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Paper short abstract

Mingrelians, a population in Western Georgia, engage in scale-making in the face of conflicting projects of political integration through narrations of how natives, who have risen to influence in power centres, change the course of history.

Paper long abstract

The endeavour of global and regional powers to dominate the Caucasus as strategical crossroads in a great power game is both a prominent trope as well as still the dominant academic gaze on the region. Phrased in anthropological terms, the Caucasus can be described as ‘field of forces’ and space over which a multitude of ‘projects of political integration’ have yielded conflicting hegemonic claims (Wolf 1982). Inhabitants of the Caucasus region make sense of this field of forces through scale-making by relating to the centres of these projects of political integration. I call these processes, which I call ‘geopolitics in vernacular’, often find expression in humour, irony, rumours and ‘conspiracy theories’ as forms to navigate ambiguity.

My paper inquires how Mingrelians, a population in Western Georgia, who lives on both sides of the Georgian-Abkhazian administrative boundary line, have manoeuvred this field of forces over time and how they make sense of this predicament, in-between such diverse projects of political integration as Russian and Ottoman Empire, Soviet Union, Georgian (nation-)state, Abkhazian de-facto state and the Russian Federation. The paper argues that Mingrelians’ geopolitics in vernacular involves narratives of natives of Mingrelia, who have risen to influence in the power centres. The ascription that they have steered the course of history during crucial events is a wide-spread pattern. Based on ethnographic field notes, the paper details rumours that narrate why during the 2008 invasion of Zugdidi, the capital of the Georgian province of Samegrelo-Svaneti, the town was not plundered by Russian forces.