Synagogue as Infrastructure in Everyday Life of Batumi Jewish Community

The subject under scrutiny is Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogues in Batumi (the Black Sea Region of Georgia) that reveal both universal and culturally specific forms. The paper is based on ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork in Batumi, in 2019, and on the theoretical postulates of anthropology of infrastructure. The article argues that the Batumi synagogues could be viewed and understood as ‘infrastructure’ in their own right, as they serve as objects through which other objects, people, and ideas operate and function as a system. The paper attempts to demonstrate how the sacred edifices change their trajectory according to modern conditions and how the sacred place is inserted and coexists inside a network of touristic infrastructure.

Informal Networks in the Black Sea Region

In 2014, local community members nailed a pig’s head to the door of a Muslim boarding house in Kobuleti, a small town in Adjara, to argue that ‘this is a Christian place.’ They expressed fears about the building owner, who was thought to be of Turkish origin. Enlargement of the boarding house was perceived as a possible Islamization of the town and an increase of transborder flows in the region. In this article, I examine the agency of the boarding houses in Adjara through human and non-human actors. At the same time, I look at the legal responses of the state and official structures for controlling informalities embedded in the boarding houses’ networks.

In Chase of ‘Modern Religiosity’

In the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread through the four corners of the world, Christian Orthodox churches were caught in the age-old altercation with science. Tensions condensed around a small material object—the communion spoon—and its potential to transmit the virus. The article examines the ensuing Eucharist-related debates between ‘liberal secularists’ and followers of the Orthodox Church of Georgia: namely, the former’s selective juxtaposition of abstract ‘faith’ against religious practice due to the latter’s alleged incongruity with modernity. The goal of this article is to illuminate the underlying discourse behind these accusations, which in turn draws on the notion of ‘modern religiosity’ informed by post-Reformation ideals.

Identifying Major Actors of Shi’i Revival in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

This article is an attempt to describe, analyze, and evaluate the major players who contributed to the rise of transnational Shi’i activism in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The article is based on a chronology of the most important events, and internet resources, personal contacts, observations, and interviews have been the primary source of this research.

Baptizing into Kin

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a multi-ethnic village in Georgia, this paper shows how everyday peace is continuously reaffirmed in the tradition of inviting Muslim godparents to baptize Christian children. The Muslim godparents perform the roles of the chosen Christians while at the same time remaining Muslim. Hybrid local lay-religious practices around the ritual of christening are analyzed within a larger cultural semiotics that allows reciprocity of perspectives and, specifically in this context, enables the recruitment of non-Christians into the role of godparent. Religion serves as a ground for asserting peace.

Worship of Shrines in Armenia

In this article, the author tries to trace the trajectories of Soviet and post-Soviet transformations of vernacular religiosity in Armenia, in particular, the cult of shrines. She argues that the cult of shrines and related manifestations of vernacular religion were consistently reconceptualized, first, in the period of Soviet secularization and modernization, and, secondly, in the period of post-Soviet and post-secular transformations of the Armenian society. The Soviet modernity led to ‘neo-archaization’ of vernacular religious practice by instrumentalizing some pre-institutional forms and manifestations of religiosity. The post-secular reconceptualization of vernacular religion draws upon new realities, such as mobile/virtual religiosity, new religious materiality, commodification and consumerism, and a new, modernized interplay between institutional and non-institutional dimensions of religion(s).

Georgian Israelites or Jews of Georgia

The paper explores the evolution of Georgian-Jewish identity in different political, ideological, and cultural contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. It is focused on the beginning of the twentieth century when religious and national dimensions of Georgian-Jewish identity were developed as competing identity models. This paper addresses the impact of these identity models on contemporary Georgian-Jewish identity.