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It has been a relatively accepted fact among my interlocutors, however, that people relying on employment in public institutions necessarily have to, or at least must pretend to, adhere to government policies when outside of private settings. A relationship in which national and cultural aspirations have, at certain times and by certain people, been seen as external to or in conflict with the state. Yet there are evidently vast differences in the underlying rationales for the national impetus in the imaginaries of the Soviet state, the nationalist movement around independence and nobs post-Rose Revolution authorities. Discussions of the wider methodological implications of the field sites and the role I played within them for the analyses put forth will be addressed in the individual chapters when relevant.
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Page 9. His jailers were not good enough at cards to give him an enjoyable game. Outside the cell,. He showed it to his employer.
Only two-tenths of an inch in diameter,. Fred Wormull, who founded It, nor to the hundreds of embittered and sometimes desperate men who have written to him with their grievances.
Suffering from dental trouble, President Vincent Aurtol went to his dentist. He was an elder statesman. Page Brock Harrap NO name—excepting that of Guy Fawkes himself! S so popularly associated With fireworks as that of Brock. They [the government] criticize the Bolsheviks – and now they are doing same. How can we cut Stalin out of history? Just because you cannot see something, it does not mean that it has ceased to exist.
That actually his absence offers perhaps less controllable potential in the hearts of people and through the likely comparison of the authorities with the Soviet regime they try so hard to distance themselves from. It is in this light that I suggest we may see the Stalin Monument and its removal as a metaphor for a more general feature of Georgian political practice.
Stoler ; Frederiksen Forthcoming but is potentially produced and enacted just as much in the intangible corners of social life and practice as in those explicitly articulated and readily visible. In short, I shall come to suggest that what, at first glance, seems politically uneventful often possesses highly eventful potential: that what is not openly articulated or readily visible may, still, produce tangible effects.
Legislative authority is vested in the parliament. This is now history. Mikhail Saakashvili is still in the presidential office but is unable to run in the upcoming presidential elections scheduled for fall After these elections, a new constitution will come into force and the Prime Minister will become head of state, with presidential powers markedly reduced. Data was generated while the United National Movement and Saakashvili held both parliamentary and presidential power, and it is this rule that I and my interlocutors refer to throughout the following chapters.
For this reason, Saakashvili is frequently referred to when illustrating government initiatives and discourse. The formal structure of the Georgian political system is no doubt an important contextual factor.
Weaknesses of voter representation within the parliamentary system and institutional factors such as the strong executive powers vested in the President are, in many ways, point of departure for the analyses of the particular political practices considered in the following chapters. However it is a central proposition of this dissertation that these formal political institutions and mechanisms are not necessarily the mediums through which all central political processes and practices play out.
At least, as we shall see especially in Chapter 6, a year prior to the elections this outcome was virtually impossible to imagine. It was not that oppositional voices had not been loud and clear for years. Just that even against this background it did not seem realistic that enough of these critics of the post-Rose Revolution authorities would actually cast their votes in favor of an opposition coalition — or cast votes at all.
And even more so, it was difficult to imagine that there would be a peaceful and democratic transfer of power. But why was this so? In order to illuminate such macro-political events and surprises, I propose that we look outside formal political institutions and across societal scale.
Nugent and Vincent ; Vincent Spencer This extension will ultimately provide us with important insights into how formal political institutions and policies, including their rhetorical presentation to the public, intersect with everyday perceptions, social norms and rationales and often, in the end, produce counter-intuitive and paradoxical outcomes. That the same statement is true for illuminating politics in a broader sense is the central presumption of this dissertation. In what follows, I ask what may be gained by looking for the production and reproduction of Georgian politics understood as a conglomerate of macro- and micro-practices concerning cultural values, authority, social organization and the distribution of resources in the sites of everyday life.
I will emphasize the symbolic and performative aspects of political processes and illuminate the ways in which imaginaries of how Georgian society is, and ought to be, are represented and practiced by the authorities in office.
Despite government rhetoric a point I shall return to in Chapter 2 , I will argue that, among my interlocutors and a majority of the Georgian population as a whole, there is virtually no imagination or perception of the state beyond the government authorities.
The state is, in emic terms, seen as equal to the government, and people working within state institutions are seen as adhering to, and performing, government politics. Or, at least, they are seen as people who cannot afford to oppose this political line in public. This does not, of course, mean that these are all one actor, or that they do not differ in strategies and approaches internally. I will, however, contend that, from the perspective of the majority of my interlocutors, they are more or less viewed as one political entity.
Or, alternatively, as political individuals sharing the same characteristics in terms of being powerful and egocentric or at the prey of those who are and hence acting to preserve their own positions rather than in the interests of the people they should supposedly be representing. Likewise, people working in state institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums etc. It has been a relatively accepted fact among my interlocutors, however, that people relying on employment in public institutions necessarily have to, or at least must pretend to, adhere to government policies when outside of private settings.
This, as we shall see, notably in Chapter 6, creates a particular understanding of politics as essentially insincere and opaque. Gotfredsen Hansen and Stepputat ; Dunn ; Aretxaga , I suggest that we may see the political as both a set of concrete practices engaged in the pursuit of authority, moral values or resources not limited to tangible social institutions and organizations and an idea, or imaginary, that feeds into these concrete practices and their effects. A form, through which political practice often appears paradoxical, in the sense that it denies its own existence.
