Kartvelian studies emerged long before it acquired a name. The earliest attempts to describe Georgia and its inhabitants appear in classical Greek and Roman texts (e.g., Hippocrates, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch), where the region entered written history as a geographic, ethnographic, and political curiosity.

Over the following centuries, scattered references gave way to more sustained observation, particularly through Byzantine sources and early modern travel writing of the 17th and 18th centuries. This long, uneven process came to a head in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Georgian culture began to be studied as a whole, spanning language, literature, art, archaeology, folklore, ethnography, history, law, and other humanistic disciplines. The establishment of Tbilisi State University (1918) and the Georgian Academy of Sciences (1941) was really what allowed the field to flourish.

In an article from The Karvelologist titled, “The problem: why is Georgian history so little known in the West?”, the author suggests several reasons for a lack of outside scholarship [1]:

A major problem is location: Georgia lies beyond Constantinople, beyond our artificial boundary of “Europe”; yet we do not associate Georgia with the Near East. Language has not helped; both the Georgian script and grammar are immensely challenging. In addition, a constantly changing mosaic of political entities hampers acquaintanceship. Religion has not helped; only the specialist sees beyond Western European Catholicism and Protestantism. Georgia (at least until 1990) could be termed “a stepchild of history”, presented to us most often as a footnote to Persian, Turkish, and Russian history, shamefully shortsighted and intellectually limited though this is.

Taken together, these explanations point less to an absence of material than to a deeper problem of how Georgia has been positioned within Western historical narratives. In essence, it doesn’t fit neatly into the categories that scholarship relies on. As a field formed to study a society that consistently resists such categories, kartvelology comes about in response to this structural blind spot.

Kartvelian studies, then, is an attempt to treat Georgia as a subject rather than an afterthought. The journals1, institutes, and cross-disciplinary work that define the field grew out of a practical need: to bring together a history and culture that had long been scattered across other traditions or ignored altogether. The aim in this article is not to survey Kartvelology, but to explain why such a field had to be created in the first place, and what that need says about the gaps in how history is usually written. The article quoted earlier closes with a proposition:

In the age of the internet, can we not ask for a site and service to make English-language materials available to any interested reader? This is the vital first step in winning the wider audience that culturally rich Georgia so well deserves.

My answer to that is “yes”. And while only a small part of a much larger effort, the hope is that Georgiaphile can serve as one such bridge, or at least help extend it a little further.

Sources

1 - The problem: why is Georgian history so little known in the West?

Born to a peasant family in a small village in Western Georgia, and expelled from Kutaisi high school for taking part in the 1905 revolution, Dimitri Uznadze’s experience situated him in a world of disrupted authority, unmet needs, and collective tension. Expectation and belief, as he would discover, were drivers of action before conscious reasoning can kick in.

Beyond psychology, Uznadze also published works in philosophy, education, and history, reflecting his broad intellectual interests. But it was his seminal work on the “Theory of Attitude” (or “Set”) that went on to gain worldwide recognition in 1939, after an article of his was published in the Dutch scientific journal Acta Psychologica, which was friendly to theoretical and experimental ideas. With it, he argued that behavior is shaped by an unconscious state of readiness, formed by needs and expectations, that influences how we perceive and act.

The original term in Georgian, used by Uznadze and his followers, is “განწყობა.” In Georgian literature, both “attitude” and “set” can be translated into this same word. In English-language psychology, “attitude” usually refers to a stable trait, while Uznadze focused on situational attitudes or “sets”, temporary states shaped by current needs and context.

Uznadze, in his opening paragraph, presents a foundational example to explain why perception isn’t shaped by raw stimulus [1]:

As is well known, in 1860 Fechner reported an illusion that became known in psychological literature as the weight illusion. It is formulated as follows: “If a heavy weight is lifted very often, the lifting impulse becomes so ingrained that it still takes effect after 24 hours, with the result that another weight that is lifted appears too light.”

