Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T00:56:18.177Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Power/Memory: New Elite, Old Intelligentsia, and Fixing of the Georgian Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2019

Nutsa Batiashvili
Nutsa Batiashvili*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Free University of Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Georgia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Soviet intelligentsiamemory-makingnational narrativesRussian–Georgian relations
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1083 - 1099
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Antonyan, Yulia. 2016. Elites and “Elites”: Transformation of Social Strucures in Post-Soviet Armenia and Georgia. Yerevan: Academic Swiss Caucasus Net.Google Scholar
Asmus, Ronald D. 2010. A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret. 2006. Moral Disorder. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Batiashvili, Nutsa. 2018. The Bivocal Nation: Memory and Identity on the Edge of Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Batiashvili, Nutsa. 2012. “The ‘Myth’ of the Self: The Georgian National Narrative and Quest for ‘Georgianness.’” In Memory and Political Change, edited by Assmann, Aleida and Shortt, Linda, 186–200. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Batiashvili, Nutsa. 2014. “We Were Always United, Except When We Were Not: Bivocal Memory and Georgia’s Geopolitical Dilemma.” PhD diss., Washington University in St. Louis.Google Scholar
Booker, Christopher. 2004. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, Brubaker. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chavchavadze, I. 1888. Eri da Istoria [Nation and History] Iveria, November 10, N237, pp 1–2.Google Scholar
Cherchi, Marcello, and Manning, Paul. 2002. “Disciplines and Nations: Niko Marr vs. His Georgian Students on Tbilisi State University and Japhetidology/Caucasology Schism.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (1603): 66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cole, Jennifer. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Dudwick, Nora. 1994. Memory, Identity and Politics in Armenia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles. 1985. “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding.” Quaderni Di Semantica 6: 222–253.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1971. The Commissariat of Enlightenment; Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1979. Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garagozov, Rauf. 2008. “Characteristics of Collective Memory, Ethnic Conflicts, Historiography, and the ‘Politics of Memory’: Characteristics of Historical Accounts and ‘Forms’ of Collective Memory.” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 46 (2): 58–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gella, Aleksander. 1971. “The Life and Death of the Old Polish Intelligentsia.” Slavic Review 30 (1): 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. The Cheese and the Worms : The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Gordin, Michael D., Hall, Karl, and Kozhevnikov, Alexei B.. 2008. Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860–1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Francine. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Stephens F. 2010. War and Revolution in the Caucasus: Georgia Ablaze. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Khalvashi, Tamta. 2015. Peripheral Affects: Shame, Publics and Performance on the Margins of the Republic of Georgia. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Kitaevich, Jane. 2014. “History that Splinters: Education Reforms and Memory Politics in the Republic of Georgia.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 14 (2): 319–338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuzio, Taras. 2002. “History, Memory and Nation Building in the Post-Soviet Colonial Space.” Nationalities Papers 30 (2): 241–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2003. George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen: Metaphors We Live By. London: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2009. The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Leach, Edmund. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Manning, Paul. 2004. “Describing Dialect and Defining Civilization in an Early Georgian Nationalist Manifesto: Ilia Ch’avch’avadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler.’” Russian Review 63 (1): 26–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manning, Paul. 2009. “The City of Balconies: Elite Politics and the Changing Semiotics of the Postsocialist Cityscape.” In City Culture and City Planning in Tbilisi: Where Europe and Asia Meet, edited by van Assche, Kristof, Salukvadze, Joseph, and Shavishvili, Nick, 93–102. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.Google Scholar
Manning, Paul. 2011. Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orintalist Geographies in Nineteenth Century Georgian Imaginaries. Brighton, UK: Academic Studies.Google Scholar