This, she argues, requires tracing the political against accounts that would normalize it, and not constrain its study to limited sites or places. I operate with a similar view on the political and its location — or rather 1 For a discussion of this perception of politics in the post-socialist world more broadly and its relationship with previous political regimes see e. My approach is one of searching for its paradoxical manifestations in different institutional and everyday domains, in order to catch a glimpse of the forms it assumes.
Paradoxical, here, understood in relation to precisely the intuitive logic of accounts that normalizes it and locates it in particular domains and in a linear one-to- one relation between particular dispositions nationalist, neoliberalist, communist, traditionalist and corresponding acts.
Adopting this view in relation to the Stalin Monument, for instance, would mean that not protesting its removal did not necessarily mean that one shared government values and visions, and found the monument appalling. And, vice versa, protesting its removal was not necessarily tantamount to adherence to Stalinist ideology and neglect of the worth of the nation as we shall see elaborated in Chapter 4.
My approach, then, entails a view of politics as something people do rather than merely values to which they subscribe. This does not exclude my interlocutors subscribing to different sets of values in terms of the nation, state responsibilities, traditions, family life, moral goods and bads but rather acknowledges that their articulation or non-articulation sometimes produces seemingly paradoxical outcomes and effects that may counter these values.
Outcomes and effects that are difficult to grasp if we do not include in our analysis the micro-contexts of these articulations and their reception and interpretation Wedeen 16, 21; cf. Yurchak In her study of Yemeni politics, Wedeen argues for a performative perspective of political practice that accounts for the ways in which democratic or national persons are constituted through speech-acts and deeds associated with nationalism and democracy, without necessarily committing to their underlying ideals 16, Analogously, I propose that the political may be produced through performative practices that are not necessarily aimed at being political cf.
I suggest that a similar dual potential for the interpretation of practice and performance is a defining characteristic of Georgian politics. Hence, whereas I concur with Wedeen that we should focus our study of the political on what people do, I want to stress that this doing is still, in social practice, left to be interpreted and perceived in terms of its underlying meanings and values.
These meanings and values, I suggest, may be perceived as dual and unpredictable, and this duality may, ultimately, produce tangible political effects. This descriptive metaphor would often — literally or indirectly — accompany characterizations and discussions of politics among my Georgian friends and interlocutors.
In the experiences and perceptions of my interlocutors as well as analytically speaking. In short, even if, as we shall see, certain elements of Georgian politics are extremely well articulated and visible, I will come to argue that what is most explicitly signified and performed may not always be, in itself, that which holds the greatest political potential.
Rather I propose that the political assume a dual form — oscillating between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, articulation and silence. Considering politics as evasive, I will suggest, brings our descriptive and analytical attention to this apparent paradox of the political in the Georgian setting.
It assists us in illuminating the political productivity of the apparently absent — the unnoticed and unarticulated — and invites us to embrace the paradoxes producing, reproducing and, now and then, changing political landscapes. The setting If you pass Gori from the main highway crossing Georgia from east to west, one of the first things you notice is a large complex of green buildings with Georgian flags waving in the breeze.
If you take the second exit into town, the Tskhinvali Highway, the somewhat rough and bumpy road leads you right past the military complex on your right-hand side. On your left, you see rows of identical small houses on little square plots of land, most of which — if it is the right season — will be covered with maize plants.
Some of the small houses have had additions added onto them — some of brick, some wooden, some of sheet metal, and others of temporary constructions covered with tarpaulin. Small kiosks are placed next to each other on the roadside. Some offer petrol and wine in recycled plastic bottles, others cigarettes, vodka, candy and basic food stuff. Following the war with Russia in , the houses were built to accommodate refugees from South Ossetia — just some 25 km in the opposite direction.
With its identical bungalows in strict lines, this refugee settlement and others like it spreading over the hillsides on the outskirts of town bears similarities with the military complex. In contrast with the military complex, however, which occupies an open and airy space, the bungalows give an impression of being almost claustrophobically cramped together, and neat is hardly the first word that springs to mind.
As you continue into town, you pass through the neighborhood of Tsminda Tskhali: a patchy combination of Soviet-style five-storey apartment blocks, family houses, small kiosks and grocery shops, restaurants, and a shopping center with large glass facades. In front of you Goris Tsikhe, a medieval fortress, lies on a hilltop surrounded by the coiled streets of the old town. This is no doubt the busiest, noisiest and most hectic place in town with bus- and marshrutka drivers calling out for passengers, market stands offering all kinds of things from building materials to flowers, pottery and food-stuffs, and old women offering juice, pastries, bananas, magazines and toys for the travelers both inside and outside the buses.
Following the road left alongside the market, you reach Chavchavadzis Gamziri, the main shopping street in town with a myriad of small shops and second-hand outlets selling mobile phones, cameras, jewelry, clothing, study materials and kitchen utensils. Continuing along Chavchavadzis, you end up at the central square, Stalinis Moedani, spread out in front of the town hall.
Gori is the administrative center of the Shida Kartli Region of central Georgia, located approximately 70 kilometers west of the capital, Tbilisi. In Soviet times, it was an important industrial center but the economic crisis of the s caused the shutdown of the majority of former industries and factories, and a general exodus of population. In , the town had an official population of 54, inhabitants — around 13, less than in the late s.
