The Bivocal Nation

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 signifiestwo 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.

Offers a distinct approach to understanding how geopolitical issues, like Russian-Georgian relations, are made sense of through culturally embedded practices Fills a gap in the existing literature by exploring the cultural undercurrents of political processes from the anthropological perspective Offers contributions not only to the field political ethnography, but also to the theory of the nation-state in post-imperial contexts as well as to the nexus of memory and politics

Autorentext
Nutsa Batiashvili is Assistant Professor at the Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia.

Inhalt
Introduction: What Kind of Imagined Community? A Community of Voices.- 1. We, Us, Ourselves and Our Others.- 2. We Were Always United, Except When We Were Not.- 3. Things Coded in Our Genetic Memory.- 4. Horizons, Margins and Centers of Nation-Making in the 19th Century Georgia.- 5. "It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards."- 6. Libri Magni or the Book that will Stop the War.