Folklore and Terror in Georgia’s “Notorious” Pankisi Gorge: The ethnography of

the state violence at the margins of the nation.

Paul Manning

Trent University

One of the more curious side effects of the “branding” of localities in the War on Terror

was the production of certain kinds of fantastic places, such that certain otherwise

unremarkable place came to be diagnosed as “Terror bases”. This paper explores a

curious dual apperception of this place within two “folkloric” discourses. Within the

discourse of Georgian folklore, Pankisi is at best peripheral, within the discourse of the

Folklore of Terror, Pankisi briefly became central. Finally I show how the peripherality

of Pankisi to “the nation”, and centrality to “terror”, became a resource for the

Georgian State.

Once upon a time in Pankisi. The Chechens indigenous to Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge

[Geo. p’ank’isis kheoba, p’ank’isi], called Kists [Geo. kist’I, PL. kist’ebi], can have a

pretty dry wit about their predicament. A Kist joke in Pankisi Gorge goes: “Georgia—

you know, it’s near Pankisi”. Factually, more people know where Pankisi Gorge is than

know the location of the country of which it is a part, the Republic of Georgia. One

empirical location, Pankisi leads a rich and multiple imaginary life, both “indigenous”

and “cosmopolitan”, as a place of terror and fear. For Georgian folklorists, Pankisi is a

repository of traditional folklore threatened by Wahhabism. For the international media,

1

it is an international Al Qaida terror base, similar to the much larger Afghanistan in the

world imaginary of “terror”.

Pankisi Gorge in this way has attracted different kinds of observers because of its

status as being a visible microcosm of some larger, perhaps hidden and mysterious,

whole. For global security analysts and policy wonks, Pankisi is an exceptional “crisis

zone”, a node in the vast occult web of mystery that is called Al Qaida. For analysts of

ethnic conflict, Pankisi is a crisis and also an opportunity, a way of investigating ethnic

accommodation and religious tolerance in a border region (Melikishvili (ed.), 2002). For

Georgian folklorists and ethnographers, Pankisi is a second order object of study, not as

valuable as studying the repositories of pure Georgian traditions next door in the

mountainous valleys of Pshavi and Khevsureti, but still, a way of accessing mountain

traditions in general. The logic is familiar, we are all obedient to it: to be worth

studying, to be fundable by international foundations and funding agencies like the

McArthur Foundation (in the United States) or SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council in Canada), places like Pankisi must come to represent some more

general predicament, often with policy consequences. To become representative, the

banalities of everyday life in some small region like Pankisi must be ritually transformed

into palpable microcosms of some larger macrocosm of cosmological import, whether

that of international terror or of national folklore. So, we are encouraged to represent

places like Pankisi in different ways. On the one hand, there is nothing extraordinary

about Pankisi, Pankisi’s problems are typical of the problems that confront any

equivalent sized region in Georgia (Kurtsikidze & Chikovani, 2002, p. 40; Melikishvili

2002, p. 5,). At the very same time, Pankisi’s ethnic, religious, demographic and

2

linguistic complexity confer upon it a certain analytic importance, so that it “represents a

microcosm of the region, a ‘mini-Caucasus’,” the fate of whose “latent ethnic conflict

may say a lot about the future of the whole Caucasus region” (Kurtsikidze & Chikovani,

2002, p. 40). But ultimately, Pankisi became interesting not because it is representative of

the typical problems of the region, or even because it represented a microcosm of the

region, but because the “Pankisi Crisis” became representative of a global specter of

terrorism.

How places like Pankisi are “branded” by such global discourses obviously has

powerful local consequences. The people who live in Pankisi have the fears of a

powerless ethnically marginal population that the chimerical beliefs and fears about them

will lead to a Chechnya style ethnic cleansing. In such a situation, cosmopolitan

narratives of terror become constitutive of local fears. No ethnography of localities like

Pankisi is complete if it fails to take into account this “folklore of terror”, the “occult

cosmologies” that turn this sleepy backwater into a chimerical terror base, with grim

consequences for those who live there (on “Occult Cosmologies” see Sanders & West,

2003). According to such cosmologies of “terror”, to understand the current situation in

Pankisi, it is not enough to observe the farmers of Duisi going out to thresh hay, to see

the women of Joqolo taking cattle in the drizzle of the morning to pasture. Even the

sardonic barbs of the natives provoke only suspicion amongst the seasoned world-wise

journalists who visit the Gorge, who can see behind every shepherd a veiled Al Qaeda

operative or Chechen Guerilla. In the semi-fantastic Orientalist cosmology of terrorism,

only the naïve believe in the phenomenal world of transparency and appearances,

journalists, wonks and assorted intelligence experts all know that every apparently

3

innocent phenomenon is a ticking time bomb, a threat that cannot be known by the senses

alone. Such people live in a much more interesting, indeed, enchanted world, than the

rest of us. I will recite to you such a journalistic fairy tale now. We might have called it

“once upon a time in Pankisi”, or better, to begin the fairy tale the traditional Georgian

way, “There was, and there was not, an Al Qaida base in Pankisi”, but this journalist

titled his story “Shepherds in camouflage”, it goes like this:

The Pankisi Gorge is not more than 15 kilometres long. Only half of it is habitable.

There five villages merge with each other along one street that starts in Duisi, the

"capital" of the gorge. And on different sides of Duisi there are several more

villages populated, among others, by Georgians and Ossetians. The road goes up

into the mountains where the Chinese are building a hydroelectric plant in the

highlands extending to Chechnya. It is next to impassable country with scattered

small, gradually dying settlements like Omalo.

"Well now, shall we go farther and look for Al-Qaeda? the Chechens asked

mockingly. I preferred to continue our excursion of the villages to a tramp at sunset

in the local mountains where even classified army maps promised no passes. It

proved a wise decision. Later, back in Tbilisi, local colleagues asked: "Did you

happen to see any guerrillas?" "I think I did", I answered.

Of course, Pankisi is not a place for light-minded storytellers to visit hoping to

watch guerrillas' manoeuvres. "No guerrillas", reported the sturdy villagers of Duisi

without batting an eyelid. "Ever been here before?" "Never". "They haven't come to

winter here?" "No". I gave up and undertook a frontal attack. I told them of what

4

was going on behind the mountain ridge, about Chechen guerrillas, frankly

describing the dangerous passes from Chechnya to Georgia with such convincing

knowledge of small details that some of them even sank into my memory though I

had never been in these parts. We had already struck up a friendship, so I was

hoping that now the locals would not resist any longer and confess something, some

tiny bits, even in a low voice. "Well", they countered coolly, "that's your job,

spying, maybe, you know more than we. But we haven't seen any guerrillas. They

are not here, and have never been" (Dubnov, 2004).

And so it goes on and on.... This translated version originally from a Russian newspaper,

a story with no date of posting, it remains in circulation as part of that perpetual present

tense of web publics, a “once upon a time” that might also be “right now”, a story which

is constantly as fresh as the refresh button on your search engine. The English language

web sites have been more than happy to parrot from these savvy sources, the endless

stream of cross-citation of undated web pages guarantees that the crisis in Pankisi will

always be an ongoing “now”, whatever the actual situation on the ground, until these

undated, un-updated web-pages themselves expire and the crisis vanishes with finality.

