Download PDF by Bruce Grant: The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty

The Caucasus zone of Eurasia, wedged in among the Black and Caspian Seas, encompasses the trendy territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, in addition to the republic of Chechnya in southern Russia. a website of invasion, conquest, and resistance because the onset of old checklist, it has earned a name for fearsome violence and remoted mountain redoubts closed to outsiders. Over prolonged efforts to regulate the Caucasus region, Russians have lengthy mythologized tales in their countrymen taken captive by means of bands of mountain brigands.

In The Captive and the Gift, the anthropologist Bruce supply explores the lengthy courting among Russia and the Caucasus and the skill during which sovereignty has been exercised during this contested zone. Taking his lead from Aleksandr Pushkin's 1822 poem "Prisoner of the Caucasus," provide explores the extreme resonances of the topics of violence, captivity, and empire within the Caucasus via mythology, poetry, brief tales, ballet, opera, and movie. provide argues that whereas the ordinary Russian captivity narrative mirrored a variety of political positions, it generally and compellingly steered a imaginative and prescient of Caucasus peoples as thankless, lawless matters of empire who have been unwilling to recognize and settle for the presents of civilization and defense prolonged via Russian leaders.

Drawing on years of box and archival learn, supply strikes past fable and mass tradition to indicate how real-life Caucasus practices of trade, against this, aimed to manage and cut back instead of unharness and elevate violence. the result's a historic anthropology of sovereign varieties that underscores how enduring well known narratives and shut readings of formality practices can make clear the administration of pluralism in long-fraught international areas.