ETHNIC ELEMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY GEORGIAN 
 POSTMODERNIST INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE 
 (“ARILI” AND “DIDGORI” AS ACTORS OF “IMAGINED 
 COMMUNITIES” AND “INVENTED TRADITIONS”)

Abstract

The author analyzes the collective ideas about ethnicity and ethnic culture in the modern intellectual discourse of Georgia in contexts of interdisciplinary theories of nationalism. The purpose of the article is to analyze the various forms and dimensions of “ethnicity” and “ethnic culture” in modern Georgian cultural nationalism as a modernist and constructivist project. It is assumed that the modern project of the nation in Georgia is based on the imagination of Georgians as a political community and the actualization of the concepts of “kartveloba”. Kartveloba is defined as an invented tradition that arose in intellectual discourse as a result of transplantation of Western theories of nationalism. The author analyzes the role of ethnicity and ethnic culture in the development of modern Georgian nationalist imagination in the contexts of the activities of intellectuals as the main producers of nationalist discourse? In modernist historiography, nationalism is imagined as a social and cultural construct and one of the consequences of modernization, which minimizes the factor of ethnicity, reducing it to one of the invented traditions. It is assumed that Georgian intellectuals are active in their attempts to support and develop the concept of “kartveloba” as a synthetic version of Georgianness. The author believes that intellectuals are not inclined to ethnographization of ethnic culture, rejecting its museufication in the world of postmodernity and consumer society. It is presumed that Georgian intellectuals were able to synthesize the values ​​of ethnicity and the principles of the nation as a political community. The author shows that Georgian ethnic culture is widely represented and actualized in cultural spaces, and the intellectual transplantation of Western culture does not exclude the manifestation of Georgian ethnicity, facilitating its integration into the Western canon.