The official number of inhabitants is currently somewhat disputed among the residents, with most of them insisting that the figures are too high and do not reflect the large number of people who have actually left in search of work in Tbilisi or abroad. Walking around town, it is indeed hard to imagine more than 50, people living there. According to official statistics from , the Shida Kartli region has an unemployment rate of 8. A number intuitively much more fitting for my experience and the 3 Statistics from www.
Even if Shida Kartli is not the worst affected of the regions, and Gori is not as poor, marginal and dull as other provincial towns, it does indeed represent a markedly different context for everyday life and leisure than that of many Tbilisi neighborhoods.
Still keeping in mind of course that in Tbilisi, and Batumi too, one can find the extremes of both wealth and poverty, proliferation and decay that one encounters across the country cf.
Frederiksen Forthcoming ; Jones What Gori and my interlocutors will show us, then, is maybe not so much the extremes — of either side — as a rather ordinary perspective that applies to the more average towns and places in the country.
The majority of the people we will meet in the following pages are not especially rich or poor, powerful or marginalized, happy or depressed, and neither is Gori, in comparison with other provincial towns across the country. As we have already seen with regard to the removal of the Stalin Monument, however, the place does possess certain crystallizations of symbolic and performative potential that have made it a fruitful place for studying the political environment and practices under the post-Rose Revolution Government.
Besides its association with Stalin, Gori attracted particular attention during the short- lived but intensive war between Russia and Georgia in August The war was the culmination of years of tension and occasional violent clashes in the Russian-backed de facto independent republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The two territories, 4 Of the population listed as employed in the entire region of Shida Kartli, approximately 70 percent are self-employed.
This partly reflects the fact that it is predominantly an agricultural region. However, this simultaneously constitutes a statistical masking of the many households living mainly from subsistence farming on small plots of land and now and then selling off surplus produce at the local markets.
Also, these statistics do not count the unregistered unemployed and women who have stopped seeking work Jones , Both territories are de jure considered part of the Georgian republic but are today de facto independent, with support from Russia. Having their own specific trajectories, the two territories have both been centers of conflict and dispute since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the waves of violent clashes in the regions have caused a great number of refugees and, consequently, internally displaced ethnic Georgians within Georgia proper.
The last wave of refugees from South Ossetia, many of whom live in settlements such as the one passed on the road into town, has made these conflicts over territories highly visible in and around Gori. The conflict over South Ossetia peaked in August According to Georgian intelligence, Russian troops had entered South Ossetia through the Roki Tunnel prior to the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, which was thus framed as a response to a Russian assault on Georgian territorial integrity.
On August 11, Georgian ground troops were forced to retreat, and Russian forces began to advance into Georgia proper. Gori, situated approximately 25 km from Tskhinvali, was the main staging area for the Georgian military during the battle. After an expansion of the military infrastructure in the area over the s, the town hosted the 1st Infantry Brigade of the Georgian ground forces in , as well as the Central Military Hospital. On August 10, the Georgian Interior Ministry declared Gori unsafe, and a large number of civilians began to flee the town and its surrounding villages.
Having been defeated in Tskhinvali, the Georgian army regrouped near Gori to try and prevent the Russians from taking the town. However, with reports of the Russian forces approaching Gori, Georgian troops were ordered to retreat in order to defend Tbilisi. In the afternoon of August 12, the Georgian army began to abandon the town, as did the majority of the remaining civilians and, the next day, Russian ground troops entered. The Russian occupation of Gori lasted until August 22 although some Georgian territories in the vicinity of Gori and the South Ossetian border remained under Russian control until October.
Most of the people I was to meet had stories to share from the war: stories of the bombings; of shootings in the streets and bullets entering living rooms; of fleeting the city and returning. However, there were also stories of the Russian soldiers behaving and refraining from looting and abuse; of solidarity between Russians and locals, as well as within families and friendships of mixed Georgian, Russian and Ossetian nationality. Most insisted that the war was a matter of large-scale politics with ordinary people — Georgians, Russians, Ossetians — caught in the middle.
Due to the Russian bombardment and occupation, Gori became a key symbolic site for framing the war not just as a disagreement over South Ossetia but as Russian aggression towards undisputed Georgian territory and the Georgian nation as such. This framing fed into the statements made by the authorities in the aftermath of the removal of the Stalin Monument.
The statements reflected a particular interpretation and logic concerning the relationship between Stalin and the national past and present. In other words, historical events that have happened over the course of almost years are symbolically and temporally collapsed and signified in Gori. An interview with the then Georgian Minister of Internal Affairs, Vano Merabishvili, in a Russian newspaper in spring , further illustrates the rhetorical use of the Stalin Monument.
In implicitly acknowledging that the government itself was hesitant to remove it, Merabishvili said that the Georgian authorities had tried to pay the Russian troops USD 50, to destroy the monument once and for all during the occupation of Gori. I will say otherwise. There are only two ways in the world — either to move towards western culture or to move nowhere.
We have chosen the first one. And you? Has anything good happened in your country during these years? You have quarreled with your neighbors. They are afraid of you. You are afraid of each other.
The society and police are in the state of war in your country. What have you built during past ten years? Therefore, you will never win the war with Georgia Civil Georgia a. And, because of this, they will remain stuck in the past, not moving anywhere, in contrast with Georgian aspirations. To the authorities, and many others, the Stalin Monument was an insult to the suffering of the Georgian nation in the past as well as to the people who lost their lives in the war. But, moreover, its existence, and the fact that it was still popular to some, seemed to act as a reminder that the aspirations of being part of a Western culture and moving away from the dark Soviet past were not shared by all.
