CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Makharadze, Ana |
|---|---|
| Title | Cooking Up National Identity: Cookbooks and Social Transformations in Georgia |
| Summary | The main objective of this thesis is to show how cookbooks both reflect and influence the transformation of national identity in post-socialist Georgia. To address this issue, I trace versions of the cookbook, Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes by Barbare Jorjadze, in three periods of Georgian history (Pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet). I conduct discourse analysis of three editions of Jorjadze’s cookbook in reference to other cookbooks or similar projects from respective periods: Book for the Kitchen, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, The Family Book and restaurant ‘Barbarestan’ – commercial project that revolves around Jorjadze’s cookbook and identity. This work depicts how and why this cookbook has become a cultural artefact that bears profound emotional legitimacy and nurtures national sentiments in the community. Through tracing the narratives that are woven around these cookbooks, I demonstrate how the process of forming post-socialist identity in today’s Georgia is built on all the stages the cookbooks have gone through in the past century before they became material objects they are today. This research found that the cookbooks are used as a means of social influence in post-socialist Georgia by simply offering this narrative to the society as a choice of action in wide repertoire. The authors of these projects exercise some level of social influence, the degree of which is later “decided” by the public. This thesis also adds onto the body of literature on utilizing cookbooks as source for researching social matters by providing theoretical framework and demonstrating its applications. |
| Supervisor | Professor Daniel Monterescu; Professor Alexandra Kowalski |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/makharadze_ana.pdf |
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