Kevin Tuite Amirani #1 The uses of the Caucasus The ancient Greeks, although in sporadic contact with the

e peoples on the eastern shores of the Black Sea since Homeric times, used the Caucasus as a setting for an imaginary world radically different from the one they knew at first hand. Their Caucasus was a wonderland of savagery and wealth, alluring princesses with magical powers, nymphs, Amazons, and primitive Lice-eaters (Phtheirophagoi). This is the way many, perhaps all peoples use distant lands as distorting mirrors of their own cultures, as mythic fantasy-tools for thinking about aspects of their social life. Did not the great poet Shota Rustaveli use India in just this way? And how is the Caucasus used now? Consider, on the one hand, the modernist campaign of Russia, still dreaming as did the Americans of the 19th century of a land full of beauty and natural resources, once emptied of its bothersome indigenous peoples. If Khruschev wished for a Gruzia bez gruzinov, his contemporary successors in the Kremlin now seek to achieve, by all means necessary, a Chechnia bez chechentsev. Then, on the other hand, there is the postmodern, post-industrialist campaign of American globalization, not waged with tanks or rockets, but rather with dollars, Coca-Cola and mobile telephones. The Americans would much rather have the Caucasus with the Caucasians, not without them, since they are needed as a market for foreign goods, intermediaries in the exploitation of resources, a source of cheap labor Greeks, Russians and Americans each nation formed an image of the Caucasus from the perspective of its own needs, not from those of the Caucasians themselves. The Greeks, Russians and Americans told the stories and wrote the histories, but the Caucasians had no voice. We too, the authors and editors of Amirani, use the Caucasus. We explore its past, dig up its soil in search of ancient settlements and cemeteries, interview its people, record its languages and rituals and folklore. We too have our own perspectives and our own needs, our own stories to tell. How then do we differ from Greek geographers, Russian imperialists and American capitalists? The difference, if there is to be one, must come from a commitment on our part, whether we are natives of the Caucasus or foreigners, to ensure that our work does not represent yet another chapter in the long history of the exploitation of the North and South Caucasus. It is our hope that this journal will provide an opportunity for collaboration between local and foreign researchers, and provide an independent venue for publishing research which is not affiliated with any government agency or university. It is also our hope that Amirani will always be animated by a spirit of reciprocity. By encouraging publication in languages accessible to a local, as well as global, readership, we hope to open a dialogue in which both researchers and those they study will have a voice. In so doing, we are advancing forward, yet perhaps in a way we also return to the practice of a time that predates even Jason and the Argonauts. Some linguists and archeologists believe that the Proto-Indo-European speech community was located close to the Caucasus approximately 7000 years ago. Contacts between Indo-Europeans and Caucasians were frequent and long-standing enough to effect both groups ideas, trade goods, elements of religion, mythology and technology were exchanged in both directions. Let us hope that exchanges between indigenous Caucasians and peoples of other nations in the third millennium after Christ will be characterized by a spirit of sharing that is at once post-postmodern, and pre-pre-modern.