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Contested Heritage Regimes and Everyday Life in the Monuments of the Caucasus (CCC7)

Heritage regimes in the Caucasus consist in state policies that are using history as cultural, political and economic resource for the present. The research of the students focused on the use of cultural heritage as political tool but especially on how people on the ground are living with and do perceive such ambivalent heritage policies. Caucasus Conflict Culture part 7 (CCC7) took place in Svaneti (Georgia). Core questions were: Is heritage policy a top-down project; if and how the local population is consulted? In places which have already been transformed into a monument we ask questions like how does the population experience its life in a ‘museum’? Does the population have coping strategies to encounter the process of ‘heritagization’ in their daily life?

The design of the series of student research projects Caucasus Conflict Culture (CCC) is a unique combination of, first, a methodological and theoretical training, accompanied by a one-week intensive field research on the ground. It offers, second, to twenty students from the South Caucasus and Germany a supervised framework for face-to-face dialogues on conflict-related issues in the region. Third, the participants have intensive experiences in goal-oriented multicultural teamwork, in which they learn to deal with the others’ positions.

Mestia (Georgia), 20.08.-01.09.2018
Funding: DAAD
Coordination: Dr. Stéphane Voell, Prof. Dr. Ernst Halbmayer