On Tue, 26 May, 17:00 PM, Giorgi Cheishvili will deliver an online lecture “Uncanny Remnants: Ruins, Otherness, and Belonging in Northeastern Turkey”,  organized by the Anthropology Research Center and the Doctoral Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University.

Abstract

Anthropological accounts of ruins typically view them as bridges connecting people either to a specific historical era or to a specific absent “other.” But what happens when neither the past era nor the absent people can be identified or definitively named? This presentation centers on the ethnically Georgian Turkish citizens in the northeastern borderlands of Turkey. Rather than static monuments, I treat the church ruins in these villages as active sites that disrupt conventional ideas of time and continuity, resisting the two most common ways of relating to the past — claiming and externalization. I argue that this unresolvable ambiguity gives the ruins an uncanny quality, rendering them spaces that defy both ways of categorization. I demonstrate how these ruins take on a political life by resisting the very histories that local residents recognize as their own. Ultimately, I suggest, by their physical presence, these ruins quietly unsettle not only how the past is viewed, but how people imagine their right to belong to their immediate locality and to the Turkish nation more broadly.

Biography

Giorgi Cheishvili is a social anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University. He earned his PhD from the University of Bergen in 2022 and held research fellowships at the University of Oxford in 2023 and 2025. His work focuses on borders and bordering practices, state, territoriality, as well as the relationship between the physical border and social boundaries in the Turkish-Georgian borderland. Currently, as part of the ERC-funded INFRAEMPIRE project, he examines the impact of Turkish-led infrastructural development in Batumi, Georgia. His work explores how infrastructure and geopolitics intertwine in everyday life, shaping future imaginaries and producing new forms of power dynamics.