Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Workshop in Anthropology and Cultural History
"Caucasus Paradigms"
16-17 March 2006
Speakers and Abstracts
LEVON ABRAHAMIAN (Head of Department of Contemporary Anthropological Studies, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Armenian Academy of Sciences) has written widely on Armenian traditional and contemporary culture, comparative mythology, and political anthropology. He has held teaching positions at Yerevan State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Among his most recent works are Conversations Near a Tree [Besedy u dereva] (Moscow, 2005); and Armenian Folk Arts, Culture, and Identity [co-edited with Nancy Sweezy] (Indiana, 2001). Abstract: Dancing Around the Mountain: Armenian identity through rites of solidarity
EVA-MARIA AUCH (PD East European History, University of Bonn) has studied history, Oriental studies, Russian, Arabic, and educational sciences at the universities of Baku, Leipzig, Greifswald, and St. Petersburg; and has taught at the universities of Greifswald, Bonn, Basel, Muen-ster, Hamburg, Baku, and Tashkent. She has held many scholarships and carried out research in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, focusing on colonialism; nationalism; the development of Islam in the Caucasus and Central Asia; modernization movements in the Middle East, the Russian empire, and the former Soviet Union; elites; and environmental protection. Her works on the Caucasus include, Öl und Wein am Kaukasus. Deutsche Forscher, Kolonisten und Unternehmer im vorrevolutionären Aserbaidschan [Oil and wine in the Caucasus: German re, colonists, and entrepreneurs in prerevolutionary Azerbaijan] (Reichert 2001); and Muslim – Untertan - Bürger. Identitätswandel in gesellschaftlichen Transformationsprozessen der muslimischen Ostprovinzen Südkaukasiens (Ende 18. – Anfang 20. Jh.). Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Nationalismusforschung [Muslim – Subject – Citizen. Identity shifts through social transformations among Muslims of the eastern provinces of the South Caucasus (from the end of the 18th until the beginning of the 20th centuries): A contribution to comparative studies of nationalism] (Reichert 2004). She is also co-editor of the book series, Kaukasische Studien [Caucasus Studies] (Reichert-Verlag). (Web: http://www.graphic-bridge.de/eurokaukasia/www/ansprechpartner/index.htm). Abstract: On Death in Postsocialist Societies: coping with dying in the Caucasus
GEORGI DERLUGUIAN (Associate Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University) holds a doctoral degree in Modern African History from Moscow State University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from SUNY-Binghamton. Having once served as an advisor to Gosplan in Mozambique, he went on to hold fellowships at Cornell, the University of Michigan, and the US Institute of Peace; as well as grants from the SSRC, NCEEER, the Soros Foundation, and IREX. In 2001 he was named a Carnegie Scholar of Vision. (Web: http://www.cas.northwestern.edu/sociology/fac-ulty/derlug.html). Among his recent writings on the Caucasus are Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (Chicago, 2005); and "How Soviet Bureaucracy Produced Nationalism, and What Came of It in Azerbaijan," in Colin Leys and Leo Panitch, eds., Fighting Identities (Merlin, 2002), 93-113. Dr. Derluguian also writes commentaries for leading Russian newspapers such as Izvestiia, Vremia novostei, and Ekspert weekly magazine. Abstract: The Codes of Dissertation Titles: towards a taxonomy of Homo Academicus Sovieticus (Caucasiensis)
BRUCE GRANT (Associate Professor of Anthropology, New York University) received his Ph.D. from Rice University and began work in the former Soviet Union as a scholar of indigenous cultural politics in the Russian Far East, as well as Moscow monuments, and Soviet cinema. He has held grants from the NSF, NEH, SSRC, and recently, NCEEER for new fieldwork in Azerbaijan. (Web: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/anthro/faculty/grant.html ). His work on the Caucasus includes, "The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains," Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2005): 39-67; and "An Average Azeri Village (1930)," Slavic Re-view 63, no. 4 (2004): 705-731. Abstract: Cultural Histories of Kidnapping in the Caucasus
ERIN KOCH (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Middlebury College) received her Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. She is the recipient of grants from the SSRC, the NSF, and most recently a postdoctoral fellowship from the Harriman Institute of Columbia University. Her work in medical anthropology addresses public health and prison populations in both the United States and the former Soviet Union, and she is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled, Governing Tuberculosis: Competing Cultures of Disease and Medicine in Postsocialist Georgia. Her recent publications on the Caucasus include, "Beyond Suspicion: Evidence, (Un-) Certainty, and Tuberculosis in Georgian Prisons," in press at American Ethnologist. Abstract: Market-Based Medicine in Georgia: "optimization" and health reforms
PAUL MANNING (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Trent University) received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, based on extensive ethno-linguistic research in both Wales and the former Soviet republic of Georgia. He has received grants from the Spencer Foundation and NCEEER, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals, Language and Communication, Amirani, and Enis Saxli. His recent work on the Caucasus includes, "Disciplines and Nations: Niko Marr vs. his Georgian Students" [with Marcello Cherchi], Carl Beck Papers (2002); and "Describing Dialect and Defining Civilization in an Early Georgian Nationalist Manifesto: Ilia Chavchavadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler," Russian Review 63, no. 1 (2004): 26-47. (Web: http://www.trentu.ca/anthropology/pmanning.html). Abstract: Mountaineer Romances: Georgian intelligentsia and Georgian landscape
SHAHIN MUSTAFAYEV (Deputy Director, Institute of Oriental Studies, Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences) holds a Candidate’s Degree from the Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow, and has received grants from the Soros Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and, for 2005-2006, at Indiana University through the offices of Fulbright. His work on the Caucasus includes, "The Diaries of Yusif Vezir Chemenzeminli: An Azerbaijani Intellectual in the Process of Accultura-tion," in Beate Eschment and Hans Harder, eds., Looking at the Colonizer: Cross-Cultural Perceptions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Bengal, and Related Areas (Ergon 2004), 31-45; and "The Interaction of Religious Traditions of Central Asia, Anatolia, and Azerbaijan," in Pro-ceedings of the UNESCO Forum ‘Culture and Religion in Central Asia’ (Bishkek 2001), 114-121. Abstract: The History of Sovereignty in Azerbaijan
