CREES Noon Lecture. Political Anxieties in the Caucasus: the Georgian National Narrative Between War and Peace

Against the backdrop of Russian aggression in Ukraine and the renewed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, anxiety about Georgia’s fate and its place in the region has taken over the quotidian life of ordinary people. Veiled as peace-preservation efforts, Georgia’s ruling party has made a sweeping turn away from the country’s European course towards a Russian-style authoritarian rule. The waves of mass protests that surged in response to the government’s actions are part of the broader charged atmosphere in which national anxiety from being a small country shapes not only political rhetoric, but the sense of ordinary life in Georgia. In this lecture, Batiashvili explores the historical and cultural antecedents of the anxiety rooted in what Timothy Snyder calls the “deep narratives” of the region. Based on the ethnographic studies among politically active youth, ethnic Armenians in Tbilisi, and the community of Caucasian highlanders, Batiashvili examines different facets of political and cultural anxiety that have prevailed in the Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nutsa Batiashvili is Professor of Anthropology, Dean of the Graduate School, and Director of the “Memory and Anxiety Research Lab” at the Free University of Tbilisi. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Washington University in St Louis, and her MA and BA in Psychology from Tbilisi State University. Her current research focuses on the Caucasian Highlanders and ethnic Armenians in Tbilisi. Her collaborative research projects on "The Anthropology of Anxiety" and "Memory and Anxiety" have been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, James McDonnell Foundation, Templeton Foundation, and Georgian National Science Foundation. Her book "The Bivocal Nation: Memory and Identity on the Edge of Empire" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) is about a divided nation and polarized notions of nationhood. Her second book, "The Anthropology of Anxiety in a Small Country" (in progress), interrogates anxiety as a collective and political phenomenon based on ethnographic data gathered over more than ten years.

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