Gwendoline Lemaitre

Gwendoline Lemaitre's research focuses on populations displaced within Georgia during the Soviet era. She is interested in the impact that such displacements have on people's relationships with the regions they left and their new regions of residence. For her PhD, she focused specifically on the Tush, a transhumant pastoral population in eastern Georgia, and their ability to produce and maintain a discontinuous territory. During this period, she worked at the University of Nanterre's Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology, with which she remains affiliated. For her postdoctoral research, Gwendoline Lemaitre examines how the movement of stones from the mountains to the plains can facilitate intergenerational knowledge transmission about distant places. From January 2026 to December 2027, she conducts her postdoctoral research, with the Fyssen Foundation fellowship, at the Mongolian and Inner Asia Studies Unit in Cambridge and at LESC in Nanterre.

The project

Title: Des enfants aux cœurs de pierre. Des pierres comme opérateurs de transmission d’attachements aux lieux dans des familles de populations déplacées en Géorgie (Caucase).

"In Georgia, some children grow up with a gradual acquisition of knowledge about particular stones. The biographies, places of origin and characteristics of these stones are all elements that acquire a force of evidence for these children, making it possible to develop a lithic semiotics shared with those around them. This knowledge is often linked to ancestral biographies, family narratives or the history of the collective, particularly with regard to its presence in certain places and to the movements that led to its simultaneous presence in several regions. The study of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge concerning the reproduction of the group and the vitality of the collective, especially in a context of uprooting, leads us to take displaced stones seriously as catalysts of the relationship between people and the places on which their social organisation depends."

Hosting institution: Institut français d’études sur l’Europe orientale, le Caucase et l’Asie du nord (IRECA), Tbilissi office.

Selective Bibliography

• Applis Stefan, Mühlfried Florian et Lemaitre Gwendoline, Tuschetien. Kultur und naturraumwandel im Grossen Kaukasus, Mitteldeutscher verlag, English, German, Georgian, 2025
• Lemaitre Gwendoline, « Tisser des liens au fil de laine, du dos des moutons à celui des bergers. Production, transformation et utilisation de la laine chez les Tushes de l’est de la Géorgie », Techniques & Culture, Varia, 12 mars 2024
• Lemaitre Gwendoline et Violon Chloé, « Repenser les mobilités spatiales par le prisme des transactions de bétail à partir de deux systèmes pastoraux (touche de Géorgie et arabe du Tchad) », Cahiers d’Anthropologie Sociale, 21, L’Herne, 2023
• Lemaitre Gwendoline, « Case study of a tushe transhumance. Contemporary challenges of a journey across Georgia : sociability, contingency and relationship to the land », Nomadic People, vol. 26 (1), 2020