Haunted Modernities: Ruins, Resistance and Poetics of Watery Infrastructures in Georgia

Abstract

In the complex landscape of post-Soviet transitions, infrastructure in Georgia has emerged as a crucial mediator of power, identity, and social dynamics. This article examines the diverse ways infrastructure shapes and is shaped by political, ecological, and affective processes in contemporary Georgia through ethnographic case studies from Tbilisi’s Mtkvari Riverfront, the resistance movement in the Rioni Valley, and informal scrap metal economies in Poti. Drawing on theoretical insights from the anthropology of infrastructure, the research illustrates how infrastructural formations transcend their materiality to become dynamic sites of ideological expression, contestation, and everyday survival.

In Tbilisi, the transformation of the Mtkvari riverfront demonstrates how Soviet infrastructural legacies severed historical and ecological continuities, leaving behind landscapes marked by collective memory and estrangement.  By contrast, the Rioni Valley emphasises infrastructure as a site of political formations, where locals actively challenge state-imposed development narratives and reclaim their relational linkages to land and water. In Poti, meanwhile, infrastructural ruination has encouraged informal economic practices and created novel socio-material forms of resilience amid systemic breakdown. These diverse responses to infrastructure underline the tensions that are integral to neoliberal changes and state-driven modernisation, which are especially visible in their neglect of local knowledge, adaptive resilience, and collective attachments. By highlighting the need to see infrastructure as relational, dynamic, and affectively charged matter, this paper attempts to illuminate how marginalised spaces can become active venues for negotiating sovereignty, memory, and possibilities for alternative futures in post-Soviet Georgia.