Pankisi has become one of those places that has been added permanently to the

mythology of “terror”, “Pankisi Gorge” will always be preceded by the adjective

“notorious”. Even willingness of Chinese investors to build a multimillion dollar

hydroelectric project in this supposed hotbed of terrorism does nothing to undermine the

general sense of ongoing crisis.1

5

Even in 2005, after two years of relative calm in Pankisi, after the narcotics trade

had been halted, after the Chechen guerillas had departed, Al Qaida maintained a spectral

presence in Pankisi. That year, the French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin

claimed that Al Qaeda cells are currently manufacturing biological agents, “including

anthrax, ricin, and botulism toxins” in Pankisi after being expelled from Afghanistan!2

All empirical evidence to the contrary is irrelevant, because, as we know from the mantra

that followed the general hysteria of 9/11 and continues today, Al Qaida operatives are

techno-savvy troglodytes who have wired their cave dens with lap tops and cell phones to

control their web of terror.

Even as Villepin was speaking, however, the US and Georgian governments, and

even the Russians, had already reclassified the “notorious” gorge from an international Al

Qaida terror base to an apparent “victory” in the war against terror. This was said to be a

result of the US funded Georgian Trains and Equip (GTE) Operation which had, as one

of its goals, the pacification of Pankisi (in 2002). According to post-Rose Revolution

Pro-American government of Saakashvili, it would seem that there aren’t any terrorists in

Pankisi, because they aren’t there any more.

Georgia's notorious Pankisi Gorge appears to be free of terrorists

"It's clean here now," said Peter Tsiskarishvili, the young, U.S.-educated governor

of the region that includes the Pankisi. "We used to have terrorists, yes. And

hiding behind them were criminals and kidnappers." He said three years of

Georgian army patrols - along with American military advice, a deployment of

European border monitors and "a lot of tough police work" - have expelled the

6

terrorists, the drug smugglers and the highwaymen from the Pankisi. Even the

Russians seem to agree. (McDonald, 2005)

And why not? Why argue? For residents of the Gorge, ex-terrorists are almost as good

as no terrorists ever. The article continues in a lighter vein, for this curiously callous

Western reporter, everything seems to have hearteningly returned to normal when all

people want to complain about is the squalor of their poverty-stricken hopeless everyday

lives:

"There are no terrorists here anymore, thank God, and everything is calm," said

Sadula Margoshvili, 73, a lifelong Pankisi native. Then he raised his voice and said

angrily, "But we have no water or electricity!" It can only be encouraging that

complaints about shoddy utilities have replaced fears about terrorist training camps.

(McDonald 2005)

Score one victory for the war on terror. Now that everyone agrees that there aren’t

any terrorists in Pankisi, it is best to claim that that is because there were lots of them, but

there aren’t any more. But terrorists will always have been there, once upon a time, and

now they are banished, and Pankisi can live happily ever after.

The many faces of Pankisi: folkloric discourses and multicultural discourses.

Pankisi is a place that people tell folktales about, but it is also a place where you can

study the more traditional kind of folklore, the kind where caves are populated by Ogres,

not Al Qaida operatives. This was ostensibly my reason for going to Pankisi in the years

7

2004-5. I will admit it, part of the reason I wanted to visit Pankisi Gorge was this spy-

world aura that it had attracted, perhaps some juvenile desire to flaut the ongoing ban for

US citizens on travel there by the US state department. But the main reason grew out of

my collaboration with Georgian folklorists and ethnographers on Georgian mountain

regions like Pankisi. I say, like Pankisi, but if Pankisi Gorge is “good to think” in policy

circles, occupying a central place (albeit briefly) in the mythological world of wonks,

journalists and spies, Pankisi plays little or no role in the equally rich mythological

universe of Georgian national imaginings, whose story tellers are folklorists and

ethnographers. The kind of folklore that these specialists are interested in are memorized

texts passed by word of mouth anonymously from generation to generation, stripped of

their individuality, they become testaments to the creativity of the genius of the folk,

monuments of folk and, by extension, national culture. But I have captured both this kind

of folklore and the discourse of terrorism under the label “folklore”, and I do so not

merely to undermine the epistemic authority and ontology of “The War on Terror” by

implicitly comparing its epistemic status to beliefs in pixies and elves. Although I am

doing that, too. I do so because I believe that fears of terrorism can be understood as

cosmological systems much like folkloric systems, involving “occult cosmologies”

(Sanders & West 2003; Manning, 2007a) where the phenomenal world is understood to

be animated by malign occult forces, whether demons or Al Qaida agents or the Masons.

I also do so because the mode of textual transmission and circulation that defines the kind

of folklore studied by folklorists in Pankisi is not so very different from the mode of

transmission that defines the folklore of terror about places like Pankisi, passing, not by

8

memorization, but by control-c and control-v, cut and paste, not by word of mouth, but

by posting on web-sites, not anonymously, but pseudonymously, and so on.

There are differences between the cosmology of terror and traditional folklore, of

course. The transcendent object of traditional folklore and ethnography is not the world

of the folktale itself, the demons, angels, sprites and other supernatural or preternatural

folkloric creatures that define the world of ‘folk belief’, but the elite-level nationalist

ideology of ‘Folk Spirit’ that animates these folkloric spirits. It is not so important to

Georgian folklorists and ethnographers what Georgian peasants believe specifically as

long as those beliefs are authentic, indigenous, distinctive, ageless products of an

essentially secular object, folk or national culture of Georgia. As Figal (1999) shows for

Meiji Japan, so with Georgia, a secular National Spirit is produced from local folkloric

spirits. The valleys that are the mythic centre of this “once upon a time” Georgianness

are right next door to Pankisi, in Pshavi and Khevsureti. The people of Pshav-Khevsureti

have been studied, and continue to be studied, by generations of folklorists and

ethnographers, every shrine ritual there is attended by some ethnographer or another (see,

for example, Manning, 2007b). The Pshavs and Khevsurs were by the late nineteenth

century identified with the sublime national past in Georgian, and quickly became the

quintessential object of the sciences of ethnography and folklore:

1 Details about this hydro-electric project are unknown beyond that it is a Chinese investment.

2 I found this information, complete with a map showing the location of Pankisi in Georgia here

(http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/1701/documentid/2916/history/

3,2360,655,1701,2916), this report citing the March 10 Eurasia Security Watch

(http://www.afpc.org/esw/esw74.shtml), which in turn cites a Russian source (Mosnews.com).

