B4: Identitätspolitik (Kaukasus)

This ethnological project focuses on an examination of changing representations of national identity in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – a region currently suffering from inter-ethnic conflicts, wars and economic uncertainty. We study rapid urban transformations in three South Caucasian capital cities by considering continuities and discontinuities in the process of reconfiguring public space, ethnic representations and city images in the aftermath of postsocialist change. In all three societies the impacts of global and new geopolitical orientation interfere with questions of contested postsocialist politics of identity in different and dramatic ways. National capitals – in this case Yerevan, Baku and Tbilisi – present the "stages" on which this conflict is strategically enacted through media discourses, representations of images of self and other, urban signs and memorials, as well as through popular culture. In selected urban places the project analyses processes of reconfiguring cultural heritage and history by new elites, urban dwellers and "foreigners" (refugees, expats, diasporans). Representations in this case are understood as symbols, configurations and practices in which different positions of identity politics are formulated, communicated and legitimated. Performative practices in urban places thus play an essential role here.
The central questions in this research project are: How do cities with the status of postcolonial and socialist capitals at the margins of Europe and Asia reshape their identity and position in a world region which is perceived as a realm of violence, conflict and closure? How is the sense of national unity staged and negotiated in urban multicultural public space as well as in a condition of postsocialist "spatial disorder"? How do various actors define and negotiate social order by means of these representations? To what extent does the Soviet ethnic and cosmopolitan past shape the nationalised present in urban spaces?

The region is divided in two units of examination: Armenia/Azerbaijan and Georgia. In Yerevan as well as in Baku we look at spatial and symbolic construction of national commemorations, reconfiguring public sacred spaces and city symbols. In Tbilisi, above all the reconfiguration of national representations of "Georgianness" is to be examined in the context of ethnic and religious diversity, with reference to the examples of Armenian and Azerbaijani minorities. The ethnographical "close-up view" opens up deeper insights into techniques, enactments and strategic realization of identity politics as well as into the postsocialist dynamics of social change in everyday life. The aim of this research project is to contribute a critical approach to regional studies and to the anthropology of postsocialist cities.

Publications by members of this sub-project

• Tsypylma Darieva, Wolfgang Kaschuba, Melanie Krebs (Hg): Urban Spaces after Socialism. Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities. Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York 2011.  (mehr)
• Tsypylma Darieva, Wolfgang Kaschuba (Hg): Representations on the Margins of Europe. Politics and Identities in the Baltic and South Caucasian States. Campus, 2007.  (mehr)
• Tsypylma Darieva: From Silenced to Voiced. Changing Politics of Memory of Loss in Armenia. In: Tsypylma Darieva, Wolfgang Kaschuba (Hg): Representations on the Margins of Europe. Campus, 2007. S. 65-88  (mehr)
• Tsypylma Darieva: Russlanddeutsche, Nationalstaat und Familie in transnationaler Zeit. In: Sabine Ipsen-Peitzmeier, Markus Kaiser (Hg.): Zuhause fremd. Russlanddeutsche zwischen Russland und Deutschland, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2006.  (mehr)