Stéphane Voell and Ketevan Khutsishvili (eds.) Caucasus Conflict Culture Reihe Curupira Workshop, Band 18 herausgegeben vom Förderverein ›Völkerkunde in Marburg‹ e.V. durch Ingo W. Schröder, Conrad Klein und Ernst Halbmayer Der Kaukasus ist gekennzeichnet durch ein komplexes Nebeneinander von Men- schen, die sich als Teil unterschiedlicher ethnischer Gruppen verstehen. Ungelöste Territorialkonflikte wie Bergkarabach führten bis in die jüngste Zeit zu bewaffne- ten Konflikten. Geschichte und Identität werden auf nationaler und lokaler Ebene stets neu ausgehandelt, um Ansprüche und Interessen geltend zu machen. Zu eben jenen Themen forschten Ethnologinnen und Ethnologen aus dem Südkaukasus und Deutschland. Sie dokumentieren eine alternative Perspektive auf Konflikt und Kultur in der Region. Die Arbeiten basieren auf intensiver Feldforschung und dokumentieren mit ihrer Sichtweise ›von unten‹ ein vielschichtiges Bild von bei- spielsweise interkulturellen Beziehungen, die sich trotzt der konfliktreichen Ge- genwart entwickelten. The Caucasus is characterised by a complex side-by-side of people who claim to be of different ethnic origin. Unsolved territorial conflicts, like in Nagorno-Karabakh, have led until recently to armed conflicts. History and identity are constantly nego- tiated and renegotiated on the local level based on ever-changing claims and inter- ests. Precisely these issues are at the core of the research of the contributing an- thropologists from the South Caucasus and Germany. Their work is based on intensive field research and they present, with their perspective ›from below‹, a multi-layered picture of, among other things, intercultural relationships that have emerged despite the conflict-torn present. Caucasus Conflict Culture Anthropological Perspectives on Times of Crisis edited by Stéphane Voell Ketevan Khutsishvili CURUPIRA Der Förderverein ›Völkerkunde in Marburg‹ e.V. wurde 1993 gegründet. Seine Aufgabe besteht unter anderem in der Herausgabe der ethnologi- schen Schriftenreihen ›Curupira‹ und ›Curupira Workshop‹. Auskünfte er- halten Sie unter folgender Adresse: Förderverein ›Völkerkunde in Marburg‹ e.V. c/o Institut für Vergleichende Kulturforschung – Fachgebiet Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie Kugelgasse 10, 35037 Marburg/Lahn Tel. 06421/282-2036, Fax: 06421/282-2140, E-Mail: [email protected] www.curupira.de Cover picture: Sergey Parajanov, Collage (1989) from the series ›Several Epi- sodes from Gioconda’s Life‹, Sergey Parajanov Museum, Yerevan (Arme- nia), printed with the grateful permission of the Sergey Parajanov Museum. © 2013 Curupira ISBN 978-3-8185-0512-7 ISSN 1430-9750 Druck: Difo-Druck, Bamberg Alle Rechte vorbehalten Printed in Germany Contents Ketevan Khutsishvili and Stéphane Voell Preface ................................................................................................................. 7 Stéphane Voell Going Beyond Essentialism: Introduction .................................................. 13 Mkhitar Gabrielyan and Artak Dabaghyan At Borders as in Islands: Steps of Anthropology into the Field .............. 37 Levon Abrahamian and Gayane Shagoyan Rallies as Festival and the Festival as a Model for Rallies ......................... 65 Philipp Naucke Gene Sharp: Nonviolent Action and the Rose Revolution: On the Confusion of Political and Scholarly Success ................................ 91 Sergey Rumyansev and Sevil Huseynova Peaceful Interethnic Cooperation during the Nagorno-Karabakh Crisis: a Criticism of Attempts to Essentialise Conflicts ......................... 103 Arsen Hakobyan New Life in a New Space: the Appropriation of ›Alien‹ Space Armenian Refugees in the Village of Dzyunashogh ................................ 129 Ilham Abbasov From ›Friendship of Peoples‹ to a Discourse of ›Tolerance‹: Constructing Ethnic Boundaries in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan ................... 147 5 Sascha Roth The Making of Home, the Making of Nation: Cultural Notions of Conflict and Displacement in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan ........................ 169 Yulia Antonyan Reminiscences of the Future: the Social Life of Monuments in Refugee-Villages ............................................................................................. 195 Tea Kamushadze Conceptualisation of the Past: the Place of the Socialist City in Georgian National History ........................................................................... 