Maslov, Kirill. 2015. “‘Neither Class, Nor Party’: Paradoxes and Transformations of the Russian and Soviet Scientific Intelligentsia.” History of the Human Sciences 28 (2): 111–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mits’ishvili, Nikolo. 1926. “Pikrebi Sakartveloze” [“Speculations about Georgia”]. Tbilisi: Kartuli Mts’erloba (Georgian Literature), September, 11–23.Google Scholar
Mühlfried, Florian. 2005. Banquets, Grant-Eaters and the Red Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet Georgia. Central Eurasian Studies Review 4 (1): 16–19.Google Scholar
Narvselius, Eleaonora. 2012. Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L’viv: Narratives, Identity and Power. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Nugent, Stephen, and Shore, Chris, eds. 2002. Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
O’Connor, Timothy Edward. 1980. The Politics of Soviet Culture : Anatolii Lunacharskii—Revolutionary Romanticism and the Soviet Intelligentsia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press.Google Scholar
Oushakine, Sergei Alexei. 2009. “Introduction: Wither the Intelligentsia: The End of the Moral Elite in Eastern Europe.” Studies in East European Thought 61 (4): 243–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raleigh, Donald. 1989. Historians and Perestroika: The First Phase. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
Reisner, Oliver. 2009. “Traveling Between Two Worlds—the Tergdaleulebi, Their Identity Conflict and National Life.” Identity Studies (1): 36–50.Google Scholar
Salverda, Tijo, and Abbink, Jon. 2013. “Introduction: An Anthropological Perspective on Elite Power and the Cultural Politics of Elites.” In The Anthropology of Elites: Power, Culture, and the Complexities of Distinction, edited by Abbink, Jon and Salverda, Tijo, 1–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.Google Scholar
Sanjian, Ara. 2009. “Book Review: The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus.” Central Asian Survey 28 (4): 440–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schimmelpenninck van der, Oye David. 2010. Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Donald, and Panossian, Ramzik. 1994. Nationalism and History: The Politics of Nation Building in Post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Centre for Russian and East European Studies.Google Scholar
Scott, Eric R. 2016. Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Shatirishvili, Zaza. 2003. “‘Old’ Intelligentsia and ‘New’ Intellectuals: The Georgian Experience.” Eurozine. https://www.eurozine.com/old-intelligentsia-and-new-intellectuals-the-georgian-experience.Google Scholar
Shnirelman, Victor. 1998. “National Identity and Myths of Ethnogenesis in Transcaucasia.” In Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities, edited by Smith, Graham, Law, Vivien, Wilson, Andrew, Bohr, Annette, and Allworth, Edward, 48–67. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shnirelman, Victor. 2009. “Stigmatized by History or by Historians? The Peoples of Russia in School History Textbooks.” History & Memory 21 (2): 110–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review 53 (2): 414–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. 2004. Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald Gregory. 1993. The Revenge of the Past : Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Toal, Gerard. 2012. “The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia.” Nationalities Papers 40 (5): 826–828.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tromly, Benjamin. 2014. Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life Under Stalin and Khrushchev. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 1991. National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered. 2002. “Commemorating a Difficult Past: Yitzhak Rabin’s Memorials.” American Sociological Review 67 (1): 30–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wertsch, James V. 2000. “Narratives as Cultural Tools in Sociocultural Analysis: Official in Soviet and History.” Ethos 28 (4): 511–533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wertsch, James V. 2008. “Blank Spots in Collective Memory: A Case Study of Russia.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617 (1): 58–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wertsch, James V., and Batiashvili, Nutsa. 2012. “Mnemonic Communities and Conflict.” In Trust and Conflict: Representation, Culture and Dialogue, edited by Markova, Ivana and Gillespie, Alex, 42–64. Hove, East Sussex, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. 1981. “The Value of Narrativity in the Presentation of Reality.” In On Narrative, edited by Mitchell, W. J. T., 1–23. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Wineburg, Sam. 2001. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zurabishvili, David. 2002. Dzveli intelligentsiidan axal intelektualebamde [From Old Intelligentsia to New Intellectuals]. In Dzveli inteligentsia da axali intelektualebi. Sazogadoeba da politika, edited by Nodia, G., 47–53. Tbilisi: CIPDD.Google Scholar