Previous to and during my fieldwork, my Tbilisi friends and acquaintances would dread my doing fieldwork in Gori and living there for months.
Nothing happens in Gori! This was stressed with reference to Goris Tskihe, the medieval fortress overlooking the town and, not least, Uplitsikhe, an ancient town approximately 10 km outside Gori carved out of rock and believed to date back to the early Iron Age.
One of these dualities was precisely the local pride, fusing ancient national tradition with the former leader of the Soviet Union. Even more so, however, there was a tension between this pride and an almost fierce insistence that Gori was a dead town with nothing happening.
Its obvious importance for political rhetoric and signification and yet the insistence that the town was marginal and dull. A combination of rather anonymous apartment blocks, pot-holed streets and decay and, on the other hand, the experience of being hospitably welcomed into cozy and warm kitchens and living rooms.
A sense of general inertia and sparks of genuine engagement. This sense of duality followed me throughout my fieldwork, partly in terms of my personal ambiguity about the place but also in the ambiguity, or duality, I met in people when they were relating to their town, its history, and the lives they currently led within it. An ethnographic journey As mentioned at the outset of this introduction, the structure of this dissertation will mirror my ethnographic journey into, and through, the field.
The reasons for this are twofold. First of all, this movement reflects how my fieldwork developed as a series of conscious strategies mixed with coincidences. It illustrates the new questions, puzzles and insights that appeared as I gradually engaged with new groups and social settings, moving from largely public to private spheres. In this sense, it is an invitation to follow me through the gradual cognition that ethnographic fieldwork is, in many respects, all about cf.
Hastrup and Hervik Secondly, this journey reflects how my search for political practices and their manifestations in the field, in many respects, felt like trying to hunt down something that would not stay in one place. In short, the structuring narrative of the dissertation, then, reflects my movements and attempts to capture aspects of the political across, and between, social scales and practices.
I visited Georgia for the first time in summer , roughly six months after the Rose Revolution and the coming to power of Saakashvili and the National Movement. This dissertation builds mainly on data obtained in Gori throughout a total period of 10 months of fieldwork carried out in two phases in and Data consists mainly of daily fieldnote entries, recorded interviews, local and national news and media coverage, and a variety of government policy papers and statements, along with NGO reports obtained and produced during this time period.
However, my previous long- and short-term stays in the country act as important contextual backdrops and have, in many ways, sparked the questions that I more thoroughly addressed during the fieldwork of and As planned in my original project design, I spent much of the first phase of fieldwork in the Stalin Museum.
During the opening hours of the museum, I would hang out with curators, guides, managers and visitors, in search of the political aspects of the exhibition as well as everyday working life. Access to the museum was granted by official request, and it seemed like a safe point of departure for doing research in a town in which I did not yet have any personal network. As I will show in Chapter 3, even if access was formal, I was in many respects welcomed as a guest as much as a professional researcher.
This position of the guest makes fieldwork in Georgia a blessing in certain respects, and challenging in others. Pelkmans A challenge because you can easily come to question whether you are, in reality, a burden that people feel obligated to welcome even if they would rather not, for personal, economic or other reasons. The ethical dilemma in this setting, then, is not so much one of how to deal with repeated requests for money, gifts, meals, etc.
And, consequently, how much pressure can one put on people who agree to meet you but repeatedly back down — possibly because they do not have the means to host you properly? For now, it is important to make the point, however, that many of the paradoxes or dualities that I consider throughout the dissertation have materialized to me in my shifting position between guest and almost insider, spectator and practitioner of such socio- cultural ideals.
To my surprise, the staff in the Stalin Museum would rarely discuss Stalin amongst themselves and, in general, working in the museum was not considered particularly political. Rather, in the everyday life of the museum work, the chat among the guides, curators and managers concerned much more everyday subjects such as boredom, family life, life outside Gori, and the latest gossip.
It did, however, become evident that Stalin was surrounded by a multitude of ambiguous connotations — amongst museum staff as well as people outside the museum. Stalin as a figure proved to be linked with and weaved into issues of the nature of the Soviet past, nationality and national enemies, nostalgia, tradition and social responsibilities and -security.
All these were themes, I gradually realized, that fed into more general perceptions of politics and political change. I found them manifested in particular field sites, and it is these sites concretely and figuratively speaking that have provided the overall structure and content of the following chapters. Besides the Stalin Museum, these sites more or less include the Stalin Society, in combination with the local Communist Party; private spaces and everyday family life; news, TV and information flows; and, broadly speaking, Gori as a public place.
This phase of fieldwork relied heavily on my personal contacts and their friends, families and acquaintances. Without knowing in advance, it turned out that my field assistant had a family member who was involved with the Stalin Society and local Communist Party, which granted me access to weekly meetings of these associations and interviews with their members. As I will describe in Chapter 6, by more or less coincidence I ended up living with a family whose friends and other family members became points for entering new private settings and everyday activities.
Everyday fieldwork in this phase became a mix of conducting interviews, attending meetings in the Stalin Society and Communist Party, hanging out with people around town, tables, Turkish coffees, and in front of televisions and, not least, waiting for something to happen.
