(caucasusconflict.wordpress.com) Voell, Stéphane and Ketevan Khutsishvili (eds.) 2013. Caucasus Conflict Culture: Anthropological Perspectives on Times of Crisis (Curupira Workshop, 18). Marburg: Curupira. 296 pp.
“At beginning there was a conference in Tbilisi. At the end there is this book. The latter is closely related to the former. The book would not have been possible without the initial conference. But the conference and the book are very different from each other. In November 2011 the Institute of Ethnology of the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University hosted the conference ‘Caucasus, Conflict, Culture: First Symposium on Anthropology and the Prevention of Conflicts in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia‘ (CCC1). The event was organised together with the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology of the Philipps-Universität Marburg. It was probably the first purely anthropological conference (just three years after the Georgian-Russian War in August 2008) to deal with conflictual relations in the South Caucasus, focussing on the perspective ›from below‹ and including numerous local scholars. Many papers given at CCC1 referred explicitly or implicitly to the conflict-torn Caucasian present. The presenters touched a wide variety of topics, from mass protest rallies in Yerevan preceding the Nagorno-Karabakh war to staged skirmishes between prominent chefs in local restaurants, enacting a culture war on which nation supposedly invented which dish.” (Khutsishvili/Voell in the Preface of the book).
The cover image for this book is a detail of a collage by the artist and film maker Sergey Parajanov (1924-1990). It is taken from collage from the series ‘Several Episodes from Gioconda’s Life’ (1989). The same image was used for the programme booklet of the conference CCC1. We used to call it ‘Mona Lisa in Conflict’. We can use this picture for the cover with the kind permission of the ›Sergey Parajanov Museum‹ in Yerevan.
(note: Even though the books has been officially published in 2013 for some ‘technical’ reason it will only be available in the next days to come).
The edited volume contains the following chapters:
- Ketevan Khutsishvili and Stéphane Voell. Preface
- Stéphane Voell. Going Beyond Essentialism: Introduction
- Mkhitar Gabrielyan and Artak Dabaghyan. At Borders as in Islands: Steps of Anthropology into the Field
- Levon Abrahamian and Gayane Shagoyan. Rallies as Festival and the Festival as a Model for Rallies
- Philipp Naucke. Gene Sharp: Nonviolent Action and the Rose Revolution – On the Confusion of Political and Scholarly Success
- Sergey Rumyansev and Sevil Huseynova. Peaceful Interethnic Cooperation during the Nagorno-Karabakh Crisis: a Criticism of Attempts to Essentialise Conflicts
- Arsen Hakobyan. New Life in a New Space: the Appropriation of ‘Alien’ Space Armenian Refugees in the Village of Dzyunashogh
- Ilham Abbasov. From ›Friendship of Peoples‹ to a Discourse of ‘Tolerance’: Constructing Ethnic Boundaries in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan
- Sascha Roth. The Making of Home, the Making of Nation: Cultural Notions of Conflict and Displacement in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan
- Yulia Antonyan. Reminiscences of the Future: the Social Life of Monuments in Refugee-Villages
- Tea Kamushadze. Conceptualisation of the Past: the Place of the Socialist City in Georgian National History
- Melanie Krebs. Negotiating Cosmopolitanism in Baku
- Sevil Huseynova. Ethno-cultural Diversity in the Imperial and Post-Imperial City: Communal Violence, Nationalist Conflicts and Interethnic Cooperation in Baku in the 19th-21st Centuries
- Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne. Ingiloy – Ingiloi: the Ethnicity and Identity of a Minority in Azerbaijan
- Natia Jalabadze and Lavrenti Janiashvili. Perspectives for the Integration of Ethnic Minorities in a
Multicultural Region: the Example of Kvemo Kartli - Giorgi Cheishvili and Natalie Wahnsiedler. Student’s Report on ‘Caucasus, Conflict, Culture 1′
