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Establishing the End of the Soviet Union As a Temporal Boundary

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Establishing the End of the Soviet Union As a Temporal Boundary Working Paper Series B/ORDERS IN MOTION Nr. 4 Establishing the End of the Soviet Union as a Temporal Boundary. Perspectives from Georgia’s Greek Community Concha Maria Höfler Kontakt Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION Europa-Universität Viadrina Große Scharrnstr. 59 D-15230 Frankfurt (Oder) www.borders-in-motion.de Dr. Andrea Meissner Wissenschaftliche Geschäftsführerin Tel: +49 (0)335 5534 2880 [email protected] Coverbild: Ehemaliger Grenzübergang Frankfurt (Oder) / Słubice ©Heide Fest Zitation: Concha Maria Höfler (2019): Establishing the End of the Soviet Union as a Temporal Boundary. Perspectives from Georgia’s Greek Community. Working Paper Series B/ORDERS IN MOTION Nr. 4, Frankfurt (Oder): Viadrina, doi:10.11584/B-ORDERS.4. Lizenz: Textinhalte freigegeben unter Creative-Commons-Lizenz Namensnennung 4.0 International (Details siehe creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) ISSN 2569-6025 Datum der Veröffentlichung: Juli 2019 Abstract In interview conversations with self-identifying members of Georgia’s shrinking Greek community, consultants regularly contrast aspects of their life that have changed profoundly since the end of the Soviet Union, thereby establishing the end of the Soviet Union as a temporal threshold relating today to a very different yesterday. Based on an ethnographically informed conversation analysis of 49 semi-structured interview conversations, this article aims to further our under- standing of what the end of the Soviet Union means to my consultants, contribut- ing a sociolinguistic perspective to current debates in the field of Border and Boundary Studies. I will take two analytical perspectives, both of which highlight different important aspects. Firstly, I follow the metaphor of family breakdown that emerged in the interviews as having occurred on two levels. On a communi- ty level, this breakdown of the Soviet “family of nations” is narrated for instance in terms of rising Georgian nationalism. This is perceived as challenging consul- tants’ belonging to the Georgian nation state and as drawing new boundaries. On an individual and very tangible level, consultants communicatively have to come to terms with their own families being put under strain through family members’ migration to Greece. Secondly, I follow the tidemarks left by the Soviet yesterday in independent Georgia’s today and how consultants use them to posi- tion themselves and their community. Keywords: temporal boundaries, Greeks in Georgia, minorities after the Soviet Union, ethnographically informed conversation analysis Table of contents Establishing the End of the Soviet Union as a Temporal Boundary. Perspectives from Georgia’s Greek Community 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 2 Greeks in Georgia ......................................................................................................2 3 Temporal boundaries ...............................................................................................5 4 Differentiating “today” from “yesterday”: the end of the Soviet Union as a “family breakdown” .........................................................................................7 4.1 Particularisation and rising nationalism ...........................................................8 4.2 Emigration: “they were all close, and now I’m alone” ...................................13 5 Tracing “yesterday” in “today” ............................................................................16 6 Discussion: From seemingly clear differentiations to complex boundaries .............................................................................................. 20 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................22 References ..................................................................................................................23 About the Author ....................................................................................................27 Establishing the End of the Soviet Union as a Temporal Boundary. Perspectives from Georgia’s Greek Community Concha Maria Höfler (Durham) 1 Introduction It is not very controversial to say that the end of the Soviet Union is to be seen as a tem- poral threshold, a “turning point” before and after which political, economic and social realities are “different”. However, rather than taking this notion for granted and treating it as “simple”, I will show how this temporal boundary is established in interview con- versations and how my interlocutors from Georgia’s Greek community make it relevant in relating their lifeworlds and positionings to an outsider from Germany. In 49 semi- structured interview conversations with self-identifying Greeks in Georgia, consultants made and unmade social, spatial and temporal boundaries throughout our conversations, speaking at length about their family history, (self-)identification and belongings. The end of the Soviet Union is established regularly as a crucial temporal boundary, profoundly altering consultants’ (im)possibilities for belonging. The transformation from the Soviet Union to the independent Georgian nation state challenged previous identifications as SOVIET CITIZENS1 by discarding the foundations of much prior knowledge about the world as well as points of identification, and establishing new frames of belonging. At the same time and on a very personal level, the massive emigration of Georgian Greeks fundamentally transformed the social life of all of my consultants, leaving many feeling profoundly isolated. After providing the historical background to this transformation as well as Georgia’s Greek community in section 2 and setting out my theoretical approach (section 3), I will take two analytical perspectives that elucidate different aspects of this temporal bound- ary. The first perspective (section 4) follows the contrast that is established by creating TODAY in opposition to a very different YESTERDAY (cf. Tilly, 2004) and by portraying these temporal categories as clearly different. In taking this perspective, I will explore a metaphor frequently used in the interviews: that of narrating the end of the Soviet Union as an instance of a FAMILY BREAKDOWN. As I will show, this can be observed on a metaphorical level, where rising nationalism in the 1990s is given as an example of how the Soviet “family of nations” disintegrated (cf. section 4.1). At the same time, this is how consultants speak about the very tangible breakdown of nuclear families and close knit communities that took place when their family members emigrated (cf. section 4.2). The second analytical perspective I take (section 5) is concerned with following Soviet traces and tidemarks in independent Georgia (cf. Green, 2009), exploring how they pose both challenges and at the same time afford new belongings. 1 Categories established as relevant are set in SMALL CAPS throughout. Note that I will often refer to spaces, countries and national affiliations without typographically highlighting that they are not natural givens. This, as well as my choice to not mark the labels “Pontic”, “Urum”, and “Greek” unless they are constructed in the analysed excerpts, is a concession to readability rather than a claim that these categories are in any way less constructed than others. Establishing the End of the Soviet Union as a Temporal Boundary. 1 2 Greeks in Georgia The present paper stems from a larger research project on the Greek community in Geor- gia2, which took as its starting point what is most obviously intriguing about Georgia’s Greek community – their self-identification as GREEK, despite great differences in terms of the heritage varieties they either still speak or that were spoken in their family: Pontic Greek or Caucasian Urum, a Turkic language.3 Not only does this mean that community members need to communicate in a third language when talking to one another (mostly Russian or Georgian, rarely Standard Modern Greek) – but in the context of the Southern Caucasus, “Greek” and “Turkish” are also frequently perceived to stand for their speakers’ religious affiliation, categorising the former as “Christian” and the latter as “Muslim”. Countering the modern nation state’s assumptions about how national affiliation and language competence might relate to each other, being a competent speaker of a Greek variety is not necessarily considered to be the central defining attribute for being GREEK (Höfler, 2016, 2018). In many cases and across various conversational contexts, consultants verbalise their GREEK self-identification in terms of tracing it through their ancestry, their complex historical migration trajectories, as well as through their “resilience” in hold- ing on to the religion they all share: Orthodox Christianity (Höfler, in prep.; Sideri, 2006; Zoumpalidis, 2016). Notably, their self-identification according to religious criteria has been in accordance with governmental systems of categorisation from the outset of consultants’ community narratives. These usually begin in the early 19th century in the Ottoman Empire, where Orthodox Christians, regardless of their language use, were grouped in the millet-I-Rûm, a category that would come to be re-analysed as “Greek”.4 Following their (forced) migration from the mid 1820s onwards, the Russian Empire – itself no stranger to ordering systems based on religious affiliation – adopted the Ottoman categorisation. Later, policy-makers
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