Discussions of the wider methodological implications of the field sites and the role I played within them for the analyses put forth will be addressed in the individual chapters when relevant. It draws on anthropological and social science literature on the political history and present of Georgia and combines this with anthropological studies of socialism and post-socialism.
The timespan covered is roughly the past years and the focus is on themes such as the nation, forms of political rule and opposition over the course of this time, and the ideologies of progress embedded in these political forms. The chapter will conclude by juxtaposing and relating the national political history with the rhetoric and initiatives installed after the Rose Revolution. The main aim of the chapter is to provide a contextual and historical backdrop for the themes considered in the subsequent chapters.
In this sense, the chapter is not to be understood as a comprehensive political history of Georgia but rather an account of chosen political events, aspects and practices that form an important background for understanding the positions, attitudes and practices of my interlocutors. Chapter 3 analyzes the Stalin Museum and the nexus between state institution and working place. The chapter builds mainly on material obtained in during the first phase of my fieldwork.
It includes interviews with museum guides and curators, the museum director at that time, and conversations with museum visitors. The analysis has, in particular, been assisted by daily fieldnote entries describing the daily routines and working practices of the museum employees, such as the guiding of visitors through the museum exhibition, and the discussions had over coffee while waiting for visitors to arrive. Anderson ; Duncan ; Horne , and, partly, a literature emphasizing the museum as a potential site for the contestation of power, i.
Dahl and Stade ; Handler ; Karp and Lavine Besides an empirical contribution and dialogue with this body of literature, however, the main point of the chapter will be to illustrate the features and characteristics of some paradoxes relating to the political significance of the museum, both in terms of the national political context, and the micro-political processes unfolding in everyday working practices.
Whereas Chapter 3 addresses political aspects of the past and present within a state institution, Chapter 4 considers this subject in a wider public setting.
In contrast with both government discourse and my intuitive expectations, it seemed possible to admire Stalin as a figure, hail Georgian independence from the Soviet Union, be pro- Government and simultaneously express nostalgia for Soviet times. The chapter is based on data obtained from participating in weekly meetings of the Stalin Society and the local Communist Party, life-story interviews with members, and life-story interviews with people between the ages of 45 and 70 who were not active members of any such associations.
Through this material, I analyze nostalgic recountings of pasts and experiences that are largely silenced and rendered void in government discourse. By alluding to conceptualizations of nostalgia, stressing its intimate relationship with both present and future, the chapter argues that the contested and dismissed mode of nostalgia is contested and dismissed precisely because it is not only concerned with the past.
The chapter describes the circumstances surrounding the marriage and divorce of the eldest daughter of my host family. Concretely, through an analysis of two supras, or ritualized feasts, one shortly after her marriage and the other on the night of the break-up of the marriage, the chapter draws attention to a particular form of communication that is highly valued and idealized as a Georgian cultural characteristic.
One point of the chapter, however, is that behind the idealized words and performance involved in the supra, contradictory and conflicting feelings and attitudes often linger as a potential parallel interpretation.
The analysis, in short, illustrates a duality of communication that I suggest extends beyond the supra and into more explicitly public and political realms. It combines the three empirical levels considered in the previous chapters and draws on a conglomerate of data from the above field sites and more overall observations of media coverage and the spread of news and information between people.
Even if the stories depicted in this chapter represent different circumstances and political scales, I argue that the expressions of uncertainty and opacity often emerge as one communicative form. One that stresses personal or group marginality and places the ability of meaningful acts with others. My argument, however, is that this does not mean that people do not engage themselves politically or act on their lives and futures, but rather that we may have to look beyond formal political institutions and practices to notice it.
This is, from the outset, an ethnographic piece of work. The analytical concepts and approaches invoked in the individual chapters reflect the empirical cases and puzzles arising therein. In other words, they have been invoked in their capacity to unfold and shed light on the empirical material rather than mirroring one theoretical project per se. In the final chapter, however, I fuse the various perspectives and analytical angles — or the conclusions arising with their assistance — and seek to draw a synergetic image of the complex sites and agencies of a contemporary Georgian political landscape.
In trying to account for and meaningfully grasp the paradoxes appearing throughout the chapters, I will further explore the potential for understanding political practice through the metaphor of the evasive. Nikita Khrushchev was influenced by Western agents and he slandered Stalin. Stalin was already dead at that time and he could not answer them.
Once, I listened to interviews of ex-FBI officials on the TV in which they said that a special reconnaissance bureau had been established with the aim of destroying the Soviet Union.
In , people went out onto the street to demonstrate against Khrushchev. People were also in the streets of Gori and I attended that demonstration. I was not in Tbilisi. They wanted to remove the monument to Stalin at that time as well, but they did not manage to […] People used to spend nights in front of the statue. They protected it like guards. KG: Do you remember how many times the statue was under threat of being removed? Archil: The idea of removing the monument always existed but they were not able to put it into practice.
KG: The government has succeeded in removing the statue recently. What do you think has changed over this period of time? What made it possible now and not five, fifteen, or fifty years ago? Now the only generation left is that which grew up in the time of Khrushchev. In , the statue was protected by people who grew up under Stalin. Many years have passed and we now have a different generation. People are poisoned by the ideas which are announced on television or by the media.
