THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AUTHORITY THAT MATTERS: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF TRUST AND FOOD SAFETY IN POST-SOVIET GEORGIA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY BY NATALJA CZARNECKI CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv List of Figures vii I. Georgian Food Politics Introduction: Global Food Safety, Trust, and the Making of Moral Authorities 1 in Post-Soviet Georgia, 2013-2016 Chapter One: Epistemic Mercurial: Rumored Food Dangers and the 37 Political Epistemics of Safety in post-Soviet Tbilisi, Georgia Chapter Two: Hungry for a Body: Inhabiting a Missed Body Politic 88 in post-Soviet Tbilisi II. Crafting Trustworthy Authority: The National Food Agency Chapter Three: Righteous Reform: Standardizing Biomoral Authority 129 on a National Scale Chapter Four: Encoding Ambivalence: Legal Harmonization and Emergent 165 Technoscientific Authorities at the post-Soviet Georgian National Food Agency Chapter Five: Authority that Matters: Managerial Experts, Sincere Regulation, 196 and Food Safety Reform in Post-Soviet Tbilisi, Georgia III. Epilogue 233 Works Cited 248 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the moral politics of food safety in post- Soviet Georgia. It focuses on the intersection of Georgian regulatory expertise and EU- designed reforms of food safety laws and governance in the capital city of Tbilisi, where I conducted three years of fieldwork within different institutional contexts of food safety reform: Georgian experts in food safety at the National Food Agency (NFA), food vendors at outdoor popular food markets, and household matriarchs tasked with provisioning and caring for their families every day. It examines how public recognitions of and claims to trustworthy regulatory authority are made possible, articulated, and valued. These processes of claiming and recognizing authority, as they unfold in daily life at the local level, have unintended and ironic consequences that allow us to think about authority and trust as potent sites of political meaning-making. In more general terms, this ethnography demonstrates what daily decisions about food, such as deciding what to eat or feed one’s family, tell us about expertise, moral authority, broader geopolitical transformation, and the gendered ways these processes unfold. The dissertation analyzes how EU-designed regulatory regimes of consumer good safety stem from the EU’s self-awareness as a moral formation grounded in its presumptions of its own technocratic authority, its mandate of public safety, and its own forms of liberal-democratic governance. In relation to this moral stance, the lived experience in the EU’s post-socialist eastern zone is, in varied ways, ambivalent in its orientation to both “Europe” and “Russia.” This ambivalence often surfaces as an emergent public politics that only recognizes and trusts particular forms of moral authority (often of a socialist or early post-socialist dispensation). Keywords: Post-socialism, food safety, public health, moral authority, trust, gender, bureaucracy iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I do not have the words to express how grateful, honored, and lucky I am to have worked with the best dissertation committee in all the land. Thank you to all of you for your generous, productive, and close readings of multiple drafts of these chapters, and for our ongoing conversations. Thank you to my co-chairs, Susan Gal and William Mazzarella. You are both the embodiments of the kind of anthropologist and mentor I hope to be one day. Susan Gal continues to be an ideal of theoretical, pedagogical, and creative rigor; her mind-bending, razor sharp, and deeply precise insights across multiple worlds of theory and method transform and inspire me and my thinking every day. Thank you to William Mazzarella for his uncompromising openness to dialectical reasoning and for his teaching me the critical and poetic potentials of letting the contradictions breathe, seeing where they take me. Judith Farquhar and her exquisitely fine craftsmanship in ethnographic writing and critique have transformed how I think about the words that communicate worlds and ideas. Michael Fisch, my friend and colleague of many years now, has never failed to push and inspire me to believe in myself. He continues to be an absolute model of professional and theoretical rigor, imagination, and strength. Eugene Raikhel has always been a voice of productive, open-minded, and creative critique; thank you for your very inspiring commitment to all things medical anthropology and to the ethnographic imagination in post-socialist worlds and in general. I am looking forward to continuing our conversations. Thank you, of course, to Anne Ch’ien, whose commitment to the inner workings of the department and discipline is what has made my and countless others’ intellectual pursuits possible. I am grateful to the various organizations and sources of funding that made the field research for