9

In their homeland the Pshav-Khevsurs have preserved unchanged until today their

ancient, ancestral customs, life, past traditions. In this respect the Pshav-Khevsur is

more Georgian [kartveli] (if it can be said so), than the Kartlian [kartleli, resident of

Kartli, the central Georgian province] himself. The Kartlian lives more in the

present, in the future. If he has not turned his back on the past, still, he avoids

facing it. (Khizanashvili, 1940, p. 1, my translation)

These are “pure” Georgian regions. Pankisi is the opposite. The population of Pankisi is

composed of a mixture of Georgians and Ossetians and Georgian Chechens (Kists), as

well as members of different religious populations, traditional and reformist versions of

both Islam and Orthodox Christianity. As a result, the Georgian literature on Pankisi in

ethnography or folklore is sparse. In fact, marginal border regions like Pankisi became

attractive to Georgian scholars only when Western foundations, like the McArthur

foundation, funded a large multidisciplinary study by Georgian scholars of the “Pankisi

Crisis” in 2001, just a year before the US used the Gorge for their train and equip

operations (Melikishvili 2002 ). Suddenly an ethnography of the “Crisis in Pankisi”

spoke to all the key words Western foundations like MacArthur liked to hear in the late

1990s: words like “civil society”, “identity”, “multiculturalism”, “minorities”, “borders”,

“globalization” appear prominently in the first paragraph of the report of an ethnographic

expedition whose goal was to study the situation of a “multiethnic, multiconfessional

microsociety, which lives in a border zone” (Melikishvili, 2002, p. 5). The title of

newspaper report on the Gorge from 2005 (“Pankisi-many faces, but above all multi-

ethnic”) sums up this “other Pankisi”, the Pankisi of “tolerance” and not “terror”, the

10

Pankisi that illustrates the desirable, rather than the dangerous, aspects of globalization,

in which the adjective of choice is “multi-ethnic” rather than “notorious” (Chauffour,

2005).

But this fashionable global discourse of multiculturalism is not merely a

façade adopted for the granting agencies. If Pankisi is not representative of a

discourse of Georgian national belonging, epitomized by the putative pure

Georgianness of the Pshavs and Khevsurs, the syncretism and hybridity of

Pankisi, including three of the major mountain dwelling groups of the Caucasus

region, Chechens, Georgians and Ossetians, makes it appealing to another

discourse of belonging rooted in the discipline of Caucasology. And if Georgian

identity has been largely imagined as in essentializing nationalist terms of ethnic

purity, the Caucasus and “Caucasian” identity has been imagined in one of two

ways: either as a broader category of racialized, essentialized ethno-linguistic

belonging to the ancient autochthonous Caucasian populations like Georgianess

itself, or alternately, as being typified by syncretism, mixture, and hybridity (see

Cherchi & Manning 2002 for the opposition between these two imaginings?).

While there is no question that the former imagining of Caucasianness as a

racialized ethno-linguistic form of identity is a dominant one within the Caucasus,

there have been attempts (beginning with the famous Georgian linguist Nikolaj

Marr in the pre-socialist and early socialist period) to envision Caucasian identity

as being grounded on syncretism, mixture and hybridity3. Indeed, at the elite

3 See Cherchi & Manning (2002), for the development of Marr’s theories of hybridity and mixture in

relation to the disciplinary study of the Caucasus and Georgia, in particular in reaction to the essentialism

of Georgian and Caucasian nationalisms.

11

level, it remains fashionable at times even within Georgian Caucasological

discourse to represent Caucasian identity as being a historical product of mixture

and syncretism due to migration and contact rather than a primordial essence

based on autochthony (e.g. Sikharulidze, 2006, p. 5, and more generally the

discourse of Caucasianness of such NGOs as “Caucasian House/K’avk’asiuri

Saxli). It would be tempting to reduce such discourses that see Caucasianness

historically emerging from mixture of national categories and cultures (that might

in themselves be imagined in primarily primordialist terms) as a kind of borrowed

ideology sprung from local elite understandings and appropriations of the

ideological imperatives and fashions of Western funding agencies. However, that

would be only part of the story, because there have been, beginning perhaps with

Marr, influential views of Caucasian identity that are predicated on mixture rather

than purity. Indeed, if Georgian nationalist historians like Javakhishvili famously

advocated the need for Georgians to study the languages and cultures of the

Caucasus as part of understanding their own national essence, Marr famously

criticized his erstwhile Georgian students for embedding Georgia in the Caucasus

in terms of an essentializing ethno-linguistic discourse of genetic relatedness. In

Marr’s opinion, Georgian ethno-linguistic nationalism could only be articulated in

such an essentializing discourse to the Caucasus in one of two ways, complete

separation, or hegemonic assimilation, leading “inevitably either to the separation

of Georgia from the pan-Caucasian complex or to the restoration of the past

hegemony of the Georgian people over the Caucasus in general” (Marr 1918:

1501).

12

Bruce Grant and Lale Yalcin-Helkman (2007) sum up this antinomic, paradoxical

quality to the way the Caucasus is represented as follows:

The briefest survey of the most prominent ‘Caucasus paradigms’ begins to paint a

picture of a region famous for its cultural, linguistic, religious, political and

economic pluralisms; its violence, savagery, conflict and corruption; its nobility,

hospitality, natural beauty and severity. Already this presents a paradox since,

despite such intense evidence of mobilities and crossings, the Caucasus is most

often conjured as a place of closure to those ‘from outside’. (p. 2)

One might even say that currently fashionable tropes of hybridity, mixture, and

syncretism have one of their sources in the field of Caucasology as developed initially by

the maverick Georgian scholar Niko Marr in the 1920s and 1930s in reaction to the

genetic models of relatedness employed both by hegemonic Indo-European linguistics as

well as Georgian nationalists (Slezkine, 1996; Cherchi & Manning, 2002), and

transmitted to the West in a modified form through Voloshinov and Bakhtin (Smith,

1991; 1998). Briefly, if the discourse of Georgianness is imagined in puristic, essentialist

nationalist terms, the discourse of Caucasianness is ambivalent, sometimes imagined as

being a primordial racialized form of ethnic belonging like, or indeed including,

Georgianness, and sometimes is imagined instead as occurring in borderlands, the result

of mixture, hybridity, syncretism. This is not to say that the latter discourse does not

generate essentialisms and exclusions, it does, more on that below. The two exist in a

complex pairing, sometimes opposed, sometimes identified, but within Georgia

13

discourses of belonging of Georgianness (national belonging) have always been primary,

Caucasianness (regional belonging) always a distant second. Furthermore, in the current

period, discourses of primordial national belonging are always foregrounded in national

ideologies for local consumption, even as state discourses for foreign, Western audiences

attempt to represent Georgia as a ‘multicultural’ site of cultural crossings and tolerance

(in these contexts the president of Georgia will always bring up the one street in Tbilisi

[and, indeed, in all of Georgia] where one can find a mosque, a couple of Christian

churches, and a synagogue all across the street from one another).

Nothing better illustrates the very different imaginings of even national belonging

than a trilingual billboard that went up all over Tbilisi a few years back (ironically, one of

which appeared above the same aforementioned street that instantiates Georgia’s claims

to multicultural tolerance). Addressed to three publics in three languages (Georgian,

English, Russian), and showing a revamped version of the ‘peoples of Georgia’ in a mix

of traditional ethnic and modern costumes, one might assume that the Georgian and

Russian messages were translations of the English message “Celebrating Georgia’s

Diversity”. But no, the Georgian message is a flatly contradictory message, dzala

ertobashia (“There is Strength in Unity”), and so is the Russian message, Gruziya Nasha

Rodina (“Georgia is our homeland”). The fact of multiple messages of kinds of belonging

in different languages should tell us that the Georgian State is representing itself and its

national ideology very differently and ambiguously to different internal and external

publics. It should also remind us that the Georgian Rose Revolution Government, as I

have argued implicitly elsewhere, are confirmed Straussians, or at least simply

14

Machiavellians, whose own neo-liberal ideology is dressed up in kitschy performances of

frankly contradictory locally palatable ideologies such as this one (Manning, 2007a).