The demonstrations continued for several days, with the crowd reciting poems and listening to speeches commemorating the great deeds of Stalin. The demonstrations ended on March 9 with the army and police firing into the crowds, killing dozens and wounding hundreds of young people as they tried to move through the capital Suny Patriotic pride was mixed with political protest in March Suny While the Georgian intelligentsia may have acted as if they were loyal to communist ideology, he argues, most people would consider real devotees to be fools and, at least in trusted company, distance themselves from Stalin as well as the Soviet state.
In both cases, the pro-Stalin demonstrations of and the positive displays of Stalin afterwards are interpreted as resistance — nationalist, ideological or both — towards the Soviet state. According to Georgian political analyst Gia Nodia, one of the reasons for the relatively late removal of the monument to Stalin in Gori can be found in a combination of the two above arguments.
Namely fears on the part of the government of offending local patriotism and stirring up emotionally motivated political opposition towards the ruling party Nodia Rather than adherence to Socialist or Stalinist ideology, he argues, the honoring of Stalin in Gori and Georgia signifies national pride and patriotism — today as well as historically speaking.
In short, in all three analyses of opposition against the removal of monuments to Stalin in Georgia — in Tbilisi in the s and in Gori in — the underlying argument is that the figure of Stalin is connected to nationalist pride and opposition towards state authorities rather than necessarily Stalinist ideology and practice as such.
I do, however, wish to suggest that the configuration of national patriotic emotions vs. The introductory excerpt from and interview with Archil, the head of the Stalin Society in Gori, illustrates some of this complexity. In her account of Soviet Russia in the s, Sheila Fitzpatrick notes that even though the gap between the modernist utopias of Stalinism and everyday life was wide, the generations growing up at that time took to heart, in many respects, the optimism and imaginary of a completely new and different society Fitzpatrick Archil, being born in , is part of this generation.
In other words, a certain belief in the socialist project and imaginaries quite possibly accompanied patriotic and oppositional emotions. In other words, to Archil there have clearly been different forms of Soviet authority and different times and contents of Soviet ideology.
And, I would add, different versions of national patriotism, adherence and opposition at different points in time. At least in retrospect then, there seem to be multiple perceptions and complex configurations at play in terms of the Soviet authorities, the socialist revolution, independence, national pride and the latest neoliberal revolution.
The time span covered is roughly the past years and the focus will be on themes such as the nation, forms of political rule and opposition over this period, and the driving rationales embedded in these political forms. The chapter will conclude by juxtaposing and relating the national political history with the rhetoric and initiatives established after the Rose Revolution.
The main aim of the chapter is to provide a contextual and historical backdrop to the themes addressed in the subsequent chapters and serves as an outline of some of the registers informing contemporary Georgian historicity. In this sense, the chapter is not to be understood as a comprehensive political history of Georgia. Rather, it is an account of chosen political histories that form an important background for understanding the positions, attitudes and practices of my interlocutors in relation to Stalin, the Soviet past, national traditions, social relations and networks and politics in general.
Positions, attitudes and practices that, at times, appear paradoxical, but may be rendered somewhat coherent if considered within their specific historical and macro-political context. As already implied in the introductory chapter, the authorities taking office after the Rose Revolution built their imaginaries of a prosperous future by firmly asserting what it was not. What the post-Rose Revolution authorities were, and what they would bring to the country, can be viewed as a combined antithesis of two previous political systems, or epochs: that of the Soviet state — as one continuous and definite power rather than a contingent and period-specific entity.
In that sense, paradoxically perhaps, the Rose Revolutionary imaginary was a fusion of anti-stability and pro-stability. Of anti- totalitarianism and state repression as signified by Soviet times, and anti-weak state and de facto rule of criminal elements as signified by the early years of independence.
The following sections will therefore provide an outline of these two periods. It sings the triumph of freedom and truth, beauty and virtue, the progressive ideas of the equality of men and friendship among the peoples Javakhishvili and Gvelesiani The section, and large parts of the book as a whole, moves back and forth between what we might call Georgian national grandeur, courage and uniqueness, and, on the other hand, Soviet rhetoric of equality, freedom, progressiveness and solidarity.
Prominent also today national figures of the 19th century such as writer, poet and thinker Ilia Chavchavadze , educationalist Iakob Gogebashvili , poet and national liberationist Akaki Tsereteli , and writers Vasha Pzhavela and Aleksandre Kazbegi are all mentioned and hailed for their talents and contribution to the national liberation of the Georgian people.
A somewhat selective description of the Red Army invasion that eventually established Soviet Bolshevik authority in the country Suny This thesis of national awakening has been widely contested in academic scholarship for its primordial connotations but, in numerous of the former republics — at public, state and, academic level alike — it is a thesis prevalent to this day Hirsch 3; Suny 3; Tishkov Georgia has been no exception to this trend Jones Ch 8; Suny Ch But, as we shall see in the following sections and chapters, the extent to which this was, and is, thought to be incompatible with socialism, and even the Soviet state, is not as straightforward as the thesis of national awakening would have it.
The Bolsheviks thought it possible to push history forward through the changing of the economic base and cultural forms simultaneously. The creation and equation of the territorial, productive and administrative units of the Union with national units was part of the grand scientific experiment of socialism. This was also the case in Georgia. Suny describes how a process referred to as korenizatsiia, rooting or nationalization, contributed to the reinforcement, or creation, of a popular national awareness.
