Social Science Research Council

Abstract

The research project I am engaged in that is designed to result in a book of some sort on the development of cultural discourses of Georgianness in Georgia in the late nineteenth century. I am currently doing research in Tbilisi focussing on the two chapters that will follow the paper present at the conference on Ilia Chavchavadze’s ‘Letters of a traveler’, both of which emanate from that text in different directions. These would be chapters on the genre of ‘travel letters’ that becomes an extremely popular genre in the wake of the Russo-Turkish war of 1878 for the reconquered regions of Ottoman Georgia, and the partially overlapping and partially opposed genre of ethnographic letters that becomes increasingly specialized as time wears on for the mountain regions of Georgia in the 1880’s, the heyday of popular ethnography in Georgia. Since Ilia’s ‘Letters of a Traveler’ (1871) partakes of aspects of both of these descendents, it is important for me to set up this chapter in such a way that it facilitates the later process of differentiating these genres as they come to be specialized as methods of investigating and conveying very different experiences of Georgianess to an increasingly popular audience.

Travel Letters. The rediscovery of Ottoman Georgia via travel letters seems to be very much a process in which most, if not all, of the irony and cultural criticism of Ilia’s original is lost immediately in the patriotic wake of the Russian victories. However, much of the initial glee and exuberance experienced in the wake of these victories is tempered by the disturbing reports from travelers that ‘our Tatars’ (or ‘Georgian Tatars’) seemed not to recognize their kinship with Georgians and instead elected to leave for Ottoman territory. At the same time, reports are rife that the Georgian ‘Tatars’ practice a kind of secret Christianity, particularly widespread among women, and in general any undestroyed church comes to be taken as a sign of such secret Christian practices. As time progresses, churches and ruins of churches attract more and more attention from these travelers than the people themselves, who for the most part are consigned to an unredeemed and irredeemable state of Tatardom, to the point that the entire genre of travel letter by slow degrees transforms itself instead into an account of a pilgrimage to a holy site. By the twentieth century the behavioral genre of excursion in Georgia has become synonymous with a visit to some church or another somewhere, in other words, leisurely travel, sacred pilgrimage and national self-awareness become fused.

Proto-ethnography and correspondence. I am also, at the same time, investigating the first fits and starts of ethnographic and travel description that precede and take place during the period of composition of Ilia’s travel letters. The 1860’s show occasional writings in the newspaper Droeba that label themselves as ‘travel writings’, but these seldom go very far afield, often exploring provinces of Georgia such as Imeretia that by the 1880’s are the un-narrated point of origin for a traveler rather than his narratable destination. By the 1880’s such portions of Georgia would be the topic of generic letters about village life or peasant life, the idea being that peasants are an ethnographic object of a more generic sort different from mountaineers, Tatars, and other peripheral georgians. These travel writings are also obsessed, in the wake of the great reforms, with vertical distinctions of estates (lord and peasant) rather than horizontal distinctions of an ethnographic interest. Peripheral mountaineer groups such as Svans, who are later of central ethnographic interest, enter primarily as symbols of mountaineer freedom.