MATHIJS PELKMANS (Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) has received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Over the past ten years he has carried out extensive fieldwork in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. He is the author of Defending the Border: Religion, Politics, and Modernity in the Georgian Borderlands (Cornell University Press, forthcoming) and has published on Muslim-Christian relations, territorial borders, and postsocialist change. (Web: http://www.eth.mpg.de/ ). Abstract: Powerful documents: Passports, passages, and dilemmas of identification on the Georgian – Turkish border
ANTON POPOV (Research Fellow, The University of Warwick) received his PhD from the University of Birmingham based on the study of the cultural production of identity among the Greeks in Southern Russia and the North Caucasus. In Russia, he has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Pontic and Caucasian Studies conducting his research on different migrant and ethnic minority communities in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Black Sea region of Turkey. He received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation and moved to do his PhD in Cultural Studies and Russian and East European Studies in the University of Birmingham. He is now working at the Department of Sociology in the University of Warwick as a manager of the ‘Releasing Indigenous Multiculturalism through Education’ project which has as its foci regions the South Caucasus, the Balkans, Ukraine and Southern Russia. His recent works on the Caucasus includes: ‘Becoming Pontic: "Post-Socialist" Identities, "Transnational" Geography, and the "Native" Land of the Caucasian Greeks’, Ab Imperio, 2: 339-360; and ‘Ethnic Minorities and Migration Processes in the Krasnodar Territory’, Central Asia and the Caucasus, 1(13): 160-175. Abstract: The Internal Others: the Cultural Boundaries of the Pontic Greek Identity in Southern Russia.
SETENEY SHAMI (Director of the Middle East, North Africa, and Eurasia Programs, Social Science Research Council) is an anthropologist from Jordan with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.). After establishing the first graduate department of anthropology in Jordan at Yarmouk University, she moved in 1996 to the regional office of the Population Council in Cairo as Director of the Middle East Awards in Population and the Social Sciences. In 1999, she moved to her current position at the SSRC in New York. She has additionally taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Georgetown University, the University of Chicago, Stockholm University, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Her recent publications on the Caucasus include, "Prehistories of Globalization: Circassian Identity in Motion," Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 177-204; and "Engendering Social Memory: Domestic Rituals, Resis-tance and Identity in the North Caucasus," in Feride Acar and Ayse Gunes-Ayata, eds., Gender and Identity Construction: Women of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey (Brill, 2000), 305-331. Abstract: North and South: rethinking margins through Circassian ethnography
NONA SHAHNAZARIAN (Associate Researcher, Center for Pontic and Caucasian Studies; and Lecturer, Kuban’ State University ) received her Candidate’s Degree from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, and has conducted fieldwork in Russia, Armenia, Georgia, and Nagorno-Karabagh, through grants from Memorial, the Soros Foundation, and MacArthur. Her recent articles on the Caucasus include, "Our Mountains Shall Feed Us: Structures of Everyday Survival in Post-Soviet Karabagh," Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies (2005); and "The Virtual Widows of Migrant Husbands in War-Torn Mountainous Karabagh," in H. Haukanes and Frances Pine, eds., Women After Communism (Bergen, 2005). Abstract: Fields of Social Networks: informal local economies in Ponto-Caucasian communities
ZAZA SHATIRISHVILI (Associate Professor, Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature) holds a Doctoral Degree in Philosophy from Tbilisi State University. He has taught widely in Tbi-lisi, and at the University of California, Berkeley. (Web: http://www.eurozine.com/authors/shati-rishvili.html ). Among his books and articles, his recent writings on the Caucasus include, "Fic-tional Narrative and Allegorical Discourse: The Reception of Rustaveli in 16th-18th Century Geor-gian Culture and King Vakhtang VI’s Commentaries," in Der Kommentar in Antike and Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 179-183; and "Romantic Topography and Dilemmas of Empire" [with Harsha Ram], Russian Review 1 (2004): 1-25. Abstract: "Old" and "New" Georgian National Narratives
LALE YALÇIN-HECKMANN (Head of Research Group, "Caucasian Boundaries and Citizenship from Below," Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) received her Ph.D. in Social Anthro-pology from the London School of Economics, and has taught at Middle East Technical University, the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, the University of Bamberg, and the Free University in Berlin. She has held grants from the Turkish Ministry of Education, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Volkswagen Foundation, in support of fieldwork and research among Kurds in Turkey, on land tenure in Azerbaijan, and her extensive public advocacy work for migrants. (Web: http://www.eth.mpg.de/ ). Among her recent publications on the Caucasus are: "Retreat to the Cooperative or the Household? Agricultural Privatisation in Ukraine and Azerbai-jan" [with Deema Kaneff], in The Postsocialist Agrarian Question, compiled by Chris Hann and the Property Relations Group (LIT, 2003), 219-255; and "Zwischen Assimilation und Akkomodation: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der Kurden in Aserbaidschan," in S. Conermann and G. Haig, eds., Die Kurden (EB-Verlag, 2004), 151-206. Abstract: Citizenship Regimes and Borders in the Caucasus after Socialism: closures and openings
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