Nutsa Batiashvili

NUTSA BATIASHVILI, Free University, Tbilisi, Georgia, was awarded funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Caring for ‘National Treasure’: Political Agency of Heritage Objects in the Caucasian Highlands.” This project studied how practices of “caring for” and “guarding” Medieval churches and religious objects in the Caucasian highland region of Upper Svaneti enact forms of livelihood and relations of power in a social field defined by geographic remoteness, scarce resources, unstable economy and poorly sustained infrastructure. It focused on the assemblage of relics, political relations, and rituals designated by locals as “gandzi” literally meaning “treasure”, to question the dominant paradigm of “national heritage” and interrogate the ways in which “care” (movla) and “guarding” (dacva) speak to the anxious form of belonging among highlanders. Methodologically this study employed unorthodox fieldwork techniques described as “dispatched ethnography” whereby local women served as co-ethnographers of the study, partially designed in response to the challenges posed by COVID-19 pandemic. Such decentering of ethnographer’s subjectivity and authority, apart from its implications for decolonizing anthropology’s epistemic techniques, effectively revealed hitherto invisible tensions, anxieties and inequalities produced through the relations surrounding “gandzi”. The findings of the study speak to broad topics on the agency of materiality, subversive forms of property and subnational anxieties of sovereignty in the decolonizing periphery.