209 Melanie Krebs Negotiating Cosmopolitanism in Baku ...................................................... 225 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 ...................................... 243 Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne Ingiloy – Ingiloi: the Ethnicity and Identity of a Minority in Azerbaijan ................................................................................................... 273 Natia Jalabadze and Lavrenti Janiashvili Perspectives for the Integration of Ethnic Minorities in a Multicultural Region: the Example of Kvemo Kartli............................... 281 Giorgi Cheishvili and Natalie Wahnsiedler Student’s Report on ›Caucasus, Conflict, Culture 1‹ ............................... 291 Contributors ................................................................................................... 295 6 Ketevan Khutsishvili and Stéphane Voell Preface 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 Department of Ethnology of the Ivane Ja- vakhishvili Tbilisi State University hosted the conference ›Caucasus, Con- flict, Culture: First Symposium on Anthropology and the Prevention of Conflicts in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia‹ (CCC1). The event was or- ganised together with the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology of the Philipps-Universität Marburg. It was probably the first purely an- thropological 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 con- flict-torn Caucasian present. The presenters touched a wide variety of top- ics, 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. During the conference in Tbilisi, local researchers and German experts on the Caucasus met. The Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in Marburg is specialised on research on conflict in Latin America and col- leagues working in this area left the conference in Georgia with a fresh perspective. The present volume reflects to a certain extent the multi- layered event in November 2011. Despite the variety of topics presented and discussed at the conference, they can all be subsumed under three core headings. The first concerns social life in times of conflict and thereafter. Interesting here were the alter- native pictures drawn by the participants, i.e. how the local population co- operate even though – on a national level of regions in conflict – one might 7 suspect no interrelations at all. The second heading might be called the role of ethnicity and the third the (re)construction of history. These three core issues are reflected in the contributions to this volume. Fig. 1: Participants of ›Caucasus, Conflict, Culture 1‹ in Uplistsikhe, November 2011; some participants are not on the picture (photo: CCC). For various reasons, only half of the papers presented at CCC1 made it into the present book. Apart from the authors in this volume, the following colleagues presented their research during the conference in Tbilisi: Parvin Ahanchi, Milena Baghdasaryan, Sylvia Karl, Harutyun Marutyan, Teona Mataradze, Satenik Mkrtchyan, Irakli Pipia, Ruzanna Tsaturyan and Manana Tsereteli. Lale Yalçın-Heckmann held the keynote lecture at the beginning of the conference on citizenship in the Caucasus. We also want to name here the discussants and panel chairs: Nino Abakelia, Susanne Fehlings, Oliver Reisner, Nino Ghambashidze, Ernst Halbmayer, Elke Kamm, and Natalie Turabelidze. The conference did not have a clear-cut conceptual or theoretical frame. Consequently, it is not possible to create retrospectively for the present book a comprehensive approach that could include all the contributions. Many articles are based on the presentations made in Tbilisi, but developed their arguments further in the longer text. We, the editors, refrained con- sciously from creating some kind of umbrella concept that is and was not there and which might, most importantly, contradict our original ›Caucasus, Conflict, Culture‹ project idea. CCC meant for us the collaboration with 8 local colleagues in anthropology. This collaboration did not take place ›on paper‹ alone, but in day-to-day research, together with our students in in- tense relationships. It was important to get involved with the position of the other, even if we were often not of the same opinion. This was not always easy; different academic traditions collided, and different ideas on theory and methodology. Fig. 2: Participants of ›Caucasus, Conflict, Culture 2‹ in Akhaltsikhe,