For the residents of Pankisi, this ambivalent discourse of national belonging has

several consequences. One is that while they are not ethnic Georgians (excluded from the

ethnic discourse of the nation), they are considered to be loyal citizens of the Georgian

state (included within the civic discourse of the state), and moreover, they are

Caucasians, like the Georgians, and Pankisi’s pan-Caucasian multiculturalism illustrates

what some Caucasologists have long liked to extol about the Caucasus in general, just as

their Chechen identity makes them exemplars of a prototypical primordial Caucasian

people, unlike, for example, the Ossetians, who, being Indo-European language speakers,

are not imagined as belonging this way.

15

But even Pankisi’s briefly fashionable properties of being a multicultural,

multiethnic, multiconfessional border zone could guarantee only a brief flicker of

interest, even in Georgia. Now that Pankisi is no longer a crisis region, and celebrations

of tolerance and hybridity seem curiously dated, even dangerous, to Western eyes, the

interest of Georgian scholars and journalists, not to mention foreign ones, has vanished.

But what unites all these ethnographers and folklorists in either discourse of

belonging, Georgia-centered or Caucasus-centered, is their commitment to the self-

valuable nature of indigenous traditions, folklore and culture and a general suspicion of

change. Even as I began working in the Gorge with a Georgian folklorist colleague,

Nugzar, we were confronted, here and there, with signs that contemporary history would

not leave the folkloric traditions of Pankisi in a pristine state of purity. Nugzar was really

not all that interested in the contemporary history of the Gorge. For one, as a pro-western

liberal, he had a profound distaste for Islam in general, and therefore preferred the

nominally Christian Pshavians to the nominally Muslim Kists. Moreover, as a folklorist,

his distaste for the presence of Wahhabi reformers (primarily young men and women) in

the Gorge was twofold, on the one hand, evidence that Al Qaida was at work, on the

other, damage was being done to the traditional forms of Islam, which, after all, were

folklore and therefore inviolable. Wahhabism was change, change is bad. Here Nugzar

was simply echoing a more general Georgian and Western discourse in which

Wahhabism is uniquely excluded from the otherwise harmonic traditional

multiconfessional multicultural syncretic hybridity of the existing culture in Pankisi,

which represents a form of hybridism so thorough that the result can not be said to be

either Christian or Muslim, and therefore the people themselves are neither Christians or

16

Muslims (Jalabadze, 2002, p. 52). Such a tolerant syncretic paganism is really the next

best thing to secularism, and quite the opposite of Wahhabism.

Wahhabism, because it is pathological, dogmatic, antithetical to syncretism,

opposed by traditional cultural and religious elites and adats (local ‘customs’ [adats]

usually viewed by Russian ethnographers as being secular antidotes to religious law

[shariat], see Jersild 2002), and since it is derived from Arabian culture and not the

Caucasus, is simply foreign, is bad (Chikovani 2002, p. 126; Kurtsikidze & Chikovani,

2002). Moreover, Wahhabism is viewed as being akin to violence and terrorism, and its

literature no different in kind from firearms (among the things found in the GTE

[Georgian Train and Equip] operation in Pankisi were, for example “more than 100

firearms, Wahhabi literature, etc.” [Melikishvili (2002, p. 9)]). From the perspective of

this variety of Caucasocentric discourse of belonging (whether imagined as in

primordialist terms or in terms of syncretism), the Kisti “belong” in Georgia as long as

their cultural reform projects involve the revitalization of acceptable traditional forms of

“Caucasian” Islam (Sufism) and other aspects of local culture (local ‘customs’[adats].

But learning Arabic, adopting “foreign” forms of Islam like Wahhabism, these are all

presented as external disruptions of an authentic traditional culture (Melikishvili (ed.)

2002, Kurtsikidze and Chikovani 2002).

Such negative perception of Wahhabism is in spite of the fact that the local

Wahhabi charitable organization Jamaati was the most widely trusted and most efficient,

so much so that many area aid recipients in Pankisi asked the Red Cross, the European

Community, and other relief agencies to use the Wahhabis as their aid distributors

(Shubitidze, 2002, p. 95). Other Christian “sects” such as Jehovah’s Witnesses too are

17

feared by the Georgian Orthodox Christians, but Wahhabis are perceived even more

negatively because of their Islamic and foreign associations (Chikovani 2002: 123).

Indeed, some of these Christian “sects” were making inroads among the local Pankisi

Ossetians, which was not widely felt to be a dangerous a sign of cultural decline

(Chikovani 2002: 124).

Nugzar, my folklorist colleague, did not like change in general, at least not in his

field site. He also frequently lamented the deleterious effects of literacy on the oral

transmission of texts, the life blood of folklore. But Nugzar’s paranoia about the

Wahhabis was palpable. Once, memorably, when our host got into an argument with his

oldest son, a Wahhabi, in the Kist language, Nugzar became distraught, absolutely

convinced that he was about to be turfed out of the village for violations of some Islamic

law. This paranoia continued unabated, even after Nugzar announced to me (in 2006) that

his work in Pankisi was done and he had decided never to return, he would occasionally

become distraught and disconsolate, particularly when drunk, fearing that he would be

assassinated by some Chechen warlord hired by one of his erstwhile Muslim friends.

But his paranoia, too, reflected a more general trend that any disturbance in Pankisi

tended to get blamed on the Kists, and, a fortiori, on the Wahhabis. As an example, in the

last couple of years a few traditional monuments in the valley, either Christian ruins or

ruins that have become traditional mountain religion shrines, have been blowing up here

and there in the valley. As the wife of our host pointed out with irritation, “Of course,

they just blame us Kists when anything blows up around here.” The host’s oldest son

agreed, explaining that while Wahhabis in the valley were not fond of what he called

zikrs, traditional lay practices of dubious orthodoxy, their iconoclasm certainly did not

18

extend to blowing up anyone else’s shrines. He added that it was probably some one of

the visitors to the valley, but also added in a bored voice that he knew that no one would

ever believe them, which is why he had stopped talking to reporters. For a fact, they were

right about what many non-Kists were saying: Georgian Christian churches blowing up?

Almost certainly the work of Kists or other Chechens, probably Wahhabis.

But this was not the only explanation given for the mystery of the exploding

shrines. An Ossetian man we met told us a different story. Yes, someone had been

blowing up shrines, of course, they were looking for buried treasure, gold and silver!

And why not, since the nineteenth century mountain shrines have attached to them by

reputation either mythical or real collections of treasure, gold and silver, sacrificed by

worshippers to the deity. Since that time we also know other people have been trying to

steal this sacrificial wealth. This explanation, the likelier of the two by far, did not

resonate as much as one rooted in fanaticism and iconoclasm.