Like Hirsch, he demonstrates the ways in which this was, to some extent, a participatory process of give and take between the Georgian intelligentsia and political elites and the Moscow centre. In order to limit opposition and stabilize and reinforce socialist developments in the country, the s saw several measures to promote ethnic Georgian culture in the form of art, language and education.
Simultaneously, ethnic Georgians were increasingly holding important posts within local government institutions. The analyses of Hirsch and Suny both demonstrate that the making and consolidation of the Soviet Union was a complex process not limited to the will of central authorities.
They also, and Suny in particular, show how the national was not limited to form but was given actual content through practices consolidating these nationalities. In this sense, national aspirations were by no means given free rein to develop. In some cases, as we shall see below, their particular manifestations or origins would be considered a danger to socialist transformation.
Hirsch A significant factor in the development of the Soviet ideology of the people and their revolution was the rise of German national socialism. The Stalinist approach to speeding up and consolidating the revolution was one of social and cultural engineering. Even at the level of language, the construction of proper vocabulary, speech and text was thought to eliminate deviations from the right ideological course and, hence, further speed up the revolution Yurchak The continuous rush for leaps forward, so to speak, melted the present into its historical end.
One revolution related to economy and production in terms of collectivization and industrial development. The other to culture and political ideology in terms of the elimination of alleged political opponents and critics of the proper socialist course as defined by Stalin.
In Georgia, the peasants resisted collectivization and the resulting changes in customary ways of life, and the process was comparatively slow. Hence, in the s the official policy of korenizatsiia was increasingly accompanied by attacks on local nationalism.
Throughout the early s, a number of Georgian academics in language, poetry and history were dismissed from their posts at institutions of higher learning, intellectuals were increasingly marked as class enemies and nationalist dissidents, and the consequences of these accusations became harsher Suny The old Georgian party elite was eliminated and replaced with a new group of functionaries even more loyal to Stalin and his dedicated local subordinate, Lavrenti Beria, then First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Suny It is against this background, I would argue, that Stalin is allowed to come forth as an ambivalent figure in the following Chapters.
As we shall see, especially in Chapters 3 and 4, the Stalinist era is valued and represented differently by different categories of people in contemporary Georgia. Especially this latter quality will come forth in the nostalgic narratives I consider in detail in Chapter 4.
Even if valued differently, however, there seems to be some form of agreement that it was the Stalinist period of the Soviet era that saw the highest level of socio-economic transformation and authoritative order and control over Georgian society — for better or worse.
Dissidence and the late Soviet state […] The most complete consolidation of the Georgians as a nation came in the seven decades of Soviet power. Although the thrust of Marxism had seemed opposed to the creation of a coherent and separate Georgian nation, the actual evolution of Soviet Georgia resulted in the emergence of a conscious nation with its own national intelligentsia and political elite Suny Following the death of Stalin in , Khrushchev, denouncing the personality cult of Stalin and the terror of his reign, set out to loosen the tight grip on the political and cultural sphere throughout the Union.
Whereas political expressions and actions were, in general, strictly controlled, public expressions of national feeling and sentiment were increasingly tolerated over the coming years. This was evident in the new party program in which Khrushchev elaborated on the official theory concerning the nationalities of the Union.
The right expressions of national and ethnic identity, in other words, were not considered dangerous to the main goals. This period reflected what Suny terms a renationalization in the form of the Georgians somewhat regaining political control and ethnic dominance over the Georgian Republic, which they had only held in theory during the Stalinist period. This renationalization resulted in an increasing popular national awareness and pride.
According to Suny, there were two different ways in which this reinforced nationalism was enacted. One operated within the established system, seeking to secure the maximum of benefits for ethnic Georgians within the Soviet system. The second was a dissident nationalism, acting in opposition to the Soviet system.
In the late s, however, the latter still only represented a very small minority, and demands for national independence seemed distant Suny Hence cultural production by the intelligentsia was almost always about the Nation.
Culture was first and foremost a set of national forms, a set of ideologies of ethnolinguistic identity. But while this intelligentsia liked to view itself as an organic part of the nation for whom it spoke, it also liked to be separated from this nation residentially living in cities as opposed to the countryside and in terms of privileges received from the state […]. The intelligentsia imagined itself as being in a symbiotic relation to the people in ideal terms from which it was separated in practical terms , and in practical terms it existed in a symbiotic relation to the state from which it distantiated itself in ideal terms Manning In other words, the national intelligentsia was in many ways dependent on the Soviet state and vice versa.
But if national forms and aspirations were, to a large extent, allowed to blossom among the cultural elite in the late Soviet state, how come, eventually, this was not considered enough? What turned national aspirations into national dissent? At least, present day ideas of what the state is and ought to be definitely feed on this past state formation.
As we shall see, especially in Chapter 6, informal networks and kinship ties are still essential to social and economic organization and the state and macro politics are in many respects considered external to everyday life. On the other hand, as especially Chapter 4 will show, this does not prevent people from longing for a strong paternalistic state. Beissinger ; Suraska People were now, to a greater extent, encouraged to make criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy, and dissident intellectuals were released from prison.
In interviews I conducted with current members of the Georgian Communist Party, Gorbachev was often pictured as having been influenced by foreign agents, and being the main contributor to the decline and dissolution of the Soviet state. Interestingly though, in their retrospect perspective, this did not equate to criticism of the Georgian national dissident movement.
