Generative exhaustions: Thresholds of long-term uncertainty and stink bug infestation in Georgia’s contested borderland

ABSTRACT

Displaced Georgians from the Gali region of the de facto Georgia–Abkhazia borderland have constructed mobile lives by navigating a decades-long conflict and its turbulent landscapes. For the people of Gali, cross-border mobility is a vital concern; uncertainty is a daily matter of tactical anticipation. Arbitrary checkpoints, unannounced border closures, and the Enguri River’s capricious water levels interfere with mobilities; occasional crises unsettle the subtle ways that the Gali people have developed over three decades to manoeuvre everyday uncertainties. Focusing on an unanticipated stink bug infestation that disrupted already precarious lives, this article explores the temporal and affective anatomy of long-term uncertainty with its continuities and limit points. Using exhaustion as an analytical concept, it examines the generative thresholds of protracted uncertainty without eclipsing the cumulative toll of continuous life struggle in a conflict zone.

KEYWORDS:

• Uncertainty
• temporality
• crisis
• exhaustion
• conflict
• Georgia

Acknowledgements

I thank my interlocutors in Georgia and Abkhazia for opening their lives and homes to me. Thanks to the colleagues, mentors and friends for their comments on earlier drafts and for conversations on the article – including Sarah Richardson, Keti Gurchiani, Tamta Khalvashi, Tsira Kakubava, Megi Sajaia, Nino Gvagvalia, Nana Gulua, Kristi Shonia, Florian Müehlfried, Kerstin Klenke and Sabrina Perić. I am especially grateful to Rebecca Bryant for our conversations about the future and its thresholds, and to Joshua Bell, Ilana Feldman, Stephen Lubkemann, and Sarah Wagner for their multiple rounds of feedback and mentorship. I would also like to thank the participants of the Vectors panel at the 2021 4S meeting for discussing an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘refugee’ (lt’olvili), instead of ‘Internally Displaced Person (IDP) [devnili]’, has been commonly used in Georgia, especially during the early years of displacement. The word ‘refugee’ is offensive to some IDPs in Georgia. It reminds them of the initial and more challenging years of their displacement when they were discriminated against by descriptions that positioned them as ‘refugees’ external to the Georgian society.

2 For the people of Gali, dying and funerary practices are fractured by arbitrary legal and border enforcements. Participation in funerals, burials, and the care of the dead are contingent on and reconfigured by shifting regimes of documentation and border in/formalities. In this sense, the ability to have a dignified death, burial, and a grave in the right place is a matter of concern.

3 The relational and historical complexity of the crisis in question is also related to the study of the specificities of global connections (Freidberg 2004; Hetherington 2020; Mitchell 2002; Tsing 2011; West 2012); and interspecies/multispecies ethnography (Haraway 2003; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2007; Kosek 2010; Tsing 2015).

4 My analytical framework also contributes to the limited literature, mainly in geography, that takes exhaustion as the center of analysis. Geographers Straughan, Bissell, and Gorman-Murray (2020), for instance, develop cultural geographical understandings of exhaustion by investigating it as a collective structure of feeling in Australian context of resource extraction. They trace the temporal qualities of bodily exhaustion and everyday depletions for mobile worker households. Geographers Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar (2019) explore exhaustion, or weariness as they call it, as a right and way of survival and endurance as well as a site of political possibility under the everyday violence of welfare reform in UK.

5 Western Georgia, including Abkhazia, with its fertile lands, remained mostly rural as the center of Soviet subtropical agricultural production; and the region's inhabitants enjoyed spacious lands and houses, unlike the majority of the Soviet Union.

6 The United States has been battling the stink bug since the 1990s (first detected in Pennsylvania in 1996. Since then, non-native populations have been found in at least 40 US states, Canada and several European countries.) Italy asked Brussels to intervene a few years ago after stink bugs damaged fruit. New Zealand recently refused entry to four ships from Japan because trained dogs detected the bugs on board.

7 The same lab has been blamed for engineering COVID-19 as well.

8 In the schools of Gali, the language of instruction is predominantly Russian; Georgian is taught only as a second language. Since the teachers are ethnic Georgians, my informants say that even the teachers themselves are not comfortable with Russian, and the students also have difficulty in understanding the course material. In addition to the question of education in their mother tongue, parents are also concerned about the Russian and Abkhaz propaganda in schools. They also want their children to study in Georgian and to use Georgian in their daily lives.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant (#1627876); American Council of Learned Societies; the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES); The George Washington University; the University of Calgary; and Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).