The end of the story

-- Was that coming from the inside? Are they returning fire?

-- It’s two-way fire.

-- It’s two way. If it wasn’t two way, it wouldn’t be like this, I don’t think, that it

would be like this. If someone is returning fire from the house, then, yes!... If not

then I don’t know….

That’s the way my last interview tape from Pankisi, on the third of July 2005, begins,

with a discussion of the gunfire and rocket fire in whose shadow we tried to conduct a

19

folkloric interview. This was the day that the two “folklores” of Pankisi I have been

discussing came to a head. This day, as it turned out, was also the last time that Nugzar

would ever visit Pankisi with me. On that day Nugzar and I hired a taxi and drove into

the Kist village of Duisi for a day of folkloric interviews. When we arrived, everyone in

the town appeared to be standing outside alongside the main street. They all had

concerned or angry expressions, and were looking up the road in the direction of travel.

We continued driving past the town people for a bit, until we reached a point where

people were all across the road. I heard popping noises, like fireworks. Sure enough, the

sound of gunfire in various calibres and various rates of delivery was waiting for us up

ahead. We backed up.

Slowly we cobbled together a story, with the help of a Kist acquaintance we

encountered, Temo. According to him, the Georgian special forces operation began at 4

am. Two local Kist men, at minimum, were holed up in their house on the main street,

and they would not surrender. Outside, on the street, aside from the extremely pissed off

locals, were about 50 assorted heavily armed Georgian special forces, the fruit of the

Georgian train and equip operation funded by the U.S. in 2002. Gunfire ranged from the

popping noises of pistols to the more sustained staccato of automatic and semiautomatic

fire to the occasional boom of someone firing a recoilless rifle.

But Nugzar is a determined folklorist, and wanted to complete his interviews. We

drove around the site of the armed misunderstanding, and on the way Temo gave us an

outline of what is happening, and why: Apparently a certain local man, a Kist, last year

had taken up with the wife of another local man, a certain Avto, while Avto was away in

Russia. Avto, when he returned, found out, and wanted revenge. In the last few days

20

finally Avto came across this other man and shot him in the leg. This man went to the

police and complained. Avto then holed up in a house in Duisi and refused to surrender.

Driving around by back streets along the banks of the Alazani river, we finally

came to our destination, circuitously, ending up again only a few blocks from the

fighting, the house of an older Kist woman (a woman who had, among other things, an

extensive knowledge of both Kist and Khevsur folklore). She had not seen Nugzar for

years, so they caught up, in a spate of relative quiescence of gunfire. We arranged chairs

outside in the shade and Nugzar started his battery of folkloric questions, old rituals,

history of last names, do you remember any old stories or texts? That sort of thing. I sat

quietly, taping. Each question was punctuated by the staccato of an automatic rifle or the

boom of a recoilless rifle, not 3 houses away. At the beginning of the interview, we

couldn’t help but discuss the gunfire and the general situation. Our interviewee took it to

be a sign of the Kists’ general predicament of up’at’ronoba, the lack of a patron, a

general sense of abandonment (by the State in particular), which allowed her to contrast

the current violence with happier times, when Pankisi didn’t have such problems. She

mobilized a discourse of patronage to characterize socialist period role of the State with

respect to the people, to critique the chaotic and increasingly predatory post-socialist

relationship (Manning, 2007a), the abandonment of the Kist people by the State which

turned that day into a predatory one, one where the State manifested itself to the people

by a display of exemplary state violence:

Such a thing has never happened in my living memory to this day…No, this is the

first I’ve heard of it. This is [the result of] the up’at’ronoba of this village, of this

21

Gorge… This is a result of the fact that this village has no patron. When there was

Gigoshvili [a local State representative during happier times], there was the

reception of guests, he talked to the people, the village had guards, the village had

a patron, we had it all. Now…. We have nothing. That life went and

disappeared. Back then they even used to cry out “This [i.e. socialism] is

worthless!” But now how is it? Is there anything that is worthwhile?

Her desire to escape into the past aided and abetted our own project of folkloric

elicitation under fire. Ironically, her use of the comparison of the idyllic past to the

chaotic present as a way of critiquing the Georgian State and the historical predicament

of the people was artfully turned into a folkloric discussion of an old Kist ritual of

hospitality, lohram. Once we had successfully moved from talking about history to

talking about folklore, I was struck by her stoicism in disattending the gunfire and

recollecting obscure rituals, perhaps it was a relief to recollect the past, when Pankisi was

peaceful and happy, to help forget the present moment? A particularly sharp set of

gunfire exchanges began for a couple of minutes a few blocks away, and Temo and this

woman became quite agitated, complaining about how the peaceful life of Pankisi has

been in general ruined by waves of outsiders, Chechen refugees, fighters, corrupt

Georgian police, heroin traffickers, and now this.

-- When the Chechens came in… before then where was there gunfire here?

22

-- There wasn’t! Where, where would you see gunfire among us, what do I

know…. People were accustomed, that when you heard the sound of a gun shot in

the village, you knew, that they had brought a bride into the family.

-- It meant a pleasant matter.

-- Yes, that’s the sort of thing they would fire a gun about, you know?

Nugzar makes valiant efforts to bring the conversation back to recollecting

snippets of folklore, perhaps she remembers a poem, maybe a poem she heard as a child

in Khevsureti or in Pankisi? But the time for folklore is over. The experience of contact

with the Chechen fighters and refugees, who are otherwise closely related to the Kist in

language and in custom, has caused the Kist to think of themselves as being something

other than Chechens. But this experience at the hands of the Georgian state made the Kist

conclude that day that maybe they were not so very welcome in Georgia, either.

Later, having taken leave to visit another friend in the neighboring village of

Joqolo, walking along the banks of the placidly murmuring Alazani river, we looked back

to see the house in which the men were holed up in explode and catch fire. Temo, an

influential man in the village of Duisi, concluded that the moral of the story was that the

Kist “would be hunted down like dogs.”

Conclusion: From the margins of the nation to the center of the state. To understand

what happened that day in Duisi, we need to understand how Pankisi is positioned

discursively as being simultaneously central to the discourse of the war on terror, and

peripheral to the Georgian nation. We also need to reposition both these discourses of

23

the nation and terror in relationship to each other and to the State, whose job, of course, is

to defend the nation from terror. With the “war on terror”, Pankisi becomes both a global

and a local resource for the (re)consolidation of the Georgian state’s monopoly on

violence, a process that began in Pankisi in 2005, and moved to the streets of Tbilisi in

November 2007 when Saak’ashvili’s administration violently suppressed anti-

government protest demonstrations. The ethnography of the state thus begins on the

margins of the nation. Accordingly, I began my fieldwork in Pankisi to study the ethnic

margins of the imagined nation (taking the nation as an ‘imagined community’ in the

sense of Anderson 1984), but eventually started doing an ethnography of the re-

imagining of the Georgian state.