this dissertation possible. The American Research Institute of the South Caucasus iv (ARISC), Fulbright-Hays, University of Chicago Social Sciences Division, and US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) made my fieldwork possible. Thank you to Lia Tsuladze and Tbilisi State University for hosting and working with me. Thanks to Timothy Blauvelt and the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) for a constant forum for intellectual life and ideas in Tbilisi, most notably through the Work-in-Progress series. Thank you to the various workshops at the University of Chicago, where I presented and received invaluable feedback on multiple drafts: Semiotics: Culture in Context; Medicine and its Objects; Money, Markets, and Governance; and Anthropology of Europe. I am grateful to professors, mentors, colleagues, and friends at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, over the years. Thank you to Tami Wysocki for teaching me all the workings of Georgian grammar, which was invaluable for my Georgian in the field. Thank you to Valentina Pichugin who taught be Russian, and has always been an inspiration to me in so many ways. Thank you to my writing groups and friendships: Genevieve Godbout, Yaqub Hilal, Britta Ingebretson, Shefali Jha, Adam Sargent, Chris Sheklian, Shirley Yeung, and Xiaobo Yuan. Thank you to all my students who, over the years, have made everything worthwhile. Thank you to my colleagues at the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, all of whom have made my final years of writing a most memorable and rewarding time. In Georgia, thank you to my colleagues at the Ministry of Agriculture and to the National Food Agency for your willingness to work with me, and for teaching me so much. I will not name you here for the sake of anonymity, but I am so grateful to all of you. Thank you to Vakhtang Kobaladze, Koba Turmanidze, Keti Gurchiani, Nana Tevzaia, Irma Miminoshvili, Lia Todua, Lika Tsuladze, and so many others for sharing your time and your friendship. Thank you to all of my family for their love and support. Most immediately, to my father Henry Czarnecki, to the memory of my v mother Helene, to my sister Danielle Czarnecki, to my brother-in-law Mushfeq Khan, and to all of our beautiful dogs. This dissertation is dedicated to my beloved Moncia. vi LIST OF FIGURES 1. Definitely not plastic: Keti the grocer 61 2. Dacha (country cottage) 63 3. Kitri da pomidori on the table at the dacha 63 4. Definitely not plastic. Georgian strawberries 70 5. Greenpeace Canada pamphlet 75 6. A consumer rights scientists explains 75 7. “How to choose products without transgenes.” 77 8. “What does ‘GMO’ mean?” 79 9. From the window of the Bio Market I 81 10. From the window of the Bio Market II 81 11. From the window of the Bio Market III 81 12. The flooded dog shelter 240 13. Dog shelter 240 14. A different dog shelter 241 15. Desertirebis bazari 241 16 Buying Georgian lari (GEL) with US dollars (USD) 242 17. Batumi Bazaar, Black Sea Coast I 243 18. Batumi Bazaar, Black Sea Coast II 243 19. Blackberries and currants at Desertirebis bazari 244 20. Poultry section: Batumi Bazaar I 245 21. Poultry section: Batumi Bazaar II 245 22. Dairy section: Batumi Bazaar I 246 23. Dairy section: Batumi Bazaar II 246 24. It is not exactly “straight from the village” I: Wholesale distribution 247 25. It is not exactly “straight from the village” II: Wholesale distribution 247 vii Part I: Georgian Food Politics INTRODUCTION Global Food Safety, Trust, and the Making of Moral Authorities in Post-Soviet Georgia, 2013-2016 This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the moral politics of food safety in post- Soviet Georgia. It focuses on the uneasy articulation and production of “global food safety” in the post-Soviet context, centering on the intersections of Georgian popular food politics, regulatory expertise, and global as well as European Union (EU)-designed reforms of food safety laws and governance in the capital city of Tbilisi. It is based on three years of fieldwork within different institutional contexts of food safety reform: Georgian experts in food safety at the National Food Agency (NFA), food vendors at outdoor popular food markets, and household matriarchs tasked with provisioning and caring for their families every day. These chapters examine how public recognitions of and claims to trustworthy regulatory authority are made possible, articulated, and valued. These processes of claiming and recognizing authority, as they unfold in daily life, have unintended and ironic consequences that allow us to think about authority and trust as potent sites of political meaning-making. In more general terms, this ethnography demonstrates what daily decisions about food in the post-Soviet context, such as deciding what to eat or feed one’s family, can tell us about the making of moral authority and why it matters, about collective forms of belonging and sovereignty, and the gendered ways in which these processes unfold.