The Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop at the University of Chicago is hosting two upcoming events related to the archaeology of the Caucasus.
Thursday January 5, 2012 at 4:30 pm in Haskell M102
Dr. Roman Hovsepyan
Research Scientist, Institute of Archaeology & Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences, Armenia and Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University)
The Practical Significance of Archaeobotanical Investigations for Archaeology and History of the South Caucasus
And:
Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 4:30 pm in Haskell M102
Kathryn Weber
Graduate Student, Anthropology, Cornell University
Orientalism in Russia: The Caucasus, Historical Narrative, and the Formation of a National Identity
This paper investigates Orientalism in the Russian context, from Imperial Russia into the Soviet Union, focusing on the production of anthropological and archaeological knowledge of both the “Orient” and Russia’s East (the Caucasus and Central Asia). In the Western European context, the critique of Orientalism sees the conception of the Orient as a reflection of the West, in which the Self is both recognized and created in opposition. At the same time, Western European Orientalism makes the Oriental past the originary site of history, with an infantile civilization birthed there before passing to and maturing in the West. Though the East was similarly intertwined with the past in Russia, the narrative of the relationship with the past was not one of transition, but of incorporation. The place-making implicated in Russia studies of the East contributed to the articulation of a Russian nation identity as well, but the East was less straightforwardly Other.
I contrast the Orientalism of Imperial and Soviet Russia; in Imperial Russia, both the East and the West constituted and contrasted with the Russian identity, whereas the narrative of expansive multiculturalism in the Soviet period integrated an academically produced, essentialized Other into the production of the national identity.