How it began/ How and why I chose Georgian Lamentation as my master research project subject
Back in winter I finally found the topic for my master research project - Georgian Lamentation! As I enrolled in my current master study, I had a vague idea about the theme I wanted to work with throughout my study as the master research project. That was "the unconscious" - the performativity of the unconscious - how it shows itself, how it speaks, how it acts through us people, through events etc. That subject was to wide and diffuse though and it made my head bleed every time I tried to narrow it down.
So finally in the winter, near the end of 2020- yeah, that very long year - I had my topic: Georgian lamentation! I've always been interested in death and human pain as something unavoidable, and felt in my guts that it was so much more worth living when one could grief appropriately, the quality of life enhancing through that emotional currency that it can bring. I always envied intact indigenous societies that knew the power of life and death and practiced rites that made the community emotionally aware and healthy in their expression. Though me myself, I, was raised in a family and a society where grief was something to hold back for, to suppress, to not show in front of others. My mother was always praised for having been such a strong woman, not having shed a tear over her seventeen year old dead sons body. They didn't see though, that her never-mourned-son made his death accident freeze into her emotional body and psyche. She never actually left the event of his death and of her self-conviction for poor motherhood. Overplaying with forced cheerfulness and false goods she buried her griefing self, and her true sparkle started dying slowly in her chest. The more time she'd have spent denying her sorrow, the more her mind snapped her into realms of phantasy, away from this worlds happenings. Obviously that was for us left kids a nightmare. A nightmare disguised as a happy family. I won't complicate it here with the dysfunctional family dynamics of my childhood. But it is important to understand, how much trouble can come from ungriefed grief. She is not to be faulted as an individual though for her ungriefed heart. I see that kind of emotional rapture, where negative emotions are shun, as cultural and societal damage. We are never only one single embodied person, we are also our society embodied in our person(s).
That is more or less the background, or lets say the motivation, of me having chosen my research subject- the old Georgian mourning. I was at that time in the Austrian mountains. Having managed to flee from the town I was studying in. I was all alone in the woods, with two cats, birds, frogs and many other nature folks. I had finally the space to breathe. It was autumn as I arrived there. Everything was dying. The global theme of the human world was also death of course, the pandemic having been in one of it's peeks. Death was omnipresent. The autumn in the mountain showed me how good nature is at dying. It ripes it's fruits and then it will not scare back from rotting, darkening, blackening, drying, evaporating and grieving them.
So death was all around me and being of Georgian ancestry from all of my four ancestral lineages, I wondered how the older Georgian folks dealt with death. I searched for Georgian lamentation and came to some, not many, very little in fact, material in the internet. There was this one interview with an old woman who touched on the ancient Georgian ancestral reverence, talked about the rite of passage for the passing of a villages member and about the role of the lamentors in it (I put the link of the Youtube video with a timestamp below). The grief singers where a key figure in those death rituals held in the Georgian mountains. This old woman is from Khevsureti - a mountain region in Georgia - and told about a very precise variation of Georgian lamentation they used to perform in her region. Translating it word to word: "Griefing in Voice". That "Voice" part indicates, that grief was vocalized through poetry and song, that the professional lamentor used to improvise in the very moment of her performance at the ritual. Her practice was seen as a profession, as it was a role not every person could take on. The professional lamentor in voice had to be a women. This woman was asked in the interview to perform one grief song, if she could. She collected herself, being already quit an elderly woman and then - boom she stroke with such a voice, coming from an in-depth natural resource like heavy waterfalls or thunder. The griefed song would repeat rythmically the segments of the melodical range, starting the melodical segments at high pitch and ending it low tone, the text/words would change though and not repeat, they'd tell the story of how the person (here being a small child who was taken from an eagle in to the skies, as the mother fell asleep for a moment, tired from fieldwork). Her voice was such a strike to me, I got a freeze and my body reacted in an omni-somatical trembling, like when you jump into ice water and even though you knew you'd be going into ice water, the body has a refreshing shock of- What? Really, this is for real now?- Making you wake up and focus at the very moment - the act of the moment demanding all of your attention. That was her voice. And I was blown away. And happy to have found my master research theme.
So I took it. Made it to my master thesis theme and my practical research project (which is in my university an equivalent of 'Praktikum'/internship). As I study "Inszenierung der Künste und der Medien" with the emphasis on theater, I concentrated my subject on the performativity part of the Lamenation. Namely: "Georgische Lamentation. Die Performativität der Klagensängerin mit Stimme"/ In English: "Georgian Lamentation. The Performativity of the She-grief-singer with Voice". What that meant for me as a question was: How does the grief-singer create a reality with her voice? Knowing that her role is key for the whole death ritual: for the dead to arrive well at their destination, and for the family and friends left to be able to mourn well and stay intact as a village, as a community.
As I followed the research in the internet I was intrigued by the fact, that her singing was not seen as something generating merely out from her, but in relation with the dead persons soul and in relation to the very specific ritual framework. So her griefed improvisation was a relational happening. I will explain the ritual and the performance of the griefsinger in voice in more detail in another post. But here I'll tell you, that I was very happy to have found my subject of matter. I went on and planed everything in accordance. I planed my visit to Georgia for getting on to the empirical work: meet the actual lamentors, collect their stories, wisdom, experiences,.. let me be narrated from their very old knowledge.
What I didn't take into account though, or let's say, what I couldn't have known at that time, was that this profession is practically dead- not in practice anymore. I knew that the profession of the Georgian professional lamentor was already in extinction. Which was also an underlaying reason for why I wanted to get to know these women. As long as some of them are still breathing our air - I was concerning. But I couldn't have thought that that time had already come- the cultural extinction having already come to a conclusion. I met this hard obstacle soon after I arrived in Georgia. Having started on the research and contacted some people, with the means to get to lamentors in practice, I was told that there are no 'lamentors of voice' in actual practice anymore. "People are ashamed to cry. Cold as ice. Even in the mountains. You go to a funeral there and find that same freezeing cold like in cities." - Dr. Eter Tataraidze, a scholar of Georgian lamentation, told me.
Now I am weighing out what I should do, how to maneouvre my projects steering wheel further onward. The questions flying in my body right now are: Do I still try to go on in to the mountains, stray, in the hope of finding a woman, who is still in the practice of old Georgian wisdom? Or do I change the plan and change the stream of my research skillfully?
In the next post I'll tell you about the hardships I'm encountering in reading classical Georgian academical ethnographical literature. They are old-school ethnographical texts and contain many of the pitfalls you could imagine from a classical ethnographical text, most strikingly though sexism and patriarchal ideas.
I will keep you updated in my next posts.
Thank you so much for reading!
Anaixes
Comments
Post a Comment