Soviet generation intelligentsia and liberal intellectuals animate the past on Russian-Georgian relation in two distinct ways, producing two contradictory but mutually constitutive discursive genres on Georgian identity: one based in the voice of self-idealization and the other in self-condemnation. These two genres are embedded in historical conceptions and enact public debate on the country's geopolitical challenges.
The central conceptual claim of the paper is that Georgians conceive of their past in a way that presupposes the co-existence of two contradictory registers of “Georgianness”, and framing of the historical narratives reflects what I refer to as the bivocal nature of both Georgians’ memory and their identity. This is a bivocality involving mythically idealized terms, on the one hand, and critical self-condemning terms, on the other. However, I argue that two contradictory voices that articulate Georgia’s past and Georgian identity belong not so much to distinct speakers as to discursive domains that exist within, as well as between speakers. While I coin “bivocality” to express the interplay between distinct discursive registers and their relationship to the pre-fixed cultural form, it has a genealogy linked to the neo-Kantian philosophical traditions, primarily based in Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “voice” and “multivoicedness” in speech and Ernest Cassirer’s conception of symbolic mediation.