Nutsa Batiashvili

The proposed project develops the questions and approaches toward the anthropology of anxiety. Anxiety is perhaps one of the most frequently used terms for describing modern politics of belonging and rupture, times of crisis, sensations of uncertainty, and various forms of political affect, especially those shaped by racialized, medicalized, and gendered experience and social worlds. Anthropologists in this workshop enhance the current work on anxiety by examining embodied, political experience of rupture of consciousness, and heightened readiness for emergency action in the diverse contexts of Georgia, India, France, and the United States, and from divergent perspectives including psychological, medical, cultural, and political anthropology. This workshop is designed to cultivate a more nuanced understanding of anxiousness itself as a socially-situated ontological and existential experience, especially from the ethnographic perspectives of vulnerable boundaries of our bodies as they are implicated in the cultural and political acts of resisting (Middleton, 2013), caring (Larchanche, 2020, Lester 2019, Varma 2018), storytelling (Lepselter, 2016), collective self-doubting (Batiashvili, 2018, 2020), and body-building (Hejtmanek, 2020). The project will be carried out in two stages (online and in person), culminating in the in-person workshop ‘The Anthropology of Anxiety’ at the Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia.