학술논문

Rivers between nature, infrastructure, and religion.
Document Type
Article
Source
Central Asian Survey. Mar2023, Vol. 42 Issue 1, p21-40. 20p. 3 Color Photographs, 1 Black and White Photograph.
Subject
*NATURE & religion
*RIVERS
*FLOODS
*MODERNITY
*INFRASTRUCTURE (Economics)
Language
ISSN
0263-4937
Abstract
Focusing on the domestication and undomestication of nature around the River Vere in Tbilisi, Georgia, this article analyses how modernization projects seemingly overcoming nature simultaneously reinforced the complex entanglement between nature and infrastructure, the material and immaterial, the human and non-human. The article centres around a flooding event in 2015, shedding light on the entanglement of different approaches and temporalities. The river and its infrastructure are caught up with ideas, beliefs and materialities. The paper analyses how the crisis gave rise to questions about 'morality' of materiality, 'proper' and 'improper' handling of nature. Based on ethnography and archival work, it shows how the infrastructural developments conceived as projects of Soviet atheist modernity emerged as sites where nature, technologies and religion meet. Rather than looking at Soviet and post-Soviet as two different modernities, the article shows them as continuities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]