SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
ILIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Direction:Anthropology
Position:Full Professor





Florian Mühlfried is a social anthropologist working on the Caucasus, particularly on Georgia, for more than twenty years. Before having joined the Ilia State University as a full professor for social anthropology, he was an assistant professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany), visiting professor at UNICAMP (Brazil), research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany), and lecturer at the Tbilisi State University. His publications include the monographs Mistrust: A Global Perspective (2019), Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (2014) and Post-Soviet Feasting: The Georgian Banquet in Transition (2006, in German) as well as the edited volumes Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations (2018), Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus (2018, coedited with Tsyplylma Darieva and Kevin Tuite) and Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (2012, coedited with Sergey Sokolovskiy).

Scientific interests / research interests

Politics (Egalitarianism, Citizenship), Religion (Ritual, Sacred Sites), (Mis-)trust, Migration, Food, Methodology, Caucasus

  • Articles

Between Hospitality and Hostility – Russian Citizens in Georgia. Anthropology Today 39 (3): 17-20 (2023)
(with Weronika Zmiejewski) When Distrust Meets Hope – Georgian Migrant Women in Greece. Central and Eastern European Migration Review: 1-19 (2022)
Ungovernance and Spiritual Feudalism in Northeast Highland Georgia. Caucasus Survey 10: 25-42 (2022)
Suspicious Surfaces and Affective Mistrust in the South Caucasus. Social Analysis 65 (3): 1-21 (2021)
The Spectrum of Mistrust. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 146: 201-218 (2021)

  • Chapters

The Diplomatic and Military Relationship between Georgian Highlanders and the Russian Empire – From the 17th Century to the Present Day. In: Kahl, Tede and Ioana Aminiam Jazi (eds.): Ethno-Cultural Diversity in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences: 177-192 (2023)

  • Online Publications

Seing for a State: Policing the Border between Georgia and the Russian Federation. boundary 2. Available online: <https://www.boundary2.org/2022/10/florian-muhlfried-seeing-for-a-state-policing-the-border-between-georgia-and-the-russian-federation/> (2022)

An extensive list of publications

Current Courses

Course Catalog

Introduction to Socio-Cultural Anthropology (ENG); Citizenship from Below in Post – Soviet Societies (ENG); Trust and Mistrust in Social Sciences
  • Political Anthropology
  • Trust and Mistrust in Social Sciences
  • Methods of Fieldwork
  • Protest Movements
  • Postsocialism: Anthropological Approaches
  • Egalitarian Societies
  • Citizenship from Below in Post-Soviet Societies
  • Theories of Ritual and Performance
  • Introduction to Socio-Cultural Anthropology

Seing for a State: Policing the Border between Georgia and the Russian Federation. boundary 2. Available online: https://www.boundary2.org/2022/10/florian-muhlfried-seeing-for-a-state-policing-the-border-between-georgia-and-the-russian-federation/> (2022)

Moments of Mistrust in the South Caucasus: Observations from Abkhazia and Georgia. Heinrich Böll Foundation South Caucasus 2019. Available online: https://ge.boell.org/en/2018/12/03/moments-mistrust-south-caucasus>