1 The Discourse of Empire
Our activities in the Caucasus are reminiscent of the many
tragedies of the early conquest of America by the Spaniards; but
without any heroic victories or military successes such as those
of Pizarro or Cortés. God forbid that the conquest of the
Caucasus might leave a similar bloody legacy to Russian history,
such as that left by these conquerors to the history of Spain.
Nikolai N. Raevskii to Minister of War
A.I. Chernyshev, 1841^1introduction to the north caucasus
In 1872 O. Iosseliani, a Georgian missionary and educator in the em-
ploy of the Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxy in the Caucasus,
attended the funeral of a wealthy prince in the Okum region of
Abkhazia. Accompanied by a local imperial official, he witnessed
elaborate rituals of mourning and despair. The privileged Abkhaz
women separated from the men and collectively beat their heads and
cried. They bowed to the ground for ten minutes at a time before the
family and relatives of the deceased. The men processed by the body
and placed their hands on the forehead of the body and cried,
“A-a!a-a! a-a!” The body was draped in a white cloth and brought to
the courtyard, where the commoners were given their opportunity to
wail, tear at their hair, and put their hands to their foreheads. They
chanted their various cries of sympathy to the family of the deceased,
who responded in kind.
The intriguing aspect of this story of a funeral is the fact that
Iosseliani felt compelled to recount his afternoon in such detail to offi-
cials and missionary colleagues in the imperial bureaucracy. “On my
trip Iwitnessed an extremely interesting scene,” he explained, “not be-
cause the event was particularly remarkable but because it was simply
novel.”^2 To convey his experience he adopted an ethnographic mode of
representation, communicating his distance from virtually unknown
peoples on a remote colonial frontier: “The official and I remained in
the courtyard and viewed this spectacle.”^3 Iosseliani successfully