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The paternal/provider role of the Soviet State is being gradually replaced in the case of Georgia by a more individualistic and money orientated society. Time is not only money, says Eleni Sideri, it also flows and this fluidity offers new opportunities, contradictory experiences, and also disappointments to social agents.


Gjorgi is a 50-year-old, ethnic Greek, Georgian. He used to teach Russian literature, but in 1980s he grasped the opportunity of Perestroika and turned into tourism. The last decade, though, was disastrous for him since the political instability in Georgia left him unemployed and his health gradually deteriorated. During my fieldwork in Georgia, I used to stop by at his house since we were almost neighbours. He spent most of the working hours repairing things, sometimes an old broken chair, sometimes painting a wall. Gjorgi was not satisfied with that situation because as he believed, “only women stay at home at these hours. Men should go to work”. In his opinion, unemployment turned him almost into an effeminate man. His wife, Tamara, a 40-old-year schoolteacher, however, did not agree. “I always used to be at work (as she does until today) during these hours” she says coming into the living-room, feeling a little irritated because a man in a hurry had stepped on her new shoes as he was getting of the mini-bus. “He had a job, unlike me”, Gjorgi emphasizes.


‘Dro’ (time) in modern Georgia provokes different perceptions and understandings. It becomes engendered and ‘traditional’ roles seem to get reversed because of family economic exigencies. It causes comparisons and self-assessments creating its own inclusions and exclusions in terms of social belongingness. The passage from Soviet Georgia to the Independent Republic of Georgia was labeled as transition. The term underlined the expectations of the international community, donors, civil society, and western academia for a quick recovery of the Georgian economic and socio-political life from the problems (inflation, civil conflicts, and corruption) that had become almost endemic in the country in early 1990s. The directionality, though, of this transition was not easily defined in the Georgian political discourse of the period.


On the one hand, the political rhetoric tried to follow the western expectations for transition to an open-market system and a gradual democratization of the country by translating this demand according to the Georgian past and equating the latter with the creation of a homogenous Georgian nation-state, as it was envisioned in the 19th century Georgian ethnogenesis. On the other hand, the population felt that its life had really followed since 1990s a backward direction, a retreat from the Soviet standards and far behind from the national revival project’s expectations. De-industrialization, unemployment, massive migration, civil conflicts made the dream of a modern independent statehood to look like an illusion, if not a lie.


What Gjorgi seemed to experience today is a lack of directionality in his life. Time appeared stagnant, repetitive. On the contrary, perceptions of time both for his wife and the anonymous man in the mini-buss had a pace. Tamara and her co-traveler have the luxury of being in a hurry; for them time was money. In the capitalist spirit time, time generates money through work discipline and a Protestant ethos where sloth is one the seven deadly sins. However, Gjorgi was not imbued in this spirit. In a process that Verdery calls ‘étatization’ since the Communist Party and its apparatchiki used to control time in day life, through, for example, a chaotic bureaucracy and a long queuing, individual time management was limited. In this framework, however, social agency was not completely excluded. Social networks were an alternative channel to overcome the economy of shortage through sharing, bartering or exchanging information, products or services. Interpersonal relations, often based on ethnic lines, as my fieldwork has illustrated, used to compensate for the loss of time. This type of relations had helped Gjorgi in the past to make his professional passage from teaching to tourism.


A closer look on Gjorgi’s time management today might shed some light into the role of these networks today, which force us to rethink the initial interpretation that time in his life was stagnant. ‘Why don’t you visit me more often?” Gjorgi asked. My explanation about fieldwork engagements did not satisfy him. On another visit Gjorgi seemed upset with me. He discovered that the night before I had had dinner with another Greek family. I explained to him that they wanted my help for the family son’s application in a Greek university. He seemed rather annoyed by my excuse. This upsetting incident made me realize that the time of stillness, as I have translated Gjorgi’s daily routine, had another aspect. It was used as a way for constructive networking. Time was translated not in money, or at least not directly, but into relations that could be ultimately convert into capital through access to information. Moreover, the former ethnic connections since the geopolitical changes of 1990s were transformed in the case of ethnic-Greek Gjorgi, into diasporic networks. But if Gjorgi seems to continue to invest, or at least trying to, into interpersonal relations, based on ethnicity, like he did in the past, why does he have this feeling of isolation and stagnancy?


I think that this feeling does not only stem from Gjorgi’s autobiography, but also the economic and political uncertainties that Georgia had faced since its Independence (1991). This feeling must have been intensified with the country’s consecutive new beginnings in order to find the ‘right’ course, according to the western prerequisites for a modern European state, as Georgia wants to see itself. As Heintz argues, “Repetitive daily activities receive meaning only in the long term, when a succession of accomplishments can be reviewed” (see ‘Time and Work Ethic in Post-Socialist Romania’, in The Qualities of Time, 180). This retrospective reflection is inextricable linked to the so-called national time, a more systematic discourse on the nation’s accomplishments which is perceived as history. Georgia’s history of this period is full of high hopes and traumatic disappointments. Gamsakhurdia period (1991-1992) is rather the most tragic example, with a rhetoric deeply embedded in a mythological past mixed with eschatological promises about the future. Then, Shevardnadze (1992-2003) with his stabilization program ended with the Rose Revolution in November 2nd, 2003, which marked a new phase in the Georgian politics.


In that precarious political situation, Gjorgi seems to take recourse to past strategies in order to face the new challenges. However, if economic and political uncertainties in the Soviet years, to an extent, were compensated for through national and family networks, today the introduction of a market economy seems to have changed this balance. Old networks were devalued and new ones have emerged. The recent ‘Rose Revolution’ (2003) in Georgia was mainly driven by young people with little experience of the Soviet period who have spent time in the West (to further their education or work). Economic liberalisation in Georgia has initiated new, market-driven, social divisions. The paternal/provider role of the Soviet State is gradually replaced by a more individualistic and money orientated society in which Gjorgi has to rebuild new networks that often extend the borders of his country. I am not trying to picture here, a transition from ‘etalization’ of time to its ‘marketization’, in the sense of a new holistic framework of time management analysis, but to illustrate how this shift creates new evaluations and interpretations of strategies, experiences, gender roles and identities. Time is not only money; it also flows and this fluidity offers new opportunities, but also disappointments to social agents, like Gjorgi and his wife. Depicting these often-contradictory experiences help us step beyond the dichotomies that ‘transitology’ introduced in the study of this part of the world.


Further links


In quest of Eastern Europe: Troubling encounters in the post-Cold War field


The state, the family, and the expression of Armenian identity

Special issue: recent articles, time/governance
Tags: anthropology, eleni sideri, Georgia

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