Trading Truths: Missionaries, Diplomats, and Spies in the South Caucasus

TRASUS investigates how religious and political truths move across boundaries. The objectives are to identify the modalities of how truths travel, to propel incisive understandings of how truth-values are attached to collective ideas, and how the resulting truths configure and reconfigure social worlds. Such an in-depth study that theorizes the workings of truth is of paramount importance in an age of misinformation and fake news, in which the transmission of truth is a crucial weapon of power.The project will examine the ‘trade of truths’ along three modalities of transmission (which can intersect and overlap): a missionary modality involving the projection of truth onto those ‘in need’; a diplomatic modality involving the tactful mediation and management of knowledge; and an extractive modality geared towards excavating hidden truths. These modalities will be tested in the South Caucasus, a region onto which expansionist projects have long projected their civilizing truths, and where sociopolitical fragmentation confounds the exchange of knowledge. By carrying out six case studies, the project will examine how these modalities are mobilized in missionary endeavors aimed at converting others, in the projection of nationalist truths onto ethnically cleansed areas, in efforts to mediate between opposing ethnic and religious groups, and in top-down practices of surveillance and bottom-up efforts of critique. Based on long-term, historically informed ethnographic field research, the project will analyze how old and new technologies are mobilized in knowledge encounters, follow relevant ‘truth merchants’, and trace the trajectories of specific truths claims. In doing so, TRASUS will reveal the shifting interlocking of epistemic objects, human engagements with them, and the situations in which they are entangled. This will offer comprehensive and dynamic understandings of how truth is produced; and it will produce new insight into the biases, gaps, and limita