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WOMEN IN ABKHAZIA BEFORE AND AFTER THE WAR
Rita KUZNETSOVA
Rita Kuznetsova, Research associate, The Pontic-Caucasian Studies Center, Kuban State University (Krasnodar, Russia)
Normally both outside observers and Abkhazian researchers themselves describe gender inequality and discrimination of women as two inherent cultural traits of the Abkhazians. This is not absolutely true: one has to bear in mind that information about the position of women in Old Abkhazia came from 19th-century enlighteners and local lore students—N.S. Derzhavin, M. Djanashvili, K. Machavariani, and others. True to the colonial era spirit they served the idea of progress and denounced the remnants of the dark and unenlightened past that remained “outside history.”
On the whole, both for Georgia and Russia Abkhazian women and men comprise an ethnic minority. Today, more and more people become convinced that men from the Caucasus are especially aggressive: they borrow this racist prejudice from the media as well as academic publications. In fact academics when felling prey to the fairly popular idea about “discrimination against women being a primordial feature in the east” wittingly or unwittingly become racists. This should be borne in mind when analyzing the gender situation in Abkhazia; one should take care, at the same time, not to side with the idea supported by the Abkhazian men, according to which Abkhazian society has created special mechanisms that make women free and independent.
Female Economy
The status of women in traditional Abkhazia was a very contradictory one; the issue has been made even more complicated because all descriptions concentrate on the results of opposite processes. The position of women deteriorated under the impact of newly introduced legal systems (first Muslim and later Christian Orthodox and, still later, state-supported laws). Little by little Abkhazians were acquiring a more complicated social structure; from their neighbors they borrowed a hierarchical system of gender relationships. On the other hand, Abkhazian society insisted on the old order of things when men and women, masters and servants, etc. had no clearly identified rights and duties. K. Machavariani wrote in his time: “All attempts to liquidate the rights of……………………..
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