In the weight illusion there’s evidence of carryover from prior experience, rather than sensory error on its own. The motor set is the pre-established lifting impulse, or pre-conscious expectation prior to picking up the weight. Uznadze generalizes this and transfers it from weights to everyday perception and action. The difference between readiness and reaction shows that we don’t meet the world fresh each time.

Uznadze extends this logic beyond perception. By itself, a need only produces action when a situation makes fulfillment possible. Hunger, for example, doesn’t automatically generate the impulse to eat unless food is realistically available. Without that context, no psychological set is formed [2].

At the same time as Uznadze’s article in Acta Psychologica, mainstream psychology was treating humans as stimulus-response machines (e.g., Skinner). Inner states were either ignored or treated as unscientific, but the Theory of Attitude said something intervenes. Between stimulus and response sits a pre-existing readiness, shaped by past experience, that biases perception and action before awareness. That let psychologists talk about internal structure without abandoning experiment.

To address the elephant in the room, it’s important to at least briefly pit Freud’s approach against Uznadze’s. The father of psychoanalysis famously put the unconscious at the center of psychology, but mostly through interpretation and clinical stories. Uznadze treated the unconscious as something you could create in an experiment and observe through its effects, without relying on psychoanalysis. While their lives overlapped over many decades, the year that Theory of Attitude was presented was the same year the Freud died, so he never had a chance to critique or comment on it. However, the criticism in the other direction did occur [3]:

Uznadze was ambitious enough to claim that Freud’s understanding of the unconscious is flawed and the Freudian term unconscious should be replaced by the set.

The reach of the theory extended beyond perception studies. In an article in 1944, Jean Piaget referred to the phenomenon describing the visual field illusion as the “Uznadze effect” and drew on it in describing stages of intellectual development, placing Uznadze’s work within mainstream twentieth-century psychology [4]. It also exists in a middle ground in twentieth-century psychology, since it’s neither behaviorist nor psychoanalytic. His idea of set is a reminder that perception and action are always shaped in advance, by history as well as stimulus.

Sources

1 - Untersuchungen zur Psychologie der Einstellung (Acta Psychologica, 1939)

2 - Reconsidering the “Uznadze Effect” and Psychology of Set (Gantskoba) From a Systemic Cultural Psychological Perspective

3 - Alternate Unconscious: Uznadze’s Theory of Set (video version)

4 - Basic Points of the Anthropic Attitude Theory

In the late 1960s and early 70s, Georgian theorist-cartographer Alexander Aslanikashvili came up with the concept of metacartography, shifting mapmaking from a technical craft to a theoretical science. It exposed contradictions between “just making maps” and the deeper scientific principles behind how space is represented. If Cassini taught us how to measure the world, metacartography teaches us how maps decide what the world is.

The fact that it came about at the same time as French theorists like Foucault were shifting attention from brute facts to how knowledge is structured may not be a coincidence. Aslanikashvili was asking who defines space, by what rules, and for what purpose. If maps are ideas and not just tools, then they shape perception, power, identity, and knowledge, and they also become products of their time rather than some atemporal representation of reality.

Even if the phrase is overused currently, metacartography basically formalizes the “the map is not the territory” concept, but in a meta way that applies it to cartography itself, and theorizes upon it, treating maps as models of real space rather than mathematically perfect representations. Cartography was ignoring deeper philosophical questions about what space is and how humans understand it.

Aslanikashvili splits cartography into three levels, or strata: the Intervention stratum reflects real-world space and phenomena; the Object stratum looks at actual maps (as communication, models, or critiques of reality); and Metastratum represents the language of maps itself, which Aslanikashvili treats as the true theoretical subject of cartography, expressed through the idea of an ideal map.

What the Georgian theorist anticipated is the world of digital mapping, where maps are no longer static images but relational systems that decide what matters (what’s searchable, what’s visible and what’s ignored). Technology like GPS, GIS, and algorithmic maps reflect reality while actively structuring it. Metacartography explains why this happens at a conceptual level, decades before the technology existed.

Sources

1 - Semiotics from Maps to the Digital Earth: Problems and Challenges

2 - Metacartography of A. Aslanikashvili and Relational Cartography