Violence and other media of power seem quite real in visceral material terms, of

course, “but it is their association with the idea of the state and the invocation of that idea

that silences protest, excuses force and convinces all of us that the fate of the victims is

just and necessary” (Abrams, 1988, p. 77). To see how the visceral materiality of

violence is converted into the bland, anodyne stuff of the state, we need to inspect the

ontological underpinnings, the foundational presuppositions, of the cosmology of terror.

Both the terms included in the phrase “war on terror(ism)” are terms denoting violence,

but qualitatively different kinds of violence: war denotes a kind of legitimate state

violence (directed at other states), terror(ism) denotes an illegitimate kind of non-state

violence4. The default assumption is that State violence (typified by war) is legitimate (or

at least necessary), while non-state violence is intrinsically illegitimate and defines

terrorism.5 As Asad (2007) summarizes one influential view (Walzer’s) of the distinction

between the two forms of violence:

24

[I]t is not merely the deliberate creation of fear for political purposes that defines

terrorism: the killing of innocents is a necessary (though not a sufficient) criterion.

What Walzer condemns in war is excess and in terrorism its essence. States kill, too,

of course, although they claim to kill only legitimately. (Asad, 2007, p. 16)

Therefore, as has often been noted (Asad 2007), the phrase “War on Terror”

attempts a legitimation of a massive extension of the State monopoly of violence,

precisely by placing all non-state violence, and even some state violence, under the

nebulous category of Terror/ism, and using the term that denotes a prototypically

“legitimate” form of state violence (“war”) to describe all State violence against it. All

one really needs to know is that a term that used to legitimate armed conflicts between

two possessors of a legitimate monopoly of violence (the very definition of “war”

between states) can now also be used to legitimate state violence against non-state agents

of all kinds, provided that “violence” can be predicated of those non-state agents. As with

4 For an extensive exploration of these points see Asad (2007), Pendas (2007); for an ethnographic

exploration of the Russian and Caucasus reception of the term “terror” see Lemon (2004).

5 There are actually a number of ways to legitimate State violence here.One can argue that State violence is

legitimate because the teleology is legitimate (in moral terms), and doing that also makes a more tenacious

argument that violence is itself a mere socio-technical means that is evaluated not in itself, but in terms of

its ends (Elias, 1988, p.179). Thus, all arguments that state violence is “necessary” reduce violence in itself

to a mere amoral technical means, leading to what Bauman calls an “adiaphorization” of violence, a

process by which violence and other forms of social action, is rendered indifferent, adiaphoric, that is,

‘neither good nor evil, measurable against technical (purpose-oriented or procedural), but not moral values

(Bauman, 1991, p. 144).

25

torture, so with other forms of State violence against civilians, human beings must be

sorted into two categories, the status variables of our time, the torturables and

untorturables, those who are intrinsically more killable and those who are not. Asad

(2007) has drawn our attention to the classic scene from Graham Greene’s novel Our

Man in Havana where the Cuban Police chief Segura explains who belongs to the

“torturable class” to the shocked British Secret Service Agent Wormold (p. 32):

The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central

Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you

are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés

from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country

or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more

torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal...

Of course, the moment of redefinition , when one moves into the “torturable class”,

usually comes as a shock (Asad 2007, p.33). In the case of the Kist, this redefinition

happens this way. Being ethnically peripheral to the discourse of the Georgian nation

makes groups like the Kist more dependent on state-based civic definitions of belonging,

hence they must be more “loyal” than the average ethnic Georgian. The Kist are easily

divorced from all discourses of belonging, whether State-based or based in regional

forms of belonging. The Kist are divorced from the discourses of State belonging because

they are seen as betraying the State by adopting a form of Islam which is allegedly

intrinsically violent or anti-state (Wahhabism), or by publicly flying the flag of the

26

Ichkerian republic, rather than the Georgian flag (Chikovani 2002: 126). They also betray

the regional forms of belonging by learning Arabic and adopting foreign forms of Islam

like Wahhabism over indigenous, reassuringly “traditional”, “Caucasian” forms of

Sufism. One Kist boy explained to me the following year that there was no question that

the events of July 3rd 2005 were a case of exemplary violence, a show for the community

as a whole. On July 3rd, 2005, the Georgian State was, so to speak, revealing to the Kist

that they now belonged to the “torturable class.” Presumably the rest of Georgia already

knew that, for there was no sense of outrage outside the Kist community (even among

non-Kist residents of Pankisi). In fact, most Georgians I knew hadn’t heard of the event,

it was not widely reported, and when they did, they assumed that it was justified,

proportional and portended absolutely nothing with respect to real Georgians. The

margins of the nation thus open up a space for legitimate state violence against its own

citizens.

Naturally, part of the legitimating strategy here depends on altering the meaning of

“violence,” so that violence becomes an essential and defining status attribute of certain

groups of people, religions, cultures, and even activities. For other groups, religions,

cultures, of course, it becomes accidental and deviant (Pendas, 2007). The net result is

that State violence, especially when directed at groups who are defined as being

essentially violent, becomes justifiable and unremarkable, a matter of indifference.6

Pankisi, therefore, was a perfect locus for such violence: the Kist, being Chechens,

Muslims, and peripheral members of the Georgian nation, tended to attract epithets like

6 On the production of indifference to violence [“adiaphorization”] see Bauman (1991); see Lemon (2004)

for an extended and sensitive critique of how “difference” leads to “indifference” in the case of the

Chechens).

27

“violent,” alongside their already notable status of being in league with Al Qaeda. As

such, Pankisi became a perfect place for an exemplary display of legitimate state

violence.

It now seems clear in retrospect that the new Georgian “Rose Revolution”

government (a government that took power by non-violent means, whose very symbol,

the rose, is a symbol of non-violence) used exemplary displays of violence against such

peripheral “terrorist” populations only as a kind of pilot experiment. The very same

weekend the New Georgian Rose Revolutionary government used other units of these

special forces (the product of the “Georgian Train and Equip operation” of 2002 whose

objective was Pankisi) to disperse a protest in front of Parliament, the so-called

“Wrestlers” Revolution.”7 The question of how to interpret this event would depend

crucially on interpretation of the predicate “violent.” From the government and pro-

government NGO stance, the protestors were intrinsically “violent” (after all they were

wrestlers, whose methods of self-expression do not habitually include “civilized dialog”)

and even had suspected “criminal” contacts. By contrast, for many in the Georgian

opposition, the return of violence to the streets and parliament seemed to be a mark of a

retrograde movement of the State from the peaceful ideals of the Rose Revolution, a

return to the chaos of 1991-1992 civil war. For such opposition members, this was also a

movement of Georgia away from “European Civilization” within an Orientalist

cosmology in which violence is the opposition of civilization and is something which

typifies non-European spaces (Pendas, 2007). Government officials working within the

same Orientalist ontology locating civilization in Europe, and violence “elsewhere”,