Whereas several of these interlocutors would sometimes state that they regretted the break-up of the Soviet Union, they would equally stress their sympathies with the nationalist movement around the time of independence. In other words, it seemed that they, through their aspirations for national independence, were expressing their dissent towards a particular kind of Soviet state — not socialism as such.
After Gorbachev came to power in , the Georgian dissident movement became increasingly visible to the public. This latter group of intellectuals included Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Merab Kostava and Giorgi Chanturia, who were to be prominent national figures in the years to come. These groups and their focus on Georgian national identity and rights, combined with the possibility of expressing political dissent, inspired an environment in which ethnicity and nationality became increasingly visible in its oppositional form.
On 9 April , a public demonstration in opposition to an Abkhazian12 declaration to separate from Georgia was supressed by the Soviet army and a number of unarmed were protestors killed. This was interpreted as a clear example of Soviet brutality and anti-national policies. In other words, 9 April would come to symbolize the ruthlessness of Soviet power, the historic victimhood of the Georgians and, thus, the necessity of national independence and territorial and cultural integrity.
The complex relationship between the making of the Soviet Union and the nurturing of particular elements of national identity throughout the time of the Union, I would argue, is an important background for the upcoming Chapters for two reasons. First of all, it provides a historical context against which Stalin and the Soviet era more generally speaking may today be interpreted as equally repressing and nurturing of the Georgian nation.
Secondly, and related, this dual potential feeds into what is, as we saw in the case with the Stalin Monument above, perhaps even more prevalent: a highly ambivalent relation to this past era and Stalin as a Georgian national within it. National independence The period following the events of 9 April saw a radicalization of nationalist politics in Georgia. However, the nationalist opposition to the Communist Party was not a coherent popular movement.
Rather, it consisted of numerous factions and one-man parties relying more on the popular appeal of their leaders than actual political memberships and programs Wheatley In October , in the first elections to the Supreme Soviet allowing non-communist candidates, Gamsakhurdia became Chairperson of the new legislature and, later that year, he convinced Parliament to make him Executive President.
On 9 April , the second anniversary of the killing of the protesters in Tbilisi in , Gamsakhurdia declared Georgian independence from the Soviet Union. Jones ; Compajnen In many respects, Gamsakhurdia encapsulated the essence of a new chauvinist nationalist agenda. The minorities, on the other hand, started to fear their position within an increasingly national chauvinist atmosphere, eventually causing them to do exactly what the Georgians feared: vote for full status as a Union Republic and independence from Georgia.
This ultimately led to military interference on the orders of Gamsakhurdia, and the armed conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia began. Conflicts which, to this date, have not been resolved and thus still constitute significant course for concern, speculation and political debate in the country.
Even if these conflicts, then, are not as such central cases in the upcoming chapters, they are symbolic vehicles for nurturing particular government and public views of Russia, Stalin and the Soviet Union. Moreover, the conflicts, and the failure to solve them, feed into imaginaries of acute external threats to the Georgian nation.
Imaginaries that we shall repeatedly encounter in the following pages. However, as Manning argues, many opponents of Gamsakhurdia also turned on him for lack of privileges rather than disagreement with his politics. With his government composed of parts of the national intelligentsia, the former relationship of nurture and dependence between state authorities and the intelligentsia lost ground and attention under Gamsakhurdia Manning Jones draws on a similar understanding when stating that, in reality, the Georgian intelligentsia that took over state and government following independence was untrained in matters of governance.
They had previously been focused on cultural development, and had never been bothered with issues of statehood Jones Conflicts between Gamsakhurdia and his supporters and the fragmented opposition escalated throughout the fall of The increasing discontent even materialized close to the Presidential office and in his National Guard.
On 22 December the opponents of the President, including segments of the National Guard led by Tengiz Kitovani and a paramilitary group, the Mkhedrioni,15 led by Jaba Ioseliani, attacked the Parliament building in central Tbilisi. The Mkhedrioni presented itself as the heir to historic Georgian guerrilla groups who fought Persian, Ottoman and Russian occupiers.
Each member would take an oath to defend the Georgian people, the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the Georgian land. On that day, President Gamsakhurdia fled Tbilisi. He rallied support in western Georgia and thereafter directed his troops from hiding, first from Samegrelo and later on from Chechnya.
Clashes between pro- and anti-Gamsakhurdia forces continued throughout and , and in late , Gamsakhurdia returned from his exile in Chechnya to western Georgia in an attempt to regain power. He died shortly thereafter and whether he was murdered or committed suicide is to this day a matter of speculation Suny In March , Shevardnadze was elected Chairman of the State Council and embarked on the difficult task of uniting the fragmented nationalist camp as well as reconciling relations with the non-Georgian population Suny Throughout and , a state of civil war prevailed in the country.
Zviadists followers of Gamsakhurdia fought troops loyal to Shevardnadze in western Georgia and Abkhazians and Georgians fought each other in Abkhazia, resulting in numerous displaced ethnic Georgians and the risk of a military conflict with Russia, which had intervened.
At this point in time, the Georgian state had no monopoly on the use of force. Rather, this power lay with paramilitary groupings, mainly the National Guard and the Mkhedrioni, who were largely operating on their own financial motives and initiatives. He thus reversed the previous decisions of Gamsakhurdia to remain as far removed from Russian influence as possible.
By , Shevardnadze had succeeded in centralizing executive power and a certain level of stability prevailed in the country.
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