Ethnos, Nation, Religion: Recent Scholarship and Societal Processes in the South Caucasus

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to reveal a few trends in the interaction between religious, national, and ethnic identities as applied to the understanding of current developments in the South Caucasus. It starts with the dominant paradigms in scholarship of identities that has undergone deep evolution towards post-modern washing-out of old solid concepts, such as ethnos, nations, and religion. It turns next to those objective and subjective developments in the emerging new societies of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which seem to contradict the fashionable academic episteme by recreating robust and powerful concepts of ethnos, nation, and religion. Finally, it will suggest a more complex interpretation that would mitigate the above contradiction between dominant academic scholarship and the societal processes.