7 Gia Nodia - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, Heading For A New Revolution?

http://www.kvali.com/kvali/index.asp?obiektivi=show&n=456

28

claimed that it showed that it was Georgian society, or part of it anyway, that was “far

from Europe”. Accordingly, the government reaction using heavily armed police against

the crowds was not classified (by the government at least) as “force”, but rather “a

normal method used in all civilized countries”. If violence is the opposite of European

civilization, then Georgia remains far from Europe, and Pankisi further still.8

The July of the following year, 2007, was the year of the K’odori Crisis. Here,

again, a known “trouble spot”, a place of permanent “crisis”, was the venue for a display

of State power. K’odori is a disputed region of Abkhazia that remains in Georgian hands

from the Georgian-Abkhaz war (1992-4) almost exclusively due to the fighting done by

an irregular unit of ethnic Svan mountaineers living in the region, the so-called “Hunter”

(monadire) unit, lead by local Svan warlord Emzar K’vitsiani. In that period of the

1990s, irregular armed units of Georgians were commonplace, this unit was the last to be

disbanded officially, after the Rose Revolution in 2003. However, in July 2007 the unit

re-armed itself (partially in order to protect the Kodori region which remains in dispute)

and defied the Georgian government’s demands that the unit be disarmed. On the 25th of

July the Georgian government sent troops to disarm the units. These irregular soldiers

were, in some sense, heroes of the Abkhaz war (Kodori is the only region that remained

in Georgian hands during the conflict), and as ethnic Svans, they are both in a sense “not

Georgian” but also consecrated within Georgian ethnographic discourse as being “the

Purest Georgians”.9 Consequently, the (essentially) Government-controlled Television

Station Rustavi 2 claimed that these irregular units were being aided and supplied by the

8 “P’arlament’shi cema-t’q’ep’is sezone gaisxna”, Axali Taoba no 181, 2-9 July 2005; “Evrop’isgan shorsa

vart.” Rezonansi no 171, 2 july 2005; Natia Msxviladze, “1991-1992 ts’lebis ikit ar ts’avsulvart.” Axali

Taoba no 181, 3-9 July 2005.

29

Abkhaz and the Russian governments (a bizarre claim on the face of it, but then,

Saak’ashvili has claimed that every protest or opposition group is being run by the

Russians or the Mafia). Here too, another pattern was seen to emerge, in which the

Saak’ashvili government seems to recapitulate the general suspicion of the Stalinist

period that the mountains are unruly places of violence, so that those obsessed with the

pacification of Georgian territory become obsessed with mountain gorges like Pankisi

and Kodori populated by non-quite-Georgians. But the main argument was not about the

problematic position of belonging of the Svans in the nation (as being both central and

peripheral members of the national pantheon), but about the state monopoly on violence

on Georgian sovereign territory. The crisis generated a memorable exchange between

Saak’ashvili and K’vitsiani where, in somewhat crude language, Saak’ashvili in effect

laid out, in so many words, his plan for restoring the state monopoly on violence lost in

the 1990s:

Whoever tries to create a problem for the country, will definitely be defeated. I

want everyone to know, that I will fuck the mothers [literally “make the mothers

cry”] of all those who imperil State unity and independence. Let everyone

remember that.

To which K’vitsiani replied, quite reasonably, that the fact that he was president didn’t

give Saak’shvili the right to talk trash about his mother.10

One can see, then, Georgian state violence against civilians extending its legitimacy

from 2005-2007 by baby steps, primarily by defining “violence” as not only as an

30

intrinsic attribute of some groups (Chechens, Muslims, Wrestlers, Svans, “Hunters”,

among others), but also of certain activities, notably street protests, even those without

Wrestlers. To paraphrase Segura’s argument, some people are torturable by nature,

essentially, others are torturable according to circumstance, accidentally: For example,

the Kist, being Chechens, Muslims, Wahhabis, what have you, are intrinsically violent,

Wrestlers in the streets in front of parliament breaking furniture are also intrinsically

violent (by avocation, one might say), and armed groups of irregulars are also, by the fact

of arming themselves, intrinsically violent non-state actors. But the attribution of

violence to street protests requires a considerable extension of the term “violent”. Here

Georgian state discourse echoes a discernable trend in Western discourse, for example

virtually all “procedural” theories of democracy, which see any kind of expression that

does not fall within the proceduralism of elections and parliament, or, by extension,

9 While Svans figure as the butt of many an anecdote of primitive or barbaric backwardness, this same

quality leads them to be treated, alongside the Khevsurs, as being among the purest or most pristine

representatives of Georgian stock and traditional culture (see for example Manning, 2007b). Certainly the

Svans I know regard themselves to be exemplary Georgians in terms of ethnic purity. However, since

Svans speak a language which is related to Georgian, but unintelligible to Georgians, there are worries that

they may succumb to putatively natural, universal desire to form their own independent nation if Svan is

defined as a separate “language”, rather than a “dialect’ (albeit completely unintelligible) of Georgian. A

news report that reproduced cell-phone conversations in Svan with Georgian sub-titles between members of

the monadire group was criticized as a provocation attempting to depict the Svans as being Non-Georgians

and to marginalize them as ethnic “others.” This and another event from this period was when Georgians

learned that the government was listening in on their cell phone calls and acting on what they heard.

10 Reported in Rezonansi, 198, July 25, 2006.

31

“civilized or peaceful dialog” as being tantamount to “coercion”, “force” or “violence”

(see Manning, 2007a; Montag, 2000; Remer, 2000).

On November 7th 2007, these same Special Operations troops who had been trained

and equipped by the US for use in the War on Terror in 2002, directed specifically at the

“Crisis in Pankisi”, who had been used against intrinsically “violent” Muslim populations

of Georgia in 2005, were turned loose on thousands of peaceful protestors on the streets

of Tbilisi.11 At this point, it became clear that Rose, the symbol of the “peaceful”

“velvet” revolution of 2003, had been replaced with the mailed fist. The same or similar

arguments were made about the intrinsic “violence” of street protests and indeed,

Saak’ashvili lamely claimed and continues to claim that the protests were funded by

certain opposition members as part of an attempted coup de etat, a hilarious claim that

was accepted without so much as a wince or a grin by the po-faced, or poker-faced,

journalists interviewing him. The result is that many Western Journalists, seemingly

unwilling or unable to assess the directionality or agency lurking behind the anodyne

epithet “violent”, simply characterized the protests as “violent”. Indeed they were

“objectively” violent, in that they elicited state violence, but there is a vast difference

between peaceful protests that elicit state violence and protests that begin as violence.

But “violence” is one of the favorite words of the objective, neutral school of journalism,

because it objectively describes a certain kind of unpleasantness but abstracts it away

from all agency, intentionality, causation, culpability, analysis, or understanding.

