Nutsa Batiashvili

Nutsa Batiashvili is a professor of Anthropology and the Dean of the Graduate School at the Free University of Tbilisi. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Washington University in St Louis, USA and MA and BA in Psychology from Tbilisi State University. She has been awarded postdoctoral visiting fellowships from Oxford University School of Global and Area Studies (2016), Uppsala University Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies (2021). Her research is situated at the intersection of cultural anthropology, memory studies, nationalism studies and the interdisciplinary field of cognitive sciences, with a particular interest in political affect and cognition. Her book The Bivocal Nation: Memory and Identity on the Edge of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) is about a divided nation and polarized notions of nationhood. Her current research projects include: Anthropology of Anxiety - funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation;  The Political and Affective Agency of Heritage Objects in Upper Svaneti - funded by Templeton Foundation; Memory and Anxiety – funded by McDonnell foundation. 

As part of her ONGC fellowship, Nutsa Batiashvili’s research focuses on the ways in which practices of “caring for” and “guarding” the churches and heritage objects in the Caucasian highlands of Upper Svaneti, shape forms of belonging through material and symbolic agency. The wealth of the religious heritage kept in Svaneti – rarest samples of religious manuscripts, Georgian and Constantinopolitan iconography, numerous precious items and church inventory dating to Middle Ages – has produced a wide repertoire of biographies of these objects and of their keepers. By presupposing the affective nature and the agentive capacity of the objects, the study investigates the ways in which historically sedimented value - both material and symbolic - of these objects informs practices of guardianship and creates affordances that facilitate acts of defiance, evasion, or distancing from the power institutions, enabling Svan communities to claim sovereignty and right to their own landscape, memory and livelihood.