23.04.2025
cooperation

On 29th of April Ketevan Khutsishvili will hold a lecture

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On 29th of April, at 16.15, in Ülikooli 17 room 220, Ketevan Khutsishvili will hold a lecture on the dynamics of border interactions in Georgia.
Professor Ketevan Khutsishvili is the head of the Institute of Ethnology-Anthropology of the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. Her main research fields are economic, religious and urban anthropology. Professor Khutsishvili has for years conductud research on interaction on Abkhazian-Georgian border, especially on border trade. She is in Estonia through the Erasmus+ mobility programme.
Everyone is welcome to come listen!
The borders in the Caucasus are playing an important role in the nationalist agendas as excluding and overwhelming barriers in the local landscapes. However, the situation is quite different in various border regions. I will talk about de facto borderline on river Enguri in West part of Georgia. The Enguri Bridge is connecting Zugdidi and Gali Municipalities (Abkhaz controlled region). This de facto Georgian–Abkhaz border is increasingly hardened following the war between the two sides in 1992–1993, and the additional eruptions of violence in 1998, 2001, and finally during the war of 2008. The peculiarity of the situation in Zugdidi Municipality is that the borderline which has appeared after the armed conflict in 1993, has physically separated the territory settled by the group of people homogenous in terms of ethno-cultural, lingual, religious and kin belonging and everyday practice. Border settlements on both sides maintain intensive contacts. Even if signs of tension are continuously present in the border zone and the border periodically is strictly closed due to the impact of the general political context, the local population often does not conceive the border as an impermeable institution. Crossing of borders happens frequently by the use of formal or informal channels. The agents involved in the interaction are various. The main domains of communication are trade-vending relations, healthcare issues, crime and kin relations. By focusing on trans-border contacts, a topic closely is related to the specific empirical phenomena that create a possibility of overcoming the conflict through the cross-border peaceful communication.
The daily life of the people in the region is going within the process of permanent definition and change of the boundaries. Their lives depend on external factors, on the interests of political elites. The talk is based on ethnographic data and discusses the dynamics of trans-border relations.
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