I want to conclude that the new forms of State Violence that came to roost in

Tbilisi in 2007 were bred and born in Pankisi in 2005. In 2005, in a manner that can now

only be seen as prophetic, the Saak’ashvili regime had in one week made its points by

11 For details see the letter by Zaza Shatirishvili on my blog at www.dangerserviceagency.org.

32

two exemplary displays of violence, employing its “new” special forces, one directed to

the streets of the metropole, the other for a peripheral public, a small, poor agrarian

community of mostly Muslim Georgian-Chechens that somehow have been saddled with

the job of representing the spectre of international Islamic terrorism in Georgia. Now it

wasn’t Osama Bin Laden making bacterial weapons in Omalo, it was Wahhabism of the

Kists themselves, that raised the specter. According to Georgian president Saak’ashvili,

speaking soon after taking power in 2004, a year before the incident in Duisi:

Some villages in the Pankisi region have already turned into centers of

Wahabbism [sic]. It is a fact that there are Wahabbi schools there and that they are

propagating Wahabbism. From childhood on, our people there - the local Kist’’

population - are being poisoned with this unacceptable, hostile ideology. I want to

remind the State Security Ministry that Georgia is a secular state and that every

attempt at propagating Wahabbism is anti-Georgian, anti-national, and is directed

against the Georgian statehood (Peuch, 2004).12

Saak’ashvili here made an attempt to include the Kist within the discourse of

belonging of the nation and the state (“our people there”), but made it perfectly clear that

this belonging is conditional, and that Wahabbism [sic, I reproduce this common

misspelling as being, perhaps, symptomatic of the ignorance and hysteria that attends this

word in the West] takes them out of the domain of belonging to the nation and the state.

12 See also Célia Chauffour, “Mikhael Saakashvili’s Pankisi valley.” Caucaz.com 18/04/2005

(http://www.caucaz.com/home_eng/breve_contenu.php?id=147); Mark Irkali, “Georgia:

welcome to America's new El Salvador.” Sobaka.com Is This an internet site, March 12, 2003

(http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/salvador.html).

33

Saakashvili added a final ultimatum, warning “all those who are propagating the ideas of

Wahabbism in Georgia that they will face the utmost in severe actions and that they

should not expect any compromise on our part." In July 2005, the Kists got that

message, loud and clear. But the broader argument, about the broadened understanding of

the legitimacy of state violence, and the much longer list of people who were in the

“torturable” class, would reach the rest of Georgia only late in 2007.

Endnotes

References

Abrams, Philip

1988 ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977),’ Journal of Historical

Sociology, 1:1, 1, 58-89.

Anderson, Benedict.

1984. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Asad, Talal

2007. On Suicide Bombing. Columbia University Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt.

1991. ‘The Social Manipulation of Morality: Moralizing Actors, Adiaphorizing

Action,’ Theory, Culture and Society 8, p. 144.

Chauffour, Celia

34

2005. “Pankisi-Many faces, but above all multi-ethnic” , Electronic document,

http://www.caucaz.com/home_eng/breve_contenu.php?id=146, accessed

18/04/2005.

Cherchi, Marcello, and Paul Manning

2002. Disciplines and Nations: Niko Marr vs. his Georgian Students on Tbilisi

State University and the ‘Japhetidology’/ ‘Caucasology’ Schism. The Carl Beck

Papers: The Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of

Pittsburgh.

Chikovani, Guldam.

2002. Dasakhlebis st’rukt’uruli cvlilebebi, k’onplikt’uri sit’uaciebi da mati

daregulirebis t’radiciuli mekanizmebi. [structural changes of settlement, conflict

situations and traditional mechanisms of their regulation]. In Melikishvili (ed.),

2002, 98-145.

Norbert, Elias,

1988. ‘Violence and Civilization: The State Monopoly of Physical Violence and its

Infringement,’ In J. Keane, (ed.), Civil Society and the State, London, pp.177-198

Dubnov, V. Vadim

2004 ‘Alone with the Gorge’ Electronic document,

http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/detail.asp?art_id=409), access ed December 2005

Figal, Gerald.

1999. Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan. Duke.

Grant, Bruce and Lale Yalcin-Heckmann.

35

2007. "Introduction," in Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the

Making of a World Area (Berlin: LIT), 1-19.

Jalabadze, Natia

2002. urtiertobis t’radiciuli normebi sazghvrisp’ira regionshi [Traditional

relationship norms in a border region]. In Melikishvili (ed.), 2002, pp. 42-75.

Jersild, Austin.

2002. Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the

Georgian Frontier. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Khizanishvili, N.

1940. Etnograpiuli nats’erebi. Tbilisi: SSRK mecnierebis ak’ademia.

Kurtsikidze, Shorena and Vakhtang Chikovani.

2002. Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge: an Ethnographic Survey. Electronic document,

http://repositories.cdlib.org/iseees/bps/2002_03-kurt, accessed March 6 2008.

Lemon, Alaina

2004. “Dealing emotional blows”: realism and verbal “terror” at the Russian state

theatrical academy. Language & Communication 24.4, 313-337.

Manning, Paul.

2007a. Rose-colored glasses? Color revolutions and cartoon chaos in post-socialist

Georgia. Cultural Anthropology 22.2, 171-213.

36

2007b. Love Khevsur Style: The romance of the mountains and mountaineer

romance in Georgian ethnography. IN Bruce Grant and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann

(eds.), Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World

Area, pp. 23-46. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia: (Berlin: LIT

Verlag).

Marr, Nikolaj,

1918 . O Kavkazskom Universitete v Tiflise. Izvestija rossijskoj akademii nauk, VI

serija, tom XII, pp. 1496-1516.

McDonald, Mark.

2005. “Georgia's notorious Pankisi Gorge appears to be free of terrorists” Posted on

Wed, May. 04, 2005. (http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11563492.htm)

Melikishvili, Lia. (ed.)

2002. P’ank’isis K’rizisi [P’ank’isi Crisis]. Tbilisi: CIPDD.

Melikishvili, Lia.

2002. Redakt’orisagan. [From the Editor]. In Melikishvili (ed.), 2002, pp. 3-9.

Montag, Warren

2000. The pressure of the street: Habermas’s fear of the masses. In Mike Hull and

Warren Montag (eds.), Masses, Classes and the Public Sphere, 143-4. Verso:

London.

Pendas, Devin.

2007. “The magical scent of the savage”: colonial violence, the crisis of

civilization, and the origins of the legalist paradigm of war. Boston College

International & Comparative Law Review 30.1, 1-25.

37

Peuch, Jean-Christophe,

2004. ‘Georgia: Saakashvili sees in “Wahabbism” a threat to secularism.’ Radio

Free Europe Radio Liberty. Wednesday, February 18, 2004. Electronic document,

(http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/02/b1fb268c-b6da-4aa0-ae0b-

9339f803ccbd.html), accessed December 2005.

Remer, Gary.

2000. Two models of deliberation: conversation and oratory in ratifying the

constitution. The Journal of Political Philosophy 8.1, 68-90.

Sanders, Todd and Harry West,

2003. Power revealed and concealed in the New World order. In Harry West and

Todd Sanders (eds.), Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in

the new World order , 1-37. Duke: Durham.

Shubitidze, Vera.

2002. usaprtkhoeba da etnik’uri k’ult’uris adap’t’acia unari akhal socialur-

k’ult’urul garemostan. In Melikishvili (ed.), 2002, 76-96.

Sikharulidze, Ketevan.

2006. K’avk’asiuri Mitologia. Tbilisi: K’avk’asiuri Saxli.

Slezkine, Y.

1996. “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic

Review, vol. 55, no. 4, pp. 826-862.

Smith, Michael.

1991. Soviet language Frontiers: The Structural Method in Early Language

Reforms 1917-1937. Dissertation, Georgetown University.

38

1998. Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917-1953. Berlin and

New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

39