Rooted in ethnographic data from the provinces of Guria and Svaneti in Western Georgia, my research focuses on how the growing popularity of a musical practice shapes the worldwide discourse and local policies around it. I explore how power, preservation, and death — both semiotic and literal — coincide, intersect, and diverge in the Georgian folk singing communities, and what happens when rigid institutional power structures are imposed onto a fluid, improvisational tradition that is pre-disposed against them.
Academic CV // Resumé